That would have been the ideal moment to visit. Of course one can see The Art of Painting at the Kunsthistorisches Museum, but Vienna time, for the non-Viennese, is limited. I haven’t been since 2005. Supposing I get there again sooner or later, for how long, and how carefully, would I be likely to look at the Vermeer?

So I hope it comes back to New Jersey in May 2045 for the centennial of V-E Day. As for the present, the Princeton museum reopened last fall in a new building after being closed for five years. I made a point of not reading reviews before I went this month, but I’d seen a few pictures of the new galleries, and I feared the worst. What I mean by this is that I feared a ‘thematic hang.’

I’d been once before, years ago, so I knew the collection was not in the same league as those of the museums at Yale and Harvard (both of which I wrote about in 2024—Yale, part 1; Yale, part 2; Harvard). My worry was that Princeton’s curators would try to compensate, try to conceal the comparative weakness of their holdings by following the fashion for jumbling everything together.

This worry seemed to be confirmed when, ascending the stairs to the main floor of the museum, I was confronted by the pairing of one of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroes with a fourteenth century Florentine Madonna.

My heart sank, but soon I realized I was in the ‘Orientation Gallery.’ According to a wall label, this is where “cross-cultural or cross-temporal connections [are] intended to surprise, delight, or challenge.” So a false alarm: the whole museum was not going to be like this. From the Orientation Gallery I stepped into the gallery for European art, where everything was fine.

Well, more or less. The European Gallery is divided into bays, roughly one per century for the fifteenth to the nineteenth. Each bay is a bit cramped, as if a Park Avenue apartment had been broken up into studios. I wouldn’t mind if I felt this was the best the museum could do given its constraints, but the Orientation Gallery is so spacious and airy that I wondered about their priorities.

From the point of view of an architect, rectangular, windowless bays probably aren’t too interesting to design, at least not compared to ‘orientation galleries.’ I’m tempted to take an extreme position here, to say that allowing an architect free rein, allowing an architect to express a vision, is—however sublime the vision in question—contrary to the mission of a museum like the one at Princeton. This isn’t the Guggenheim, which doesn’t have much of a permanent collection, or Dumbarton Oaks, where the holdings reflect individual taste. It’s a university museum that aspires to be encyclopedic. It’s there for students to learn from.

An architect’s goal for a such a museum should be to maximize gallery space without leaving too many fingerprints, without doing much to distract attention from the objects. If fingerprints must be left, let them be left on the façade or by the entrance. And I should also mention that the ground floor entrance hall at Princeton is enormous.

To be fair, if Princeton had taken an approach that would have suited me—that is, if the architect had been asked for something unobtrusive, a building whose design few visitors would notice, a building whose liminal spaces were not out of scale with the whole, it is doubtful that Time Magazine would have included the result in its list of ‘The World’s Greatest Places of 2026.’

No one would have written, as Time did:

The project made headlines from the start: designs by Adjaye Associates show a striking mix of classical and contemporary spaces, with a Brutalist exterior and light-filled interiors finished in warm blue spruce.

I’ll grant the last point. Not that I know spruce from hickory, but the wood looks great.

*

Now, with my rant out of the way: this is an excellent museum, well worth visiting for anyone who can get there on a day trip.

Highlights include the tiny, late Goya watercolor on ivory, Monk Talking to an Old Woman, every bit as disturbing as the words ‘late Goya’ promise; the original woodblock for The Holy Family with Three Hares by Dürer; a series of mosaics from Antioch that are scattered artfully around the museum; and the great Charles Willson Peale portrait of George Washington with the Battle of Princeton in the background, commissioned in 1783 by the trustees of the College of New Jersey, as Princeton was called at the time (though you won’t learn about the commission from the label, which instead focuses on Washington’s role as Hanödaga:yas, Seneca for ‘Town Destroyer’).

I will pass over these without further comment and instead present eleven personal favorites, either nine or ten of which I saw, depending on how one defines ‘saw.’

1. & 2.

What the museum calls its Massive Horse, a ceramic grave good from the Sichuan region that dates to the Eastern Han dynasty (25–220 AD), must be among the finest Chinese horses on the Eastern Seaboard. (I wrote about two others, the Tang dynasty Taizong Horses, in my post on the Penn Museum.) The bearing of the Massive Horse is proud, its form sinuous and strong. That it is alert as well as formidable can be seen from its pricked ears, flared nostrils and upright tail. But can it really be said that this horse, at 55 inches high and 47 inches long, is massive? Yes and no. Compared to those of the terracotta army in the Mausoleum of the first Qin Emperor (which are also more naturalistic), Princeton’s horse is on the small side. It is, however, unusually large for a ceramic horse of the Eastern Han.

Massive or not, I wish this horse had a bit more space in its vitrine, or even a vitrine of its own, but it’s in good company where it is, facing Princeton’s Money Tree, another Eastern Han grave good from Sichuan. A money tree, made to ensure a wealthy and contented afterlife, has a solid and often figural base, ceramic in this example and with a man riding a ram. A bronze stem, with branches of varying length and thickness, rises up from the base.

The branches of money trees like the one at Princeton often include representations of Xiwangmu, the Queen Mother of the West. She’s at the center of the branch pictured below, seated beneath a canopy and surrounded by attendants, hunters and animals. The tree itself, it is believed, is meant to recall the environs of Mount Kunlun, land of immortality and the site of Xiwangmu’s palace. Elsewhere in the branches are motifs resembling Han coinage, which in the first century AD was minted in the Sichuan region.

3.

One of the great questions of seventeenth century art is that of how to distribute credit for the fresco on the ceiling of the Church of the Gesù, completed in 1679 by the painter Giovanni Battista Gaulli (often known by the nickname Baciccio). Two other men were involved: Giovanni Paolo Oliva, Superior General of the Society of Jesus, and the great sculptor and architect Gianlorenzo Bernini, in his eighties by the time the fresco was complete.

According to tradition, Oliva came up with the concept, which was then turned into an artistic program by Bernini, who chose his protégé Gaulli to execute it. Evidence for this comes from the travel diary of the Swedish architect Nicodemus Tessin the Younger, who visited Rome in 1673 and 1687, and who knew both Gaulli and Bernini. Tessin describes the ceiling of the Gesù as “a very magnificent invention of Cavalier Bernini.” Venerable twentieth century scholars such as Robert Enggass and Rudolf Wittkower followed Tessin in giving most of the credit to Bernini. Wittkower even called it “the fullest expression of Bernini’s revolutionary conception of painting.” The problem, though, is that no documentats survive, and visual evidence is limited to a small number of bozzetti (preparatory studies): five drawings by Bernini and a larger but still modest number of drawings and oil sketches by Gaulli.

Writing in the journal Artibus et Historiae in 2019, Steven F. Ostrow argued that the role of Bernini has been exaggerated, and that Gaulli should be considered the primary designer as well as the executor. But writing in the catalogue to an exhibition held at Fairfield University in 2018, Betsy Rosasco, through analysis of a study for the ceiling that Princeton acquired in 2005, found evidence to support the older, Bernini-centric narrative that goes back to Tessin.

Of course I’m not qualified to weigh in here, I introduce the problem to explain the significance of Princeton’s Gaulli, one of only two surviving oil sketches of the full fresco (the other is in the Galleria Spada in Rome). I don’t want to call the painting important, because that’s an auction house cliché. Nor do I want to pretend it’s exhilarating to see—it’s not, at least not in the way that it’s exhilarating to go to the Gesù. It is, however, exactly the sort of thing one hopes to find in a university museum. Not a bad idea, if you’re planning a trip to Rome, to go see it first.

4.

Joseph Wright of Derby—you might know him as the Caravaggio of the Age of the Enlightenment, the artist who put tenebrism to work for science and scientific education. You might know him as a painter of Vesuvius erupting by night. If you also know him as a portraitist, you’re better informed about the British art of the eighteenth century than I am, or at least than I was before I saw his Portrait of Old John, Head Waiter at the King’s Head Inn in Derby. Wright painted it in 1780 for the benefit of John Tonson on the occasion of Tonson’s retirement from the position of head waiter of Derby’s principal inn. The painting was raffled off for £12.12, which was used to give Tonson a pension.

Tonson was 87 when Wright painted him. That he does not look his age in the portrait can be attributed not to any idealizing on the part of Wright, but rather to Tonson’s good health and vigor. This is confirmed in an account by the American loyalist Samuel Curwen, who visited Derby in June 1780.

…our attention soon after our arrival was employed on a singular phenomenon in the person of John Tonson, who had been a waiter in this inn for 43 years… is now in 87 year, and though somewhat decrepid and stooping, carrys no mark of age in his face, that still retains a rubicund complexion without a single wrinkle, and a lively, strong memory without the least impairment, indeed all his faculties appear to be in full vigor, which we have surprizing proofs of in course of 2 or 3 hours’s attendance…1

Curwen goes on to mention Tonson’s love of country dances, where, if inspired by good fiddle music, he would sometimes dance until four in the morning. I wonder if the wig and the buttonhole rose stayed in place through the night.

5.

Princeton also owns a painting by Johann Friedrich Waldeck (or, when he was pretending to be French, Jean-Frédéric Waldeck), a nineteenth century fabulist and eccentric who spent much of the 1820s and 1830s in Mexico. After returning to Europe in 1838 he published his Voyage pittoresque et archéologique dans la province d'Yucatan pendant les années 1834 et 1836. The fanciful lithographs in this work helped popularize the idea of early contact between the Maya and Ancient Egyptians (in addition to depicting an Egyptian-style pyramid at Uxmal, he also included elephant heads in his depiction of a temple at Palenque). Waldeck was less successful as a painter, but he can be credited with leaving for posterity one remarkable work, which Princeton acquired in 2014: a portrayal of himself being carried in a sillero over a mountain pass in Chiapas.

Waldeck also left a description of the event in a journal entry of Tuesday, March 26, 1833.

After a good breakfast of chocolate and caracoles we set out at 7:30 am, this time through very thick woods and a very rapid ascent. After crossing a river which we followed for some time, we began to climb the mountain which was not to end until the end of our day. I could not help feeling sorry for the Indian who was carrying me on his back. I believe that this is the place to give an idea of this way of locomotion. Four Indians are needed, who take it in turns to share the work during the day. The silla [chair] is a very crudely made chair, but very solid, even though it looks as if it’s all broken up. Each village has two or three of these, which belong to the Cabildo [colonial administrative authorities responsible for governing municipalities during the Spanish Empire and later]. Each Indian is paid at the rate of 4 Reaux [Spanish dollar, or real de a ocho] for the day’s journey. All the traveler has to do is sit in the armchair, put his feet on the board which is fixed at the bottom of the two front legs, cross his arms, or read if he can. And if it begins to rain, all he has to do to secure himself is to unroll the mat or petate which is above his head, and he will be quite comfortable.

That’s how I got there and back [by] a narrow and very difficult path, sometimes bordered by a precipice to the right, to the left, and once on both sides, very slippery and not more than two-and-a-half feet wide. I leave it to the reader to imagine what emotion I must have felt, with the prospect of a seemingly bottomless abyss and that of a false step that could throw me into one or the other! Finally, the descent began, as fast and horrible as the climb. At last at 3:30 we entered San Pedro. The parish priest Valentin Solís received me very well, and while we were smoking our cigars we talked about the customs of the Indians.2

6.

To stick with the theme of the Ancient Americas, Princeton has an impressive display of pre-Columbian works. These have their own gallery, which is probably the most elegant part of the museum, but my favorite object from this collection is displayed in a vitrine in the center of the European Gallery. It’s a ceremonial cup of beaten gold, dating to the fifteenth or early sixteenth century, that was used by the Chimú or Inca of Peru to drink chicha. In 1694 a nobleman in Cádiz sold it, as a former possession of the Aztec emperor Montezuma, to Edmund Russell, admiral of British fleet in the Mediterranean. The Society of Antiquaries of London made drawings of it in 1775; in his History of Mexico of 1777 William Robertson wrote that it was “the only unquestionable specimen of Mexican art that I know if in Great Britain.” Robertson added that it was “rude, but very tolerable, and certainly too rude for Spanish worksmanship.” Only in 1920 was it recognized as Chimú or Inca rather than Aztec.

7.

In my second post on the Baltimore Museum of Art I made passing mention, for reasons too obscure to go into here, of The Sphinx, a rather silly Edgar Allen Poe story. The narrator of the story, having escaped the New York cholera epidemic of 1832 to a cottage on the bank of the Hudson, sees a moth. Confusion ensues.

There are more 1832 epidemic refugees in Robert Walter Weir’s The Greenwich Boat Club. The ‘Greenwich’ in the title is Greenwich Village, the setting the opposite shore of the Hudson, maybe Hoboken or Weehawken, where, under a gray sky that has been described as miasmic, nine young men have improvised a tent from a boat and its sail.3 It is thought that Weir is the figure standing at center.

According to Princeton’s wall label the group has “set up camp,” but I wouldn’t go so far, at least not if ‘camp’ implies staying the night. They don’t seem equipped for that, or even to prepare a full meal, though a few shrimp are being grilled at left. They read, write, play music, lounge about.

Camp or no camp, rather than portraying a specific occasion the painting may best be seen as a group portrait with props, a commemoration of a series of late summer trips taken in a boat that belonged to Walter Oddie, another young painter. In a diary entry of August 25, 1832, Oddie’s father-in-law, Judge Henry Meigs, wrote:

Walter [Oddie], Weir, Le Compte, Martinez, Theodore, Charles, have gone in the barge to Jersey shore, with Guns, Drawing apparatus, Guitar, Meats & Drinks.

An estimated seventy to one hundred thousand New Yorkers fled the city that summer, out of a population of just over two hundred thousand. Should Weir and his friends be counted among those who left? I’m not sure. Judge Meigs makes it clear in his diary that his son-in-law was on a day trip. By evening the party was back at the Meigs residence on Old Kiln Road (now Gansevoort Street) in what at the time was the northwest corner of the city.

Weir lived further south, at 65 Walker Street in what is now TriBeCa. In a memoir written by his granddaughter he is said to have remembered “living on the river,” which he described as “the best way to escape the pestilence.” But he may only have meant that he spent a lot of time in his friend’s boat.

Not that it matters whether Weir and his friends actually left New York, or if they only took day trips. Either way, they weren’t hanging out in Five Points, drinking contaminated water from the Collect Pond.

Princeton uses the flight of the privileged as a framework to interpret the painting. The wall label has the artist “[depicting] himself with a group of bourgeois friends… [who have] escaped Manhattan” and concludes with the observation that “more than 3,500 lower-class New Yorkers—mostly African Americans and recent immigrants—were unable to escape and perished in the epidemic.”

Looking into into the matter, I found that Princeton probably exaggerates here, but not by much.4 Slight changes would make the label unimpeachable:

“…more than 3,500 New Yorkers perished in the epidemic, the overwhelming majority of them lower-class. African Americans and recent immigrants were disproportionately affected.”

But I wonder whether statements of this sort, recapitulations of the privileges of the privileged and the sufferings of the rest, have much value. Wall labels are short. How many words should be devoted to the obvious? And wouldn’t it be worth mentioning that the man sitting on the rock in the foreground has been identified as the zoologist and doctor James Ellsworth De Kay, a neighbor of Weir’s on Walker Street? De Kay, who saw patients throughout the epidemic, had recently returned from a trip on which he studied Asiatic cholera in Turkey. He had also just been to Montreal, having been sent there in June by New York’s Board of Health to investigate the disease’s outbreak in North America.

And then there is Judge Meigs, Walter Oddie’s father-in-law. As president of New York’s Board of Alderman in 1832–33, he was responsible for hiring crews to clean the city’s streets.

If the cast of characters introduced to me in the course of looking into the history of this painting is any guide, many well-off New Yorkers acquitted themselves respectably in 1832, even if their era’s conception of nobless oblige did not require them to acknowledge their privilege as they did so.5 It may be a pity that Weir, in addition to painting this charming work, didn’t also rush with his sketch pad into the slums, and take it upon himself to play the role of an American Goya, or a Jacob Riis avant la lettre. But then Weir was twenty-nine in the summer of 1832. At that age not even Goya was Goya.

8.

Barkley Hendricks (1945–2017) is famous for his realist portraiture, works like What’s Going On, Icon For My Man Superman (Superman Never Saved Any Black People-Bobby Seale), and Brilliantly Endowed (Self-Portrait), but for several decades he visited Jamaica every winter, and when he was there he painted landscapes in the tondo format. His New Year’s Day in the Quarry (Marl Hole) jumped out at me in Princeton’s American Gallery. It was clear that I was looking at a landscape, but what sort of landscape, when it was painted, and by whom, I had no idea. So a looked at the label—a marl quarry, Jamaica, 2006. Marl, rich in carbon, was once spread on fields by farmers to decrease the acidity of soil, but now its main use is as an ingredient of cement. I tried to find Marl Hole on Google Maps, but it turns out that Jamaica is pretty rich in marl, and marl quarries, so I’m not sure where Hendricks was.

9. & 10.

Why did I carry on at such length at the beginning of this post about the oversized Orientation Gallery? One reason is that if the European Gallery were twice as big, there might be space to hang an anonymous painting from seventeenth century France, Two Boys Copying Callot Prints. I learned of it by chance last year, I think from an Instagram post (though I have not been able to confirm this).

Callot prints often appear in paintings by the still life artist Sébastien Stoskopff, for example in one at the Louvre, another in Strasbourg and a third in Rotterdam, and then, as scrupulous readers of last month’s post will recall, Callot prints were sometimes reproduced as paintings. But I’m unaware of another work like this one, in which two boys, perhaps apprentices to an artist, draw their own versions of Callot prints in their sketchbooks. The print the boy on the left holds up is easily identified; it is The Beggar on Crutches Wearing a Cap, from the series Les Gueux (The Beggars).

