From the Grand Tour to Melbourne

Brian Sewell is the often acerbic and always fearless art critic on London’s Evening Standard. In his scholarly and amusing series Brian Sewell’s Grand Tour (2006, now available on DVD) when commenting on Gianlorenzo Bernini’s Fountain of the Four Rivers in the Piazza Navona at Rome, he remarks that at the time it was constructed in 1651, Australia had not yet been discovered. However, by the time of the death of the Italian master engraver and etcher Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720–78), this country had not only been discovered, but had been taken possession of for the British Crown by Captain Cook and would soon be settled by the First Fleet. It is a fascinating fact, and an aspect of the wide cultural influence of Piranesi’s images of Rome brought back to England by the Grand Tourists, that relatively soon after the European settlement of Australia, many of those images, in printings made during the artist’s lifetime, had reached this country. A large number of them now reside in the collections of the State Library of Victoria and the University of Melbourne.

The exhibition “Rome: Piranesi’s Vision” mounted at the State Library in Melbourne from February to June and curated by Dr Colin Holden, is a testament to the phenomenal reach of Piranesi’s influence, and also a delight in itself and one of two high points of Melbourne’s cultural attractions this autumn and winter. The other high point is “Italian Masterpieces”, a loan exhibition of paintings from the Prado in Madrid, on show at the National Gallery of Victoria until August 31. Sewell has frequently warned us against the hyperbole which usually accompanies so-called “blockbuster” art exhibitions which turn out to be nothing of the sort. This fine offering from the Prado, whilst well heralded and advertised, has not been “hyped” as a blockbuster. There is no need to do so, because it is a good and generous selection of Old Master works.

The Piranesi exhibition at the State Library of Victoria again shows the wealth of literary and artistic treasures held in the collections of that indispensable and august institution, fronted by James Gilbert’s bronze statue of Sir Redmond Barry. Nationally noted for sentencing Ned Kelly to death and dying soon after, Barry is remembered in Victoria for his major contributions to the founding of Victoria’s heritage of education and high culture, starting with the State Library itself. Barry’s example is a case typical of the civilising influence of classically educated professionals and administrators who came out to the Australian colonies in the nineteenth century, to our abiding benefit. He had no Grand Tour as such, but rather a hasty trip to the Continent before his embarkation for Sydney in 1839. He later travelled Europe, purchasing books and pictures for Victorian institutions. So he had affinities with the better type of Grand Tourist of generations earlier than his own, who acquired Piranesi’s Vedute de Roma as souvenirs of their time in Italy, as a proof upon Dr Johnson’s maxim, “A man who has not been in Italy is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see.”

Selections from this Vedute series of 135 views of Rome are the primary focus of the Piranesi exhibition. There are also some examples of Piranesi’s Carcere (Prisons) series of “fantastical visions”, together with other items pertinent to the activities of Grand Tourists, such as a copy from the State Library’s collection of Jonathan Richardson’s book An Account of Some of the Statues, Bas-Reliefs, Drawings, and Pictures in Italy (1722) which became the vade mecum of English milordi on tour there and the pattern for many of the collections they formed.

The exhibition is brilliantly and carefully presented in a setting in the State Library, evocative of the eighteenth-century practice of pasting lesser prints as decorations upon walls—not that any Piranesi prints have been pasted here! The exhibition also includes the stunning bound folios of prints worked by King George IV’s bookbinder. The Piranesi series and the various other items on exhibition have come to the State Library from a wide variety of sources, but by and large, the provenance of most has been similar: scholars and people of taste, immigrant or Australian-born, who brought with them, or acquired from Europe, some examples of Piranesi’s works. One such scholar, prominent amongst various mid-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century figures in Victoria, was the first Catholic Archbishop of Melbourne, James Goold, who had trained at Rome and had lived there for five years.

