How close were Claude Lorraine and JMW Turner?

The National Gallery in London has an exhibition called Turner Inspired: In the Light of Claude which will continue until 5th June 2012. According to the gallery, it is the most in-depth examination of Turner's experience of Claude's art. The exhibition includes oils, watercolours and sketchbooks, and introduces visitors to the story of the Turner Bequest and its importance in the history of the National Gallery.

Claude, Seaport With the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba, 1648. Nat Gall

J.M.W Turner (1775-1851) himself understood well the connection between the two artists; on his death, Turner bequeathed the National Gallery two paintings, on condition that the works were hung between two pictures by Claude Lorraine (1600-82)! The final room of the current exhibition has collected and displayed archive material dedicated to the relationship between Turner's bequest and the Gallery.

Turner, Dido Building Carthage, 1815. National Gallery

So my question to the Gallery is: how real was the connection between the 17th century Frenchman who lived in Italy … and the 19th century Englishman who loved Claude’s work, even before he made his first visits to France, Switzerland and Italy?

The longer Claude lived in Italy, the more his paintings became classical, monumental and sensitive to the effects of light. One of his important mid-life paintings was Seaport With the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba, painted in 1648. Many of Claude's paintings were concerned with travel, but here he created an imaginary seaport to depict the unusual story of Sheba’s and Solomon’s separation. The classical architecture was stunning, dwarfing the human beings and even dwarfing the ships.

I believe that during the Italian decades, Claude was always Claude. So the comparison between the two artists stands or falls on which Turners were selected. Country Life 21/3/2012 aptly chose the National Gallery’s own Dido Building Carthage 1815, identifying it as one Turner’s most direct salutes to Claude. The seascape was also concerned with an imaginary seaport, with ancient architecture and human beings, but this time the sky was hazier and the water darker than in Claude’s vision.

Turner, Waves Breaking on a Lee Shore at Margate c1840. Tate

Perhaps comparing Turner to Claude became less tenable after Turner’s first visit to central Italy in 1819 and his second visit a few years later (in 1828). Then a middle aged man, Turner soon discovered that Claude’s idealised classicism was not real, and perhaps it never had been. For all the beauty of Claude’s landscape, 19th century Italy was very different. Modernity itself was very different!

Turner’s later painting Waves Breaking on a Lee Shore at Margate c1840 (Tate London) was a very different kettle of fish, owing nothing to Claude. Instead of classical ruins, depicted in minute detail and lit by a pale blue sky, Turner’s drama came from an extremely rough sea. The sky above looked ominous and in the distant coast, the viewer could almost detect the outlines of the town’s harbour wall and lighthouse. Turner no longer bothered with minutely depicted architecture, classical or otherwise. The wild sea and sky were now his subjects.

Turner, Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, 1840, Boston MFA

Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying was also painted in 1840 and once again focused on wild and romantic seas and skies. However the details were intentionally very difficult to detect and the viewer had to rely on Turner's title, when first analysing the contents. The ship in the background, sailing through a tumultuous sea of churning water, left alive human bodies thrown overboard. Brutal yes, but with more of an emphasis on wild nature than on human brutality.

Mona Lisa - stolen in 1911 and retrieved

Mona Lisa was always a special painting. Leonardo da Vinci began the painting in Italy in 1503, but then when he moved to France in 1516 for the last few years of his life, he sold it to his host, King Francois I. The king placed his treasure in the Louvre where it safely rested and enthralled the crowds for centuries. Note the date when the picture went to France - 1516; it will be important!

Mona Lisa, painted by Leonardo da Vinci, between 1503-16

Then in August 1911, a crisis occurred – France’s beloved Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre. Guards who noticed that the painting was missing assumed it had been removed to be photographed. Once museum officials realised the truth, the Louvre was shut down. Dozens of police arrived to question the staff, re-enact the crime and dust for fingerprints. All employees, past and present, were interrogated and fingerprinted, including the eventual thief. But they were all cleared.

The French border was sealed, and departing ships and trains searched. By the time the museum re-opened nine days later, the theft was front-page news around the world. What could have happened? Jennifer Rosenberg noted that some Frenchmen blamed the Germans, believing the theft a ploy to demoralise their country. And some Germans thought it was a ploy by the French to distract French citizens from international concerns.

Richard Lacayo noted that the newspaper Paris-Journal was offering a reward for information about the crime. A petty thief said he had previously worked as secretary for Guillaume Apollinaire, the poet who was Picasso's constant supporter in the public skirmishes over modern art in the French press. Before long, the thief had implicated Apollinaire. When police arrested Apollinaire, he admitted under pressure that the thief had sold the pilfered works to none other than Picasso. Thinking they had found their way into a crime ring that might be behind the Mona Lisa case, the police then questioned Picasso. Picasso was Spanish citizen and any serious criminal problem could get him deported. And he had reason to be worried, since he almost certainly had dealt with the thief in the past. However there was no evidence against Picasso.

Presumbly it was thought that that modernist enemies of traditional art might have taken the Mona Lisa. But why - to destroy it? to make an art historical-political point?

Vincenzo Peruggia, police documentation, 1913

Two years went by before the real thief was discovered and then only because the man acknowledged his part in the theft. An Italian petty criminal called Vincenzo Peruggia had moved to Paris in 1908 and had worked at the Louvre for a time. He was no criminal master mind but apparently he walked with the painting under a smock and quietly took it to his lodgings in Paris.

Peruggia travelled to Florence by train the following month, taking the Mona Lisa in a trunk with a false bottom. Eventually in Florence he took the painting to an art gallery where the owner, Alfredo Geri, persuaded him to leave it for expert examination. In 1913, the Italian police could finally arrest the thief.

According to Richard Cavendish, Peruggia apparently believed that the Mona Lisa had been stolen from Florence by Napoleon. The thief never planned to damage or destroy the painting; he believed that he was only doing his patriotic duty, by returning the painting to its true home in Italy. In fact Peruggia's patriotic rationale really DID make him a hero in the Italian press. And many Italians really did joyously welcome the masterpiece home at the Uffizi and the Borghese Galleries, Villa Medici, Farnese Palace and the Brera Museum. But we need to remember that Mona Lisa had never been part of Napoleon’s art collection, so I wonder why Peruggia’s gaol sentence was relatively minor.

modern security for Mona Lisa, the Louvre

After the painting’s triumphal tour of Italy, the Mona Lisa was returned to the Louvre and has mostly remained there, in its rightful spot, ever since. Security these days is, needless to say, rather tight.

