Every now and again, gushing is in order. Today, for instance. The Art of
Italy, at the Queen’s Gallery, is an astonishing exhibition. It consists of
90 paintings and 85 drawings, most of them masterpieces, many never seen by
the public at large. More than a few are known only to the handful of
experts who have been able to inspect a small number in the original during
cleaning. Much recent restoration — of 35 paintings — was in preparation for
this show. It resulted in some reattributions, now publicly revealed.
Everything here belongs to the Queen and is usually located in royal palaces
and residences all over Britain, though we’re not told precisely where. The
drawings, we know, are kept at Windsor, and the majority of the paintings
presumably comes from Buckingham Palace. But now these amazing things have
been brought together for the first time since heaven knows when. Certainly,
there has not been a show of Italian art from the Royal Collection for more
than 40 years, and this one gains from being staged in the handsomely
redesigned Queen’s Gallery.
The exhibition is extraordinarily rich and diverse, and the visual effect of
so many exhibits quite dazzling. Bronzino’s intimate, almost confiding,
Portrait of a Lady in Green (c1528-32) is a focal point. Another is Giovanni
Bellini’s severe Portrait of a Young Man (c1505), his last surviving
portrait. Indeed, we are given a series of extraordinary likenesses,
amongthem Giulio Romano’s portrait of Margherita Paleologo (c1531), the
future Duchess of Mantua and an early fashion victim, in which the wan-faced
aristocrat is upstaged by the intricately constructed overdress and circular
fur hat she wears. There is also Lorenzo Lotto’s commanding Portrait of
Andrea Odoni (1527), a Venetian collector surrounded by his antiquities.
Here, too, are two undeniably great Tintorettos: Esther Before Ahasuerus
(c1546-47), the key scene from a biblical story, still relevant, about
Persians and Jews; and The Muses (c1578), restored for this exhibition. So,
I think, are the two Caravaggios, previously thought to be copies. Neither
the Boy Peeling Fruit (c1592-93) nor The Calling of Saints Peter and Andrew
(c1602-04) is an especially throat-grabbing work, but both are early
compositions, and the boy preparing his five-a-day is probably Caravaggio’s
earliest surviving painting, a precious remnant of his first years in Rome.
It must have been hard for the curators to find a coherent shape for such
varied material. They have limited themselves to Italian art of the 16th and
17th centuries, from the high Renaissance to the baroque. The really famous
names — Bellini, Raphael, Titian, Tinto-retto, Caravaggio — are here, but
they are outnumbered by artists known chiefly to specialists, and sometimes
not even to them. I’m thinking of Garofalo, Girolamo Savoldo, Anastasio
Fontebuoni and Lodewijk Toeput. Not that their work is insignificant.
Garofalo’s Holy Family (1533), for example, is quite mar-vellous: a small,
sharply lit composition, with a mesmerisingly detailed landscape in the
background. The mixture of drawings, too, in every imaginable style and
technique, favours the unfamiliar. So, we are given far fewer Leonardos,
Raphaels and Michelangelos than Giovanni Angelo Caninis and Baccio
Bandinellis. Even scholars won’t have seen all of these drawings before.
Of course, we’re not all scholars, so most visitors will simply note with
satisfaction what they like. Feminists will be pleased to find no fewer than
three paintings by Artemisia Gentileschi here, one of them a self-portrait.
Others will be intrigued by some of the more recondite subjects. You will
immediately recognise David with the Head of Goliath (by Domenico Fetti,
c1620), but is Guido Cag-nacci the only painter ever to produce a Jacob
Peeling the Rods (c1650)? His composition illustrates a seldom-quoted
episode in Genesis, in which Jacob devises a stratagem for breeding large
numbers of sheep in competition with his new father-in-law.
TS Eliot once remarked in a celebrated essay that the civil war has never
quite ended. I defy any art-lover who knows about the depressing fate at
Cromwell’s hands of the Royal Collection to sympathise with anything else
the Roundheads accomplished. In a move that prefigured the Nazis’
“degenerate art” sale, Charles I’s magnificent collection of about 1,570
pictures and countless sculptures was disposed of for a mere £37,000 (no
more than £5m today), the best of it ending up in the Prado, the
Kunst-historisches Museum Vienna and the Louvre.
The harm done was dreadful, though not all of it was permanent. Immediately
after the Restoration, Charles II decided to recover what had been
confiscated and dispersed. He managed to rescue more of it than you might
expect. It is a measure of his success that 40 or so of the pictures on show
here once belonged to his father, among them the lovely Bronzino portrait,
valued by the Puritans at £100, Correg-gio’s Holy Family, knocked down in
the Commonwealth sale to £50, and Tintoretto’s Esther Before Ahasuerus, and
The Muses, which fetched £120 and £80, respectively. Somehow, no doubt with
a combination of carrots and sticks, Charles II, a great collector in his
own right, clawed them back.
There were also gifts. In what must have been the most touching of them, the
states of Holland and West Friesland presented Charles with 24 paintings and
12 sculptures as he embarked for London at Scheveningen, eager to take the
English throne. They are anything but consolation prizes. Most are
16th-century Italian. One is a portrait by Titian, another a Virgin and
Child on which he collaborated with members of his workshop. The subsequent
history of the Royal Collection is as up and down as the Peak District. If
George II was about as interested in art as George VI, at least his wife,
Queen Caroline, was an enthusiast, although her taste was not infallible.
She bought Vasari’s Venus and Cupid (c1543), included here, a monstrous copy
of a copy of a Michelangelo, in which the goddess of love inhabits a body as
androgynous as that of any East German weightlifter. Queen Caroline’s son,
Frederick, Prince of Wales, inherited her interest in art, and his son,
George III, was another insatiable royal collector — as was Prince Albert,
who preferred earlier Italian paintings to the sort of thingshown here.
What of now, though? By all accounts, neither the Queen nor the Duke of
Edinburgh cares much for the visual arts. Mind you, it’s just as well the
Queen hasn’t been itching to add old masters to her collection. These days,
even with her money, she probably couldn’t afford the occasional Garofalo,
let alone a Domenico Fetti.
The Art of Italy, Queen’s Gallery, SW1, until January 20, 2008
