Hidden Lemon

These past weeks I have been painting a small lemon tree. It's not the first time that I look at this subject of a tree-like plant. I like the scale and the intricacy of the leaves and recently, after having painted such an architectural and rigorous subject as boxes for a few months, I was in need of looking at a more complex and organic form.

        When I approach a subject, I am always aware of its endorsement as such: in this case the "father" of these set-ups is the treee in the Baptism of Christ by Piero. For me this is one of the most beautiful trees in the history of art. Its dark leaves are patiently depicted one by one and the scale of it is just so perfectly human.

 Another painting of a tree I love and I have been studying in paint is a Madonna and Child by Giovanni Bellini, in which the little tree is not more than a sapling.

And then of course there is the Membrillero by Antonio Lopez, documented in the film by Antonio Erice, a painting Lopez has abandoned finding it impossible to replicate the very elusive light that first got his eye, but a motif he has insisted upon in many drawings.

Then there are fantastic works by Sangram Majumdar and Sigal Tsabari that explore similar visual themes.

And so, on a much more humble plan, here come my paintings of this little resilient tree with its lonely lemon I have found at a local garden centre. Its leaves are dark and badly organized, there are stumps coming out at all angles and the fruit is pale and on the thin side.
The more I look at it the more I find this clumsy structure with its sickly looking sheltered yellow heart a very moving subject. Far from the heavy fruitful branches of Lopez's tree, I see it as a pale reminder of Mediterranean light and find myself longing for the South.

Hidden Lemon I, oil on canvas mounted on board,

Hidden Lemon III, oil on board 24x33 cm

Lemon and Boxes, oil on linen, 101x92

Hidden Lemon IV, in progress

Chardin at Waddesdon Manor

Today I went to Waddesdon Manor for a day trip. The beautiful residence is at about one hour from London and it was built by the Rothschild family as a place to entertain their guests and to house their collection of precious objects.
Indeed the house it's worth a visit to see the collection and the beautiful grounds, but until the 15th of July even more so as there is a small but stunning show of Chardin's paintings.

Charlotte Rothschild, from the french branch of the family, was a great collector of Chardin, having bought about twenty paintings on the period from 1870 to 1899, and her collection was further enriched by her heirs. Unfortunately most of the paintings were destroyed by german bombs while in storage in UK and others were sold.

 " The House of Cards" was bought by the Rothschild's estate in 2007 and now they have reunited four paintings with the same subject together with other Chardin's masterpieces.
The paintings are all slightly different, one is more of a portrait, the others are more genre scenes, one portrays an older and more dishevelled teen ager, one acknowledges the existence of a world outside the window, all are incredibly intense and beautiful, Chardin at his best.

The Girl with a Shuttlecock is also on display, belonging to the Rothschild family as well, after having been owned by Catherine II, Empress of Russia.

Another "old friend" I had never met in real life was the "Lady Taking Tea", on loan from the Hunterian Art Gallery" in Glasgow.

This painting was the direct source for my two recent still life works of boxes on red cabinets from the Wrap series on show next week in Galleria Elle Arte, Palermo and Chardin's open drawer often makes its appearance in my works. 

   He is one of my favourite painters, and I look very often at his work, still lifes that are extraordinary and relevant. Seeing these pictures in real life, in the intimate room and subdued light of the red ante-room in Waddesdon was an intense emotion.

    Chardin is featured again in Waddesdon in the form of a large etching by Lucien Freud from the painting " The School Mistress"in the National Gallery. Freud painted an intense copy from Chardin and etched this large plate now on display. Freud of course was a friend of the Rothchilds and the collection includes one of his self portraits and a portrait of baron Rothschild, as well as a small sensitive portrait of Serena Rothschild by painter Michael Andrews.

A detailed catalogue of the show, titled "Taking Time", is available here. It seems a very interesting read: while I was looking at the show ( it's all in one small room) the curator was showing a french gentleman round. I obviously eavesdropped and she was mentioning many interesting details and information always reassuring him that they were included in the catalogue.

I cannot recommend visiting Waddesdon enough, but get there before the end of the show ! ( and don't forget to book online as even in today's stormy weather it was very crowded and they have entry time slots) 

Giants

In the past weeks I was fortunate enough to see shows of the most eminent figurative painters of today. I am now trying to make sense of what I saw, the amount of information I have gathered on these three artists and what influence they had and will have on my work.

