Monthly Archives: October 2014

The first collectors of ‘Primitives’

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The Popularity of the Primitives, an exhibition which runs at the Galleria dell’Accademia in Florence until 8 December, is concerned with the fascinating subject of when 14th- and early 15th-century Italian paintings (and other early art treasures) came to be considered worthy of notice and were, as a consequence, incorporated in public and private collections. Up until the late 18th century, only works from the time of Raphael onwards were in vogue: besides Raphael, Michelangelo and Titian, collections featured paintings by artists such as Correggio, Guido Reni, Federico Barocci and Rubens.

‘Descent from the Cross’ (14th century) by Pietro da Rimini.

The exhibition tells the story of 42 collectors, almost all of them little-known, who lived in the late 18th or early 19th century. And an impressive amount of scholarly research has gone into it—which is heartening to see, in an age when fewer and fewer museum directors are still art historians, and curators are increasingly put under pressure to devise shows that will make money. To each collector a section is dedicated, depending on the region of Italy where they lived: besides their (for some reason usually unflattering) portrait, there is a display of a small selection of the works they are known to have acquired (and which are now in private or public collections). We discover that these erudite individuals, whether prelates or cardinals, noblemen or tradesmen, shared an interest in the cultural value of these early works and that by obtaining them they rescued them from oblivion and possible destruction. In later times when they fell into the hands of antiquarians and dealers, their monetary value steadily increased, although it is interesting to note that today the ‘primitives’ are worth far less than modern and contemporary artworks.

By looking at the provenance of the works one can see how many of them ended up in the great museums of the world: a certain Agostino Mariotti, who amassed 600 works and who was mentioned by travellers on the Grand Tour, was to leave his collection to the Vatican Picture Gallery. In 1780 Cardinal Stefano Borgia (who almost became pope) acquired St Euphemia by Mantegna, which is on show, and most of his collection is now in the Museo di Capodimonte in Naples. This great Renaissance artist is included as a reminder also that it was not only the ‘primitive’ gold-ground paintings which had been neglected up until this time but also those by artists now considered of fundamental importance. The Ranghiasci family of Gubbio in Umbria, whose large romantic park is today open to the public, owned an exquisite Descent from the Cross by Pietro da Rimini, lent to the present exhibition by the Louvre.

Marchese Alfonso Tacoli Canacci, who died in Emilia in 1801, is represented by four of the best Tuscan works in the exhibition: a Madonna of Humility by Agnolo Gaddi, which ended up in a private collection in New York; another Madonna of Humility by Fra’ Angelico; a very unusual long predella panel by Giovanni di Paolo of Christ carrying the Cross surrounded by a crowd of saints all holding a Cross; and a tiny Entry of Christ into Jerusalem by Pietro di Giovanni d’Ambrogio. The three latter works went to the national museum in Parma.

Fra’ Francesco Raimondo Adami, a Servite friar at the convent of Santissima Annunziata in Florence, collected important early works which are now part of the collection of the Galleria dell’Accademia itself: on show are St Mary Magdalene with stories from her life, by the Master of the Magdalene (named from this work), and paintings by Niccolò di Pietro Gerini, Andrea Orcagna and Fra’ Angelico. Other works acquired at this time by Tuscan collectors (and also included in the exhibition) were to form the nucleus of the earliest works in the Museo di San Matteo in Pisa and the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Siena.

Only two of the collectors are well-known today since their collections survive on public display under their own names: Angelo Maria Bandini of Fiesole (whose exquisite museum is still in that little town above Florence) and Teodoro Correr (1750–1830) of Venice (the huge Museo Correr is in Piazza San Marco). For this exhibition a relief of the Madonna and Child by Domenico Rosselli, once owned by Bandini, has been loaned from the V&A so that it has been reunited with other works still in Fiesole; and the Correr has sent two of its masterpieces to Florence: a Pietà by Cosmè Tura and another, unfinished work of the same subject, by Antonello da Messina. A superb small St Nicholas of Bari, also by Cosmè Tura, in a section towards the end of the exhibition, illustrates some of the works acquired by French collectors while in Rome.

by Alta Macadam, author of Blue Guide Florence.

From Pompeii: The Afterlife of a Roman Town

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Ingrid D. Rowland, From Pompeii: The Afterlife of a Roman Town, Harvard University Press, 2014.