But also, I notice some paint loss at upper left. Perhaps Two Boys Copying Callot Prints is in the studio of a Princeton conservator at this very moment, and will be on display soon.

It would be churlish not to add that still lifes by Sébastien Stoskopff are not only to be found in Paris, Strasbourg and Rotterdam—Princeton has one, too, and unlike the anonymous painting of the Callot copyists, it is on view.

There are two prints in Princeton’s Stoskopff. It has been suggested that one of them, the one in the album on the table, is by Callot, but I don’t think this is true, or at least I haven’t been able to find it. The painting also has some beautiful shells, a Mitra mitra and three cones—one Conus geographus and two Conus marmoreus. You may recognize the latter as the subject of an especially beautiful Rembrant etching.

11.

Along with the painting of the Callot copyists, Tern’s Eggs by Loren MacIver (1909–98) is the other painting I didn’t see, or only sort of saw. At Princeton right now there is an exhibition of the backs of paintings. I’m not a fan of the trend of putting conservators in cages for museumgoers to watch, but conservation itself, as one of the primary functions of a museum, deserves more attention than it gets. The wall labels point out cradles, stretchers with wooden keys, stencils, inscriptions, and, in one case, a cigar box.

The back of Tern’s Eggs was my favorite of the group, because it was the one with the most labels. (The image of the painting itself is from the museum’s website.)

Reading the labels made me want to piece together the history of the painting, which seems to have been, together with another work by MacIver, the first by a woman to enter the collection of the Museum of Modern Art. Here’s what I found.6

1. MacIver painted Tern’s Eggs in 1934.

2. The Museum of Modern Art recorded the title as Eggs. The accession number on the back of the painting, 400.38, indicates that it entered MoMA’s collection in 1938, and was the four hundredth new object the museum catalogued that year.

3. Another painting by MacIver, Shack, entered the collection at the same time and is still in the museum. MoMA gives the accession number for Shack as 399.1938.

4. MoMA claims Shack was given to the museum by Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, but this is wrong. Rockefeller gave MoMA money to acquire work by young artists. MoMA’s director, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. used the money to buy the two paintings by MacIver.

5. Tern’s Eggs was exhibited at retrospectives of MacIver’s work at Wellesley College in 1951 and the Whitney in 1953.

6. By the time of the Whitney retrospective, Tern’s Eggs had been deaccessioned by MoMA and acquired by Barr for his personal collection. (The deaccession is confirmed in Michael Asher’s 1999 catalogue of MoMA deaccessions.)

7. Barr’s widow Margaret gave Tern’s Eggs to Princeton in 1988.

MoMA’s provenance error is corrected in Yellow Season, a memoir by MacIver’s husband, the poet Lloyd Frankenberg.7 Frankenberg writes of receiving a call one evening when he and MacIver were living in a top floor apartment on MacDougal Street—“the coin telephone on the landing below rang”—and learning from a gallerist friend that MacIver had been recommended to Barr as a young artist on whose paintings he might spend the Rockefeller gift. Frankenberg goes on to describe bring two of his wife’s paintings to Barr at MoMA.

You may be wondering why any of this is interesting. Who cares about Loren MacIver? Who cares when and how this painting entered MoMA?

I have two answers.

One, I always thought it was Meret Oppenheim’s Object, the famous fur-covered cup, saucer and spoon, that was the first artwork by a woman to belong to MoMA. This is what the MoMA website might lead one to believe, for the provenance of Object is given as:

1936, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, purchased from the artist.

Not so. Barr bought Object from Oppenheim in 1936 and included it in MoMA’s exhibition of the same year, “Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism”, but he failed to persuade the museum’s trustees to acquire it from him. Only a decade latter, in 1946, did they relent, as can be seen from Object’s accession number, 130.1946.a-c.

Two, I am wondering why no one is interested in MacIver these days, when so much art historical energy is devoted to seeking out neglected woman artists. Lots of museums (the Met, the Whitney and the Phillips Collection as well as MoMA) have her in their collections, for decades her gallerist was Pierre Matisse, and in 1962 she represented the USA at the Venice Bienniale. There’s also a literary angle, since her friends included Elizabeth Bishop, Marianne Moore and Alice B. Toklas. She even painted Bishop’s rosary.

MacIver, then, was more fêted than neglected in her own lifetime. Is her problem now that she didn’t belong to a movement? Was she at once insufficiently abstract, and not quite surreal enough, to last? Or is it rather that she just wasn’t very good or interesting? I admit I don’t have a sense of quality when it comes to twentieth century art. (I’d rather look at a Gabriele Münter than a Kandinsky, but I wouldn’t say my preference means the art historical consensus that Kandinsky is the more important of the two is wrong—I wouldn’t say my preference means much of anything.)

What is clear is that other mid-century woman artists get a lot more attention than MacIver does. There’s an easy if rough way to quantify this, by comparing the average number of views per day they get on Wikipedia. Here’s a selection (the numbers are for English-language pages only):

• Lee Krasner – 447 views per day

• Helen Frankenthaler – 181

• Agnes Martin – 139

• Elaine de Kooning – 138

• Joan Mitchell – 121

• Louise Nevelson – 120

• Grace Hartigan – 31

• Hedda Sterne – 16

• Jane Freilicher – 14

• Perle Fine – 12

• Nell Blaine – 8

• Loren MacIver – 3

For comparison, the figure for Georgia O’Keefe is 1,403, about three times as many daily views as Krasner.

So what I’d like to know is the following: if one were to make an exhibition of the painters on the list (dropping the sculptor Nevelson), say with nine or ten works by each, would the attention paid by visitors reflect the Wikipedia averages? Would there be a collective decision to continue to ignore Loren MacIver? I don’t think I would ignore her.

So as not to turn this newsletter into an extended appreciation of the art of the Low Countries, I’ll stagger the posts. After the present writeup of the Oldmasters Museum in Brussels (the only one of these museums that I visited more than once), look for a sequel early next year.

It’s a strange name, the Oldmasters Museum—or to use proper Belgianese, the Musée Oldmasters Museum. And maybe Belgianese is also the source of the curious word ‘Oldmaster.’ That’s not a word in English, though we do, particularly in the art market, sometimes refer to painters active between the years 1400 and 1800 as ‘Old Masters.’ The Flemish and French terms, respectively, are ‘Oude Meester’ and ‘Vieux Maître.’

Anyway, if you know of this museum you likely know it by a different name, the name that is the title of a famous poem by W. H. Auden—Musée des Beaux-Arts.

About suffering they were never wrong / The Old Masters…

It’s confusing. Musée des Beaux-Arts, or, more properly, Musées Royaux de Beaux-Arts de Belgique, is an umbrella term encompassing several museums. When Auden looked at Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Fall of Icarus in the 1930s he was in the Musée des Beaux-Arts, but it would be more specific to say he was in the Musée Royal d’art ancien.

The switch from ‘Musée Royal d’art ancien’ to ‘Oldmasters Museum’ dates to the early years of the present century. I haven’t found proof, but I’m pretty sure the switch was inspired by the poem. I think the sequence goes something like this:

(i) Auden visits the museum in Brussels and sees the Fall of Icarus; (ii) in a poem about the painting he describes Bruegel as an ‘Old Master’; (iii) he takes for for the title of his poem one of the two names of the museum, not the precise name, Musée Royal d’art ancien, but the umbrella one, Musée des Beaux-Arts; (iv) in time Auden’s poem became one of the best known poems of the twentieth century; (v) three quarters of a century after Auden wrote the poem, the former Musée Royal d’art ancien adopts a new name that uses a distinctive variant of ‘Old Master’

*

The first thing I learned when I entered the museum was that I wasn’t going to be seeing the Fall of Icarus.

A little later, upstairs in the Bruegel gallery, I found out why—the museum is attempting to get to the bottom of the question of the painting’s authorship. Not that there is any doubt about the composition, but Bruegel was one of the most copied artists of his day (see the picture below). It has long been thought that the Fall of Icarus may be a copy after a lost original.

*

Even without the Fall of Icarus, the Bruegel room at the Oldmasters Museum is the second-best place in the world to see Bruegels, after the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. There are three big paintings, the Boschian Fall of the Rebel Angels, a faded Adoration of the Magi, painted in tempera, and a winter scene, the Census at Bethlehem; and there is also the smaller Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap. And then there are four copies after Bruegel by his son, Pieter Bruegel the Younger, including one of the Census at Bethlehem.

The first time I was in the gallery I divided my time pretty evenly among the paintings, walking back and forth and looking at this and that, but by my third and last visit I had eyes only for the Census at Bethlehem. I think this would have been the case even if the Fall of Icarus had been up. Not that I can’t appreciate an expensive delicate ship that, having somewhere to get to, sails calmly on as a boy falls out of the sky. Conceptually that’s hard to beat, but does a concept make a painting irresistible? I doubt it—more likely, a painting is irresistible when it feels alive. And I don’t know if it would be possible for a painting to be more full of life than the Census at Bethlehem is.

There is a consensus ‘best Bruegel’—the Hunters in the Snow. Plausible candidates for second-best include Netherlandish Proverbs, the Tower of Babel and the Peasant Wedding. But I wonder if the overlap in subject matter with the Hunters in the Snow might be holding down the reputation of the Census at Bethlehem? Try imagining a world without the Hunters in the Snow. Wouldn’t it still be the case that the winter Bruegel is the best Bruegel? Maybe the Census at Bethlehem would have a very different reputation, if the Hunters in the Snow didn’t exist?

*

The paintings in the Oldmasters Museum are not from an old royal collection. The territory corresponding to Belgium was ruled from Spain in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and from Austria in the eighteenth. That’s why the Bruegels are in Vienna and why there are so many Bosches and Patinirs in the Prado. What you see in Belgian museums are the paintings that great collectors like Mary of Hungary and Archduke Leopold Wilhelm of Austria didn’t want.

During the French Revolution paintings from religious institutions throughout the Low Countries were seized and taken to the Louvre, which was soon filled beyond capacity. Then, in 1801, Napoleon Bonaparte decreed the creation of fifteen regional museums, including one in Brussels, which opened the following year. Many of the works that had been brought to the Louvre were sent to the new museum.

So the museum has had just over two centuries to gather art. It shows. The collection is not systematic, nor is it rich in canonical works, but it is deep and full of surprises. You may recognize the names of the artists I’ll mention in the rest of this post, but (with one exception) you probably won’t know the paintings.

*

Of the Belgian museums, it’s the Groeningemuseum in Bruges that has the best fifteenth century paintings, and this is as it should be since Bruges was the center of art and commerce at the time. So let the fifteenth century wait; in this Brussels post I’ll only mention one painting from then, or not even a full painting, only a panel, a wing of a triptych known as the Aix Annunciation.

It was painted in the 1440s for an altar in the cathedral of Aix en Provence. The patron was a rich draper named Pierre Cortici; the artist, long known only as the Master of the Aix Annunciation, is now thought to have been Barthélemy d’Eyck, a Flemish painter and manuscript illuminator who worked for René of Anjou. Not much is known about Barthélemy d’Eyck. Was he a relation of Jan van Eyck? Maybe. Did he train in Jan van Eyck’s workshop? Maybe. Can the works attributed to him plausibly be called ‘Eyckian’? Yes.

While the central panel of the triptych remains in Aix, the wings were detached at some point. They turned up on the art market, separately, in the early twentieth century. It is the right panel, with the prophet Jeremiah in a niche, standing on a pedestal of stone under a high shelf piled with books and other objects, that is in Brussels. On the reverse side, which would have been visible when the triptych was closed, is half of a Noli me tangere, that is, a painting of Christ appearing to Mary Magdalene. Christ is in Brussels; Mary Magdalene is in the museum in Rotterdam.

Ok: I love this painting of Jeremiah, but I cannot help noticing that he isn’t reading the book he holds. He can’t be reading it because the pages are fanned out in such a way that he wouldn’t be able to see the text on a specific page.

To include a couple of images not from the museum in Brussels—what is true of Jeremiah is also true of the Virgin in the triptych’s central panel in Aix. She, too, gazes at a book whose pages are fanned.

But in another painting that is also attributed to Barthélemy d’Eyck, the Holy Family in the Crozatier Museum in Le Puy-en-Velay, the Virgin is more plausibly reading, or at least glancing, at an open book. She looks away from the Christ Child towards the book, which is held by an angel. It is open to a distinct page. Could these two paintings really be by the same artist? I am inclined to think not.

*

From the perspective of today, it is natural to think that by the second decade of the sixteenth century the Netherlandish triptych was on the wane. The works that are well-known today—by Jan van Eyck, Robert Campin, Hugo van der Goes, Hans Memling, Rogier van der Weyden and Hieronymus Bosch—had already been painted, and it would be a century before Peter Paul Rubens would give the format new vitality with his Elevation of the Cross.

I doubt, though, that anyone thought this at the time. Probably, triptychs seemed to be getting bigger and better. From the perspective of 1525, the year Bernard van Orley’s Last Judgment triptych was completed and installed in Antwerp Cathedral, the likes of Campin and Memling must have seemed static and uninteresting.

I’m not going to pretend I think that I like the sixteenth century triptychs in the Oldmasters Museum as much as I do fifteenth century ones elsewhere; still, they are pretty interesting. So I present, in chronological order, four that appealed to me. As three of them hang next to each other, I have been able to include a picture that will provide a sense of scale. For the first one, the Triptych of the Abbey of Dielegem, I have no such picture. I will only say that it is big—about six feet tall by ten feet wide. It was painted in the 1510s or 1520s for Dielegem Abbey in Brussels by an artist known by convention as the Master of 1518. I like the extravagant Late Gothic architecture in the central panel, which shows Christ dining at the house of Simon the Pharisee, as described in the Gospel of Luke (7:36–50). During the meal a sinful woman washes Christ’s feet with her tears and dries them with her hair.

In his account Luke makes no mention of a squirrel on a chain, nor does he describe an exquisite hanging clock. I presume both the squirrel and the clock are the innovations of the Master of 1518. The clock, incidentally, has on each side a hinged panel painted with a billowing scroll. It seems appropriate to describe it as a triptych clock, as a triptych within the triptych.

This painted clock, it turns out, attracted the attention of one Henri Havard, who had it reproduced it in color in volume two of his Dictionnaire de l'ameublement et de la décoration depuis le XIIIe siècle jusqu'à nos jours (1900). He also noted that a contemporary clockmaker, Mathieu Planchon, had attempted to create a clock based on the one in the painting. I couldn’t find an exact match online, but Planchon clocks are pretty widely available, for example a neo-Gothic oak table clock with calendar sold for a little over a thousand pounds at Bonham’s in London in 2022.

*

And the three more triptychs—on the left the Haneton Triptych of Bernard van Orley (1520), on the right Jan Cornelisz. Vermeyen’s Triptych of the Micault Family (1547–49), and at center the Bruges Fishmongers’ Triptych by Pieter Pourbus (1576).

You might know these names. Vermeyen, who accompanied Charles V on his expedition to Tunis in 1535, designed the twelve Conquest of Tunis tapestries, completed in 1554; van Orley did the same for the Battle of Pavia of 1525, designing seven tapestries that were completed in 1531. The two sets, both woven in Brussels workshops, are the among the largest, costliest and most splendid tapestries sets of the sixteenth century, landmarks in the history of royal propaganda.

As for Pourbus, for me the first association was with Balzac’s Unknown Masterpiece. But the Pourbus who is a character in the short story is not Pieter. It is his grandson, Frans Pourbus the Younger, court painter to Marie de’ Medici from 1609 until his death in 1622. Pieter Pourbus was a sixteenth century painter active in Bruges.

The Haneton Triptych was made for a family tomb in the Church of St. Gudule, Brussels. In the foreground of the left panel is the stern Philippe Haneton, who was an administrator for Charles V; behind him are his seven sons and Philip the Apostle. Opposite is Philippe’s wife Marguerite, praying with her five daughters and accompanied by Margaret of Antioch. The figures in these outer panels watch the central scene of the deposition of Christ.

In the background of all three panels—nothing but stippled gold. This is deliberate archaizing on the part of van Orley, a self-conscious imitation of a manner that had long since gone out of style. Or maybe it was not van Orley, but rather Philippe Haneton himself, who wanted an old-fashioned look rather than one set in a naturalistic landscape. He must have seen gold-background paintings of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in St. Gudule and other Brussels churches. The fact that I am not aware of another gold background by van Orley might be taken as a thin shred of evidence here. If it was Haneton’s idea, van Orley could have gone along with the request, perhaps even rolling his eyes at an eccentric client. But if it was van Orley’s idea, wouldn’t he have done more of these? I am not aware of any. The National Gallery of Art possesses a tapestry after van Orley, with the same design as the triptych’s central panel. Here the deposition takes place in a landscape.

*

Vermeyen’s triptych is similar in composition to van Orley’s, with male and female members of a family on either side of a biblical scene, in this case the resurrection of Lazarus. But here there are no saintly or apostolic namesakes. There are only Jean Micault, another high-ranking official under Charles V, and his wife and children.

In this work, too, it is the background that is most interesting. The left and center panels form a unified portrayal of the Bay of Tunis and the ancient city of Carthage, partially in ruins though also featuring a pristine obelisk and a temple. The modern city of Tunis is absent. Behind the Micault women in the right panel is the aqueduct of Segovia in Spain.