I wrote about seeing Antonio Lopez Garcia's show in Spain here a few weeks ago, I went to the National Portrait Gallery for Freud's "Portraits" on Friday and I visited  Hockney's "A Bigger Picture" today.
The shows were all retrospectives, Lopez Garcia's being the most complete as it spanned all his life and took into account all aspects of his work, all painting genres as well as drawing and sculpture. All these shows are impressive for the amount of exceptional works the painters have produced, particularly considering the slow pace of Freud and Lopez when painting.

Of the three, Lopez is my favourite. Technically unsurpassed and with an enormous emotional content in all his paintings. The tenderness of his feelings towards the subject, his love for Madrid's light, his everyday objects, food, flowers, the quiet of his empty studio, his family, is always there beneath the surface.

Hockney's show was a total surprise. I had overlooked his work for many years, I didn't get it and found it technically unsatisfying, but I understand now I just wasn't ready for it. My sympathy for Hockney started really when he published his book " Secret Knowledge".  How liberating it was having formal permission from dozens of old masters to paint from photographs and be merry and guilt-free !
Visual technology is not evil, an enemy, is something that can be used, submitted.
What I admire in Hockney is his mental youth, the enthusiasm with which he stays up to date, doing something new within the framework of centuries past.

I think that painting is the least suitable art form to speak about current times: video, installations, assemblage, sound, they can do the job so much better. Painting, though, can speak about human nature, about those elements of human nature that have not changed in the whole history of mankind. And painting talks in the language of painting, the language of portraits, landscape, still-life. What I loved in Hockney's show is the fact that he is sticking to traditional landscape, might it be in his studio or in the field ( I generally preferred the paintings he did from observation) without trying to revolutionise anything, just doing the same thing hundreds of others had done before him, with modesty and serious commitment.
The work is about man and nature, vision, the passing of time. What can be more human than that?

Actually what he tries to revolutionise instead is technology: he looks for a new and different way of filming nature ( still referencing his previous photographic works) that is more akin to human vision, and he is the most popular testimonial for using the newest gadget as a traditional medium.
The display is just a feast for the eyes, and one comes out of the show slightly lightheaded and certainly uplifted.

The opposite happens coming out of Lucien Freud's show. Fascination for the painter, for his dedication, for his immense personality, but after seeing all those paintings I felt almost empty, void.
Freud often said he wanted his models to be like animals: fall into that state of just living in the moment, like dogs do.
At the end of the show, having looked at all his sitters, almost always alone, neutral if not sad, their gaze rarely meeting the viewer's, makes me wonder if there was any emotion at all in this man, any concern for his sitters. Many of them are there like a lump of meat, a deaf heap of molecules.

I saw the latest documentary about Freud on the BBC and the image that emerges is one of a man that has had many lovers but hasn't loved anyone except his time at the easel.
He fathered three children from different women in the same year. The daughters that appear in his paintings talk fondly about him in the documentary, but I wonder about the feelings of the other eleven ones.

Freud's little involvement with the sitter, his dominating point of view, the unforgiving light, those clumsy feet, they all made me feel chilly. I used to revere his paintings but less so now. 

Anyway I feel very fortunate for being able to see all these works of art and I am sure they will resonate in my mind for a long time.

The Flagellation, Part Two. Who's Who

Read part one here.
So, who are these mysterious characters that populate the painting ?
The argument has been going on for decades, and Ronchey adds her theory while at the same time mentioning past interpretations and explaining why she agrees or not with them

The first key to understanding the painting is to try and put a date on its execution. This is another element that has been controversial. Ronchey agrees with many in placing it around 1458-1459 mainly because of the influences of Leon Battista Alberti's architectures that are echoed in the painting. This means Piero has ultimated the Flagellation just before the Council of Mantova, the one in which Bessarion and Pope Pius II were trying to find funds and members for the crusade.
In Ronchey exegesis the work does not refer to the Council of Mantova, though, but to the previous attempt at saving Bysantium, the Council of Ferrara/Firenze ( it had moved from one city to the other because of the threat of a plague epidemic). The procession of hundreds of Byzantine personalities with their colourful and strange clothes was seen by a huge crowd, among which probably Piero.

The artist who got to get a privileged view of the dignitaries and of the Basileus ( then Giovanni VIII Paleologo)  himself was Pisanello. There is a large group of drawings by Pisanello ( Louvre) where the artist had sketched people and costumes. Pisanello also was the author of at least one medal, bearing the profile image of the Basileus, that had a wide circulation and became his definitive image in those years.