Accompanying the exhibition, and in effect cataloguing its contents, is Dr Colin Holden’s book Piranesi’s Grandest Tour: From Europe to Australia (NewSouth, 2014). This is a worthy addition to the existing literature and illustration of Piranesi’s work, including such texts as John Wilton-Ely’s The Mind and Art of Giovanni Piranesi (1978) and Jonathan Scott’s Piranesi (1975). Wilton-Ely made the important point that “the key to understanding the complex personality of Piranesi, among the most Roman of artists, consists in his origins and training as a Venetian”. Dr Holden, who was the Sir Redmond Barry Fellow at the University of Melbourne in 2010, has done extensive study and research on Piranesi, one of the fruits of which is this particularly informative book, which brings out very well the influence of Piranesi upon art collectors, architects and scholars both generally and in Australia, indeed from quite early in our colonial history. Those who missed this exhibition will thus find his book a rewarding one.

The “Italian Masterpieces” exhibition at the NGV, says the exhibition catalogue, comprises:

[105] carefully chosen paintings and drawings that span the years 1500 to 1800 and which elucidate key trends in Italian art from the High Renaissance to the early Rococo period. This exhibition also reflects the enlightened taste for art in Spain’s Royal Court, as most of the paintings included were acquired by members of the Royal Family or the Spanish Nobility. Many were purchased directly from the artists, bringing the best contemporary Italian art of their age to Spain. This fact makes the Prado’s holdings of Italian art unique.

A visit to the Prado, at least once in a lifetime, is seen by art lovers today as desirable as the Grand Tour once was. So it is a rare privilege to have these 105 examples in Australia. It follows upon the Prado’s loan exhibition at the Queensland Art Gallery in 2012, which featured selected works by El Greco, Velázquez, Ribera and Murillo as well as by Titian, Peter Paul Rubens, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo and Anton Mengs, amongst others.

The quality and range of the NGV exhibition is immediately apparent from its inclusion of major works by “first-line” masters: five by Titian, six by the Tiepolos, four by Luca Giordano, four by Guercino, four by Guido Reni, three by Jusepe de Ribera, two by Veronese, as well as single paintings by Raphael, Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Correggio and Tintoretto, alongside pictures by less widely known but highly significant painters, including three by Corrado Giaquinto, two by Francesco Albani, two by Andrea de Lione, two by Vanvitelli, and two flowerpieces by Mario Nuzzi (Mario dei Fiori). Amongst the drawings on show are sheets by Michelangelo, Andrea del Sarto, Annibale Carracci, the Cavaliere d’Arpino and Veronese. These drawings are by no means “make-weights”, for it is from drawings that we gain the real insights into the development of works from an artist, both in means and in style—the indispensable disegno, which preceded the settling of colour.

It is important to note that the works on show chime in with certain works in the NGV’s permanent collection, notably Jacopo Amigoni’s Portrait Group of the Singer Farinelli and his Friends (c.1750–52), which has been hung in this exhibition alongside the Prado pictures; as well as the NGV’s portrait by Mengs of Don Luis Jaime Antonio de Borbon y Farnesio, Infante of Spain (c.1774–78) and the NGV’s recently restored Poussin, The Crossing of the Red Sea (c. 1633–34). Although not hung within the Prado Exhibition, these last two works are readily comparable, in their usual NGV places. The large Poussin oil visiting from the Prado is The Hunt of Atalanta and Meleager (1634–39). The exhibition features both an oil and a drawing by Pompeo Batoni, the portraitist of choice for the English Grand Tourists of his day; these pictures may conveniently be compared with the NGV’s own Batoni Grand Tourist oil. Other and wider perspectives for Australian picture enthusiasts are provided: the inclusion in this exhibition of two oils and two drawings by Luca Giordano enables comparisons to be made more readily with the major Giordano oil The Rape of the Sabine Women (c.1672–74) acquired by the National Gallery of Australia in 2000. All of these things, taken together, again illustrate the great utility of international loan exhibitions of this kind and the slow but steady growth of Australian holdings of masterworks of comparable quality and interest.

