On Art
MELLOW, JAMES R.
On Art FLORENTINE GOLD AND BRASS BY JAMES R. MELLOW AS A SPECIAL summer attraction, the Metropolitan Museum is displaying its entire Florentine collection. The occasion is the Met's publication...
...Silva lived only a half-mile away and usually had seen my grandmother not too long ago...
...Zeri, however, argues that the "admirably high quality of many compositional and spatial ideas, as well as a large part of the actual painting must be ascribed to Giotto himself," and explains the poorer sections as the work of assistants...
...The scholarly debate over whether Giotto painted most or much of the picture calls attention to the piecework nature of Italian painting in that period: The master would execute the important figures and leave, say, the gilded halos and crowns, the queer spindly-legged sheep and goats to some assistant...
...Anna meeting in front of the Golden Gate that forms part of his mural for the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua—a picture that, unfortunately, I have only seen in reproduction...
...The exhibition, said to be the most extensive assemblage of Florentine art outside the city of Florence itself, features more than 130 works?ranging from the anonymous painters of the 13th century to such acknowledged masters as Fra Angel-ico, Fra Filippo Lippi, Botticelli, and II Bronzino...
...This is, of course, one of the consequences of art-historical research: Later discoveries and further scholarship tend to overthrow earlier authorities...
...It has the economy of means and stark concentration upon human emotions that normally characterizes Giotto...
...The later portraits—Lorenzo di Credi's beautiful young widow, Cosimo Rosselli's incisive picture of a man, Bronzino's elegant young fop, mocked by the gargoyle faces carved on the ornate furniture—are among the most impressive paintings in the exhibition...
...The one Giotto in the exhibition, newly attributed to that great 13th-14th-century master, tends to confirm this feeling...
...Frederico Zeri, in collaboration with Elizabeth E. Gardner, the museum's Associate Curator of European Painting...
...The world and the flesh are given their due...
...it seems more accessible, and more fallibly human...
...The rigid, heavy draperies begin to flutter, almost as if a light wind was slowly rising in Italian art, catching at the gauzy veils the Virgin Mary now wears in place of her dark shawl...
...Not only does Zeri disagree with several of Berenson's tentative attributions, but he dismisses many of Berenson's firm judgments as well...
...secular subjects and portraiture achieve a new prominence...
...One of the charms of the Metropolitan's exhibition is that it illustrates, chronologically from picture to picture, how Giotto's influence and the humanizing ideas of the Renaissance gradually leavened Italian painting...
...It somehow makes Florentine painting a little less awesome than it looks in the picture books...
...Zeri dates it around the 1440s on the basis of the bride's embroidered gown and bejeweled headdress...
...She stands, timelessly, in a cramped little cubicle of a room...
...The gesture seemed a little foreign to me and even a bit suspect, for Mrs...
...I have always associated the ability to humanize moments of high religious drama with Giotto, who is said to have introduced that element into Italian painting...
...The panel is a beautifully compact rendering of the Epiphany, with the Virgin Mary lying under an improbably small, crude shelter, receiving the three Magi...
...The engagement or marriage picture attributed to Fra Filippo Lippi is one of the delights of the show...
...At a conservative estimate, he is 300 years too late...
...Active in Florence," the catalogue entry notes, then goes on to claim that the artist's representation of himself as Jonathan Swift's Gulliver "shows how closely Annigoni is linked to the great European tradition and its figurative and literary themes...
...My own recognition of it derives from the scene of St...
...The image reminded me of a scene from my childhood when my grandmother, who was Portuguese and not Italian, hurried up the path past the vegetable garden to meet her old friend Mrs...
...The occasion is the Met's publication of the first of a series of catalogues on its Italian holdings, Italian Paintings: Florentine School (distributed by the New York Graphic Society, 234 pp., illustrated, $9.25), compiled by a noted expert in the field, Dr...
...Nonetheless, it is strange to see Berenson's work erode in the field where he was regarded the principal, and certainly the most celebrated, authority...
...Zeri, who began the project in 1961, has also made a number of fresh attributions—an interesting subject in itself, even when the works in question may not appear particularly notable...