The Ultimate Cultural Experience: Leonardo and Michelangelo

Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan is the most complete display of Leonardo’s rare surviving paintings ever held. The exhibition brings together wonderful international loans never before seen in the UK, or never seen anywhere in such an impressive single location. Inspired by the recently restored National Gallery painting, The Virgin of the Rocks, this exhibition focuses on Leonardo as an artist, rather than as an inventor or scientist. In particular it concentrates on the work he produced as court painter to Duke Lodovico Sforza in Milan in the late 1480s and 1490s. The exhibition is the penultimate cultural experience.

Orient Express's elegant dining car

The ultimate cultural experience is in turn inspired by the National Gallery's Leonardo exhibition. The Orient Express tour begins on 16th May 2012, but be prepared to spend your children’s inheritance now.

Day 1 Meet a National Gallery expert and visit the British Museum in London for a private viewing of selected drawings by Leonardo & Michelangelo. Then visit the National Gallery in London, to view the Leonardo's altarpiece painting The Virgin of the Rocks and the gallery’s two paintings by Michelangelo.

Days 2-3 Depart on the Venice Simplon-Orient-Express for a luxury train journey to Verona. Explore Verona. Then travel to Milan.

Days 4-5 Visit the 15th century Church of Santa Maria delle Grazie, home to Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece, the Last Supper. After lunch, tour the Ambrosiana Library to see Leonardo’s Codex Atlanticus. In the evening dinner is arranged at one of Milan’s most famous restaurants, Savini (naturally!). In the morning visit Castello Sforzesco, home to Michelangelo’s late Pietà, before an afternoon tour of the Brera Art Gallery.

David, by Michelangelo, in Florence

Days 6-8 Drive to Florence with a stop en route to visit Villa San Donnino. Arrive at Villa San Michele for 3 night stay. Enjoy dinner on the terrace overlooking Florence. The next morning, tour Florence commencing with a visit to Chiesa di Ognissanti to view Ghirlandaio’s Last Supper and later the Accademia to view the statue of David by Michelangelo. After lunch, visit Santa Maria Novella. The next day, tour the world famous Uffizi Gallery. After lunch, visit the Church of San Miniato al Monte. On the final morning, guests fly home.

I suggested to my beloved that this would be a great tour for us to enjoy, since we both love art, architecture, Italy and fancy train trips. He agreed that it would be great, as soon as we win the lotto. If you can persuade your beloved, go to Venice-Simplon Orient Express.

Last Supper, by Leonardo da Vinci, Milan

James Joyce - the great years in Trieste

James Joyce

I have had a great deal of pleasure writing up the life and times of important authors and artists for this blog eg Charles Dickens, Agatha Christie, Rudyard Kipling, Sigmund Freud and Dylan Thomas. But writing about Irishman James Joyce (1882–1941), who lived happily in Trieste for most of the years between 1904-20, proved to be more difficult.

Had he chosen to live in Venice, Florence, Rome, Milan, Florence etc, I would have felt right at home. But James Joyce lived in Trieste, 116 ks NE of Venice.

Trieste was one of the oldest parts of the Habsburg Monarchy from the high Middle Ages until the end of WW1. And it had been a very beautiful Adriatic port. So in his years there, Joyce witnessed the last years of the city's Austro-Hungarian glory and saw the impressive buildings that had belonged to prosperous Habsburg merchants.

Presumably because of its unique location, Trieste was a cosmopolitan city loved by Bohemian artists and writers.

Bronze statue of Joyce, canal bridge in Trieste

Joyce met Nora Barnacle in 1904 in Dublin, just before the writer was attracted to Trieste. The couple arrived there in 1904, an impoverished Joyce apparently planning to fund some time on the Continent by teaching English.

map of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Trieste is marked with a cross

Joyce and Nora didn’t marry until many years later (1931), although they had two children (in 1905 and 1907). James didn’t sound like a reliable family man; in fact his family probably would not have been properly fed and clothed without the help of his younger brother Stanislaus who also moved to Trieste. Despite the brother, James Joyce’s many moves between flats seemed to have occurred because the rents were rarely paid on time and rarely paid in full. Perhaps endless boozing was responsible.

When James did manage to make a regular income, it was because he was working for the daily paper, Il Piccolo. At other times, he worked as an English teacher at the Berlitz language school and was an English tutor to some wealthy Triestine families.

Joyce breakfasted on presnitz at the Pasticceria Caffè Pirona

This was a creative and productive period. While living in this city, Joyce wrote most of the stories in Dubliners, first published in 1914. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man was also written in Trieste and was serialised in The Egoist  magazine in 1914 and 1915. Portrait was not published in book form until the Egoist Press published it in 1917.

Now there is a Literary Trail. Modern visitors can walk between the eight houses that Joyce lived in during his Trieste life and to dozens of his favourite haunts. His happiest years were spent in #4 Via Bramante, near some elegant steps leading to the Basevi Gardens. The upper floors of a different palazzo have been converted into a hotel called Hotel Victoria, recently opened. It is described as a "literary hotel" because Joyce was once a tenant there.

Trieste's funicular tram

Joyce was a good walker, despite Trieste having steep hills. A funicular tramway had already opened before Joyce and Nora arrived, and operates still, offering magnificent views over the harbour.

Joyce loved high bourgeois coffeehouses like the Caffè San Marco, still evocative of Viennese elegance, and the Caffè Stella Polare near the Canal Grande. Pasticceria Caffè Pirona was Joyce’s breakfast place of choice, an historic Art Nouveau bakery still in business.  Apparently Joyce was passionate about presnitz, a horseshoe-shaped pastry stuffed with raisins and walnuts—a house specialty since Alberto Pirona founded the shop in 1900.