So we can affirm that the first figure in the Praetorium is Giovanni VIII Paleologo, who is pictured as Pontius Pilatus, and is wearing the red  footwear that were the attribute of  the Basileus.

Giovanni, argues Ronchey, is not the one who is letting the flagellation happen ( this is a more contemporary view of the gospel's figure), but rather a powerless witness to it.

The person who is responsible for ordering the flagellation is actually the figure standing barefooted with our back to us. He is identified with the Sultan Mehmet II, the conqueror of Costantinople. After the occupation of the town Mehmet had his men look for the body of the dead Emperor: He was after the red footwear  embroidered with the double-headed black eagle, symbol of imperial power. That is why he is now pictured without footwear ( at the time of the Council of Mantua Constantinople had yet not fallen). The two men performing the flagellation seem to be two pirates of which there's an iconographic precedent again in Pisanello's drawings.

The body of Christ represents symbolically the church of Bysantium. He is tied to a column on top of which is a golden sculpture that might be identified with the huge bronze statue of Emperor Costantino, of which only a few fragments now remain, that was in Rome in front of the Lateran. The whole space in fact represents the town of Constantinople. 

In this vision, the two spaces in which the painting is divided are not removed in time from one another, but in space. What happens to the left of the painting, the torture of Constantinople, picture symbolically as the flagellation of Christ,  is happening WHILE the three figures on the right are discussing the situation. 

As we have seen the painting refers to the Council of Ferrara-Firenze. The first figure on the left, the greek mediator, is identified by Ronchey with Bessarione. We don't have any confirmed image of the Cardinal at a younger age, but the double pointed beard, the cloak and hat all point to the charismatic Cardinal. 

Elements of the architecture in the right hand side are another sign that point at the Council of Ferrara. The roof on the left is found in a painting by Francesco del Cossa and reference the tower by Leon Battista Alberti.

If this negotiation is happening in Ferrara, it is likely that the figure on the right is Niccolo' III D'Este, Lord of Ferrara and host of the council. His son Lionello would be pictured with a similar brocade overcoat in a painting by Jacopo Bellini in 1441. Niccolo's sons, Lionello and Borso, were filo-Byzantium and had ties with Bessarione and his neo-platonic circle; they also helped Giovanni VIII Paleologo's brother Tommaso when he escaped to Italy in 1460.

There is only one last figure to identify, the striking young man dressed in crimson that echos the posture of the tortured Christ. "Porfirogenito", this was what the basileus was called, "he who was born in porpora ( crimson, the imperial colour). The man looks like other figures painted by Piero:  a fragment of a fresco in Sansepolcro, an angel in the National Gallery Baptism, a prophet in the fresco from the Duomo of Arezzo. Ronchey argues that this is an idealised portrait of Tommaso Paleologo, the youngest brother of the Emperor who could inherit the throne if it was to be saved.

 A bearded Tommaso, twenty years older but still fair and " of great aspect", would arrive in Italy for his melancholic exile, where he would die as ever assisted by Bessarione in 1465. 

In 1474 the Cardinal was still looking for help for the Empire. Tommaso's daughter Zoe was the csarina of Russia, and Bessarione left for France and England to try and organise yet another crusade. He knew his health was declining and he had planned to come back to his great friend Federico da Montefeltro who  had already prepared an abode for him at Castel Durante. 

Bessarione took with him all his precious books, which he had left in legacy to Venice ( they would become the initial core of the Biblioteca Marciana). He left them with Federico whom he trusted, perhaps he had a foreboding feeling about his trips.

Bessarione didn't make it back to Urbino, and died in 1472 in Ravenna. His books, after having been detailed in an accurate inventory, were handed to Venice by Federico in 1474. Is it possible that another of Bessarione's treasured possessions was left back in the hands of his loyal friend, thus becoming the most precious treasure of the city of Urbino ?

I cannot recommend enough the book by Ronchey if you read Italian. The exegesis is of course much more detailed  and complex than I could cram in these few lines. The book analyzes many other contemporary works of art such as Benozzo Gozzoli's Cappella dei Magi, Vittore Carpaccio's Visione di Sant'Agostino,  Pisanello's San Giorgio e la Principessa and many others ( view iconography ). The research was huge and conducted with great respect for other scholars, the result is convincing and profound.

Piero's Flagellation, A Recent Interpretation. Part One- History

In the past weeks I have been reading a book that I had seen a few years ago but never got to buy. The book is called L'Enigma di Piero ( Piero's Enigma), it was published in 2006 and is by Silvia Ronchey, a scholar of Byzantine History.