...Thus "Coronation of the Virgin," ascribed by Berenson to Botticelli, has now been designated the work of a follower...
...One wonders how many more of Berenson's judgments will be replaced in the future catalogues...
...The effect, therefore, is an unusual view of the Florentine school, departing from the standard histories that concentrate on big names and great paintings...
...Yet even in a work like the "Madonna and Child," listed as "Possibly by the Master of the Fogg Pieta," where the child looks up quizzically into his mother's face, there is a hint of the flair for familial or domestic drama that is, if not typically Italian, distinctly old-worldish...
...Joachim and St...
...What Annigoni, a slick portraitist of English and Italian society, has to do with the artists of the Italian Renaissance is anybody's guess...
...One sees Florentine art in its everyday context, masterpieces jostling against outright mediocrities like the group of absolutely dead 15th-century works ascribed to the Lippi-Pesellino imitators—Renaissance kitsch...
...Emerging from the woods at the end of the garden, the 70-year-old woman immediately announced her arrival by shouting out in her high, cackling voice and slurred syllables...
...It has the man and the woman joining in a marvelous embrace, face to face, their voluminous cloaks forming a single monolithic figure...
...Delving into the reference notes for individual pictures, for instance, one finds that Zeri's attributions override many of the late Bernard Berenson's...
...When I first saw the Giotto picture, however, I immediately knew that his image of Joachim and Anna was authentic, drawn from real life and not a stiff, formal device...
...Silva...
...The bridegroom is a mere intrusion on the scene...
...The results of his complete reexamination will be published in three more volumes, devoted to other historic regions and schools of Italian painting...
...a face, in profile, handsome and a little vacuous, peering in through a casement window...
...The last picture the viewer sees on leaving the show is of a beady-eyed man wearing a sombrero and holding a staff, a self-portrait by the contemporary Italian painter, Pietro Annigoni...
...Because the museum has pulled out all of the pictures it normally keeps in storage, the show includes many paintings by minor artists as well as some unfinished pieces and others in need of restoration...
...Spinach, I'd say...
...The show's preponderance of early pictures with staid...
...Whether one agrees with Zeri or not, one begins to suspect that this aspect of an art historian's lifework is the least durable...
...What he has to say about the qualities of an individual painting is likely to prove more lasting than the arguments he produces for assigning it to a particular artist...
...The entire story is compressed within the 17-inch-square format: the angels exulting overhead, the shepherds staring in wonderment, Joseph leaning forward anxiously as one of the kings lifts the Christ child from the manger...
...Since the last catalogue of the Met's sizable Italian collection was issued in 1940, the new listing notes many additional acquisitions...
...SCHOLARLY disagreements have a way of being consigned to the fine print, and Zeri's catalogue is no exception...
...A striking portrait of a young man, another of Berenson's Botticellis, is listed by Zeri as a Biagio di Antonio...
...Previously, the museum assigned the picture to the Workshop of Giotto and, judging by the long series of scholarly references in the catalogue, many historians still maintain that attribution...
...By the late 1530s, when Bronzino's boy was painted, the stern old-fashioned religion of the early artists seems to have vanished from the scene, like a morning mist lifting from the Tuscan landscape...
...Mish Mel, Mish Mel...
...They came together in the green shade of the grape arbor and clasped each other for dear life, embracing cheek to cheek on one side and then the other, patting each other's backs and murmuring their greetings...
...Byzantine figures against gold grounds—frowning madonnas and lean, stern-faced saints who give the impression that sanctity must somehow be related to sour stomachs and malnutrition?apparently stems from the marked preference of wealthy American collectors for the so-called Italian "primitives...
...Then, too, I was already infected with the New Englander's sense of observing proper decorum and keeping one's emotions in check...
...This was an intriguing example of mass-production techniques applied to high art...
...His resemblance to Gulliver is as dubious as the relationship between his work and that of the Florentine school...
...The gilded backgrounds fall away to reveal idyllic landscapes of carefully tended gardens and blue mountains...
Vol. 54 • July 1971 • No. 15