Via San Nicolò was where the Joyces lived above the Berlitz School which employed Joyce. Next door is the Umberto Saba Antiquarian bookshop, still in business.

I was not surprised to read that Joyce frequented the Teatro Verdi to watch opera, but alas he was limited to the cheapest seats. What WAS surprising was that Joyce enjoyed different centres of religious architecture. As the main port of the mighty Austro-Hungarian empire, Trieste embraced many different cultures. One of Joyce's favourites was the exotic Greek-Orthodox church of San Nicolò with its twin towers facing the sea. Many of his most friends and students were from the even more exotic Jewish community, which was confident enough to open a beautiful synagogue in Via San Francesco d'Assisi. Joyce's timing was perfect - he could watch every step of the synagogue's construction process (1908-12).

Trieste synagogue, built between 1908 and 1912

Susan Griffiths’ article provided very helpful information. She mentioned The Hotel James Joyce which is located in the colourful historical area of old Trieste, and I would love to know whether Joyce was ever a guest there. She also noted 45 plaques around the city that mark places of Joycean interest. One of these plaques highlights the red light district of the Città Vecchia quarter, including a brothel at 7 via della Pescheria. Another helpful suggestion was the guide book James Joyce: Triestine Itineraries by Renzo Crivelli. A bridge over the canal has a distinctive bronze statue of the ex-pat Irishman, sunning himself in this old Austro-Hungarian-Italian city.

World War One must have been a difficult time. Although Joyce was too old to be a soldier himself, it must have been galling for him when his students were called up to fight in a war between Italy (and the Allied Powers) versus Austria-Hungary (and the Central Powers). So in 1915 the Joyces moved to Zurich, a neutral city that became home to exiles and artists from across Europe. They didn't return to Trieste till 1918.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire did not dissolve until the end of the war and many of its border areas were disputed among its successor states. In November 1918, a treaty was signed to end hostilities between Italy and Austria-Hungary. Trieste was occupied by the Italian Army and the city was formally absorbed into Italy.

James Joyce died in Zurich in 1941 and was buried there. Nora died in 1951 and was buried alongside her husband. Stanislaus died in Trieste in 1955, and was buried in the Trieste cemetery. None of the bodies was repatriated back to Ireland.

Despite our perhaps preconceived ideas, Literary Traveller said it was Trieste that claimed James Joyce. Trieste was more significant than Dublin, which Joyce immortalised in Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses; more than Zurich where he was buried; more than Paris where he wrote Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake. I have not read John McCourt’s book The Years of Bloom: James Joyce in Trieste 1904-1920, but it may be very helpful.

James Joyce Hotel, Trieste

The Old Masters - Berenson and Duveen

Joseph Duveen (1869-1947) was from a Dutch-English family. He loved pictures and knew a lot about British art, but he was not an academic. Lithuanian-Italian art scholar and critic Bernard Berenson (1865-1959) was not a smart businessman, but he had a very expensive lifestyle. So it was sensible that the two men should get together in a professional partnership, as I noted in an earlier post. Berenson found and authenticated pictures for Duveen, and Duveen paid him a share of his firm’s profits.

The Old Masters opened up in New Haven with an American cast, 2010

Clearly the Jewish contribution to the European art world was in part a function of specific historical and sociological circumstances. Consider the major art dealers and scholarly art connoisseurs of the early C20th: Alfred Flechtheim, Herwath Walden and Paul Cassirer in Berlin, Joseph Duveen in London, Jacques Seligman, Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler and Berthe Weill in Paris. Heinz Berggruen and Daniel Wildenstein came a decade later. Every single one was Jewish! Even Bernard Berenson, a convert to Catholicism decades earlier, was still thought of as having a fine Jewish brain.

I wonder how much interaction there was between this amazing group. I also wonder how much opposition they faced, given they were at the forefront of the avant-garde, especially French modernism.

"The Old Masters" is the name of a play that was first performed at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in June 2004, then at the Comedy Theatre London from July 2004. It was written by Simon Gray and directed by Harold Pinter. The play opened in Bernard Berenson's gardens, Villa I Tatti near Florence, one summer night in 1937. Berenson, the famous art critic, was increasingly anxious about the state of his finances. His wife, Mary, was in poor health while he continued to have an affair with his secretary.

Joseph Duveen's assistant Fowles arrived to deliver a copy of a painting, and to tell Berenson that Duveen would like him to reconsider his attribution of a painting, The Adoration of the Shepherds. Berenson had already declared it to be by Titian, but Duveen wanted him to change his mind and attribute it to Giorgione. Duveen was keen to sell the painting to the American art collector, Mellon, who specifically wanted a Giorgione. Other art critics had already decided it was a Giorgione, but Berenson, whose reputation was pre-eminent, refused to change his mind. Fowles left.

Berenson examining a painting

Duveen on a cruise to the USA with wife and daughter

Later that evening Duveen arrived, unannounced, to convince Berenson to change his mind in person. From there, the intense nature of their long and largely satisfying working relationship unfolded. The timing in 1937 was not coincidental. They were two Jewish intellectuals with anti-Semitic chaos gathering around them, particularly worrying with the rising power of Mussolini and fascism.

I hadn’t read or seen the play, so my class here in Melbourne had to rely on one of our art history students who had seen the play in Britain. She said the play tackled the confusing world of the art market, raising questions of taste, provenance, financial values, the honesty or otherwise of private interests in the marketplace, and the historically documented relationship between Duveen and Berenson. At the end of the play, the student was still not sure what was most important - professional connoisseurship, popular taste (which changes from generation to generation) or realistic financial valuations.

The play is of particular interest to American audiences because Duveen truly did help wealthy Americans (eg Mellon, Rockefeller, Frick, Huntington, Morgan and Kress) to amass great collections of Renaissance, early modern and modern art. Simon Gray’s The Old Masters opened in New Haven Connecticut in 2010 and will move onto Broadway this year (2011).

Benito Mussolini: The Italian Stallion

Ida Dalser (1880–1937) was born in a village near Trento, an Italian speaking region in what was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. As a young adult, she opened a beauty salon in Milan.

