15th Century And Earlier
Waldemar on Leonardo the Anatomist
May 10 2012
Picture: Royal Collection
The Royal Collection's new show get's the thumbs up from Waldemar:
So accomplished is the presentation here of our inner biology, it’s easy to overlook the fact that Leonardo isn’t just progressing anatomical understanding. He is also inventing biological drawing. Today, we live in a world of plentiful biological illustration, and all these methods of explaining the inner body are familiar to us: the section, the inner close-up, the view across the cut, the map of the arteries, the exploded joint. In Leonardo’s time, they all needed to be invented. Here he is, turning abstract knowledge into a tangible and understandable visual coding.
The final room is dizzyingly impressive. It records his most sustained effort to turn his anatomical knowledge into a published treatise. Somehow, he gets to know the professor of anatomy at the university in Pavia, and the two of them embark on a thorough investigation of the skeleton and its muscles. A few of the sheets of intense, insightful drawings that result — a set of views of the inner workings of the human hand; a series of cross sections of the human shoulder in motion; the first accurate drawing of the human spine — are downright miraculous.
These sensitively shadowed drawings of body parts achieve so much more than is demanded of them. There’s a sense of movement, a thoroughly convincing corporeality and, above all, that uniquely Leonardoesque sense that you are somehow able to look through the human skin to a precisely observed inner reality: not an abstracted diagram of the stuff of life, but the stuff itself.
The unobservable is being observed here. And this utterly convincing sense of reality is Leonardo the artist’s greatest gift to Leonardo the scientist.
Leonardo as anatomist
May 1 2012
Excitement is building ahead of the Royal Collection exhibition of Leonardo's anatomical drawings (opens 4th May at Buckingham Palace). Will we see queues like those outside the National Gallery? Probably not, but it will be crowded.
Above is a fine video featuring the Royal Collection senior curator Martin Clayton on the drawings. You can buy the exhibition app here. And here is a piece by Channel 4 News, which is a little simplistic but features a contribution from National Gallery director Nicholas Penny.
New Raphael exhibition the Prado
April 18 2012
Picture: Louvre, Raphael's Portrait of Baldassare Castiglione
This sounds like a must-see:
This will be one of the most important exhibitions ever to be devoted to the work of Raphael (1483-1520) and his studio and the first to focus on the final phase in the artist’s career when he became the most influential painter in Western art.
Organised in collaboration with the Musée du Louvre (where the exhibition will take place following its showing at the Museo del Prado), the 40 paintings and 30 drawings that comprise this exhibition will be displayed chronologically. As such they will cover the last seven years of Raphael’s life, from the start of the pontificate of Leo X (1513) up to the artist’s death in 1520. This period includes famous works such as the Saint Cecilia Altarpiece (Bologna, Pinacoteca Nazionale) and the portrait of Baldassare Castiglione, from the Louvre. Space will also be given to the work of Raphael’s principal pupils and followers, Giulio Romano (c. 1449-1546) and Giovanni Francesco Penni (1488-1528), who worked under the master’s close supervision on the late commissions he received.
12th June - 16th September.
The one thing we should return?
April 10 2012
Picture: Adrian Pingstone
There was news this weekend that the Turkish government has formally requested the return of a 1st century BC stone relief, the Samsat Stele, which is held in the British Museum. The Stele thus joins the Elgin Marbles as an artefact of international dispute.
I'm generally not one for repatriating items such as the Marbles. But I've always thought that 'Cleopatra's Needle' in London probably should be returned to Egypt. Unlike objects in the British Museum, it is not preserved for study by scholars, or a destination for the world's tourists. Instead, it is largely forgotten, hidden by trees, and eaten by pollution to such an extent that its hieroglyphics have become unreadable. I doubt many would notice if it was replaced by a replica. Would you miss it?
That early Titian
April 5 2012
Picture: Hermitage
A reader writes:
It's a pity you (and The Guardian) displayed the photo of the painting before cleaning.
Above is the cleaned picture, via ArtDaily.
Prado copy hits the news again
March 6 2012
Picture: Prado/Louvre
A classic example of how speculation can become fact. From the Daily Telegraph:
'Mona Lisa copy may have been painted by Leonardo's lover'
Last month, a copy of Leonardo's most famous painting rocked the art world with revelations about its provenance.