Ronchey looks back at previous interpretations of The Flagellation, the small painting by Piero della Francesca in the Palazzo Ducale of Urbino and gives her own reading of the masterpiece. I am summarising the content of the four hundred pages of the book here because I see it has not been translated in English and it is a very intriguing read.  Ronchey's interpretation is now well respected and takes into account the work of many previous scholars.

 The painting is one of the big mysteries in art history, and since its "rediscovery" it has prompted a myriad of different exegeses.
 The Flagellation is the painting where figures were deemed having "some African features" and " thick ankles" and therefore rejected by the envoy of London's National Gallery, in Italy to buy masterpieces for the museum.
 Its success started later on with a French scholar, Layard, and Degas was the first painter who rushed to Italy to see it after reading Layard's article. Soon critics realised Piero was a major artist and his paintings were written about by all the most renown art historians, including Berenson, Kenneth Clark, Longhi, Gombrich, Pope-Hennessy and countless others. The first one to interpret the work in the light of Byzantium's history was Kenneth Clark, and Ronchey proceeds from that idea and enriches the book with a hundred pages of apparatus to support her theory.

      Ronchey tells the story of the first half of the fifteenth century, when Byzantium was about to fall to the Turkish armies and frenetic negotiations were made in Europe to try and save the Empire.
The main ambassador of the Emperor in the west was Bessarione, a greek cardinal who, though originally an anti-latinist, had argued in favour of the reunification of the Eastern and Western churches during the Council of Ferrara/Florence as he thought it the only way of obtaining help for the Empire. A crusade organised after this council ended in a complete disaster.

 The plan was to move the capital of the oriental Empire to Mistra, a city close to Sparta in the Peloponnesus,  that was already one of the most prosperous parts of the Empire under the aegis of Teodoro and then Tommaso Paleologo, brother of the Emperor.

 This would have been a very beneficial move, as Mistra could be an important strategical bridgehead to contast the ever increasing Ottoman empire both commercially and militarily. Mistra was also at the centre of cultural interest as it had been the home of a school of Neoplatonic philosophers which had deeply influenced Humanism, the movement at the heart of Italian Renaissance.


 One of the major sponsors of this strategy was Pope Pius II, Cardinal Enea Silvio Piccolomini, who canvassed for years in order to organise another crusade.
    All the leading families in Italy were interested in Mistra: the Gonzaga in Mantova, the Estensi in Ferrara, the Malatesta in Pesaro, the Montefeltro in Urbino. They all had family ties between themselves and with the Emperor ( the beautiful Cleopa Malatesta had been married to Teodoro Paleologo, brother of Tommaso and previous despot of Mistra), they had power and money.

Enea Silvio Piccolomini, painted by Pinturicchio in the Libreria Piccolomini ( Duomo di Siena)

 in 1502/1507 with the help of Raffaello. 

Pope Pius II organised a second council, in Mantua in 1459 to try and launch yet another military offensive. Not only he was seeking for the support of these families, but he also tried to involve Venezia, Genova, Burgundy and other countries. Constantinople had, in the meantime, fallen, and the last remaining Emperor, Tommaso, the youngest brother who wasn't expecting to reign, had escaped to Italy with his family.
Having decided to personally lead the crusade in order to push all his very reluctant allies, the Pope died in Ancona while getting ready to set sales for the Aegean sea in 1464.

The crusade happened anyway, and it was another failure. In a short time the Pope, the last Basileus Tommaso Paleologo and Sigismondo Malatesta, leader of the crusade who caught malaria in Mistra, all died, and with them the hope to reunite the Empire with Rome. The daughter of the last despot of Mistra would then marry Ivan III, great prince of Russia, the new Cesar ( Csar). The ideological legacy of the Empire of Bysantium was going to pass to Moscow, re-enter orthodoxy and be progressively detached by the West.

The -failed- unification of the first and the second Rome is the project of which the Flagellation, in Ronchey's opinion, was the manifesto.

In the next post I will write about tht Ronchey"s exegesis of the painting.

Bilbao Foray

I have not been painting for the past two weeks, but I haven't been far away from paintings either.
I have seen a few shows in Rome over Christmas, but I want to start from the end: I spent 24 hours in Bilbao yesterday with the sole aim of visiting Antonio Lopez's show at the Museum of Fine Arts.