Ida Dalser first met young Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) in Trento, where he was journalist in 1909 and the two of them definitely  started an affair. Ida seemed committed to the relationship and was even prepared to sell her beauty salon to help Mussolini, who was then a leftwing journalist, establish his own newspaper. Ida clearly thought Mussolini shared her romantic  feelings. But to a young and ambitious Mussolini, Ida was just a pest, particularly after she told him she was pregnant.

According to Ida, they got married in 1914. And in 1915 she gave birth to his first child, Benito Albino Mussolini. No records of the marriage survive but Mussolini did accept the boy as his son, and paid monthly child support.

Ida Dalser and young Benito Albino Mussolini

The reasons why Mussolini and Dalser separated after their marriage and the birth of their son remain unclear, but perhaps he was becoming closer to another of  his long term mistresses Rachele Guidi. Or perhaps Ida was too emotionally demanding. Anyhow when WWI broke out in 1914, Mussolini rushed to join up. In December 1915, while recovering in a hospital from wound caused by a grenade launcher, the hospital priest married Mussolini to Donna Rachele Guidi at the bedside. When Ida Dalser heard about the second marriage, she was outraged. There had been no divorce!

Immediately after his second marriage, Mussolini left Italy to rejoin his army unit. Ida constantly wrote to her husband, and complained of her situation to the military and civil authorities. Two pieces of evidence from this period suggest that Ida was still considered a legitimate wife. Firstly while he was on service, the Kingdom of Italy regularly paid Ida a war pension. Secondly when Mussolini was injured by a mortar shot in 1917, she received a visit from the police notifying her that her husband was wounded in action.

In 1917, Mussolini came back from the war. His political career took off but his passion for socialism was over. He organised the Italian Combat Squad (WW1 ex-servicemen) in 1919, founded the National Fascist Party in 1921 and was soon elected to the Chamber of Deputies. In October 1922, Mussolini and the Black Shirts marched on Rome, intending to force King Victor Emmanuel III to set aside the old prime minister. The military could have easily controlled  Mussolini and his Fascists, had the king asked them to, so the king has to take a great deal of responsibility for Mussolini's rapid rise to power. 

Mussolini now had power and was officially recognised by the then ruling House of Savoy. But even a dictator needed papal approval, something that may have been withheld, had the church known about his pre-marital affair, his possibly illegitimate son and his possibly bigamous second marriage. Furthermore his five children with Rachele Guidi had to be protected.

That didn't mean for a moment that Mussolini now saved himself for his second wife. Michael Day and Peter Popham noted that the ambitious young leader demanded sex in industrial quantities from beloved mistresses and call girls alike. But it did mean that Ida Dalser and her son were watched very carefully by the police. She told everyone about her marriage to Mussolini, but noone believed her… or they didn’t want to get involved with her. Eventually she was certified and locked up in a psychiatric hospital in 1926. Still certified, she was later isolated in a psychiatric prison on the Venetian island of San Clemente, where she died in 1937. By the time of her death, after 15 years of being called a liar and a traitor, she really was insane.

Benito Mussolini,  Il Duce.

His son Benito Albino Mussolini was removed by government agents at 11 years of age, told his mother was dead, and was adopted out. He enrolled in the Italian Royal Navy, and always remained under close scrutiny by his father's fascist government. Rather unwisely, as it turned out, he also persisted in stating Benito Mussolini was his father. So he too was eventually certified, locked up in an insane asylum in Milan and was given mind-controlling medical treatments. There he died in 1942, aged tragically young (26). Both Ida and Benito junior were placed in unmarked graves.

The story of Benito Mussolini's first marriage was totally hidden during fascist rule in Italy. In particular Mussolini's officers erased all paper traces of Benito's and Ida's relationship. They overlooked only one thing according to the documentary Mussolini’s Secret: a certificate by Milan city council ordering Mussolini to make maintenance payments and referring to his wife Ida Dalser and their child.

It is not 100% certain that Mussolini’s first wedding was legal. However it is not too much of a stretch to say that the Italian dictator drove his first woman and son to early deaths in lunatic asylums; public knowledge of their existence might have somehow compromised his rise to power. Perhaps Mussolini should have been more worried about Margherita Sarfatti, Claretta Petacci and all his other mistresses.

All the information for this inglorious part of Mussolini history was finally discovered and published in 2005 by Italian journalist Marco Zeni.

Marriage, fertility and courtly love in Renaissance Italy: cassone

A cassone was a richly made carved and decorated chest. Because it was expensive to buy, the cassone was much loved by wealthy families in Renaissance Italy. And it was connected to a very special occasion as well, being given by the parents to a young bride during the wedding and then placed next to the marriage bed. A cassone would be a storage space, but it could also be useful as occasional furniture eg a table top.

Cassone with tournament scenes, Florence, c1460, 38 x 130 cm, National Gallery UK

My favourite cassoni had classical architecture, where the flat panels might have corner pilasters, and the sculptural panels might be carved in low relief, under cornices. Most did not have a high panelled back, for these were much too heavy and much more expensive. But with all that gold leaf and all those Old Master paintings, I suppose some families REALLY wanted to show off how elegant they were.

There was one important fact I did not know. James Yorke (Country Life 19/5/2010) said that on the wedding day, the cassone was carried in procession through the streets to the bride’s new home, as shown in a contemporary painting in Tuscany Arts. Thus the element of public display was even more important than I had imagined.

And another thing about the nature of more private display. The Courtauld Gallery said the cassone probably dominated the relatively small but significant space at the centre of the household’s activities. Here the husband and wife would conceive the next generation of their family. Here, too, important guests were entertained or family discussions held. The cassoni provided the backdrop to the life of the family and their painted decorations were carefully chosen, providing both entertainment and instruction.

Courtly love in the Story of Esther, Florentine cassone panel, c1465, tempera and gold on wood, 18 x 55", Metropolitan Museum of Art NY

There was no end of subject material for decorating the side panels, depending on the tastes of the individual family. Certain artists specialised in cassone decoration and became very talented in the themes they depicted – religious, courtly, romantic or domestic. Typically, a devout family might ask for a painting of the Annunciation or the Visitation of St Anne to the Virgin Mary, feminine themes. A family with more noble aspirations might select courtly figures at the fountain of love, or ladies on horseback with falcons taking part in the hunt of love.