Moving to the capital paintings and drawings in this exhibition, we may start with seven outstanding works: Raphael’s Holy Family with Saint John or Madonna of the Rose (c.1517); Correggio’s magnificent and tender Noli me Tangere (c.1525); Veronese’s superb depiction of The Penitent Mary Magdalene (1583); Titian’s Religion Succoured by Spain (c.1572–75), Annibale Carracci’s The Assumption of the Virgin (c.1587); Reni’s Saint Sebastian (1615–20); and Lotto’s Penitent St Jerome (c.1546). They are all of them great pictures in the first rank and even if they alone were on show here, they would be well worth your journey to the NGV, whether by suburban train from Upwey, or by interstate flight from Uluru.

When we look at a work such as this Holy Family by Raphael, we readily understand why his tomb in the Pantheon at Rome bears the telling inscription: “Ille Hic Est Raphael Timuit Quo Sospite Vinci/ Rerum Magna Parens et Moriente Mori” (“Here lies Raphael, by whom Nature feared to be outdone while he was living, and at his death, feared herself to die”). He came from the small northern Italian city identified as one of the most agreeable in Renaissance Christendom; and it shows, in the calm repose and in the great humanity of works like this.

Likewise, when we take a good look at Correggio’s Noli me Tangere, with its subtle balance of the two figures at the centre of the picture and at the heart of this dramatic post-Resurrection encounter, we see a scene that conveys mystical devotion with gentle renunciation of the earthly realm, and a composition that sweeps upwards to the higher place. A number of artists have managed to suggest these things in their depictions of the same scene—but when we take in the way in which Correggio has drawn the landscape setting and coloured it in verdant greens and blues and from dark to light and has so carefully composed the figures along a diagonal running from the Earth up to Heaven, we can see why Correggio was so highly regarded by informed Grand Tourists. It can justly be said that, of all the 105 works here, this is the most striking.

Veronese’s depiction of The Penitent Mary Magdalene is in similar vein by its subject matter but this master adds something more and something closer to Titian in his marvellous handling of the silken folds of the Magdalene’s robe, the colour changing from darkened red over to a pink that is almost like Tiepolo’s, with the high edges shown in silvered sheen. The foliage, the crucifix, the devotional book and the memento mori skull all have their places from top to bottom at the left-hand margin, but it is an almost transfigured face of the Penitent Mary looking upwards, towards and into the rays of streaming light, that arrests our gaze and holds it. There is something infinitely appealing in Veronese’s design and colour.

That brings us to perhaps the best of the five Titians: the Religion Succoured by Spain. Modern research has shown the picture has a curious history and draws upon other known and related images. It is obviously meant to show Catholic Spain saving the Church from threats and it is indeed, a commemoration of the Battle of Lepanto (1571). But Titian’s composition, execution and colouring are highly reminiscent of his great pagan mythological pictures, such as the Diana and Acteon. Whilst the subject matters and styles differ, one can relate this scene, with its sea in the distance and the armour piled up, to some elements in Nicolas Poussin’s The Crossing of the Red Sea.

Annibale Carracci’s The Assumption of the Virgin is similarly a picture which takes a form familiar in religious works of its period: a canvas well populated with figures, who are witnessing the scene of the Virgin Mary’s bodily assumption into Heaven, five men immediately around an empty sarcophagus raised on a double plinth base, in an architectural setting with three Corinthian columns and with various onlookers standing astonished by and prayerfully thankful for this singular event. Angels and cherubs accompany the Virgin, as she moves upwards into Heaven. There is a distant landscape and the upper scene is suffused with clouds and a glory of pale yellow light surrounds the head of the Virgin. The catalogue makes the important point that Carracci here shows his “compositional advances, use of colour and the representation of his characters’ affetti (movements of their souls) through their gestures announces the new direction his painting was to take in the following years”. One can see this sort of thing later, in some of Poussin’s works.