It is unclear whether anyone from the Micault family went to Tunis in 1535. Jean could not have been there, having already retired due to ill health by then, but his son Nicholas may have taken part in the expedition, and it was he who commissioned the triptych for his parents’ tomb. But even if he was there, that wouldn’t explain the painting’s Tunisian setting.

Two things can be said for certain. One, since Vermeyen had been to Tunis, and since he was at work designing the tapestries at the time he made this triptych, no artist was better placed than he to incorporate a scene of the environs of Tunis into a painting. Two, a reference to one of the greatest triumphs of Charles V would have been a way for the Micault family to express their loyalty.

Not certain, but probable: the decision (Vermeyen’s?) to portray Carthage rather than Tunis implicitly links Charles V’s conquest of Tunis to antiquity, to the invasion of Africa led by Scipio Africanus in the Second Punic War (218–201 BC).

So perhaps Nicholas Micault was a Tunis veteran, and perhaps he chose Vermeyen for the painting that would commemorate his parents because he knew Vermeyen would be able to include the Bay of Tunis and Carthage. Or perhaps it was Vermeyen who proposed the setting, and Nicholas agreed. Who knows? Regarding the aqueduct of Segovia in the right panel, suffice it to say that though the exact connotation is obscure, there is little doubt that this is still another expression of loyalty to Charles V.

*

The last of the four, and my favorite, is Pieter Pourbus’s Bruges Fishmongers’ Triptych. The title says it all—Pourbus painted this triptych, to specifications set out in a contract signed on March 28, 1576, for the fishmongers of Bruges. They had their own church, St. Christopher’s, until it was demolished in the 1780s due to its dilapidation.

Here the three panels form a continuous scene of water and shore, with four biblical episodes relating to fishing or the sea. But I am less interested in the subject matter than the variety of marine life Pourbus has included, not only different species of fish, but crabs, starfish, scallops, clams, seaweed, coral and mussels. All that is missing are seagulls and sandpipers—but with that observation I am approaching self-parody. Imagine a conference talk, “On the Absence of Sandpipers in Pieter Pourbus’s Bruges Fishmongers’ Triptych.”

Of course it is a pleasure to look at all these sea creatures in the painting, but I think it may be a still greater one to think of two centuries of Bruges fishmongers and their doing the same. Generation after generation of them living out their lives with the painting as a weekly presence. Whatever admiration it gets as an old master painting in a museum must pale in comparison.

*

I said above that when I write about the museum in Bruges I’ll focus on the Netherlandish art of the fifteenth century. And having dwelled at length here on sixteenth century painting, when I get to the museum in Antwerp it will be time for the seventeenth century.

Not that there isn’t plenty of interesting seventeenth century art in the Oldmasters Museum, but there is only one painting I feel compelled to include. It is a work by an unknown artist that replicates a print by Jacques Callot.

The original version, The Fair at Impruneta, is an almost impossibly complex view of a fair held annually at the market town of Impruneta, just south of Florence. Callot made it in 1620 when he was working for the Medici court. I’ve included an image of it below, of the impression held by the National Gallery of Art.

I love the print, but I’m not sure it works as a painting. However impressive the scene is on a sheet of paper, in color it comes across as a bit flat. When looking at the print, one knows that the sheet has been pressed to and then drawn from the inked copper plate on which Callot drew with his etching needle. When looking at the painting—well, if I hadn’t recognized the source I don’t think I would have given it more than half a glance, at least not in a museum with a roomful of Bruegels. But, knowing the original, it was fun to pull it up my phone and compare.

*

I’ll close with an eighteenth century work, a nineteenth century work, and a complaint. From 1793, Jacques-Louis David’s Death of Marat is the only painting in the museum as famous as the Fall of Icarus. It ended up in Brussels because David ended up in Brussels. After his death there in 1825 it passed through the hands of several Brussels collectors before it was given to the museum in 1860.

This newsletter isn’t a survey class, so I won’t twaddle on about this painting. I will only note that I have just read (on Wikipedia) that Marat’s assassin Charlotte Corday did not flee the scene. According to Jules Michelet (Histoire de la Révolution française, volume 6, chapter 4)

Ils trouvent Charlotte, debout et pétrifiée, près de la fenêtre…

Undignified—easy to see why David left her out of the picture.

*

Possibly most startling painting in the museum is part of the collection of the Modern Museum, a branch of the Museum of Fine Arts that does not at present have gallery space. A few of its larger works are on view on the Oldmasters Museum’s ground floor, among them Jan Verhas’s School Procession of 1878, an event held for the silver wedding anniversary of King Leopold II and Queen Marie Henriette. More than twenty thousand schoolchildren paraded in Brussels for the occasion. A charming occasion, I am sure, and each of the girls in the painting seems sweet enough. But isn’t there something ominous about them, as a group?

*

Finally, a complaint. Some of the gallery space in the Oldmasters Museum is given over to an exhibition called ‘Art x Gender.’ I didn’t come to Brussels to find out what Belgian curators have to say about art and gender, so I know I’m not the target audience here, and as a general rule I’m content to ignore this sort of thing. As I argued in this newsletter’s first post, it’s fine for curators to make incongruous juxtapositions for whatever reason they like, as long as they aren’t permanent and as long as they limit themselves to one or two galleries.

What is not fine, however, is to hang paintings so high that they cannot be seen clearly. I don’t know or care who painted the work that hangs on the wall between the Adam and the Eve of Lucas Cranach the Elder. I don’t know or care why the curators thought it would be interesting to create an anachronic triptych. But I cannot forgive them for what they have done with the Cranachs. For shame!

In last month’s post on the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid I mentioned two Italian Renaissance paintings that Heinrich Thyssen bought in 1935, Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Portrait of Giovanna degli Albizzi Tornabuoni and Vittore Carpaccio’s Portrait of a Knight. I was writing about the Thyssen-Bornemisza collection—how, where and when it was formed—so I didn’t say anything about the paintings themselves. I don’t mind this for the Ghirlandaio, the 1920s photo of it in J. P. Morgan’s library seemed to do it justice, but I want to return to Carpaccio.

He’s an old favorite. Back in 2012, when I was planning my escape from my old office job, I took some graduate courses in art history at Hunter College. I had conceived the idea of getting an MA at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts, and I needed three letters of recommendation to apply. The best of the classes, or at least the one that gave me direction in art history, was on public architecture in France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but I also have fond memories of the other two, which were on Venetian painting and twentieth century architecture.

For my final paper in Venetian painting I wrote about the critical fortune of Carpaccio. It can be summarized in a few words—modest success in his lifetime, two paragraphs from Vasari, neglect, discovery in the nineteenth century, ardent promotion by John Ruskin, unqualified adoration from Henry James and Marcel Proust, polite skepticism from Bernard Berenson and Roger Fry, affection from subsequent generations of art historians and the general public.

I chose the topic because I thought it would be fun to read and quote Ruskin, James and Proust, but in the end the words that have stayed in the back of my mind ever since came from Fry, who wrote about Carpaccio and his patrons in the Venetian scuole in the Quarterly Review in 1908.

These minor scuole were really very humble institutions, maintained by small tradespeople partly for charity, partly for that mutual support of their self-esteem which forms so strong a tie even to-day among the less cultivated circles of the middle classes. One could probably get a pretty clear idea of the tone of a meeting of these brethren of the minor guilds by attending at a Masonic lodge in one of the genteel outer suburbs of London. These good people probably ‘knew nothing about art, but knew what they liked’; and they liked Carpaccio, which showed their honest good sense and freedom from snobbism. They did not want Gentile Bellini, with his high and academic design, and they felt no compulsion, like the major guilds, to employ him because of his reputation with cognoscenti.1

I don’t know whether the passage is more unfair to the Masons of London’s genteel outer suburbs, or to late fifteenth century Venetian tradesmen, or to Carpaccio himself, but anyway, when Ruskin, James, Proust, Berenson and Fry were forming their opinions about Carpaccio, and by extension ours, the painting of a knight now at the Thyssen was not on their radar, because before 1919 it hung in Wentworth Castle in Yorkshire, England, attributed, on the basis of an ‘AD’ monogram, to Albrecht Dürer. Alec Martin, having sent from Christie’s to Wentworth to arrange the sale of the collection, recognized the painting as by Carpaccio. Much later, in 1958, conservation treatment confirmed the attribution by revealing the inscription in the cartellino at lower right: “VICTOR CARPATHIUS / FINXIT / M.D.X.” (Had this been painted over by the same person who added the Dürer monogram?)

On the basis of the presence of a deer at right, Christie’s sold the painting as portraying St. Eustace. Eustace, born Placidus, was a second century Roman who, out hunting one day, saw the crucified Christ appear between the antlers of a deer. The deer addressed him.

O Placidus, why are you pursuing me? For your sake I have appeared to you in this animal. I am the Christ, whom you worship without knowing it. Your alms have risen before me, and for this purpose I have come, that through this deer which you have hunted, I myself might hunt you.”2

Placidus was baptized Eustace the next day.

But, as Martin acknowledged in the Burlington Magazine in 1924, the deer in the painting bears no crucifix.

Perhaps the subject is purely fanciful; perhaps it is derived from some myth or legend. But since so far no satisfactory solution of the problem has been thought of, we must, for the moment, rest content with the present title The Young Knight.

And so the title remains a century later. Among the many theories that have been proposed, the most plausible is that the painting is a commemorative portrait of a soldier. This would explain the armor (‘alla tedesca’) and the lack of individualized features. Such monuments existed in Venice, but in the medium of sculpture rather than painting, and for high-ranking officers in middle-age rather than young men like the one depicted here. Still, as Peter Humfrey proposes in the catalogue to the National Gallery of Art’s Carpaccio exhibition of 2022–23, it is easy to imagine a Venetian family commissioning this work after losing a favorite son in the Second Ottoman–Venetian War (1499–1503) or the War of the League of Cambrai (1508–16), and displaying it in a prominent place in the piano nobile of their palace.3

As for the astonishing variety of flora and fauna throughout the painting—the ermine, the peacock, the falcon and heron in combat, the lilies, the rabbits, and so on—in fact Dürer is a likely influence here. Carpaccio wasn’t usually so attentive to nature, and Dürer’s stay in Venice had been only a few years earlier. Perhaps he even brought the Great Piece of Turf with him on his travels, to show what he could do. A Carpaccio who learned from Dürer, a Carpaccio who seems to developed a new way of memorializing a fallen soldier—Roger Fry, shame on you. Take back that jibe, it is too clever by half.

*

Do you have a favorite painting by François Boucher? Unlike Hermann Göring, who in 1941 tasked Joachim von Ribbentrop with getting Diana at the Bath for his personal collection, I don’t—at least not yet.4 But I know I like his domestic scenes, and there aren’t many of them. To decide, I’d need to spend a little more time upstairs at the Louvre—to skip the Poussins and the Watteaus for once and go straight to the Bouchers, first of all to see Le Déjeuner. And I’d need to go to the Nationalmuseum in Sweden for The Milliner. Then, somehow, I’d want to compare these to La Toilette at the Thyssen. If only a genie would offer to send me back in time to the spring of 1986 I’d be able to see all three paintings at that year’s Boucher exhibition at the Met, and then maybe pop in for a visit to my ten-year-old self, ask him if it really makes sense to be so interested in the baseball standings in the sports section of the Washington Post, in a world that also contains Rococo art. (Friends observe that I could direct his attention to the Resting Girl at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich.)

Two of the three, La Toilette and The Milliner, were commissioned by Carl Gustaf Tessin, an important patron of Boucher during his time as Swedish ambassador to France in the years 1739–42. Two years after Tessin’s return to Stockholm, Swedish architect Carl Hårleman, in Paris to commission overdoors for the Swedish royal palace, wrote to Tessin:

Poor Boucher, his pretty wife… and so many other artists, ask me with tears in their eyes if they cannot go and join your Excellency in Sweden, and it is with great regret that I realize our resources are too small for such great figures.5

Of course Boucher, if he really said these words to Hårleman, was only being affectionate, he didn’t need to be in Stockholm to work for Swedish clients. He had painted La Toilette while Tessin was still in Paris, but The Milliner was a commission of 1745, the first of a projected series of four paintings of women at different times of the day, arranged by Tessin from afar on behalf of Crown Princess Louisa Ulrika (though Tessin hid her identity from Boucher, to get a better price).

Louisa Ulrika must have admired La Toilette, and wanted something in the same spirit—who wouldn’t? Ok, lots of people. Last August I went to the Frick Collection with a friend, an artist who mostly works in video. She liked everything there, except for the Bouchers. And then Substack’s own wrote of the Boucher-rich Wallace Collection that most of the art there is “sentimental kitsch.”

Oh, well. I’m with the crown princess. I don’t know if I’d ever before found a beauty spot anything other than odd or comical. Now that I’ve looked at this one, I get it. Accompany with rouged cheeks, lots of powder, and a garter belt of pale pink silk. Set against a Japanese screen in gold leaf, with flowers and pheasants.

In 1749, Tessin, short of money, sold most of his Bouchers to Louisa Ulrika, but he kept La Toilette for himself, so it never entered the Swedish royal collection. After Tessin died it passed into the hands of a series of Swedes, the Vienna Rothschilds, and finally, in 1967, to Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza.

As for the The Milliner, Boucher handed it over to the Swedish envoy in Paris in October 1746. Sadly, the rest of the projected set of four paintings was never completed. Various possibilities as to why are proposed in the catalogue to the 1986 Met exhibition, the one I’m going to visit if I ever encounter a genie with the gift of time travel.

*

It was my ardent hope that I would find an exhaustive analysis of In the Courtyard of the Customs-House, painted by the French artist Nicolas-Bernard Lépicié in 1775, ideally not by an art historian but by a specialist in the economic structure of the ancien régime, someone who could tell me not just what was in the packages being unloaded, inspected and weighed in the painting, but where they came from, what the notations written on them signified, and what tariffs and duties each one might be subject to. Could some of the men in the scene be on the lookout for contraband salt, or otherwise enforcing the infamous, hated gabelle?

What I found was the opposite of what I wanted, not scholars of finance taking an interest in the painting, but rather art historians taking an interest in the painting’s patron, Joseph Marie Terray, France’s Controller-General of Finances from 1769–74. And as if his background had been contrived to satisfy my desire to encounter the familiar types of eighteenth century France, Terray turns out to have been the son of a gabelous—that is, a collector of the salt tax.

Terray commissioned the painting from Lépicé in 1774, along with its pendant, Interior of a Market, now in a private collection. In the same year the painter Joseph Vernet also made a pair of works for Terray, Approach to a Fair and Constructing a Road. Just imagine, the finance minister commissioning paintings of trade and infrastructure! What fun, and why has Scott Bessent or one of his predecessors never arranged for Richard Estes to paint an Amazon fulfillment center or a Flying J truck stop?

Writing about Lépicié’s painting in his 2002 book Patriotic Taste: Collecting Modern art in Pre-Revolutionary Paris, Colin Bailey (now the director of the Morgan Library) quotes Diderot’s Encyclopédie to explain what a customs house would have signified for Terray.

In France the customs relate to trade, in the same way that man’s pulse relates to his health; it is the means by which we are able to judge the vigorousness of commerce.6

Bailey suggests that the setting, with its curved arcade, is derived from the Halle au Blés, a circular granary built in the 1760s that was considered one of the wonders of the age—Thomas Jefferson called it “the most superb thing on earth”.7

The goods on view include barrels of wine, which are being weighed on scales in the background at right. In the foreground a crate of books is under inspection as a porter with a crate-carrier stands by, waiting to take the load on his back and dash off into the streets of Paris. Nearby, Terray, dressed in ecclesiastical black (he was an abbot, and a libertine), appears to oversee the inspection of the goods of a merchant in a green coat. This figure, according to Denis Diderot’s report from the Salon of 1775, is a self-portrait of Lépicié. Further to the left travelers as well as goods are under inspection.

Of course, as anyone who has spent an hour or two getting through customs at Newark might guess, the scene is a little to cheerful to be true. Critics mostly didn’t mind, but the pendant painting, the Interior of a Market, was another story. Bailey quotes a observer who saw it at the Salon of 1779:

The author has omitted an event so commonplace that it must be considered essential to the depiction of a market place: the fighting that goes on among such people. He maintains that he has sought to represent the innocent rather than the lowly. This is a poor reply. He could certainly have avoided the latter, while still portraying the rabble in combat, where they often show themselves to be rather interesting athletes.8

The Interior of a Market being in a private collection, there’s no chance I could ever write about it in a future post. So I include it here, along with a message to its owner(s), should they happen to come across this post.

*

One last eighteenth century painting at the Thyssen, Jacob Philipp Hackert’s Landscape with the Palace at Caserta and Vesuvius. I was drawn to it for its incongruity. Shouldn’t Vesuvius be ominous? In this portrayal, made in 1793, the volcano smokes harmlessly in the distance, serving as the backdrop for a pleasant meadow scene with sheep and a party of day trippers.

That was my first thought. I’ve now realized that Hackert, a native of Brandenberg who lived in Italy from 1768 until his death in 1807, painted Vesuvius many times, including the eruption of 1774 (multiple versions) and that of 1779 (a painting sold by the German auction house Lempertz in May 2023).

But even in the eruption paintings the volcano doesn’t threaten. Taking as an example a painting of the 1774 eruption that sold at Christie’s in 2017 (for £156,250), we see Vesuvius, almost a pyrotechnic device rather than a force of nature, and we see the spectators. They feel the heat without flinching, every man a vulcanologist. The category includes Hackert himself. The Christie’s lot entry quotes a treatise he wrote in 1790: “the painter has to pay attention […] lime rocks can be very different one from the other, and volcanic rocks have a very special character, in their form as well as in colour.”