Later C15th Florentine cassone, Madrid Archaeological Museum.; cedar wood, gold leaf and oil paintings,  218 x 106 x 86 cm.  Battle of Anghiari paintings.

I knew all of this as an undergraduate art history student. But I had not looked at marriage chests for this blog because they seemed to be too early for my self-imposed 1640 starting date. However there have been several excellent museum exhibitions of cassoni since 2008 and it is worth going back to a much-loved object of domestic Italian art.

Cassoni starred in a 2008-9 Metropolitan Museum NY exhibition called Art and Love in Renaissance Italy. It explored 150 objects created to celebrate love and marriage till the mid-C16th, including maiolica, marriage portraits and paintings that extolled sensual love and fecundity, glassware, jewellery and of course cassone panels.

In 2009, The Courtauld Gallery in London opened a display called Love and Marriage in Renaissance Florence. Marriage involved huge expenditure both by the groom and by the bride's family. A patrician husband would buy clothes, jewels and textiles for his new wife and would often refurnish his suite of rooms in the family palace. Among the most significant items commissioned at the time of marriage, and displayed by the Courtauld, were pairs of richly decorated chests. Pairs!

In 2010 The Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence hosted The Virtue of Love exhibition, nuptial painting in the Florentine 15th century. The show introduced the visitor to the private universe of the nuptial suite in the 1400s, richly embellished with works of art. Images from history and mythology populated the wedding chests. Painted by great masters and lesser-known talents, these scenes formed a colourful and vivacious repertory that offered models of virtue and stories of love, historic events and tragedies, to instruct and advise the newlyweds.

Courtauld cassone with high panelled back, 1472, made for the Morelli-Nerli wedding 

Reading recommended by miglior acque came from a 2008-9 exhibition at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, also centred on painted marriage chests. I would love to see the catalogue which was clearly an important contribution to the field: Baskins CL, Randolph AWB, Musachio JM and Chong A, The Triumph of Marriage: Painted Cassoni of the Renaissance (Pittsburgh: Periscope Publishing, 2008).

Caravaggio's The Taking of Christ - at home in Dublin

I read a Caravaggio article by James F Clarity in The New York Times. Only later did I see a much longer and more detailed analysis of the apparently lost painting in the brilliant BBC series The Private Life of a Masterpiece, 2009. It was a better story than Dan Brown could have told... and all true!

Recently Sergio Benedetti, the gallery's senior conservator, stood behind a hushed crowd in the National Gallery of Ireland. The crowd was expressing its pleasure about the painting he hoped would give the museum new status in the art world: a wide canvas of dark gloom and sparkling light showing Judas as he kissed Christ. At the same time, a soldier gripped Jesus' neck, ready to drag Him away for crucifixion.

Guernica magazine described the scene accurately and colourfully. "The implied violence of the scene foreshadows the future. No routine arrest, this is a brutal takedown, ordered by the highest authorities, of a cult leader whose teachings threatened the social fabric of one of Rome's occupied territories. Because we know the story, and because the tension in the work is so tangible, we know what's to come: interrogations, brutal public torture, and of course, execution. It contains, within a common religious scene, the brutality of an age."

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio's painting, The Taking of Christ c1602, has been hanging in the gallery since Nov 1993. Finally the 3 years of detective work, technical examination and restoration by Mr Benedetti had paid off. It is one of only 65 or 70 works by the painter that experts have certified as authentic. Caravaggio, a notorious carouser and duelist, died in 1610 in rather tragic circumstances, eight years after this particular painting was completed. He was only 39.

The Taking of Christ by Caravaggio, c1602, The National Gallery of Ireland

Since its installation in the Irish gallery, the painting has been attracting spectators at a record pace. "Museum directors all over the world would give their eye teeth to have a painting like this," said Raymond Keaveney, the gallery's director. Mr Benedetti agreed, noting that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has two Caravaggios (Music and Lute Player), but the National Gallery in Washington and the Getty have none. This will put us on the map, he said of the gallery, a splendid Georgian building in the centre of Dublin. The Caravaggio is now the centrepiece of a collection that includes two Rembrandts.

The Caravaggio, whose authenticity was verified by 10 European experts who travelled to Dublin to examine it, first came into Mr Benedetti's view when he was asked to restore it by its owners. The owners were a community of Jesuit priests who had it hanging in the dining room and parlour of their Dublin residence for 60 years. They thought it was, as the title on its frame says, the work of a Dutch painter, Gerrit van Honthorst. Gerard van Honthorst was not a bad guess; he was in any case one of Caravaggio’s Dutch followers. But the real treasure, the original Caravaggio, was thought lost for all times.

The painting, now on permanent loan to the gallery, had reached the Dublin Jesuits by a twisting route, which Mr Benedetti retraced over three long years to verify its provenance. It was painted a year before another Caravaggio masterpiece, Supper at Emmaus, now in the National Gallery in London, for the Roman palace of the Mattei noble family whose ancestors had originally commissioned it.

The painting stayed in the Mattei Palace until 1802. Then it was mislabelled (by mistake or intentionally) as the work of Honthorst and sold to a Scottish landowner, William Hamilton Nisbit. In the 1920s, a Dublin physician, Dr Marie Lea-Wilson, bought it for less than $1,000. In the mid-1930s, Dr. Wilson gave it to the Jesuits, who noticed a few years ago that it was becoming dirty and got in touch with Mr Benedetti.

Sergio Benedetti said "After one month of working on it, everything was so perfect. I began to look for things wrong. But I could find nothing. The pentimenti were all there." These corrective touches by the artist included the over-painting of Judas's ear to make it smaller and the narrowing of a soldier's belt. In addition, on Christ's face, close to the hairline, there is a squiggle indicating a curl probably executed with the butt end of the artist's paint brush," a technique Caravaggio used in other work. "A copyist wouldn't bother with pentimenti. He would follow the original. Honthorst was a good painter, but not one-twentieth of the painter Caravaggio was." He declined to estimate the work's value except to say it would be in the millions of dollars.