Two weeks after it went on show to the public at the Prado, the museum's conservation team believe they are closing in on a conclusion about the painting's authorship.
The most likely candidate is Gian Giacomo Caprotti, the apprentice known as "Salaì" - which translates as "Little Devil" - who went to work in Leonardo's workshop when he was ten years old.
Many historians believe, though it is not proven, that Salaì was Leonardo's lover. He is presumed to be the youthful model for Leonardo's paintings 'St. John the Baptist' and 'Bacchus', as well as numerous drawings.
Things we can't know for sure in relation to this story:
- Nobody knows if Salai was Leonardo's lover, or even if Leonardo was gay.
- We can't really be certain that the Prado copy was painted simultaneously alongside the original.
- We don't know much at all about Salai's style or oeuvre, and certainly not enough to make a stylistic attribution.
Van Eyck in ultra-high resolution
February 27 2012
Picture: Universum Digitalis
A reader has alerted me to this excellent site on Van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece. You can even zoom in on the infra-red images.
$1.4m drawing purchased by the Getty
January 26 2012
Picture: Sotheby's
ArtInfo reports that this Renaissance drawing attributed to Piero del Pollaiuolo was bought yesterday at Sotheby's New York by the Getty Museum for $1.4m.
'The Wrong Leonardo'
January 24 2012
Picture: Louvre/National Gallery, London
The art historian and former director of the Warburg Institute Charles Hope has an interesting review of the Leonardo exhibition in the New York Review of Books.* He has titled it 'The Wrong Leonardo', and the 'wrong' picture in this case is the National Gallery's version of the Madonna of the Rocks:
It is perhaps not surprising that in the catalog it is argued at length that the London version of The Virgin of the Rocks, which in the past has often been doubted, is “fully autograph,” like the one in the Louvre. But it is exceedingly unusual for any Renaissance artist to produce two almost identical versions of the same altarpiece, and it is certainly very surprising that Leonardo, who, by all accounts, only painted when he felt inclined to do so and was remarkably cavalier about the wishes of his patrons, should have done such a thing. I believe that the history of the commission, which is unusually well documented, cannot be reconciled with the claims made in the catalog.
Longstanding readers will know that I thought the Paris version is certainly 'better' than the London version of The Rocks, but I would still call both pictures 'Leonardo'. The only question in the London picture is the extent to which Leonardo was involved. Some say entirely; I'd say less than the Paris version, but that it is largely by Leonardo, and we can forgive him if he left parts of it to be completed by highly talented students acting under his supervision. This was normal artistic practice. Charles Hope, however, goes further:
Leonardo’s own involvement, if there was any at all, is likely to have been very limited. It seems entirely out of character that he should have made a copy of one of his own works, but on occasion he certainly allowed others to do so. In comparison with the Louvre version, there is a lack of individuality and inner life in the figures, which now have a strangely gray complexion. Although much of the modeling is of great delicacy and skill, it seems obvious, now that the two pictures can be seen together, that they are not by the same hand.
Like many, Hope doesn't like the Madonna Litta from St Petersburg, and rejects entirely the attribution to Leonardo. He also questions two other works catalogued as 'Leonardo' in the show; the Portrait of a Musician, and the newly discovered Salvator Mundi. On the latter, he writes:
Much more suspect, however, is a recently cleaned painting of Christ as Salvator Mundi from a private collection. This was recorded in a print of the mid-seventeenth century, and the composition is known in other versions. But even making allowances for its extremely poor state of preservation, it is a curiously unimpressive composition and it is hard to believe that Leonardo himself was responsible for anything so dull.
This seems to be yet another case of the Salvator Mundi producing entirely subjective responses. Many of those who have declared it to be either by or not by Leornardo have gone on to describe their reasoning in subjective terms. Here it is too 'dull'. Andrew Graham-Dixon said it lacked 'the spark of inner life and feeling'. Readers will know of other similar views. And I'm sorry, but it isn't good enough. Attributions cannot be made or dismissed on a viewer's own human response to a painting. One person's 'dull' picture can be another's 'magical' one. For example, Richard Dorment remarked that the Salvator Mundi's 'strangeness' made him doubt it - but this is the very same 'strangeness' which made Waldemar like it: 'The sheer strangeness of the image makes it feel Leonardo-esque. No normal painter would have attempted this.' So can we please have proper, evidence-based responses to Salvator Mundi; indeed, to any picture?