It’s an eighteenth century thing. I chose to dwell on these eighteenth century paintings at the Thyssen because I like them, but also because I’m intrigued by the ‘between’ status of eighteenth century art. The 1700s in Europe (I speak of the ‘short’ eighteenth century, 1715 to 1789) were better to live in than the 1600s. Not that there weren’t wars, not that Poland wasn’t partitioned by its neighbors, but it was a time of relative stability and prosperity. The religious strife that began with Luther had run its course, and what big things were coming next were still over the horizon. Not the end of history, but a something like a pause.

A little over a decade ago I applied for a pre-doctoral fellowship with the Met’s Department of European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, to help prepare for an upcoming exhibition. I didn’t get the job, but I had just finished an internship in another department at the Met, so I at least got an interview. The curator who interviewed me told me something amusing. “Here in ESDA, we do not acknowledge that the French Revolution happened.”

If I had the means and the space, not to mention the patience, the eighteenth century is the one I’d collect in. I’d buy prints after Boucher and Hackert, prints after Watteau and Tiepolo and Pietro Longhi, maybe even a painting by Arthur Devis, like the aesthete in the Visconti film.

I’m fond of the art, but also, it’s fun to play at having good taste. And maybe this the point—it’s the tame century, and my affection for it comes in part from feeling I don’t quite have to take it seriously.

There’s another painting of Vesuvius, made in the 1650s by Domenico Gargiulo. It shows the 1631 eruption, which killed thousands. The volcano is in the distance, black smoke blasting up and out, while in the foreground the relics of St. Januarius are taken in procession through a mass of Neapolitans. In flight above is Januarius himself, surrounded by cherubim. He raises his arms in a plea for mercy. There is not a vulcanologist in sight.

*

When I was in Paris in January 2024 a friend recommended that I go to the Nicolas de Staël exhibition at the Musée d’Art Moderne. I asked, “Nicolas who?” But one evening the museum had late hours and I was free. The exhibition was packed; the median age around sixty. I ended up liking Nicolas de Staël a lot. He’s an abstract painter, born in St. Petersburg into an aristocratic family that fled Russia in 1919, when he was five. Soon orphaned, he was raised and educated in Belgium, discovered a vocation for painting in his teens, and eventually settled in France. It was a troubled life. A few years of success in the late 1940s and early 1950s were followed by his jumping to his death from the roof of his studio in Antibes in 1955. He was forty-one.

My favorite paintings were the ones from his last years, when he developed a style on the verge of figuration, heavy in impasto, with a palette of blues and grays. There are quite a few of these, as de Staël worked at a relentless pace. It was one such painting that was on display at the Thyssen. The title given is Mediterranean Landscape—but of course for me its associations had nothing to do with the Mediterranean. On seeing it I was taken straight back to those crowded galleries in Paris in January 2024.

Looking it up now, I’ve learned that the de Staël exhibition was the most visited in the history of Musée d’Art Moderne, and I’m wondering why he isn’t better known in the US. It was in New York galleries, first with M. Knoedler & Co. and then with Paul Rosenberg, that he had the most success, and the Philips Collection in Washington has six of his paintings and three works on paper. But they’re in storage, as are the two works of his at MoMA.

Maybe it’s just bad timing. Americans are endlessly fascinated by the European artists of the first half of the twentieth century—the parade of -isms, each with its accompanying manifesto. After the war it was our turn. Maybe I could assert de Staël is a more interesting painter than Jasper Johns, but wouldn’t that be missing the point?

*

Finally: while discussing Lépicié’s customs house above, I said Scott Bessent should hire Richard Estes to paint a truck stop or a fulfillment center. Actually my first instinct was to suggest the photographer Andreas Gursky, famous for works like Salerno and 99 Cent, but then I remembered the Estes paintings at the Thyssen, three impressively vivid works of Photorealism (a fourth, Telephone Booths, wasn’t on view when I was there in January, but is now).

Granted, Estes is 94 years old, but the third of the three paintings below, his Self-Portrait near the Oculus at the World Trade Center, was done in 2017, when he was well into his eighties. Maybe he’s still up to it.

In any case, if you’re curious about Estes, and live in the New York area, consider going to the retrospective of his work that just opened at the Schoelkopf Gallery (390 Broadway, 3rd Floor). It’s up through August 21.

Let me start with a proposal: the Prado is the world’s art museum, and the Thyssen is Madrid’s. This may sound absurd if you know anything about the two collections. Many of the Prado’s greatest paintings were painted in Madrid, and many more were commissioned or collected by Spanish royalty, whereas the paintings in the Thyssen have only been in Madrid since 1992, when Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza (1921–2002) moved them there from Lugano, Switzerland.

So the one collection is bound up with the history of Madrid, the history of Spain, and the histories of the Habsburgs and the Bourbons; the other was formed by two generations of German steel magnates and ended up in Madrid by chance—because Lugano’s City Council refused to allow an expansion of the original Thyssen-Bornemisza gallery there, and because of the nationality of Hans Heinrich’s fifth and last wife, Carmen Cervera—Miss Spain back in 1961.

And as for Spanish art, while there are a few Spanish paintings at the Thyssen—I like Saint Casilda by Zurbarán—the collection is stronger in other areas.

Why, then, do I claim that it’s the Thyssen rather than the Prado that belongs to Madrid? One way to explain this is to say that in January the Prado’s main temporary exhibition was on the German artist Anton Raphael Mengs, who was court painter to Charles III of Spain for much of the 1760s and 1770s. Meanwhile at the Thyssen there were Picassos and Klees on loan from the Museum Berggruen in Berlin. Picasso and Klee vs. Mengs. You can probably guess which exhibition was filled with locals. It would have been interesting to accost some of them to ask, “When was the last time you stood in front of Las Meninas? And how often do you feel compelled to go see any of the seventy-five canvases by Rubens, or the thirty-three by Titian, that hang in the Prado? Maybe not too often?”

And then there’s this: while the Prado’s collection doesn’t actually stop with the death of Goya in 1828, none of its later works were made by artists anyone is much interested in today—the Prado website describes its nineteenth century collection as “the largest and least known of the schools of painting represented in the Museum.” The Thyssen by contrast, at least when it comes to European painting, is encyclopedic, with a few representative works for every period, every movement, every -ism. You start on the upper level with gold background panels of the fourteenth century and wind your way through the ages and styles until you find yourself sitting in front of Morris Louis’s Pillars of Hercules. Nothing like that at the Prado.

One other thing to mention is that even if you’ve never been to Madrid, you’ve probably seen works from the Thyssen, as it is a champion lender. It possesses at least one work by many or even most of the major Western artists of the last six centuries, so it has something to contribute to almost any exhibition. Just from the pictures above, the Valentin was at the Met in the fall of 2016, the Balthus was at the Fondation Beyeler in Basel in 2018, the Caravaggio was at the Palazzo Barberini in Rome last spring, and Saint Casilda is at the Zurbarán exhibition at the National Gallery, London until August 23.

*

I was surprised, on my previous trip to the Thyssen in the summer of 2002, to see all of the American art there. By ‘American art’ I don’t mean abstract paintings like the Pillars of Hercules—you can probably find that sort of thing in every big city from London to Stockholm—I mean paintings from when the USA was an artistic backwater, paintings one doesn’t expect collectors or institutions from other countries to take an interest in. Of course there are Copleys and Sargents and Whistlers in London, because those three were London artists. But Catlin, Bierstadt, or Peto? Church, Homer, or Heade? Sheeler, Sloan, or Demuth? Fitz Henry Lane? James McDougal Hart? Don’t bother trying to find any of these guys at the National Gallery or the Louvre or the Musée d’Orsay. For the European who wants to see American art pre-Pollock, pre-Warhol, pre-Darger, there are two choices: cross the Atlantic or go to the Thyssen.

It was in 1963 that Hans Heinrich bought his first American painting, Jackson Pollock’s 1951 Brown and Silver I, but that was a one-off. It wasn’t until after 1972, when the Thyssen-Bornemisza Group took over Indian Head, an American conglomerate of 55 factories and 18,000 employees, and Hans Heinrich began to spend much of his time in New York, that he began to collect American art in earnest.1

Was it expedient for this Dutch-born Swiss national, whose family fortune was founded in Germany and whose title of nobility was Hungarian, to discover an interest in American art at this point in his life, when it was to his advantage to ingratiate himself with prominent Americans? Undoubtedly, but the interest may also have been genuine. He had American roots—his maternal grandmother, Matilda Louise Price, had been a native of Wilmington, Delaware who had married a Hungarian baron, and like many Europeans of his generation he had grown up reading about the exploits of Winnetou, Chiefe of the Apaches, in the novels of the German author Karl May.

In 1973 Hans Heinrich bought five paintings at the Sotheby’s sale of the estate of the Odessa-born New York gallerist Edith Gregor Halpert (Halpert was the subject, incidentally, of an exhibition at the Jewish Museum in 2019). These were Modernist works, such as Georgia O’Keefe’s Abstraction. Blind I. Later in the decade, interested in the historical roots of American Modernist painting, and also caught up in the spirit of the bicentennial, Hans Heinrich began to buy works from the nineteenth century as well. Visits to MoMA may have encouraged him in this, as tracing the genealogy of American Modernism was the explicit goal of the museum’s bicentennial exhibition, The Natural Paradise: Painting in America 1800–1950, in which 84 works from the nineteenth century were displayed alongside 73 from the first half of the twentieth. As the show’s press release put it, “it is especially appropriate to explore the native soil from which the Abstract Expressionists grew.”

Hans Heinrich seems in time to have come to notice the MoMA exhibition’s arbitrary and limiting starting point of 1800, for as his collection of American art grew he expanded his buying into the colonial period. Hanging in the Thyssen today is a purchase of 1980, a portrait by Charles Wilson Peale of Isabella and John Stewart, the children of the Annapolis merchant Anthony Stewart. Isabella and John, dressed as if ready to be painted not by Peale but by Anthony van Dyck, gather peaches in a glade, with what could be the Chesapeake Bay in the background. The Thyssen dates the portrait to the period before Stewart’s cargo ship, the Peggy Stewart, was burned in the ‘Annapolis Tea Party’ of October 1774. When Peale relocated to Philadelphia in 1776 he had not been paid for the painting.

Hans Heinrich also acquired three portraits by John Singleton Copley, all from Copley’s Boston years, before he left North America for good in June 1774. One of the three, the Portrait of Judge Martin Howard, portrays a figure of some significance. Born into a prominent Rhode Island family, Howard is best known as the author of A Letter from a Gentleman at Halifax to His Friend in Rhode Island, a forceful pamphlet in favor of the Stamp Act of 1765, written after Howard’s appointment as stamp master of Rhode Island in the same year. There was no doubt in Newport as to the identity of the ‘Gentleman at Halifax’; Howard’s house was ransacked in short order. Local radicals broke up his furniture with axes, cut down the trees in his yard, and drank the contents of his wine cellar—maybe not in that order. Howard was also burned in effigy in front of Newport’s Colony House.

A widower at the time, Howard fled to England, where a year later he was named Chief Justice of North Carolina. He returned to North America and assumed the new position in January 1767. At some point in the same year that he sailed to Boston, where he sat for Copley and also married his second wife, Abigail Greenleaf, the daughter of the sheriff of Suffolk County, Massachusetts.

It might be thought that the chief justice appointment would have been seen as a reward to Howard for his support of the Stamp Act, and that he would have been received in North Carolina with the same fury that was visited on him in Rhode Island. But while it is true that there was apprehension when the appointment was announced, Howard soon acquired a reputation for fairness, particularly in his handling of trials related to the so-called ‘Regulator’ movement, a back-country uprising of the years 1766–71. His evenhandedness earned him the respect of some of the most zealous Carolina Whigs, as well as of Regulators on trial for acts of vandalism similar to those visited on Howard in Rhode Island.

A few years into his tenure in North Carolina, in an address he made at a 1771 session of the North Carolina Supreme Court, Howard revealed that his contrary spirit extended beyond fealty to the British Parliament. The subject of the address was the murder of slaves.

Howard was no abolitionist. In fact he was a slaveholder, and, perhaps remembering what had happened in Newport, he was at pains to reassure his audience that he did not wish to throw into question the institution of slavery itself. All the same, the address reveals him to have been conflicted about it. He opens by observing that a North Carolina grand jury had lately declined to charge a white man with murdering a slave, and suggests that while the reason for not doing so could have been a lack of evidence, he suspects the grand jury’s demurral was based on the principle “THAT IT IS NOT MURDER FOR A WHITE MAN TO KILL A NEGRO SLAVE.”

The goal of the address is to rebut the principle, but in places Howard goes beyond this to condemn slavery itself—as an evil for its own sake, as a corrupting influence on society, and as the likely cause, sooner or later, of a violent insurrection.

Great part of the property here consists in negroes—and that sort of policy which avarice and luxury have made necessary, and which sacrifices justice and humanity to the acquisition of wealth, and the enlargement of commerce, has given a sanction to slavery, and incorporated it within our laws.

Nevertheless, I am not alone in my opinion, that slavery is not only in itself a great evil, but produces the worst effect upon our manners.—Accustomed to an uncontrolable power over slaves, men become lazy, proud, and cruel; and we may reasonably conclude that these vices, so hurtful to ourselves and to society, would become still more enormous if we should adopt so barbarous a maxim as, that a white man may murder a slave with impunity.

…

If you should publish to your slaves, that their loss of liberty includes the loss of life, whenever the humour or caprice of a white man should be pleased to take it away from them—depressed as they are in spirits I question if they could bear such an addition to their burden. We should, therefore, be careful not to make them desperate, lest we ourselves should become the first sacrifices to the maxims of our own cruelty.

Howard also contrived, by pointing out the hypocrisy inherent in a slaveholders’s demand for freedom from taxation, to incorporate the preoccupations of his Newport days into the North Carolina address.

What apology or answer could we make to a negro slave, who should remonstrate and say to us, “You invoke Heaven and earth against a claim to take from you a trifling sum of money without your consent, or to try you without a jury, when you are charged with any crime; and are you so judicially hardened and reprobate as to take from us every right and privilege of humanity?” The reproof would be just, and it is not easy to express one’s indignation to behold men, with an unfeeling indifference, holding their fellow creatures in the most miserable bondage; but when they imagine their own liberty is in the least invaded, they will gravely, and without blushing, quote every writer upon government and civil society to prove, that all men are by nature equal and by nature free.

I wondered, when I read these words, if they had been inspired by Samuel Johnson’s famous question, “[H]ow is it that we hear the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?”—but no, the North Carolina address predates by several years the publication in 1775 of Taxation No Tyranny, Johnson’s pamphlet containing the quip.

Unlike in the case of the Newport pamphlet, in his North Carolina address Howard placed himself within the window of socially acceptable opinion. No mob seems to have assembled in front of his house, and while the state would not define the deliberate killing of a slave as murder for another twenty years, the address was not so provocative that it couldn’t be published locally—it ran in the Wilmington Cape Fear Mercury of February 12, 1772. It was then republished in the Newport Mercury on May 11 of the same year—presumably Howard sent it to one of his old Newport friends. No copy of the Cape Fear Mercury survives, nor is the address preserved in North Carolina court records. The text is only known through the Newport version, which was discovered by the historian Don Higginbotham of the University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill in the seventies and published in the William and Mary Quarterly of October 1979.

The timing raises an interesting question: Hans Heinrich bought the Copley painting in 1984—could he have have known of Howard’s North Carolina address at the time? Not that tycoons read the William and Mary Quarterly, but maybe sometimes their assistants do, and in any case it is the job of gallery owners to know about the paintings they are selling. Maybe Hans Heinrich saw, in Copley’s portrayal, the self-assured, polemical energy that drove Howard not only to be an outspoken Tory in the days of the Stamp Act, but also to advocate, in however limited a fashion, for the rights of the enslaved?

*

There is also an eighteenth century painting on view at the Thyssen that was considered American when Hans Heinrich bought it in 1983, but is now thought to be British. A half-length portrait of black man, proud of bearing, wearing a tall white hat—who else could this be but Hercules, George Washington’s cook? And who could have painted it but Gilbert Stuart? The fanciful attribution first appeared in the magazine Connaissance des arts in April 1977, in an article on the hôtel particulier of the Parisian socialite and heiress Daisy Fellowes (1890–1962). Fellowes’s daughter, Ermeline Isabelle Edmée Séverine, Countess A. de Castéja (1911–86), was the source. Fellowes had bought the painting as by Gilbert Stuart around 1945, and is known to have referred to it as a portrait of a chef, but it may have been her daughter who first claimed the work was a depiction of Hercules specifically.

Since the sitter exudes contentment, the identification implicitly links the painting to flattering tales about the comfortable lives of the slaves of the Founding Fathers. This might have appealed to the countess, for like Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza (like all European aristocrats?) she was part American. Daisy Fellowes’s maternal grandfather was Isaac Merritt Singer, the founder of the Singer Sewing Machine Company. And after all it was 1977 when the Conaissance des arts piece ran—maybe Ermeline’s myth-making in saying that the painting portrayed Hercules can be ascribed to a Parisian socialite’s bicentennial fever.

Hans Heinrich bought the portrait at a sale of Daisy’s estate at the Parisian auction house Hôtel Drouot in 1983. It must have been sold then with the same attribution, for a 1994 guide to the Thyssen assigns it to Stuart and describes it as a ‘Presumed Portrait of George Washington’s Cook.’ As recently as 2016 the Thyssen loaned the painting to Mount Vernon for the exhibition, Lives Bound Together: Slavery at George Washington’s Mount Vernon.