The Dublin painting was recently on loan to an Italian gallery, as part of Caravaggio's 400th anniversary.

The National Gallery of Ireland, Dublin

In a totally unrelated set of circumstances, Caravaggio's painting The Taking of Christ or The Kiss of Judas c1602, had been stolen in July 2008 from the Ukrainian Museum of Western and Eastern Art in Odessa. The badly damaged work, which looks very similar to our Irish painting, was recently recovered in Berlin after four members of an international gang of art thieves wanted to sell it.

It would be interesting to know if Caravaggio painted both of them, and which of the two paintings came first. The Association for Research into Crimes Against Art reported that the Dublin picture was lighter yet more brooding, and the figures were sharper. The Odessa figures, particularly that of Christ, were different and less refined than Caravaggio’s normal work.

"The Irish work is undisputedly regarded as the work that is documented as having been commissioned in 1602 by the Mattei family in Rome", said Fionnuala Croke, the Irish gallery's Keeper and Head of Collections. "Obviously Caravaggio's influence was enormous in his own lifetime and in succeeding generations and there were many copies of this work because it would have been seen by many, many guests and visitors to the Mattei family home, which was in the centre of Rome. There is a record in the documentation in the Mattei family records that there was a copy commissioned of our painting by another member of the Mattei family in 1626 that was painted by another artist who was otherwise completely unknown called Giovanni di Attilio. Sergio Benedetti believes that it is this copy, painted 20 years after our original, which is the Odessa painting." She added that the Odessa painting had the exact dimensions of the original, which pointed to the fact that it was copied directly from the Caravaggio original.

The real Ponte Vecchio in Florence

The Ponte Vecchio bridge was first built in Roman times to span the Arno River at its narrowest point. Older versions of the bridge were burnt, flooded or destroyed by armies until the version that we see today was completed in 1345. From these earliest times, the bridge always provided shop-space for merchants who displayed their goods for customers walking past.

So what was the Vasari Corridor and how did it differ from the older parts of the Ponte Vecchio? A spacious corridor, nearly 1k in length, was built in 1565 by Giorgio Vasari. Vasari was just the man for the commission – he was an architect, to be sure, but also a painter and an art historian. And his finest building was Florence’s Uffizi which he had built as recently as 1560.
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Ponte Vecchio, inc Vasari Corridor (top storey), seen from the Arno

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It linked up the Pitti Palace, where the Duke Cosimo I de Medici of Florence (1519–74) resided, with the Uffizi/offices where he worked. The timing was excellent since Duke Cosimo’s son Francesco de' Medici (1541–87) married Joanna of Austria, youngest daughter of Ferdinand I Holy Roman Emperor, in a glittering ceremony in Dec 1565. But there is also the clear suggestion that this art loving duke was also an authoritarian ruler who secured his power through brute force. Secrecy and secure movement served Duke Cosimo I well.
                                                           
The Vasari Corridor (and Uffizi) agreed with the idea of a nervous Cosimo, but they added another suggestion. The idea was to get the thirteen Guilds and Magistrates who administered the city under one roof, and in close proximity to Cosimo so he could control them better. As a collateral benefit the Medicis were to get the top floor for their art, theatre etc without extra costs.
                                                             
As you can see in the map below, the Corridor goes on top of the shops on the Ponte Vecchio, the bridge over the River Arno that linked the Uffizi on the north bank with the Pitti Palace on the south bank. On the south side, the corridor actually passes through the interior of the church of Santa Felicita, over the top of the Guicciardini family’s houses and gardens, and ends at the Boboli gardens and Pitti Palace.
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Self-portraits section of the Vasari Corridor

Even if you have seen every gallery and cathedral across Europe, and even if you have shopped till you dropped on the Ponte Vecchio, the probability is that you will never have visited this art space. Organised tours begin in the Uffizi itself. Small group are taken from room to room, then the guide opens a modest door into the Vasari Corridor.

The corridor itself is unadorned. But the collection of art is impressive and the views through the windows are even better. A Florentine in Florence has wonderful photos of the views from the small oval windows. Apparently the windows were built into the corridor so that Duke Cosimo I de Medici could walk across his parts of the town safely AND see what was going on from the vantage point well above Ponte Vecchio. These days, if the visitor looks out, he will see nothing more subversive than hordes of tourists and shopkeepers, haggling with each other.

Vasari's own self-portrait c1567

The art contents of the Vasari Corridor are not a mere continuation of works hanging in the Uffizi's galleries. Rather there are two very interesting collections in the Corridor that deserve separate attention. The smaller collection is of charming miniature paintings, amassed from over the centuries of art history.

The larger collection is of artists’ self portraits. This gallery includes 2000 works from all important artists, including many of the masters whose works appear on the walls of the Uffizi eg Titian, Giorgio Vasari, Antonio Canova, Bernini, Jacques-Louise David and Chagall.

Museums of Florence say that this unique group of self portraits was created by Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici in the mid 17th century, although it is still receiving regular additions to the collection. Three Pipe Problem connects to a fine BBC video where Andrew Graham-Dixon examines the development of these art objects over the generations. A corridor is therefore a fitting shape, since the very best way to discuss a linear progression would be via a long, straight line. My favourite self portraits weren't even painted when Cardinal Leopoldo de' Medici assembled the first works: Rosalba Carriera 1709, Elisabeth-Louise Vigee-Lebrun 1790 and John Singer Sargent 1907.

expanding map, Uffizi-Ponte Vecchio-Pitti Palace

I have walked all over Florence many times, and had never heard of the Vasari Corridor until my son went to a wedding there. In any case the corridor was only restored and reopened to the public in 1973, and even now it can only be visited in groups who plan well in advance.

As the corridor will be closed for 3 years from late October 2011 for a major restoration work, I recommend that would-be viewers book quickly. For those who cannot get to Florence, I recommend the book by Ann J. Reavis called Walking in the Footsteps of the Duke: The Vasari Corridor in Florence, 2003.

Could Violet Gibson have saved Italy from Fascism? Violet who?