* via Three Pipe Problem.
Leonardo as comedian
January 17 2012
Picture: Royal Collection
Following on from the rather lame jokes in the East Anglian Times' review of 'Leonardo' (see below), here's a genuine Leonardo joke from one of his notebooks:
It was asked of a painter why, since he made such beautiful figures, which were but dead things, his children were so ugly; to which the painter replied that he made his pictures by day, and his children by night.
Isn't that pretty funny? I bet it was during the Renaissance. In fact, you only have to look at Leonardo's drawings to see that he had a good sense of humour. One of my favourites is the above finely executed head of a man in profile [Royal Collection]. I like to think that Leonardo thought his subject needed livening up, and so hurriedly added the impish face to the left. Another favourite is the drawing of a Rocky Cavern, complete with cheery-looking duck [also Royal Collection].
Hitting 'le jackpot' - eventuellement...
January 17 2012
Video: Francetvinfo
The town of Vic-le-Comte in France is celebrating a EUR2.3m windfall, after the Louvre bought the above Pieta by Jean Malouel (d.1415). The Louvre paid EUR7.8m for the picture - but part of the price went back to Vic-le-Comte in order to resolve a potential legal dispute over its ownership.
The work had first been sold by a parish priest in the town for just a hundred francs in 1985. The priest thought it was an 18th or 19th Century work, and needed to raise funds to pay for the heating. But - heureusement - in France all works of art in churches have belonged to the state since 1905, so it was never the priest's to sell. And happily, as it says in the film above, the town has now been able to reclaim at least a part of 'le jackpot' it missed out on in 1985.
In Le Figaro, the chief curator of paintings at the Louvre, Vincent Pomarede, called the acquisition 'the most important in the last fifty years'. For more details in English head over to Le Tribune de l'Art here.
Need a Leonardo fix, but can't face the queues?
January 10 2012
Picture: Royal Collection
Then head to Birmingham. Ten Leonardo drawings from the Royal Collection will go on display soon at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. The exhibition will be part of the Queen's Diamond Jubilee. Dates 13th January - 25th March.
To clean or not to clean?
January 6 2012
Picture: Louvre
Here's a belated notice about the row in France over the cleaning of Leonardo's Virgin and Child with St Anne [Louvre]. I hadn't commented on it till now largely because there seem to be few tangible facts - and certainly no images of the cleaned work. But essentially it seems someone has resigned from the Louvre's conservation board in a huff, saying the picture has been over-cleaned. Predictably, it is all the fault of Les Anglais. From The Guardian:
The Louvre source said that Keith and Syson [of the National Gallery, London] were particularly keen on this restoration: "The English were very pushing, saying they know Leonardo is extremely delicate but 'we can move without any danger to the work'. There was a row a year ago about solvents because they said they were safe and Bergeon Langle said they're not safe. It took a long time before the committee really had explanations on the chemicals used on the picture. Details were asked for [by the critics on the committee], but didn't come for months …
"There are people who are very much for bright hues and strong cleaning. Those people are in charge."
For what it's worth, Leonardo was quite keen on bright hues too. Anyway, we can make no judgement till we see the cleaned work. In the meantime, feast your eyes on this super high-resolution image of the picture before cleaning, to which I was alerted by the ever-invaluable Three Pipe Problem. He has even spotted what appear to be a couple of finger-prints in the top left of the painting. Are they Leonardo's? Who knows - but it'll be interesting to see if they are still there in the cleaned painting...
Record price for a medieval work of art
December 12 2011
Picture: ATG
The Antiques Trade Gazette has news of of this c.1250-80 Virgin & Child making £5.05m in Paris recently. It was bought by London-based dealer Sam Fogg.