Shortly thereafter the story came apart. Researchers determined that the painting was not by Stuart, that it did not depict Hercules, and indeed that it did not to depict a cook. The white hat—toque blanche—only came to be associated with chefs in the 1820s, but similar hats were worn on the island of Dominica in the 1770s. As for the style of the painting, the work’s broad brushstrokes suggest it was made by Sir Joshua Reynolds or someone in his circle.

Dominica, originally a French colony, was conquered by the British in 1763, during the Seven Years’ War. Fifteen years later, in 1778, with the French threatening to retake the island, there was an exodus of British plantation owners. Most likely, the man in the painting was brought to Britain around this time, and painted shortly thereafter.

*

So I have demonstrated, possibly at exhausting rather than exhaustive length, that there’s lots of American art at the Thyssen. It is not only, however, the presence of these paintings that makes the Thyssen the ‘American’ museum of Europe. The Thyssen is also an American museum' in another sense—its paintings were acquired in the twentieth century, on the market. When Heinrich Thyssen (1875–1947), Hans Heinrich’s father, began buying art around 1911, the great museums of Europe were more or less what they are today. American museums, on the other hand, were either just getting started or didn’t yet exist.

A collection of old paintings formed in the twentieth century is by definition an assortment of odds and ends, late discoveries, heirlooms sold to pay tax bills. This doesn’t mean the paintings at the Thyssen are inferior to the ones in the Prado, but it does mean that on average they are smaller. As an aside, it would be interesting to compare the median size of Italian Renaissance and Baroque paintings at the Uffizi, the Prado, and the Louvre to those at American museums and the Thyssen, especially if limiting the sample to famous artists. We have great Caravaggios in the USA, but not big Caravaggios. The biggest Italian Renaissance painting at the Met, at thirteen feet high, is an altarpiece by an artist known only to specialists, Girolamo dai Libri.

Looking into the history of the Thyssen, it turned out that the museum is even more ‘American’ than I knew. Heinrich wasn’t just competing with Americans in his purchasing—sometimes he was buying from Americans. When writing about the Wadsworth Atheneum in 2024 I mentioned that J. P. Morgan’s art collection had been divided after his death among the Met, the Wadsworth, and the Morgan Library, but that other works were sold on the market by his estate. One painting in the latter group, described by the New York Times on January 31, 1935 as “the most important painting in Mr. Morgan’s entire collection,” was Domenico Ghirlandaio’s Portrait of Giovanna degli Albizzi Tornabuoni. Heinrich bought it for about $500,000, twice what Morgan had paid for it in 1907. And then there is Vittore Carpaccio’s Portrait of a Knight, which Heinrich bought from the estate of New York investment banker Otto H. Kahn. As the Times headline had it on March 23, 1935:

OTTO H. KAHN’S HEIRS SELL RARE PAINTING; Carpaccio’s ‘St. Eustace,’ Said to Have Cost $250,000, Reported Bought by Swiss Baron

*

Two more Thyssen paintings that were once in the USA: Pierrot Content and The Rest, both early works by Antoine Watteau. Hans Heinrich bought The Rest, a depiction of military life, at Sotheby’s in 1975, in the sale of the estate of the Philadelphia and New York coal executive Charles E. Dunlap. Two years later the Newhouse Gallery of New York sold him Pierrot Content, a scene of Italian comedians in a park that had been in the hands of a collector in Houston, and before that in Boston, where between 1917 and 1946 it could be seen every summer at the Museum of Fine Arts, on loan from the old Boston families, related to each other by marriage, that owned it in those years, the Russells, the Carys, and the Curtises.

My inclination would have been to write about The Rest rather than Pierrot Content, because I like Watteau’s military paintings, they are the antidote to the visual propaganda of the grand siècle, the seemingly endless succession of prints, paintings and tapestries in which the Louis XIV, ever glorious on horseback, oversees troop movements and conducts sieges. In the camp scenes of Watteau, painted between 1709 and 1715—the last years of the king’s long reign—Louis XIV is never present, and barely imaginable. These are paintings of bored soldiers standing around or splayed out on the ground, waiting for something to happen. I admit, though, that this description is more applicable to The Portal at Valenciennes, at the Frick Collection, than it is to The Rest, because in the Thyssen painting the tedium is relieved by two fashionably dressed ladies. What are they doing there, have they gotten lost on the way to Cythera? So fine, if we’re only meant to have one of Watteau’s military paintings in New York, I’m glad it’s the one we have, rather than this one.

At the Thyssen, The Rest is the lesser of the two Watteaus, not because of its inferiority to Pierrot Content, but because of a third painting, a portrait of Hans Heinrich by Lucien Freud, in which two figures from the Watteau are sketched into the background, thus placing the sitter in the position of Pierrot. The tycoon and his latest prize possession. It’s often said that the rich are ever conscious of the still richer—the existence of private jets makes the business class feel like peasants, a billion dollars is peanuts next to a trillion, etc. I can’t relate. Not that I don’t have a vivid imagination, I just know that if I were modestly rich I would never envy the superrich of the twenty-first century. Instead I would envy people like Hans Heinrich, the rich of the Cold War era. Was there ever a better time to have a fortune? What use is ten billion dollars, if there are no Watteaus on the market, if there’s no Lucien Freud to sit for?

*

I was especially taken with the eighteenth century paintings at the Thyssen. In addition to the ones I’ve dwelled on above, there are at least five more that I want to write about. But I’m out of time, my self-imposed deadline of June 30 has come and gone. So for my next post I will write a sequel. To close this one I will ask if you have ever heard of the Rhineland painter Derick Baegert. I hadn’t, but I will remember him now that I have seen the Thyssen’s five fragments of a monumental Crucifixion he painted in the late 1470s as an altarpiece for the Church of Saint Nicholas of Mathena in the city of Wesel. The work, originally around thirteen feet long, was broken up at an unknown time.

One instinctively rues the loss of the painting as whole, but it occurs to me that a thirteen-foot Late Gothic altarpiece from the Rhineland would not have ended up on the art market in the twentieth century. If it were intact it would not be in Madrid today. Rather, it would probably be in the Städtisches Museum Wesel, or maybe in a museum in Duisburg or Düsseldorf.

As I mentioned above, the January trip was my second to Madrid, after an interval of twenty-four years. The odds are probably decent that I’ll visit one or two more times in the remainder of my life—certainly better than the odds of my visiting Wesel, Duisburg or Düsseldorf even once.

I’m likely, then, to see these fragments again, and it’s also likely that if the altarpiece had remained intact I’d never have see it. Would it be crazy to wonder if it might not have been for the best that it was broken up? The fragment the Thyssen calls Knights and Soldiers Playing Dice for Christ’s Robe is so enchanting, in its action, its color, in the range of expression of its figures—wouldn’t it be unseemly to want more? If this is perfect, isn’t that enough?

It occurs to me that in making his decision Lauder may have considered the present fates of two institutions of the twentieth century. On one hand there’s the cautionary tale of the Hispanic Society in Upper Manhattan, which has been independent since its founding in 1904 by railroad heir Archer M. Huntington (b. 1870). Independent and ever languishing—today much of its exhibition space is unusable because there’s no elevator, and most of the best paintings are usually out on loan somewhere (forty of them are at the Musée Jacquemart André in Paris through August 2).1

On the other hand there’s Dumbarton Oaks in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C. The founders of this small museum and research institute, Robert Woods Bliss (b. 1875) and Mildred Barnes Bliss (b. 1879), had the good sense to give it away to Harvard University in 1940. They bought the 1801 Federal-style house in 1920, and made it their primary residence following Robert’s retirement from the State Department in 1933 after his six years as U.S. Ambassador to Argentina. By then they had added the French Renaissance-style Music Room, which on May 8, 1938 saw the premiere of Igor Stravinsky’s ‘Dumbarton Oaks’ Chamber Concerto in E-Flat, composed for the Blisses’ thirtieth wedding anniversary.

The Blisses had less money to spend than the richest Americans of their generation, less than Huntington, and a lot less than John D. Rockefeller (b. 1874) or Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (b. 1875), but all the same they were rich enough, thanks to a laxative, Fletcher’s Castoria, in which Mildred’s father, Demas Barnes, had been an early investor.

A wall panel at Dumbarton Oaks observes that the Blisses “were attracted to art that lay somewhat outside of the accepted canon for art collecting of the time.” Doubtless true, but was necessity the mother of this attraction? Was their collecting shaped by their comparatively limited means? Wouldn’t they have bought Botticellis and Memlings, if they could have afforded to?

Maybe not, since by the thirties Botticellis and Memlings weren’t easy to come by at any price. The moment was propitious for specialized collecting. So the Blisses bought Byzantine manuscripts and Maya relief panels, Byzantine floor mosaics and Wari tunics, Byzantine ivories and Olmec jades. That is to say, they focused on two markets they could do well in, Byzantine and pre-Columbian American. Or three, actually, because Mildred also collected rare books on plants and gardens. And then there is their more conventional ‘House Collection’, consisting mostly of European works, the sort of objects any rich American of their generation might have been drawn to—Flemish tapestries, Italian Renaissance furniture, panel paintings by artists such as Bernardo Daddi and Bernhard Strigel, French Renaissance portrait drawings.

When the Blisses gave the property to Harvard they moved to another house nearby, and kept collecting. A wing for the Byzantine objects was added around the same time, but the pre-Columbian works were on long-term loan to the National Gallery of Art until the completion of Philip Johnson’s square of glass cylinders and marble columns in 1963. My default is to be skeptical of museums designed by famous architects, so I was quick to note the glare, quick to decide that reflections made it difficult to read the information panels, quick to wonder if all the foliage beyond the glass, not to mention the fountain at the center of the gallery, wasn’t too much of a distraction And then I dropped my objections. It is just too interesting a space to be in.

One other thing to mention about the layout is that Dumbarton Oaks is a house, but not a house museum. The exhibition spaces are the additions—the Music Room, the Byzantine wing, the Pre-Columbian gallery and a room for displaying books. The visitor to the museum (which is free) does not set foot in the original house, or even see it. The house is visible from the adjacent garden, which for most of the year can be visited with a reservation (closed January and February, free November and December, otherwise $15).

*

Having now come to the point where it’s appropriate to move on to the objects in the collection, I face a dilemma I evaded above when I mentioned Wari tunics. The most important tunic at Dumbarton Oaks, perhaps the most important single object in the museum, is not Wari, but Inca, or Inka. It is the sole surviving example of the type of tunic worn by Inca emperors. Or Inka emperors.

Inca, or Inka, that is the question.

Dumbarton Oaks has adopted Inka, though its website (which is excellent) has not been fully purged of the older usage. Here are the first two sentences (emphasis added) of the online catalogue entry on the famous tunic.

This tapestry tunic is one of the finest known Inka royal textiles. Typical of Inca tunics, it was woven as one long rectangle of cloth with a neck slit in the middle and then folded in half and the sides sewn up to the arm holes.

The shift to a ‘k’ comes from a desire for English to emulate Quechua rather than Spanish. Quechua itself was not a written language until colonial times, and since its alphabet was based on Spanish, it long used Inca, only changing the spelling to Inka in 1975, the year the Peruvian government, adopting an orthographic standardization proposed by the Academia Mayor de la Lengua Quechua, made Quechua an official language.

Quechua was not, however, the first language, to switch to ‘k’. Some early texts in Spanish use Inga rather than Inca, and Inga can also be found in seventeenth and eighteenth century works in other languages, including English and German. In the long run English followed Spanish in making Inca standard, but by the nineteenth century German usage had settled on Inka. So when in 1972 Werner Herzog made his film about the mutinous conquistador Lope de Aguirre, he would have conceived of it as taking place after the fall of the Inkareich.

Let this reflection justify my use of the ‘c’—I cannot type Inka without thinking of Klaus Kinski. And while Aguirre, the Wrath of God is a favorite film, it hardly seems appropriate for an English speaker to vouchsafe the Teutonization of the Andes.

*

The tunic is small, or at least smaller than I expected it to be. Bigger than a t-shirt, but not by much. On each side of the neck slit at upper center there are six columns of tocapu, or geometric designs set in squares. These extend down for thirteen rows, making a grid of 156 panels, or 312 in all, as the reverse side is woven in the same way. Both in terms of the overall number of tocapu, and their variety, this tunic surpasses any other that has survived. To quote Art Institute of Chicago curator Andrew Hamilton, author of The Royal Inca Tunic: A Biography of an Andean Masterpiece (2024), it is “the single work of ancient Andean art that has most entered the consciousness of modern Peruvians… like a Mona Lisa or a Starry Night.”2

Among the roughly twenty-five distinct designs is one consisting of two isolated squares, each with a dot inside, and two more squares, also with dots, that are linked by diagonal lines. This pattern, which appears on other tunics as well as on drinking vessels, has been called the Inca key. There is also a black-and-white checkerboard, overlaid with a zig-zag and topped with a red triangle, that replicates in miniature tunics worn by elite Inca soldiers. (There are two of these at the Met.)

The tocapu are arranged either at random or according to a logic as yet undiscerned. If the latter, it is not for a want of effort, by art historians and anthropologists and also by cryptographers hoping to discover in its patterns a system of Inca writing similar to Maya glyphs. In the words of Met curator emeritus Elena Phipps:

Many scholars have tried to map and interpret the pattern of tocapu motifs as they occur within the tunic. All concur that it is not possible to detect a logical, arithmetical, or otherwise patterned sequence. Considering that Inca culture rigidly controlled the use of garments and garment design, and that diversity and randomness was the prerogative of the sovereign, R. Stone-Miller has concluded that this random order was itself the objective of the garment. In my opinion the more important consideration is that the randomness of the design is countered by the rigidity of the columnar ordering system, creating a duality that is analogous to the Inca conceptualization of social order imposed on the natural world by their empire. If, in fact, the tocapu represent lineage groups, or members of regional hierarchies, then here we have a visual statement of how the random “human components” of the landscape have been contained and structured within an Inca ordering system.3

Phipps wrote the above over twenty years ago. Hamilton’s newer interpretation eschews the search for meaning (“it seems rather unproductive to search this composition for messages that it patently does not send”) and focuses instead on process. Relying on direct observation rather than photographs, he proposes the tunic was woven by two women working together on a single, wide loom, dividing the work between the front and the back. One was evidently the more experienced of the two, and careful observation of the tocapu reveals the experiments, the missteps and the learning process of the novice.

The Blisses may have been second to none when it came to preparing for the future of their institution, but their record keeping as collectors leaves much to be desired. Because a 1947 inventory does not mention the tunic, and because it was photographed in 1950, the window of acquisition can be narrowed to a few years. As for the place of acquisition, Robert was not the type to travel through the Andes in search of antiquities. Rather, he bought in galleries and auction houses in New York and Paris.

The tunic is probably not grave good like the Wari ones that hang in adjacent vitrines. Nor was it worn by an emperor—if it had been, it would have been burned, like all imperial Inca garments. Hamilton believes it was left unfinished (it lacks an embroidered zig-zag running through the lower rows of tocapu) during the Inca Civil War of the years immediately prior to the Spanish conquest of 1532, and then often worn in the period that followed, perhaps by a member of the royal family. How—and where—it survived between then and the 1940s is anyone’s guess.

*

There is one other object at Dumbarton Oaks I knew of before I visited, an Olmec pendant, or belt ornament, made of quartzite and depicting a deity. Later, after the fall of the Olmecs, it was owned by a Maya lord, who, to commemorate his assumption of rule, had its reverse side incised with a portrait of himself and four columns of glyphs in Protoclassical Maya. Centuries separate the creation of the object and its later alteration—the date ranges given by the museum are 900–400 BC (Olmec) and then 100 BC–100 AD (Maya).

Thus, in addition to being both an Olmec antiquity and a Maya antiquity, it serves as a testimony to the interest of the Maya in earlier cultures, an interest corroborated by the existence, elsewhere in early Maya imagery, of figures wearing other ornaments that seem to be Olmec. One might make an analogy to the Victory Stele of Naram-Sin, a limestone relief that has one inscription in Akkadian, from the era of its creation (c. 2250 BC), and another in Elamite dating to a thousand years later. The latter inscription was added after the Elamite king Shutruk-Nakhunte (r. 1184–55 BC) brought the stele from Mesopotamia to his capital, Susa.

At Dumbarton Oaks the Maya side is displayed facing the viewer; the Olmec front is seen through a mirror. My picture leaves much to be desired, so I have also included images from the website.

And a few more objects from the Pre-Columbian gallery.

*

Formal toleration of Christianity in the Roman Empire was granted by the Edict of Milan, promulgated on February 13, 313 by the co-emperors Constantine and Licinius. One might imagine that this date marked the end of persecutions and martyrdoms in the empire, and for the most part it did, but among the scattered exceptions are the Forty Martyrs of Sebaste, in Lesser Armenia (today Silvas, Turkey). This was a group of Roman soldiers who, declining to renounce Christianity, were sentenced to strip and freeze to death on an ice-covered lake. One of the forty, unable to resist a warm bathhouse on the shore, relented, but meanwhile a guard (or in some versions of the story a bathhouse attendant), impressed by the faith of the other thirty-nine, joined them on the ice, thereby preserving the original number. The cult of the Forty Martyrs has never been strong in the West (they are absent from the Golden Legend) but they are, if not a common subject in Orthodox art, at least an occasional one.