The show was well worth a trip. As my friend Allan Ramsey put it, this is a show to fly to, drive to, swim to, walk to, crawl to....
     I am not going to dwell on how delicious it was to see all those paintings and what a different sort of experience is looking at them in real life after having burnt my eyes out on reproductions.
I could finally appreciate the surfaces of the paintings, some times dry and scratched, some times smooth and seemingly effortlessly covered, the difference between his works on canvas and on board and his astonishing drawings.
Also, it was another occasion to admire the man himself, his work ethics, his dedication, his humbleness, his deep engagement with classicism.

  If you cannot catch a plane and get yourself there before the end of the show, you can still buy the catalogue  or buy the iPad app.

After such a delight in the morning, I went to the Guggenheim Museum in the afternoon, but what a disappointment !

The building itself, a weird metal extrusion from a fissured sac-a-poche, is nothing like the photos you see of it. One would think it is placed in isolation in an large space, a bit like, say, Sydney's Opera House or the pyramids in the middle of the huge Louvre courtyard.

 Actually the metal blob is sunk at the foot of a small urban hill, overlooked by drab apartment blocks.
Once you have successfully located the entrance ( it takes a while) you find yourself in a unnecessarily complicated and shapeless building with cryptic floorplans. ( I don't seem the only one with a dubious opinion)

On the left, another "more sincere" view of the building.

   The temporary exhibitions were " Painterly Abstraction" and Serra/Brancusi. The first one was the sort of "one each" show, where someone seemed to have randomly picked one example for each painter and aligned them on the walls of several rooms grouping them up a bit.  No depth, no further analysis.
The second show was even more arbitrarily put together. What do two artists such as Brancusi and Serra have in common? Ok, Serra was impressed with Brancusi studio and visited it for many days in a row when he was young in Paris. That's about it. It seems to me that the mini website on the show highlights the differences among the two artists more than any similarity or references of Serra to the work of his predecessor.
Serra works on the perception of space and time, viewers are meant to interact with the sculptures, he often makes site-specific installations, most of his sculptures are made of steel.
Brancusi instead worked on form, synthesis. His sculptures are self contained and do not require interactions, are not generally on a monumental scale ( apart from the famous endless column, made by repetition of smaller pieces though) and executed in different materials, marble, bronze, wood.
Moreover in the show installation, I felt that there was no dialogue at all between the works, Brancusi's sculptures pushing Serra's works on the walls.


What curiously happened, though, was that works from the two artists remanded me to the paintings and sculptures I had seen a few hours earlier at the Lopez show.

Lopez's Carmen Despierta and Carmen Dormida ( first photo above), as well as the many small babies heads in the show echo Brancusi's versions of the Head of a Child ( second and third photos), The First Cry and The Newborn in what is clearly a theme that has interested both artists.

One of Serra's pieces in the permanent installation The Matter of Time instead made me think about Lopez's drawings of his studio.

More evidently than in his paintings, the vertical lines defining the narrow walls of a bathroom bend in describing a field of vision that is spherical, curved: the huge steel walls of Between the Torus and the Sphere enhanced this feeling of a reality centred on the viewer's vision. 

I am now back in my studio with plenty of inspiration and I wish to all a Happy New Year full of art !

Emil Robinson at Waterhouse and Dodd

 

 

I really meant to write about this show earlier, but there's still a few days left before it closes.
Emil is one of my online friends, and hails from Cincinnati, Ohio. I was very happy to learn that I would be able to see his work in real life, as this rarely happens with American friends.
His works are shown at Waterhouse and Dodd, in Cork Street, and tie in perfectly with what is generally shown in the street.
Emil's colours are enticing and his choice of subject is even more intimate than just domestic, it rather seems confined to the studio or better to those interiors that become artist's studios just because a painter has set up there and started observing a subject.
I had the chance of finally meeting and talking to Emil at the preview, and we agreed how the Internet has been such a powerful tool for many artists to break isolation and find like minded people in which to find confirmation and inspiration.
One of Emil's paintings was also on display at the Art London Fair last week. I was talking to the gallerist there and he rightly made a connection to the work of Domenico Gnoli, whom I also thought about while seeing that particular painting of a shirt as other works such as "Blue Envelope" from the show.

 

Gnoli is not very well known outside Italy, but he was a marvellous painter. In my recent and quite disappointing visit at the new  MAXXI museum in Rome I was astonished that on the couple of hundred pieces from the collection on display there was only ONE PAINTING ! ( the rest being sculptures, videos, installations and the like). The painting was a Gnoli.

 Emil's show closes on the 21st of October.