The battle for the Battle of Anghiari
December 6 2011
Picture: Alinari Archives
Some art historians have got their knickers in a frightful twist over Maurizio Seracini's search for Leonardo's lost mural, The Battle of Anghiari (of which the drawing above by Rubens shows a small detail). The mural was painted by Leonardo in Florence's Palazzo Vecchio, but, like The Last Supper, began to deteriorate so fast that it was covered over by another work by Giorgio Vasari.
Now Seracini believes Vasari, in an act of deference to Leonardo, didn't paint on top of the great man's work, but left a gap between it and his new mural. And by drilling a series of tiny holes through which to pass a microscopic camera, he hopes to see what is left of it. But, says The Guardian:
...150 art historians from museums including the New York Met and the National Gallery in London have signed a petition to stop the work, angry at the fact that holes are being drilled in the front wall bearing its own renown fresco, Giorgio Vasari's The Battle of Marciano in Val di Chiana, painted in 1563.
"We also believe that Da Vinci painted on the wall opposite, but Seracini just doesn't know his art history," said Tomaso Montanari, the art history professor who started the petition. Backing the experts, the heritage group Italia Nostra has complained to Florence magistrates, who have opened an investigation.
AHN says - chill out. Seracini's theory may be a bit Da Vinci Code. But his tiny holes are, well, tiny. And imagine how exciting it would be if he did find fragments of Leonardo's original...
Recovering the 'Madonna of the Yarnwinder'
November 24 2011
Picture: Daily Mail
Two men cleared of attempted extortion and handling Leonardo's Madonna of the Yarnwinder have given their story to the Daily Mail. It's worth a read, but here's the story in a nutshell.
'Private detectives' and liverpool pub owners Robbie Graham (above) and John Doyle were charged with conspiring to extort £4.25m for the safe return of the Madonna, which was stolen from the Duke of Buccleuch's Drumlanrig Castle in 2003. But Graham and Doyle claimed they were acting as middle men who recovered the picture from a shady 'Liverpool businessman', in return for £700,000 in cash - money which had been given to them by a local solicitor, Marshall Ronald. Ronald was in turn negotiating with solicitors acting for the Duke's insurers, Hiscox. On 3rd October 2007 Graham and Doyle handed over the cash in the car park of a Merseyside pub, and walked away with the picture. The cash had been taken by Ronald from his firm's client account. Ronald believed he had negotiated a multi-million pound reward from Hiscox's solicitors. But it turned out that the contact at the Duke's insurers with whom Ronald had been negotiating to return the painting, and secure the reward, was an undercover policeman. All three were arrested, along with two others. Meanwhile, the unnamed 'Liverpool villains' got away with their £700,000...
All five men were cleared when the jury delivered a verdict of 'not proven'. The Scottish legal system allows for three verdicts, guilty, not guilty, and not proven.
Read the story for yourself, but I find the whole thing a little curious. Graham and Doyle say they were initially contacted by the Liverpool villains because of a website they ran, Stolen Stuff Reunited, a company which Ronald help them set up. Here's the website. It looks a little unsophisticated. It says Graham and Doyle's private investigations company is called Crown Private Investigations. According to Companies House, Crown Private Investigations Ltd has been dissolved. Stolen Stuff Reunited has also been dissolved. I'd be interested to know when the 'Stolen Stuff Reunited website was first set up. According to the Whois information for the domain, it was created on 10th June 2010, and registered in the name of Chaz Brooks Communications Ltd. It's curious that a specific Google search for 'Stolen Stuff Reunited' confined to the time the said 'Liverpool villains' might have been googling it doesn't reveal very much. I wonder how these villains came across the site? What do you think?
Still, at least the picture was safely returned...
National Gallery - ban resale of Leonardo tickets
November 23 2011
Picture: BG
Following reports that tickets for the Leonardo exhibition are trading on Ebay for hundreds of pounds, the National Gallery has announced that resold tickets will be cancelled, and entry refused. From BBC News:
"We are obviously very disappointed at the resale of these tickets for profit," a spokeswoman said. "The resale of tickets for the Leonardo da Vinci exhibition is against the terms and conditions of their sale and this information is printed on the tickets.
"Our website clearly states: 'Tickets that have been resold will be cancelled without refund and admission will be refused to the bearer.'"