Dumbarton Oaks possesses a late Byzantine mosaic icon of the martyrs, and also a post-Byzantine triptych of them. The former has lost what was presumably its bathhouse scene at upper right, and also, I believe, the fortieth martyr (I count thirty-nine heads, fourteen in the bottom row, fourteen in the middle row, and eleven above). The loss has the effect of concentrating one’s attention on the action on the frozen lake, where the suffering figures are modeled with tesserae so small that the work is easily mistaken for a painting of impressive naturalism.

The later work, the one that actually is a painting rather than a mosaic, is undamaged, so it includes the bathhouse scene. The last-minute recruit reaches up to God the Father in the heavens, or else to one of the crowns descending earthwards, and another figure, his head obscured, creeps into the bathhouse. The rest of the heads can be counted, but only with difficulty. I finally got up to forty on my fourth or fifth try.

*

A paradox of the Byzantine world is that while it was Constantinople, and not Rome, that possessed the greatest array of Classical statuary, Byzantine artists made little or no sculpture in the round. Life was lived against a backdrop of gods and emperors of bronze and marble, but these remnants of the pagan past were not imitated. (Nor were they destroyed during the iconoclasms of the eighth and ninth centuries.)

Instead of creating monumental forms, Byzantine sculptors worked in low relief, in stone, ivory and metal. A characteristically modest example of Byzantine relief sculpture is a fragment of a marble chancel barrier—that is, a structure separating the altar of a church from the space used by the congregation—from the sixth or seventh century. It is carved in what was thought to be the shape of Christ’s tomb; the central rectangle and the diamond-shaped lozenge below represent the stone mentioned in the Gospels (e.g., Luke 24:2, And they found the stone rolled away from the sepulchre). The object has been cut down to match the tomb’s roof, which caused the amphora on the reverse side, which would have been seen as a liturgical reference to the blood of Christ, to lose its neck and handles.

More unusual than the chancel barrier is a tondo of Byzantine emperor, possibly John II Komnenos (r. 1118–43), the second emperor of the Komnenian dynasty. At half life-size and carved in fairly high relief, this is about as grand as Byzantine portrait sculpture ever got. Carved from a fragment of an ancient column shaft with a diameter of about three feet, the emperor stands on a suppedion (royal footstool), lofty and supreme against a backdrop of radiating quatrefoils. He holds a staff in one hand and a globus cruciger (imperial orb) surmounted with a patriarchal cross in the other. The identification of the figure as John is based on his bejeweled costume (cape, tunic, scarf, fibula, crown), which corresponds to the imperial fashions of the eleventh and twelfth centuries, and on his resemblance to a portrait mosaic at Hagia Sophia and to images of John on coins.

According to the twelfth century chronicler Niketas Choniates, John was viewed as a second Marcus Aurelius, that is, a leader distinguished for his valor, virtue and austerity. The second emperor of the Konmenos dynasty, he continued the project of restoration begun by his father, Alexios I (r. 1081–1118), who had revitalized the empire militarily and economically after several decades of disarray and territorial loss in the mid-eleventh century. Often away from the imperial capital, John led campaigns and directed sieges throughout the Balkans and Anatolia, retaking much of the territory lost in the previous century. He might have achieved still more, but in the early spring of 1143, while preparing his army for an attack on Antioch, held at the time by the crusader Raymond of Poitiers, he went on a boar hunt at Mount Taurus in Southeastern Anatolia. An arrow wounded his hand, and soon after he died of an infection.

The Blisses bought the tondo in Lugano, Switzerland in the late 1930s. Before Lugano it had been in Potsdam, in the Prussian royal collection, and before that in Venice, where Prince Karl Friedrich Alexander of Prussia had purchased it in the mid-nineteenth century. Another, similar tondo is still in Venice today, embedded in a wall above two doors in the Campiello de Ca' Angaran, a courtyard in the Dorsoduro district. This second tondo could represent John’s father, Alexios I (r. 1081–1118). The two reliefs, presumably, were part of the booty of the Fourth Crusade, objects brought to Venice when the Venetians sacked Constantinople in 1204. It is possible, though, as the Dumbarton Oaks catalogue entry notes, that only one was originally Byzantine, and that the other is a copy made by a Venetian sculptor to create a pair.

*

Finally, The Prince of Malice and his Court, the largest of the Late Gothic tapestries in the House Collection. It portrays a bearded king with a scepter, seated on a throne in his castle and surrounded by male courtiers. At left is part of another castle, separated from the first by a row of shrubs. The figures seen here are women, some of whom are dressed in armor, and angels. It is likely that the tapestry was originally wider, with the second castle portrayed as fully as the first. A smaller tapestry fragment at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Allegory of Hope, may be another piece of the whole.

The enthroned king is identified by a woven label as the Prince of Malice (le pri[n]ce de malice); his courtiers, most of them also labeled, personify the vices—Discord, Spite, Fraud, etc. The female inhabitants of the second castle are similarly identified as Prudence, Chastity and other virtues. One scholar, observing that the vices seem to be engaged in an ethical debate, proposes medieval morality plays or allegories as an inspiration for the scene.4 So when looking at the figures Sin and Wrath (they stand, incidentally, on a floor whose tiles might be described as Netherlandish tocapu), one might use the fifteenth century Castle of Perseverance, the earliest vernacular morality play preserved in full, to imagine their conversation. Here’s Wrath:

Anon take venjaunce, man, I rede,
And thanne schal no man thee ovyrlede,
But of thee they schul have drede
And bowe to thi byddynge.5

Shall I close on a note of fury? Maybe. Dumbarton Oaks has an excellent gift shop. It must be one of the best places in Washington to find an interesting present for someone, and there’s also a good selection of postcards. I bought three, one of the Inca tunic and two of works that were not on view on my visits, a pair of Spanish still lifes that were Mildred’s birthday present to Robert in 1955. Still Life with Cardoon, Grapes and Pomegranates and Still Life with Grapes, Melon and Apricots were painted in 1644 by Cristóbal Ramírez de Arellano, a little-known artist of seventeenth century Toledo.

Though lacking the precision and austerity of the still lifes of another Toledo artist, the great Juan Sánchez Cotán, the two Cristóbal Ramírez paintings are, to judge from my postcards and the photographs on the museum website, awfully good, or at least the one with the cardoon is good. As the online catalogue entry puts it:

This cardoon—a vegetable related to the artichoke and harvested for its root and stalks—enlivens an otherwise static still life composition by arching upward with its finger-like stalks and dominating almost two-thirds of the painting, filling the canvas from top to bottom.

Ok, so much for wrath. Having failed to send myself into a fury, I will only say that I am disappointed not to have seen these paintings. A Spanish still life is a precious thing, too precious to keep in storage. If Dumbarton Oaks doesn’t want to display the pair, then maybe the National Gallery of Art would take them as a long-term loan? They would nicely complement two works already in the collection there, Juan van der Hamen y León’s Still Life with Sweets and Pottery and Luis Melendéz’s Still Life with Figs and Bread? Or perhaps even the Prado would accept them—there are already two cardoon paintings in Prado Gallery 008A, one by Sánchez Cotán himself and another by one of his imitators, Felipe Ramírez. Wouldn’t the addition of the Dumbarton Oaks cardoon create an irresistible trio?

Subscribe now

No, I’m joking, I wouldn’t do this. It’s better for Caravaggio not to know about the solar system. But I’m not the only one to imagine such a scenario. In 1920 Roger Fry speculated in a similar spirit.

One would like to know what Dr. Johnson would have said to any one who had offered him a negro idol for several hundred pounds.

Fry had seen thirty such ‘idols’ in London, at an exhibition held by the Chelsea Book Club. They were new to Europe, or rather, objects sculpted by Sub-Saharan Africans had been present in small numbers since the Portuguese began to bring them back in the late fifteenth century, but they only began to attract the attention of artists and scholars in Fry’s day. As he wrote in the opening of his review of the Chelsea exhibition:

What a comfortable mental furniture the generalisations of a century ago must have afforded! What a right little, tight little, round little world it was when Greece was the only source of culture, when Greek art, even in Roman copies, was the only indisputable art, except for some Renaissance repetitions!1

*

Now another century has passed. No one speaks of idols any more, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art has reopened, after a re-conceptualization and renovation, its galleries for African, Oceanic and Ancient American art. As before, they are named for Michael C. Rockefeller, who died at twenty-three on a collecting trip to New Guinea in 1961.

Michael’s father, Nelson Rockefeller, in addition to being governor of the state of New York (1959–73) and Vice President of the United States (1974–77), was a prominent figure in the arts—twice the president of MoMA, the patron of Diego Rivera’s ill-fated mural, Man at the Crossroads, and the founder, in 1954, of the Museum of Indigenous Art, opposite MoMA on West 54th Street. Conceived after the Met rejected his offered gift of his collection, the museum opened to the public in 1957 (with ‘Indigenous’ switched for the sake of clarity to ‘Primitive’).

Eventually the Met changed its mind and built a new wing for Rockefeller’s collection, an expansion of the Met’s footprint into Central Park on the south side that matched the expansion on the north side for the Temple of Dendur.2 The Museum of Primitive Art closed in 1976; the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing opened in 1982. In the words of then-director Philippe de Montebello:

…we are closing the last gap in our encyclopedic coverage of the arts of man, placing works by artists from so-called ‘primitive’ regions on the level of oriental, classical, medieval and other more recognized arts of the civilized world.3

And here is Hilton Kramer, who was on the verge of leaving the New York Times to found the New Criterion. “The High Art of Primitivism” was his last piece as chief art critic of the Times:

What has hitherto existed as a highly specialized point of view and a somewhat esoteric emotion — namely, the disposition to regard primitive modes of culture and experience as equal in value to our own, and in some respects even superior and more vital — has ceased to be the possession of a minority of cultural visionaries and achieved a new status as part of the mainstream of cultural life.

It may seem eccentric for me to be quote Hilton Kramer from 1982, given that the Times ran a long, sumptuously illustrated review of the new Rockefeller Wing just a few months ago. The author of that piece, Holland Cotter, holds the same title Kramer had in 1982. But here’s the problem—I read Cotter’s piece twice and couldn’t find a single non-laudatory word about the new installation. Of course critics don’t write headlines, but in this case headline writer succeeded in channeling author: “The Most Wondrous Art in the World in 1,726 Objects.”

The word ‘wondrous’ appears again in the first sentence of Cotter’s second paragraph.

Every step of the way through the revamped galleries, closed since 2021, is wondrous.

Every single step? Really? Whatever this is, it’s not criticism.

So back to Kramer: he closed his piece with the suggestion that the objects displayed in the Rockefeller Wing had been sanitized by the modern museological instinct for design.

…design is, in a sense, our magic — the means we have devised for taming the ferocity of an art that would otherwise remain resistant to easy esthetic consumption. Design facilitates detachment. It soothes and rationalizes. It comforts us. It takes us by the hand… The primitivist ideologies of modern culture have taught us to envy this art, but what the museum brings us face to face with is a mirror in which we see the magic of our own technology and taste.

The magic of our own technology and taste. I don’t know if Kramer was right in 1982; I wasn’t there. But the words do seem to apply today. The picture below was taken from the entrance to the department, where it opens from Greek and Roman art into the largest of the African galleries.

Doesn’t it look great? I’m skeptical, though, about the next step in his argument, that design saps ferocity and replaces it with a mirror. (And I will drop ferocity as outmoded and instead use power, a term more in the spirit of how this art is discussed today.) Maybe some visitors pass through these galleries in a state of “easy esthetic consumption,” or to adapt Fry, look from the comfortable confines of their twenty-first century mental furniture, but won’t that be true of any gallery in any museum? What I can say is: I felt the power of some of these works. Probably others will feel it still more keenly.

But even if I’m right, even if, pace Kramer, modern design doesn’t necessarily sap an artwork’s power, I can think of something else that does—a tv screen. And I regret to report that these galleries are full of them. Here’s what you see if you walk about halfway into the space shown in the above photograph, and turn around, looking back towards the entrance. Six screens, not including reflections. There are eleven in all in the African galleries. Still worse, some of them have the volume up.

The Met’s modest holdings in Ethiopian painting are tucked away in a corner in a smaller room, next to a film by Theo Eshetu. According to the wall label, Eshetu is a British-Ethiopian artist “whose kaleidoscopic videos explore concepts related to perception, belonging, and notions of the sacred.”

Eshetu’s film is about the return to Ethiopia of the fourth century obelisk of Aksum, looted at the end of the Italian occupation of the country in 1937 and installed at Rome’s Porta Capena, in front of the Ministry for Italian Africa (later the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization), where it stood until 2003. Italy agreed to return the obelisk to Ethiopia in 1947, but safe repatriation was unfeasible until the runway of Aksum airport was lengthened in 2004. Its three segments were flown back to Aksum on April 19, 22 and 25, 2005, and it was re-erected in 2008.

I have nothing against the film, but it doesn’t belong here. Even without sound it would be too distracting. And its presence is probably a disservice to Eshetu as well as to the objects in the adjacent vitrine, for this is not a brisk clip of a few minutes that can play on repeat, but a twenty-one minute film. For God’s sake, if you want to play a twenty-one minute film in a museum, give it its own room and some benches.

Note the reflection, over the painting of the Virgin and Child, of still another screen from the opposite wall. This one is playing a video that is part of a series called Africa’s Cultural Landmarks, short documentaries by the Ethiopian-American director Sosena Solomon that were co-produced by the Met and the World Monuments Fund. The one here is a nine-minute film called Historic Towns of Kilwa Kisiwani and Songo Mnara, Tanzania. Kilwa Kisiwani was one of the main ports of the old Indian Ocean sea trade, predating the era of the Portuguese mare clausum. Gold and ivory from the interior of Africa were exchanged at Kilwa for Asian ceramics and textiles. Its ruins are a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

All very interesting and significant, and the video is beautifully shot, but what is it doing here? There is nothing from Kilwa on display in these galleries, in fact there is nothing Tanzanian—the textile hanging by the screen in the picture comes from Madagascar. Is the idea that the video fills a gap in the collection? If so, I hope this is not a sign of things to come. Philippe de Montebello’s notion of ‘encyclopedic coverage’ notwithstanding, I can think of quite a few periods and cultures not represented at the Met. Have you ever seen an Albanian Socialist Realist painting there? Or even a Soviet one? I haven’t. Does that mean the World Monuments Fund and the Met should collaborate to produce a short video on these genres? I wouldn’t complain if they did, but the place to show it would be the museum’s website, not on a screen in a gallery.

In the photo below there is another video by Solomon, this one about the casting of bronzes. And actually—it is relevant to the adjacent objects, which are from Benin. Someone was watching it. Fine, one or two such short films are not the end of the world. I’d prefer the number to be zero, but if I could count the screens in the department on one hand I wouldn’t be complaining so much.

The ivory sculpture in the vitrine at right is one of the most celebrated objects in the Met’s collection of African art. It’s the pendant mask of Queen Mother Idia, dating to the earliest period of contact between the Portuguese and the people of Benin. Idia wears something like a tiara of alternating figures representing mudfish and Portuguese sailors. The sailors are the ones with rounded caps; the mudfish, a species that hibernates during the dry season and comes out when it rains, have the triangular crests.

Idia was the mother of Esigie, the ruler, or oba, of Benin in the first half of the sixteenth century. (By the way, this is the Benin that’s part of present-day Nigeria, not the Benin, formerly Dahomey, that’s an independent state bordering Nigeria on the west.)

In calling Idia ‘Queen Mother’ I follow the British Museum, where there is a similar pendant mask. The Met used to call her Queen Mother, too. Wayback Machine captures from March 2016 to May 2025 refer to the Queen Mother Pendant Mask: Iyoba. An essay of 2003 that remains on the Met’s Timeline of Art History, is titled “Women Leaders in African History: Idia, First Queen Mother of Benin.” On Wikipedia she’s simply Queen Idia, and that’s also what she’s called by the North American alumni association of Idia College, an all-girls secondary school in Benin City, Nigeria. Another option is to call her Iyoba Idia, as is done by the Musée des Civilisations noires in Dakar, Senegal, and also by Aṣọ, an African-inspired lifestyle brand. Aṣọ offers a Unisex Iyoba Idia Max Hoodie for $95.

In short, you can find her all over the internet as (i) Queen Mother Idia, (ii) Queen Idia and (iii) Iyoba Idia, and each of these seems fine. While a museum is under no obligation to teach the public the word iyoba, it’s also true that there’s nothing wrong with doing so. Restitution disputes over Benin bronzes have made oba a household word, at least in some households, so why shouldn’t iyoba enter our vernacular, too?

But what does not seem fine, what on the contrary seems to surpass every example of curatorial pretentiousness I have ever encountered (no mean feat) is the Met’s decision to add diacritics to Idia’s name and title.

I remember the first time I looked at Twitter. It was around 8pm on October 29, 2012. The reason I can be so precise is that Hurricane Sandy had just reached New York. Merely refreshing the Times website didn’t seem adequate to that dangerous and thrilling moment. I wasn’t ‘online’ then but of course I had heard of Twitter, knew what a hashtag was. I pulled it up, typed #sandy into the search bar, and started reading tweets. In another fifteen or twenty minutes the Con Edison transformer on East 14th Street blew up and the power went out, but in the interval I saw enough to get a feel for what Twitter was, and one of the tweets I saw that night stayed with me. It was by RuPaul, the television host.

I mention all this in the context of Iyoba Idia because I wonder if something similar happened with her. After the renovation of the Rockefeller Wing, from now on she’ll be going, thank you very much, by Ìyọ́bà Idià? (Should Wole Soyinka have reinvented himself as Wọlé Sóyinká after he won the Nobel Prize?)