Frances Stonor Saunders wrote The Woman Who Shot Mussolini, published by Metropolitan Books earlier this year: 2010. I don’t pretend to be a modern history scholar, but I did think I would have heard of a major event like the attempted assassination of one of the 20th century’s great dictators in 1926. By a woman, no less!

Prime Minister of Italy, Benito Mussolini

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Violet Gibson (1876–1956) was the daughter of British aristocracy. In fact her father, 1st Baron Ashbourne, was actually Lord Chancellor of Ireland. Raised in the Protestant staunchness of late C19th Ireland, young Violet did not make her parents happy. She was always a bit weird religiously, trying out mysticism and theosophy before ending up in the bosom of the Catholic Church. And her older brother Willie was seen as even more treacherous. The heir to his father's title, Willie became a Catholic and a supporter of Irish Home Rule, and was promptly disinherited by the family.

Apart from upholding what was seen as an extreme religious position, Violet had two other “strikes” against her. She had dabbled with the peace movement and she had a very worrying psychiatric history. Socially isolated from her family and anyone else who might have seen the warning signs, there were certainly a number of suicide attempts and probably as many fearsome assaults on other people.

Benito Mussolini (1883-1945) started his political career with dignity, but he was on his way to becoming a rather nasty dictator by the inter-war period. Did Violet see the future and decide to save Italy and the world from a Fascist dictatorship in Italy? If so, in 1926 she was well out of step with Winston Churchill and other senior decision-makers back in Britain. Centre of Criminology Library Blog stated that Italy's prime minister was one of that country's great 1920s tourist attractions! The King of England even decorated Mussolini with the Order of the Bath!

In April 1926 Mussolini was in a car after leaving an assembly of the International Congress of Surgeons, to whom he had delivered a warm speech about modern medicine. Violet Gibson, who loved Italy and was there staying for a while in a convent, approached Mussolini closely and shot at him several times with a pistol. She hit him at least twice but Mussolini’s wounds were not serious and after he was bandaged up, he continued on his parade duties. Gibson’s life was more in danger than her target’s – she was only saved from an angry mob by Italian police.

Gibson's police record in Italy

Why did a middle aged Anglo-Irish aristocrat try to assassinate Mussolini? Either she was a lunatic, answering to private voices in her head about saving the true Catholic Church. Or she was part of a larger crusade to save Italy from descending the same fascist path as Spain and Germany.

Decades later, Peter Popham reported that Gibson travelled to Rome with the original intention of murdering the Pope, but then changed her plan. Blog de study508 agreed, since Violet told her brother Willie that Pope Pius XI had betrayed the Church and should be killed. If both these blogs were correct, it suggests that Gibson was extremely angry, but that her anger was at best unfocused and unplanned.
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Clearly the Italian authorities in 1926 must have believed she worked alone, since Gibson was quickly deported back to Britain after being released without charge. She spent the rest of her life in an expensive mental asylum, St Andrew's Hospital in Northampton, in her birth town. The irony was that she wanted to live out her life in a Catholic convent. In 1956 she was finally buried in Kingsthorpe Cemetery, Northampton, aged 80 years.

Saunders does not give a definitive conclusion. The mix of spiritualism, mysticism and Catholicism seemed to have been a potent and combustible mixture for Violet. She had discovered a religious vocation that required her to make a sacrifice of her own life, in her stand against ,,, what? Fascism? Yet the large question still hovers over Gibson’s attempt on Mussolini’s life. Had she made the attempt in 1940 when Italy declared war on Britain and France, she might not have been declared insane. Instead Gibson might have been given a seat in Parliament, with the grateful thanks of the nation.

Saunder's book

Since reviewing Saunders book, I found A Blog About History's article on the secret diaries of Benito Mussolini. Mussolini apparently hid a set of secret diaries in an Italian hillside and ordered them not to be opened until 2025. The documents may or may not be secret diaries and Mussolini may or may not have written about Violet Gibson. But one point was fascinating. The blog noted a theory among some Italian historians - that Mussolini was executed as part of an MI6 plot to spare Britain embarrassment about the  closeness between Benito Mussolini and Winston Churchill.

Peggy Guggenheim, modernist gallery owner and patron

Marguerite Peggy Guggenheim was born 1898 in New York. As the second daughter of Benjamin Guggenheim and Florette Seligman, Peggy had a rather cultivated upbringing in New York. Peggy regularly visited Europe with her parents and two sisters, a very pleasant life until her father Benjamin tragically died on the Titanic in 1912.
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Peggy Guggenheim, photographed by Man Ray in 1924

Eventually, at 21, Peggy inherited from her late father’s fortune. So her fabulous career in art was totally due to her share of her father’s estate (and later her share of her mother’s as well).

When Peggy was given the first of her money in 1919, she got herself to Paris as soon as she decently could. The expatriates there thought she was terrific. She married Laurence Vail, an American writer who loved the bohemian life of Paris as much as Our Peggy did. In 1928 the marriage was over and Peggy moved to London.

In 1938 Guggenheim opened Guggenheim Jeune, a London gallery of modern art that celebrated the works of Jean Cocteau and Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp acted as a mentor for the rather inexperienced Miss Guggenheim and suggested to her that she should focus her energy on surrealist and other modernist art. The young gallery owner was delighted to display works by Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Wassily Kandinsky, Henry Moore, Constantin Brancusi and of course Max Ernst.

By 1939, Peggy was organising herself for a Museum of Modern Art in London together with the English art historian/critic Herbert Read. She hot footed it to Paris to begin collecting work for the new Museum but the outbreak of war ruined the plans. Nonethless she did manage to buy 10 Picassos, 40 Ernsts, 8 Mirós, 4 Rene Magrittes, 3 Man Rays, 3 Dalís, plus one each from Paul Klee, Marc Chagall and Georges Braque.

Only days before the German invasion of 1941, this brave Jewish woman realised the danger she and her friends were in. She left Paris for New York with hundreds of works of art with which she would begin a new American gallery. Peggy travelled to New York with the German surrealist artist Max Ernst, whom she married in 1942 (and soon divorced).