The spokeswoman said the gallery is contacting companies and websites that are accommodating ticket resales, requesting that they "stop immediately".
But she declined to comment on which methods are being used to identify resold tickets.
The last paragraph here is obviously rather important: the sad fact is, there is no conclusive way of detecting who has bought a resold ticket. So there's very little the Gallery can do...
Leonardo didn't paint 'Lady With an Ermine'!
November 22 2011
Picture: Princess Czartoryski Foundation
I'm indebted to a reader for alerting me to another piece of incisive art history in the letters pages of our national press. This is from Pauline Wood, of Ibstone, Buckinghamshire, in today's Daily Telegraph:
Sir,
In the painting Lady with an Ermine, currently on display at the National Gallery’s Leonardo exhibition, the lady’s right hand is out of proportion with the rest of her body (detail, below). If you measure from her wrist to the tip of her longest finger and transfer that measurement to her face, it reaches from her chin almost to the top of her head. My hand only reaches from my chin to the middle of my forehead.
Given Leonardo’s knowledge of anatomy, I find it difficult to believe that he would have made this error. I am not an expert or even an artist, but dare I suggest that this painting may be by one of his students?
In case you too are doubting the picture, go see the Leonardo exhibition, where you will not only understand all about foreshortening, but also see countless preparatory drawings. In fact, Leonardo liked the hand so much he used it twice; it appears in The Last Supper. And before you try putting your hand on your face to see if the Telegraph writer's theory is correct, and that a human hand cannot be larger than a human head, remember that her measurement has been taken from the back of Leonardo's sitter's hand, at the base of the bent wrist. This gives a measurement of at least an inch longer than if you measure from the base of your palm to your fingertip.
Anyway, I feel an Art History News prize coming on - for the most bonkers art historical theory of the year. Any suggestions for the title, or indeed the prize?
'Salvator Mundi' - it's all balls
November 21 2011
Picture: Salvator Mundi LLC
There's an interesting interview with Leonardo Scholar Martin Kemp over on Artinfo, in which he discusses his role in attributing the Salvator Mundi. He reveals that one of the things which convinced him about the picture is the orb in Christ's hand. After he first saw the painting he went down to the Ashmolean Museum to look at one of their rock crystal orbs:
What was striking for me was the orb, and I've subsequently researched it quite heavily. The "Salvator Mundi" obviously holds the mundus, the world which he's saving, and it was absolutely unlike anything I've seen before. The orbs in other Salvator Mundis, often they're of a kind of brass or solid. Sometimes they're terrestrial globes, sometimes they're translucent glass, and one or two even have little landscapes in them. What this one had was an amazing series of glistening little apertures — they're like bubbles, but they're not round — painted very delicately, with just a touch of impasto, a touch of dark, and these little sort of glistening things, particularly around the part where you get the back reflections. And that said to me: rock crystal. Because rock crystal gets what are called inclusions, and to get clear rock crystal is very difficult, particularly big bits. So there are these little gaps, which are slightly irregular in shape, and I thought, well, that's pretty fancy. And Leonardo was a bit of an expert on rock crystal. He was asked to judge vases that Isabella d'Este was thinking of buying, and he loved those materials.
So when I was back in Oxford, I went to the geology department, and I said, "Let's have a look at some rock crystal." And in the Ashmolean Museum, in a wunderkammer of curiosities, there is a big rock crystal ball, and that has inclusions, so we photographed it under comparable lighting conditions I also began to look at the heel of the hand underneath the globe in the "Salvator Mundi"; there are two heels. The restorer thought it was a pentimento, but I wondered if he was recording a double refraction of the kind you get with a calcite sphere. If this proves to be right, it would be absolutely Leonardesque. I like these things when they're not just connoisseurship. None of the copyists knew that. They just transcribed it. Some of them do better than others, but none of them got this crystal with its possible double refraction. And one of the points of the crystal sphere is that it relates iconographically to the crystalline sphere of the heavens, because in Ptolemaic cosmology the stars were in the fixed crystalline sphere, and so they were embedded. So what you've got in the "Salvator Mundi" is really a "a savior of the cosmos", and this is a very Leonardesque transformation.