For whose benefit have the diacritics been added? Yoruba speakers will already know how to pronounce these common words; the rest of us are no better off than we were last May. In fact I think we’re worse off—for me at least the message is, “Don’t even try to say say this name.”

And then, what is the idea behind identifying the unknown ivory carver with the term Ìgbèsànmwà, or ivory-carver’s guild. Isn’t it another mystification? If the Department of European Paintings followed suit, and attributed anonymous Netherlandish panels to ‘member of the Sint-Lucasgilde’, what good would that do?

*

A problem with declaring every step one takes in a gallery to be “wondrous” is that one is put in an awkward position when confronted with a work that stands out as uniquely impressive—should one add that certain steps are “super-wondrous”?

Having not succumbed to praise-inflation, I am content to recommend spending some time with a thirteenth century sculpture from Middle Niger (present-day Mali), a large terracotta of a seated figure whose body, somehow, is both as stretched as can be and compressed into a near-cube. I tried the pose at home, and was made conscious of the smallness of my head.

A few more works that caught my attention: a group of headdresses from Mali, a monolith head from Nigeria’s Cross River Delta, and a brass rooster made in Benin.

*

I mentioned that the word oba has begun to be known in English. I learned it a few years ago when I read a long article about the restitution of Benin bronzes in the Atlantic Monthly. It was by David Frum, who is of course known not as an expert on West African art but rather (among other things) for having coined the phrase “axis of evil” when he was a speechwriter for George W. Bush. Frum grew up with the collection of African and Oceanic art formed by his parents, Murray and Barbara Frum (much of it now in the National Gallery of Ontario) and this background, plus his status in Washington, opened doors in Lagos and Benin City.

The most interesting thing I learned from Frum is no longer true. At the time, once a Western museum decided to return an object to Nigeria, that was only the beginning, because there were three Nigerian claimants to repatriated artworks: the government of Nigeria, the government of Edo province, and Oba Ewuare II.

The consensus in the West was to support the claims of the provincial government, seen as less corrupt than the national one and more au courant than the oba. The British Museum, the Mellon Foundation, Germany’s Foreign Office and other institutions provided funds for a museum in Benin City, capital of Edo province, that would be suitable for display of repatriated works. Construction of the Edo Museum of West African Art, based on a design Ghanaian-British architect David Adjaye, began in 2020.

Then, in 2023, Muhammed Buhari, Nigeria’s outgoing president, declared all repatriated bronzes to be the property of Ewuare II.

The founders of the Edo Museum of West African Art were thus faced with the prospect of not being able to display the objects their museum was being built for. This prompted a renaming, to the Museum of West African Art (MOWAA), and a shift in focus to contemporary art.

The building was completed earlier this year, and was set to open to the public last month (sans bronzes, of course). But a private ceremony on November 9 was disrupted by supporters of Ewuare II, and the museum’s opening was postponed. Both domestic and foreign reports of the incident suggest Ewuare II is trying to engineer a hostile takeover of the MOWAA. Whatever the future holds, for now the museum remains closed, and all repatriated bronzes remain off view in the hands of the oba.

Meanwhile, in the years since I read Frum’s article, a new organization has entered the debate over the fate of Benin objects still in the west—the Restitution Study Group, or RSG. The RSG advocates on behalf of Americans of African descent, arguing against restitution.

The rooster at the Met was made from brass rings, known as manillas, that were brought to Benin by European slave traders. Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, the RSG’s Founder & Executive Director, characterizes such objects as made of “blood money.”

From the RSG website:

No way should the heirs of royal African slave traders be given exclusive control over their ancestors’ slave-trade profits.

Not an unreasonable position to take, but does this mean the RSG thinks the rooster should stay at the Met? I’m not sure. They also link to the website of a projected Benin Kingdom Museum in Harlem. If that gets off the ground, add one to the present number of claimants.

*

At first I had three main objections to the Rockefeller Wing. I still feel strongly about two of these, the excessive number of tv screens in the African galleries and the Yoruba diacritics on wall labels, but the third complaint faded a little each time I visited.

I drew the plans below when I was trying to figure out how many screens there were (each one is marked with a star) but they are also useful for orientation. The overall shape of the Rockefeller Wing is a square divided into three sections by two diagonals. Between the diagonals are the Oceanic galleries, while above and below the diagonals are the African and Americas galleries.

Until I made these drawings, I didn’t always know what I was looking at. Wood sculpture predominates in both the African and Oceanic collections, and while the walls of the respective galleries are painted different colors—African a pale yellow and Oceanic an off-white—the distinction is subtle enough that the first-time visitor might not pick up on it. There are also labels on the floor as you pass from one section to another, but these, too, are easy to miss.

Would it be preferable to use colors that made it easier to distinguish between the two? A medium gray for the Oceanic rooms? I thought so at first, but now I’m not sure. I guess it depends on how much of a priority it is to make things clear to the first-time visitor.

Then there’s the question of the Oceanic art itself. In the African galleries there was never any doubt: the more I went, the more I wanted to go, the more I saw, the more I found to like. As my corresponding feelings in the Oceanic galleries were not so strong, I am still wondering what I think of them.

For Holland Cotter, the painted ceiling from a Kwoma ceremonial house in the Washkuk Hills of Papua New Guinea is “Sistine-worthy.” The assembly of nearly three hundred painted panels of sago palm projects “an impression of rhapsodic imagery,” mapping “the cosmos, mythical knowledge and clan histories.”

I understand the impulse. The reputation of Oceanic art in the West has followed a course similar to that of African art. About three-quarters of a century before Roger Fry admired African masks in London, John Ruskin contrasted the “noble grotesque” of Assyrian Ninevah and Gothic Verona with “the barbarous grotesque of mere savages… the complete savage of the Pacific islands.” Writing for the paper of record, Cotter may feel obliged to compensate for this tradition of disdain.

And even if he seems to me to overdo it with “Sistine-worthy,’ I admit that the scale is impressive, and the panels are pretty. I was more taken, though, with a slit gong made in the 1960s by the Vanuatu artist Tin Mweleun. Slit gong—it is a type of drum, in this case carved from the trunk of a breadfruit tree. I found a clip of Papuan musicians playing a similar instrument. The head is ornamental; the two adjacent heads once adorned similar slit gongs.

Vanuatu is a Pacific island nation with a population a bit over 300,000. From the perspective of New York, Vanuatu is remote; getting there from JFK takes thirty to fifty hours, depending on layovers. From the perspective of Port Vila, Vanuatu’s metropolis, it is Ambrym Island, where the slit gong was made, that is remote. Not that Ambrym is far—the island is a little over a hundred miles north of Port Vila, and there are flights, but Ambrym is only the sixth most populous of Vanuatu’s islands, with 7,272 residents as of a 2009 census. There are a few coconut plantations, and there are lava lakes at the island’s center. I suspect that most residents of Port Vila never visit.

*

The Asmat region of South Papua, where Michael Rockefeller died in November 1961, is as far from New York as Ambrym is. Flying to Timika in Central Papua takes about forty hours; from Timika there’s a weekly flight to Ewer Airport in Asmat, which, to quote the Dutch anthropologist Adriaan Gerbrands, “is essentially a gigantic mud plain covered by an eternally green tropical rain forest.”4 Early in 1961, having being appointed by his father to the board of the Museum of Primitive Art, Rockefeller joined a Harvard Peabody Museum expedition to another part of New Guinea as a photographer and sound technician. Late in June he and a college friend, Samuel Putnam, went to Asmat on their own. They first stayed five days with Gerbrands, the anthropologist quoted above, in the village of Amanamkai. They then visited other villages by canoe, making friends by giving away tobacco, and commissioning and buying sculptures.

Rockefeller and Putnam returned to the Harvard expedition after two weeks in Asmat, and in early September Rockefeller flew home to New York. He didn’t stay long. By mid-October he was back in Asmat. That autumn (if one can speak of autumn in New Guinea) he and René Wassing, another Dutch anthropologist, traveled extensively in the region, procuring many more objects, such as the body masks below. Then, on November 17, disaster struck. Rockefeller, Wassing, and two guides were traveling off the coast in a catamaran; overloaded, it capsized three miles from shore. The guides swam off to get help. Rockefeller and Wassing clung to the canoe. Rockefeller, the better swimmer of the two, and maybe also the less able to fill himself with patience, decided to try to make it to shore. Wassing was rescued by a Dutch patrol boat the next day; Rockefeller was never seen again.5

*

So far I’ve mentioned objects from New Guinea and Vanuatu;. This is only scratching the surface. There are others from New Britain, New Ireland, the Torres Strait, New Caledonia, the Marshall Islands, Australia, New Zealand, Fiji—it is easy to see why Philippe de Montebello perorated on the subject of encyclopedism.

At some point in the course of writing the above paragraphs, I took a nap, and dreamed of an undiscovered Australia, an island resembling the actual Australia, but smaller, and hidden away in the Pacific somewhere between Hawaii and the Solomon Islands. In my dream I didn’t go to this New Australia, but I knew it was there, with its own culture and traditions, and, of course, its own sculpture. In time it would be visited by a Cook, a Malinowski, a Michael Rockefeller. After waking with a start I breathed a sigh of relief. Small mercy, one fewer gallery at the Met to make sense of.

In a recent Weekly Readings post, wrote that Substack footnotes allow him to be “more candid, provocative, playful, experimental, or otherwise ‘unofficial’”—and I think it is fair to wonder if I have shared the dream, and my reaction to it on waking, in a similar spirit, as a way to say with plausible deniability what I really think of Oceanic art.

I can respond to this self-accusation by changing the subject to Indonesia. In terms of the number of objects displayed, Indonesia is well-represented in the Oceanic galleries. The Met’s categorizations make it hard to say exactly, but roughly a quarter of the objects on view are from what is now Indonesia. Michael Rockefeller died in Dutch New Guinea, but had his expedition taken place a year later he would have been in Indonesia instead. Beyond the Asmat collection, to name a few other objects, there’s a head ornament from Sulawesi, a sword from Borneo, a ceremonial string winder from Kisar, an ornamental comb from Sumba, a ceremonial skirt from Flores, a pustaha (book of ritual knowledge) from the Batak region of Sumatra.

The last of these is a fold-out book of ritual knowledge created by a datu, or magician-priest. The Met’s meager label provides little sense of the nature of the text or the meaning of the illustrations.

Wondering why the label was so laconic, and wanting to know more, I found the pustaha in a Met catalogue from 1994. A footnote there led me to Mircea Eliade’s Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, where I read the following:

…he [the datu] protects against illnesses and spells; the healing séance consists in searching for the patient’s soul. In addition, he can exorcise begu that have entered the sick; he can also poison, though he is supposed to be only a “white magician.” Unlike the sibaso, the datu is initiated by a master; in particular, the secrets of magic are revealed to him, written in “books” made of tree bark. The master has the Indian name guru; he attaches great importance to his magical staff, encrusted with ancestral figures and with a cavity containing magical substances. With the help of this staff the guru protects the village and can bring rain. But making such a magical staff is extremely complicated; the process even involves the sacrifice of a child, who is killed with melted lead to drive out its soul and turn it into a spirit at the magician’s disposition.6

Perhaps there is after all something to be said for a laconic label. In any case, what I want to observe about Indonesia is that there is a Java-shaped hole in the Rockefeller Wing. This is puzzling. Java, the world’s most populous island, is where the majority of Indonesians live, and there is more to its artistic heritage than the ninth century Hindu and Buddhist sculpture that’s on view upstairs in the Asia galleries.

I was going to suggest the department begin forming a collection of Javanese art, but then I realized it already has one—123 Javanese textiles from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some consist entirely of ornamental patterns; others portray scenes from Javanese puppet theater. Not one is on view.

I doubt anyone thinks these textiles are less artistically accomplished than the rest of the Oceanic collection, and therefore are not worth displaying. But perhaps they don’t fit with the department’s vision, because they seem more Asian than Oceanic? Sumatra is even closer to the Asian mainland than Java, but is there a rustic or tribal quality to the pustaha that allows it to fit in, where the Javanese textiles would not?

I’m only speculating, but I can’t think of a better explanation. Whatever the reason, it’s a pity. As the department has an acre of gallery space to work with, I don’t think it would be hard to show a few Javanese textiles at a time, on rotation.

From here it is a short step to an interpretation of my dream of an undiscovered Australia: I think it may all come down to real estate. The Met is not permitted to annex more land from Central Park, nor can it build upwards. With the size of the encyclopedia fixed, the museum has reached the end of history. Additional gallery space for the art of a given period or culture comes at the expense of space for the art of all other cultures. And then with the Oceanic galleries, there is the question of what they are for. Is the idea to display the art of a region, or is it to display art the art of tribes?

If I observe that the gallery for Asmat art is on the large side, and that perhaps some space for Javanese textiles could be carved out of it, I do so not in a spirit of Ruskinian revulsion, but rather out of a Fukuyaman desire to manage competing claims.

*

As for the third section, the galleries for art of the Ancient Americas, if I have a qualm it is only that they are a little isolated, out of the way of the two already-beaten paths through the Rockefeller Wing—one African-Oceanic and the other all-Oceanic. Or it need not be a qualm: if you want to be alone at the Met, if you want to escape for a moment from drab wintertime, seek out the nine panels of macaw feathers on cotton backing, made by the Wari of coastal Peru between 600 and 900.

Little is known of the Wari, or of the trade networks that enabled the transport of macaw feathers (or live macaws?) hundreds of miles from the jungles on the other side of the Andes to the sacred burial site of Corral Redondo, where ninety-six such panels were discovered rolled in ceramic jars in 1943. Like the textiles in adjacent vitrines, they have lasted to the present day because coastal Peru is as dry as Egypt.

I won’t say much about the rest of the collection because I have also recently been to Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., another museum with rich holdings in pre-Columbian American art, and I plan to write about that soon. So just two more favorites. First, a crenellated bowl with a scene of a metalworking studio. It was made by the Nasca, who were among the predecessors of the Wari. This is not the first Permanent Collections post to include Nasca ceramics—as I said when writing about several in the Brooklyn Museum, Nasca art is irresistible.

And finally, a four-panel basalt relief from Cholula, today a suburb of the Mexican city of Puebla. It is post-Columbian, but sufficiently un-Spanish that it is not out of place in the Rockefeller Wing. In the upper left quadrant is the Great Pyramid of Cholula, an ancient pile that in volume, if not height, is the world’s largest pyramid; the relief shows a cross the Spaniards had placed at its summit. At upper right is a bell, representing either the bell of a convent built nearby in 1528, or a bell added to the top of the pyramid in 1535. On the lower left is another representation of a pyramid, this time with a trumpet, and at lower right are shown the reeds that grew at the pyramid’s base. The meaning of the trumpet is disputed, but together the four glyphs represent Cholula, known in the nahuatl language as Cholullan Tollan, the words inscribed into the two lower quadrants. Similar imagery—pyramid, reeds, trumpet—appears in an illustration to the 1581 text, Relación geográfica de Cholula.

The Met’s excellent catalogue entry suggests the relief may have been carved in the 1560s, when enthusiasm for European-style heraldry spread among indigenous elites.

Then the Frick closed for a long renovation, and its collection was moved to the old Whitney building on Madison Avenue. There, for three years, paintings one was accustomed to seeing beside Chinese vases and French commodes were hung on bare, gray walls. Instead of velvet armchairs forbidden to visitors, there were benches, just as there are at the Met or any other art museum. And unlike the usual Frick installation, based on harmony and symmetry (for example, El Greco’s St. Jerome flanked by Holbein’s portraits of Sir Thomas More and Thomas Cromwell), the Madison Avenue Frick was conventionally museological in its organization. There was one floor for Flemish and German works, another for Italian and Spanish ones and a third for French and English. Paintings were hung more or less in chronological order, and there were separate rooms for bronzes and for porcelain.1

Now, in 2025, the Frick in one sense is back to normal. Jerome again has his Holbeins, and again he holds court from his perch above the fireplace in what was once Henry Clay Frick’s Living Hall. But also, there have been changes. The old Frick living quarters on the second floor have been opened to the public. The formerly forbidden staircase now takes the visitor up to nine new rooms and several corridor galleries, which means that many more works can be displayed. To put it quantitatively, the Frick owns 199 paintings, of which 162 are at present on view. That’s about 60% more than before the renovation.

I’m thrilled—but also I’m sad. Parts of the Madison Avenue display were so good that I cannot help half-taking the Indiana Jones perspective now that everything has been returned to the coal and coke tycoon’s onetime residence. I am aware that the Frick’s Fragonard Room was custom made for the paintings in the Progress of Love series, that it’s a historically appropriate display, a neo-Rococo interior created in Paris a little over a century ago. I never had anything against it until I saw the Progress of Love on Madison Avenue, but now the paintings blend in too much. This effect can be mitigated if you stay in the room for a while, adjust to the surroundings enough to blur them out—but if one is going to stay in a room for a while, wouldn’t it be nice to sit? On Madison Avenue the Fragonards had a bench; at the Frick there is room for one, but instead of a bench there is a table with three vases.

In a review that ran in the New Yorker when the Frick Collection opened to the public in December 1935, Lewis Mumford suggested “putting the bric-a-brac down in the cellar”—but in the Fragonard Room the “bric-a-brac” is a garniture of Sèvres porcelain, with a rare example of the famous ship-shaped pot-pourri vases as the centerpiece. These are triumphs of eighteenth-century ingenuity, works of such great technical sophistication that only about a dozen were successfully made, ten of which survive.2 So: no candidate for the cellar. Probably there is no solution, apart from wistfully remembering how clearly one could see these paintings when they were hanging on a neutral wall.