Lastly, we come to the Saint Sebastian by Guido Reni and to the Penitent St Jerome by Lorenzo Lotto, which perhaps may be counterpointed or kindred subjects, depending upon one’s own views of them. The Reni Sebastian is, like Veronese’s Penitent Mary Magdalene and Correggio’s Noli me Tangere, a strikingly spare and direct depiction of this saint, “a Roman soldier who suffered martyrdom for his Christian Faith during the reign of Diocletian and Maximian at the end of the third century”. The scene is crepuscular—a thin line of cold light runs across the very distant horizon to the right. Saint Sebastian is tied to the tree with its foliage apparent above and showing up against the diminished light of the sky. His face looks Heavenward and his left side is pierced by a single arrow. The twist of the torso combines with the outwardly thrust left thigh and leg to suggest the agony of the arrow’s penetration, but the face gazes upwards with a rapt expression and the head is surmounted by a very thin halo that is just visible against the darkness. The way in which Reni has drawn and painted the turned musculature of the neck is remarkable. The eyes remind me a little of those by Zurbaran.

Lotto’s rather earlier St Jerome is both thematically different and also relies a good deal more upon attributes and various “props”, ranging from Saint Jerome’s red hat as a Doctor of the Church, instruments of bodily mortification, a lizard, a snake, a centipede, a memento mori skull and bones, stones, the saint’s bound Vulgate Bible slightly open, and his red robe upon which he kneels in front of a crucifix (with corpus) making a gesture of “arms extended, spiritually and physically imitating Christ on the cross. That supreme state of communion with Christ is alluded to in the text shown by the angel [above]: NUNC LEGIT NUNC ORAT NUNC PECTORE CRIMINA PLORAT (‘Now he reads, now he prays, now he cries on his bosom for the sins committed’).” Like many other works, this came to the Prado in 1819.

The various fine drawings in this exhibition are also not to be missed. The Study of a Man’s Right Shoulder, Breast and Upper Arm (c.1536–41), although clipped, is a sheet of great significance for the study of Michelangelo’s work, as it is “a study for one of the demons in the group at the lower right of the Last Judgment … on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel”. In the exhibition is a pen and ink and wash drawing by Vasari of St Luke Painting the Virgin (1568–72) a detailed image from this important artist and an early chronicler of many of his fellow artists of the Renaissance. A drawing of Mars and Apollo (1566–69) by G.B. Castello shows great plastic sensitivity and a decisive final line.

The fine Head of a Figure (1560–70) in pen and ink by Bartolemeo Passarotti is notably well done, as a noble depiction of a male head turned upward and to the right in the traditional pose and showing a very fine set of lines in the curls and in the moulding of contours with cross-hatchings. A drawing of St Luke the Evangelist by Veronese is helpful to accompany and amplify our appreciations of the two oils by him also in this show. It is important also to note that two fine drawings by Guercino are also here along with the oils by him. Perhaps the most interesting drawings are two pen and ink and wash works by Giovanni Battista Gaulli (known as Baciccio): Temperance, Hope, Wisdom and Chastity (1669–71) and Truth Unveiled by Time (1665–69). Gaulli’s very distinctive “and highly luminous application of washes” makes these important examples of an artist whose work can be widely seen in Rome.

The impressive exhibition catalogue is generously illustrated with good colour plates of both the paintings and drawings. It contains detailed essays on Italian Renaissance and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paintings at the Prado, and on the artistic heritage of Italy and Spain from 1500 to 1800, as well as other essays by the curators Laurie Benson and Lisa Beavan and others on a range of pertinent topics. There are detailed notes on each work in the exhibition, written by a large team of experts. Useful inclusions are a considerable bibliography, a map of Italy and Spain and an illustrated schema of the Spanish royal family from 1475 to 1833. In addition to a complete listing of the works exhibited and also of certain comparative works, there is a full set of the artists’ biographies.

This is one exhibition you are urged to try to see. It has many resonances with the exhibitions “Veronese: Magnificence in Renaissance Venice” held at the National Gallery in London from March to June, and “Titian and the Golden Age of Venetian Art” which is at the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh until September.