In 1942, Peggy found a space to exhibit her collection. Her gallery-museum, called Art of This Century, did well. It opened on 57th St in Oct 1942 and featured surrealists and cubists, Americans and European refugees. The gallery, designed by Frederick Kiesler, with concave walls, startled and intrigued visitors. Modern viewers can see a replica of the 1942 show called The Flight of European Artists from Hitler.

I am not certain about Peggy’s relationship with Jackson Pollock. Certainly he was a young artist who suddenly found the art critics were discussing his work. One thing we know for certain is that Peggy commissioned a HUGE mural from Pollock for the entry of her new townhouse. Also in 1946, Robert De Niro had his first one-man exhibition at Peggy’s Art of this Century gallery, and did well.

Art of this Century in NY, 1942

In 1947 Peggy Guggenheim could not live outside Europe for another day. In May, she closed the gallery doors for good and moved to a rather lovely palazzo on Venice’s Grand Canal. The home must have become a bit of a home away from home for travelling wits, bohemians, artists and writers. She spent the rest of her life in Venice, devoting herself to her modernist art. In 1949 she held an exhibition of sculptures in the garden.

In 1951 Peggy formally opened her Venetian home as a museum. We can see from the photos from those days that there were several Jackson Pollocks and Arshile Gorkys in the collection.

In 1965 Peggy’s collection travelled to the Tate Museum, and then in 1969 to her late Uncle Solomon Guggenheim’s Museum which had been established in New York. In 1974 the New York Guggenheim took over the running of the Venetian museum, acquiring the collection as well as the palazzo. Peggy Guggenheim died in her palazzo in Dec 1979, having lived a creative, productive and sometimes provocative life.  PollockstheBollocks said she lived her life as an art addict!

Guggenheim Museum in Venice

Today the New York Guggenheim continues to run the Peggy’s Venetian museum. The east wing houses early Cubist and other modernists including Picasso, Braque, Dalí and Miró. Out in the sculpture garden are pieces by Henry Moore and Jean Arp. Another wing hosts temporary exhibitions. For a wonderful array of photos on Peggy, the garden, her museum and its contents, see Farrago and Folly and Irenebrination: Notes on Art, Fashion and Style.

Amedeo Modigliani, a flawed genius?

I have lectured on Jewish Artists of the Belle Epoque many times in the past. What never fails to amaze me is the difference between the dozens of Eastern European lads from impoverished families on one hand and the elegant Italian Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920), son of a very comfortable family, on the other.

Amedeo was born in Livorno/Leghorn, west of Florence in 1884. His parents were business and professional people, both sides of the family being Sephardim. Amedeo was their 4th and youngest child, frail throughout childhood. Bored witless in bed, it was then that he began to play with painting. Alas the young lad became seriously ill with typhoid fever and tuberculosis, and was close to death.

Portrait of Chaim Soutine, 1916, private collection

Eventually he recovered and had formal art training in Florence and Venice. But he already saw himself as tormented and on the path to self destruction. It was therefore quite risky when he decided to move to Paris in 1906 and to settle in Montmartre, the centre for Bohemian artists and writers. He settled in Le Bateau-Lavoir, a commune for impoverished artists where each person had at least enough space to sleep, paint and drink coffee. There probably wasn’t much food in the entire rambling building complex.

There Modigliani was thrilled by Paul Cezanne, the artist who came to exert a decisive influence on Modigliani’s early years, as did Pablo Picasso in his blue period. Of the sculptors, his greatest mentor was the Romanian Constantin Brancusi, another recent immigrant to Paris.

Modigliani was a sculptor who modelled his work on African art, particularly tribal masks. When he could no longer carry out the heavy physical work required by sculpture, he turned to painting. The use of strong line and elongated shapes, so typical in his African-inspired sculptures, was carried into his portraits. I am never quite sure if modern viewers find his style simple, powerful and expressive.. or childish and repetitive.

Modigliani's portraits, rather quickly completed, came out of the positive emotional connection between the artist and his model. Very often he would use his artist friends as models, presumably to save himself the cost of paying a modelling fee. Instead he would share his food with his artist-friends who had no food of their own. He exhibited six of these portraits at the 1910 Salon des Independants, allowing the public to see a groups of his works for the first time.

Portrait of the Painter Manuel Humbert, 1916, NGV Melbourne

The pre-WW1 period saw the Paris art scene shift south from Montmartre to Montparnasse. Picasso and Modigliani moved to rue Campagne-Première, joined by Miro and Kandinsky; Braque worked nearby. Belle Epoque cabarets gave way to WW1 coffee shops and bars, heaps of them along bvd du Montparnasse: the Coupole, Dôme, Select, Rotonde and Closerie des Lilas. Often frequented by impoverished artists and writers, I can imagine the bar owners agreeing to barter coffees and wines for drawings and quick paintings.

I have selected just two of Modigliani’s artist-friends who agreed to act as models. Chaim Soutine 1916, later hunted to death by the Nazis, was his closest friend. By applying the paint strongly and thickly, Modigliani made Soutine look like the unpretentious Eastern European man he was. Manuel Humbert 1916 was a Spanish painter of landscapes and also a friend of Modigliani. In this insightful portrait, Modigliani drew attention to Humbert's eyes and sensual mouth. In both cases, the artist captured the character of his friends with appealing simplicity.

For other Modigliani portraits, see Paulo Coelho’s Blog, The Bespoken: For Gentlemen, Chasing Light and Lines and Colors.
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The sophisticated Italian was a role model for the other immigrant Jewish artists and went out of his way to be friendly to, and supportive of the younger men arriving in Paris from Eastern Europe. Moise Kisling and Simon Mondzain never forgot Modigliani’s kindness, and Andre Salmon lived across the street and often shared his meals. But no-one relied on Modigliani as much as Chaim Soutine did, professionally, socially and emotionally. Soutine was totally devastated when his friend and mentor died in 1920.

The book Modigliani: A Life was written by Meryle Secrest and published by Knopf just recently (2011). I have read many biographies of the artist, but Secrest is the first person to suggest that it was the struggle AGAINST tuberculosis that was the cornerstone of his decisions and behaviours, not the disease itself. And certainly not alcoholism or drug addiction. In a life that he knew to be short, Modigliani used alcohol and drugs only as the means by which he could keep functioning as a prolific painter.