One of the pleasures of reading The New York Review of Books is coming across the articles by Ingrid Rowland. Professor Rowland teaches at the University of Notre Dame in Rome and specialises in art history and cultural relationships, especially those between Italy and its Classical and Renaissance past. She always had something interesting to say and it is perhaps because I have happy memories of sitting around in Rome with archaeologists and art historians that I find her especially engaging.

In the introduction of her enjoyable survey of Pompeii’s after-history, we see the eight-year old Rowland, pig-tailed and bespectacled, on her first visit to the ruins in 1962. The experience clearly resonated with her (never underestimate where the experiences of an eight-year old might lead!) and she now teaches permanently in Italy. From Pompeii is the story of the characters who were fascinated by the drama of Vesuvius, its eruptions and the vanished communities of Herculaneum and Pompeii as they were slowly recovered from the lava. For centuries, legends had persisted of buried cities but there was nothing to be seen. Instead the fascination was with Vesuvius. Athanasius Kircher, would-be decipherer of hieroglyphics, a priest always on the edge of disfavour with the Church on account of his belief in the natural rather than miraculous background of geological events, gave pride of place to the  inner workings of the volcano in his influential work Mundus Subterraneus, ‘The Subterranean World’ (1665).

A hundred years later the treasures of Herculaneum and then Pompeii were beginning to emerge and were firmly fixed in the itinerary of the leading cultural figures of the day. Rowland describes the reactions of the young Mozart, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain and Renoir, not only to the ruins but to the bustling, poverty-stricken street-life of Naples. For 19th-century romantics in Russia, the painter Karl Bryullov’s epic The Last Day of Pompeii gripped the imagination as much as Edward Bulwer Lytton’s novel The Last Days of Pompeii did of those in Britain. A special accolade is due to the Puglian Bartolo Longo who embarked on creating a new Pompeii on the edge of the old, around a church of the Madonna of the Rosary. A damaged and ugly painting of the Virgin Mary, brought to the church on a dung cart, proved an unlikely miracle-worker and soon the trains that brought tourists to Pompeii were filled too with pilgrims. Longo energetically ploughed back their donations into the crime-ridden and impoverished neighbourhood and parts of his ‘new’ Pompeii survive.

Rowland enjoys her digressions. The blood of St Januarius (San Gennaro) has an important role to play. Every year it miraculously liquefies on three separate occasions—except when it doesn’t, in warning of impending eruptions of Vesuvius. Then there is the phallus of Priapus from the House of the Vetii: guides in charge of prominent visitors such as Hillary Clinton and her daughter Chelsea scurry past it in haste so that no compromising photos can be snapped. There is space too for the bizarre cult of the Fontanelle, the skulls preserved in caves under the city of Naples and which, while their owners languish in Purgatory, are supposed to have miraculous powers of intercession.

However, the ruins always form the backdrop to the digressions and Rowland relates the exploits of the famous curators. Guiseppe Fiorelli, appointed in 1848, replaced treasure-hunting pits with carefully stratified excavations. His calchi (plaster casts) shifted attention to the human victims of the eruption and still provide some of the most moving testimonies to the drama of AD 79. It was Fiorelli who kept wall-paintings in situ where they were found, rather than prising them off for the royal collection. Politics met with archaeology when Superintendent Vittorio Spianazzola, an opponent of Fascism married to a Jewish scholar, was removed in 1924 and replaced by Amadeo Maiuri, who dominated the Pompeiian scene until 1961. His use of mechanical diggers exposed large parts of the city but left it impossible to maintain. I despaired, as Rowland does, over the crumbling remains. On my most recent visit to Pompeii two years ago, many of the houses were closed off. Just ten years earlier there had been more to see. Even a campaign to round up stray dogs stagnated as the available funds were embezzled. Herculaneum is now much more welcoming.

And no less ominous than the slow decay of Pompeii is the ever-present threat of a fresh eruption of Vesuvius. The last was in 1944 and it is time for it to blow again. Rowland is doubtful whether the anarchic inhabitants of the Bay, long used to outwitting authority, will submit to the evacuation plans. The blood of St Januarius will no doubt liquefy if there is nothing to fear—but if it stays solid, an early escape will be well advised. If by chance I am caught there among the fleeing residents, I shall seek refuge on a Gran Turismo bus, its hurried entry and exit from the region long perfected by the demands of whisking tourists quickly around the site and back through the traffic jams in time for dinner in Rome.

Reviewed by Charles Freeman. Pompeii, Herculaneum and Naples are covered in Blue Guide Southern Italy. Pompeii is one of the 50 sites in Freeman’s Sites of Antiquity.