The problem, if it can be called a problem, is even more pronounced in the Boucher Room—now that the upstairs is open, eight Bouchers with allegories of the arts and sciences have been brought up to where Frick originally installed them, in Mrs. Frick’s boudoir. Here they are so fully embedded in the decorative scheme that one barely notices them. Or at least I barely noticed them. Maybe, though, it was because I was so taken with the floor, one of the creakiest parquets I have ever stepped on. Paintings, porcelain and furniture notwithstanding, it is a room in which I felt the urge to listen, rather than to look.

To return to Mumford, in fact he liked the Fragonard display, because he saw the room itself as a frame. It was elsewhere that he felt that “the paintings are lost in the background.” I suspect he was thinking most of all of the Living Hall—that is, of the El Greco and the two Holbeins, and of the three paintings on the opposite wall, where there is another symmetrical arrangement, Giovanni Bellini’s Saint Francis in Ecstasy hanging between two portraits by Titian, one of an unknown man in a red hat and the other of the writer Pietro Aretino.

In an appealing coffee table book of 2006, Only in America: One Hundred Paintings in American Museums Unmatched in European Collections, Pierre Rosenberg, former director of the Louvre, introduces Saint Francis in Ecstasy with the following words.

Which is the most beautiful painting in America, the one that is absolutely unmatched in Europe? To that question, art historians, whether they be American or European, almost unanimously reply either La Grande Jatte or the Frick Collection Bellini (in 1912 Berenson failed to persuade Mrs. Gardner to buy it).

I would have appreciated an appendix with more results from Rosenberg’s survey, but anyway, no surprise that of all the paintings in the Frick Collection it is this one that was given its own little gallery during the Madison Avenue era. I like my memories of seeing the painting there, in its splendid isolation, but it is so captivating, its landscape so easy to get caught up in, that I don’t think it gained much during those years, or has lost much on its return to the house museum.

*

If you’ve been to the Frick you may be surprised to see that I’ve included pictures in this post. Aside from in the ‘Garden Court,’ the museum forbids photography. It also, however, relies on QR codes rather than wall labels to inform visitors about its collection, and this means there is an unstated policy of encouraging us to have our phones out. Not that you should do it, not that I should have done it, but it is easy to take gallery pictures, especially on days when the museum is crowded. You only need to be discreet, to appear to be reading or texting.

Paintings do have frame labels, but they are old-fashioned, which is to say, not very informative. The one for the Bellini reads: “Giovanni Bellini St. Francis.”3 It’s a pity, as it would only take another line to make this less laconic—“Italian, oil on panel, ca. 1475–80” would suffice. Ten words in all rather than four.

Apart from these meager texts, labels are few and far between—there are some in the Enamels Room, but none in the Ceramics Room or the Medals Room. A few of the bronzes and porcelain objects have them, including the above-mentioned Sèvres pot-pourri vase, as well as a tureen in the Dining Room. The tureen’s label reads:

Du Paquier Porcelain Manufactory
Tureen from the Service for Czarina Anna Ivanovna

While this is probably information enough for those aware that Du Paquier was in Vienna, and that Anna Ivanovna was only Empress of Russia for a decade, from 1730 to 1740, even at the Frick only a small proportion of visitors is likely to have such minutiae at hand.4 And wouldn’t anyone who took an interest in Anna Ivanovna’s tureen want to know when and where it was made? Of course, one can say that the QR codes allow the museum to keep its particular institutional identity while offering visitors more information than could ever fit on a wall label. But I protest—QR codes are annoying. If using them is the only way to keep the old identity, maybe a modest shift in the direction of more wall text would not be out of place.

To return to the question of illicit photography—getting a shot of a painting is trickier than getting one of a gallery, but not impossible. It requires patience, speed and audacity (by audacity I mean a willingness to be scolded, as I was, twice).

Patience: I waited and waited in the Breakfast Room, where there are nine paintings by artists of the Barbizon School, none of which (at least as far as I can remember) was on view before the renovation. In the case of three Corots I can understand why—they are less impressive than the big one downstairs. But to have hidden, for all these years, Charles-François Daubigny’s view of the French port of Dieppe! Well, I’m glad to know it now; it is my favorite of the newly-displayed paintings.

I waited, as I say, for the security guard to turn her head. Meanwhile I looked at the painting, especially the watery middle, with its heavy streaks of white and thinner patches of green reflection, but also beyond to the thin band of the city, the masts in the harbor at left, the great church in the center, and, to the right, a clump of trees amid brownish-orange rooftops. Could Daubigny’s murky cityscape be compared to Vermeer’s View of Delft, the much-celebrated painting whose “little patch of yellow wall” the ailing novelist Bergotte admires several thousand pages into Remembrance of Things Past, moments before he steps back from the picture to die on a circular settee? Yes—no—maybe.5

I never had a chance that day, the guard was too watchful. My picture of Dieppe is from a later visit. Meanwhile, I noticed the Frick’s website allows one to sort by accession number, and found that the paintings in the Breakfast Room are among the earliest to have entered the collection. The first one of all was another (less interesting) Daubigny, of women washing clothes at the side of a pond. Frick bought it in 1896, when he was in his late forties and still a Pittsburgh man. He may over time have come to see it as a mature acquisition, one that did not seem out of place in the collection he was to form. Previous purchases, like Daniel Ridgway Knight’s Coming from the Garden, either ended up back on the market, or else (I think) remained in Pittsburgh when he moved to New York in 1905.6

Frick bought Coming from the Garden in 1894; it was his first painting from Knoedler, the New York dealer he would develop a close relationship with. Later in the decade there was a steady flow of paintings back and forth. In 1899, with his eye on still another Daubigny, The Ferry Boat, Frick returned Coming from the Garden and five other works to Knoedler for credit. But The Ferry Boat didn’t last either. Knoedler took it back on February 28, 1903, the same day that Frick bought three paintings that remain in the collection, a Romney, a Gainsborough and a Corot that is one of the ones in the Breakfast Room.7

As Frick’s taste grew more assured he returned fewer paintings, but he didn’t drop the habit completely. As late as 1913 he sent back to Knoedler a Velázquez portrait of María Teresa, Infanta of Spain, for credit towards the purchase of the great Van Dyck, James Stanley, Lord Strange, later Seventh Earl of Derby, with his Wife, Charlotte, and their Daughter. Knoedler promptly sold the returned portrait to Philip Lehman, the investment banker whose son Robert, on his death in 1969, left to the Met one of the largest gifts it has ever received (and likely the last one that will get its own wing and curatorial department). The portrait of María Teresa entered the Met as a Velázquez but has since been downgraded to workshop of. Maybe one could say he just got lucky, but it’s hard not to be impressed by Frick’s instinct here. And while “too many Van Dyck portraits” might be a plausible criticism of the Frick Collection and Gilded Age taste more generally (I discussed this penchant for Van Dyck last year in the first of my two posts on the Baltimore Museum of Art), to regret the presence of the Stanleys in the East Gallery would be eccentric indeed.8

*

It sometimes happens, in the course of writing this newsletter, that I try and fail to verify a cherished anecdote, and face the sad prospect of discarding it. Long ago I read, or misread, the following about the smallest of the three El Grecos at the Frick, a painting of Christ driving the merchants and moneychangers out of the temple in Jerusalem.

Frick would mediate on the painting, so the anecdote went, comparing himself, and his struggles with labor unions, to the outraged Christ in the temple. I loved the analogy for the implicit third comparison. It’s not just A is to B as C is to D, Frick is to labor as Christ is to merchants and money changers. It’s also E to F—a Pittsburgh steel mill is being compared to the Temple in Jerusalem. The righteous industrialist. Would it be possible to imagine a more perfect incarnation of the type?

Maybe it happened. Here’s what I’ve been able find out. Frick bought the painting from Knoedler in 1909—or to be more precise, he bought it from the Spanish artist and critic Aureliano de Beruete, with Knoedler acting as middleman. Once the Fifth Avenue mansion was completed in 1912, he hung it over the chimney in his sitting room (this is the upstairs room that is now known as the Walnut Room).9

My anecdote probably dates to October 19, 1998, when I must have read, in the Times, a profile of Martha Frick Symington Sanger, Frick’s great-granddaughter, by Judith Dobrzynski.10 Sanger, the author of Henry Clay Frick: An Intimate Portrait, just published when the piece ran, proposed that Frick’s collecting was based on grief and association. The grief was for his daughter Martha, who had died shortly before her sixth birthday in 1891. As for the association, here’s Dobrzynski:

Rembrandt's “Polish Rider,” for example, recalls Frick's journeys on his gray horse, Billy, through Pennsylvania's coal bluffs early in his career, she [Sanger] said, while El Greco's “Purification of the Temple,” in which Jesus drives out the money-changers, commemorates Frick's violent victory over the unions at the Homestead steel mill.

Good enough for the 1998 me; in 2025 I’m a bit more skeptical. Journalists, I now know, cut corners. Nothing would ever come out in a timely fashion if they didn’t. And are great-granddaughters to be trusted? Not that the anecdote isn’t true, it may well be, but a look at Sanger’s book makes it clear that she devised it.

Frick undoubtedly saw parallels between himself and the rageful Christ. Just as Christ intended his Father’s temple to become a house of devotion, Frick contemplated Homestead as a smooth-running plant entirely subservient to him. Like both the artist El Greco and Christ, Frick wanted a reformation in his church. Much as Christ’s first act on entering his Father’s temple was to cleanse it of the moneychangers (who were in consort with the Romans), Frick’s first act as chairman of the newly unified Carnegie Steel Company was the ouster of the craft unions (who were in consort with the Amalgamated association) from his own temple, Homestead.11

Emphasis added. I’m not sure where this leaves me. Is Sanger’s undoubtedly fatal? Shall I purify the temple in which I preserve my amusing stories, by casting out one that requires this sort of adverbial qualification? Maybe not, maybe the whole edifice of our civilization, from Homer on, rests on the inferences of great-granddaughters.

Speed: In this case I was too quick. The picture did not come out.

*

As for the connection of Frick’s gray horse, Billy, to Rembrandt’s Polish Rider, the stakes seem low; I’m not going to bother looking into that one. What I am curious about is the rider’s Polishness—how Polish is he? I was aware the work had occasioned art historical skirmishes, but I’d never made the effort to follow them. All I knew about the painting was that it was mentioned in a famous poem. (Incidentally, how they loved their Coca-Cola, the mid-century New Yorkers. A different world.)12

I now understand that ‘skirmishes’ understates the scope and intensity of the debates over the painting.13 The first shot came from the renowned scholar of Netherlandish art, Julius Held, who in 1944 published an article arguing that the painting’s title (he called it the “Polish” Rider) was less indicative of subject matter than provenance. The recorded history of the painting begins with its purchase in Amsterdam in 1790 or 1791 by Grand Hetman of Lithuania Michał Kazimierz Ogiński, who in August 1791 gave it to Stanisław August Poniatowski, the last king of Poland, in exchange for 420 guldens’ worth of orange trees. It is recorded in a royal inventory of 1793 (with the French name, Cosaque à Cheval). The painting remained in Poland, or rather, in what in 1795 ceased to be Poland, until Frick bought it in 1910.

The list of subsequent owners is so redolent of old Polish history that I insist on repeating it in full (the lives are interesting too; click the Wikipedia links). With the king’s death in 1798 the Polish Rider was inherited by his nephew, Prince Józef Poniatowski. Prince Józef died in 1813; the painting went to his sister, Countess Teresa Tyszkiewicz, who promptly sold it to Franciszek-Ksawery Drucki-Lubecki, who in turn sold it to the Bishop of Vilnius, Hieronim Stroynowski. On Stroynowski’s death in 1815 it passed by descent to his brother Walerian, and then to Walerian’s daughter Waleria, a patron of the arts and miniaturist who had married Jan Feliks Tarnowski of Dzików, halfway between Kraków and Lublin. The painting was held in the Tarnowski castle at Dzików until Jan Zdzisław Tarnowski, great-grandson of Waleria and Jan Feliks, sold it to Frick. This time it was not Knoedler but Roger Fry who arranged the sale.

Held argued that there was nothing especially Polish about the man’s costume, the breed of his horse, or the horse’s equipment. Had the painting been purchased by a Hunagrian rather than a Pole it would have come to be known as The Hungarian Rider. He went on to propose that the painting is not a portrait at all, but rather a generalized image of a knight prepared to defend Christendom from Turks and Tatars. Other scholars disagreed, claiming to recognize typically Polish elements such as a żupan (a long, dress-like garment), a kuchma (a wool hat then common in Poland and Lithuania), a type of bow made only by the Armenian artisans of Lwów (now Lviv), and Polish or Cossack stirrups.

Proposals for the identity of the horseman were put forward from among Poles known to have visited Amsterdam in the mid-seventeenth century—one possibility was a man who belonged to the same family, Ogiński, as the hetman who sold the painting to the king in 1791. Maybe the hetman had not bought it in Amsterdam, after all, maybe it had been in the hands of the Ogiński family from the beginning. Still other researchers pointed out as a likely source an etching of a Polish horseman the Italian printmaker Stefano Della Bella made in 1651. And in 2007 a Ukrainian Canadian scholar, Andrew Gregorovich, suggested that the 1795 inventory had been correct—that is, the rider is not a Pole but a Cossack.

As the contextual art historians were having it out in the pages of the scholarly journals, a time bomb was ticking. It went off in 1984 when Josua Bruyn, professor at the University of Amsterdam and head of the Rembrandt Research Project, attributed the Polish Rider to Rembrandt’s pupil Willem Drost. This was one of hundreds of paintings demoted by the Rembrandt Research Project during the eighties and early nineties (the Wallace Collection in London saw its Rembrandt holdings reduced from twelve to one).

The Frick refused to acknowledge the reattribution. Among the many defenders of the painting was Julius Held, by then in his eighties, who spoke of an “Amsterdam mafia.” And a New York artist, Russell Connor, “discovered” another painting, found “in a basement in Pinsk… an eye-witness portrait by Rembrandt's greatest student, Carel Fabritius, showing his teacher pausing on his work on the Polish Rider.” Connor’s conceit, which he called Hands off the Polish Rider, was written up in the New Yorker of February 22, 1993. Connor passed away in 2019; today his painting is held by the Anita Shapolsky Art Foundation in Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania. I am informed by the representative of Connor’s estate that the painting is not now on display, but may be seen by appointment.

In part due to the outcry in New York, Bruyn retired from the Rembrandt Research Project. His replacement, Ernst van de Wetering, took a more deferential approach to longstanding attributions (the Wallace collection is back up to five Rembrandts). Give the final word to Robert Hughes, writing in the New York Review of Books of April 6, 2006.

There can be few paintings of comparable quality of which less is known for sure than The Polish Rider. But the doubts cast on it by the RRP are also guesswork. The efforts to reattribute it to one of Rembrandt’s pupils, Willem Drost, about whose life and work very little is known, are quite inconclusive. They are like attempts to “prove” that Hamlet was really written by someone other than William Shakespeare—but someone who was still as good a writer as Shakespeare, for whose existence there is no actual evidence.

*

Audacity: I said I was scolded twice for taking pictures. One of the two times was when I raised my phone to get the detail of Bellini’s landscape above. The other was upstairs in the Sitting Room (originally a guest bedroomto), where there is a pair of related Pietàs from the mid-fifteenth century. It’s a tiny gallery, hard for a security guard to miss much in it, but on one of my visits it was so crowded that I was able to take a picture of the Witz painting, the second one below. On my last visit the room was not crowded at all, I was not going to get away with anything—but how was I going to write this post without images of both of them? If anyone from the museum happens to be reading, with the publication of this post my brief career as a Frick photo bandit is over. I will never do it again.

But the Pietàs. The first one, said to have come from a convent in Catalonia and attributed to an unknown artist of the Avignon school, was bought by Frick in Paris in 1907 on the advice of Roger Fry. When a second painting, presumed to be the original of the first and attributed to the Swiss artist Konrad Witz, appeared on the market in 1927, eight years after Frick’s death. His daughter Helen Clay Frick jumped at the chance to make a pair.14

One of the great pleasures of the Frick is to compare these two works, to notice the donor in the copy and the complexity of the folds in the robes in the original, and to try to distinguish differences in quality from differences in condition.

One wonders why they were only hung together for the first time in 1958. The occasion was written up in the Times by art critic Aline B. Saarinen (same name as the Finnish architect because he was her second husband):

In Miss Frick’s original version the emotionalism of the scene is played up. All the details—the expressions on the faces, the landscape, the sparkling background of architecture and mountains, the rich, angular drapery and the attenuated body of Christ—are sharp, crisp and hard.

In the “Pietá, with Donor,” everything is softened. Many of the details that add to the intensity of the expression in the Conrad Witz’ painting, such as the wounds on the bodies of the thieves and the teeth in the mouth of the dead Christ, are omitted in the copy.

*

I complained at the beginning of this post about the lack of benches at the Frick, especially in the Fragonard Room, where they would be so useful. Let me close by observing that there are two excellent places to sit and look.

One of these is in the East Gallery, that is, the room with the family portrait by Van Dyck—see the photo above. The other is upstairs, at the end of the route through the museum, just before you exit past the gift shop. It faces La Promenade, the large Renoir that Frick bought from Knoedler in March 1914. This was an unusual purchase, as Frick was not passionate about Impressionism. Apart from the Renoir, there’s a Degas painting of a dancing lesson and one post-Impressionist work, Motherhood by Eugène Carrère. (The Frick’s sole Monet, Vétheuil in Winter, is a purchase of 1942.)

In the case of the Renoir, the Degas and the Carrère, I am inclined to believe Martha Frick Symington Sanger’s theory that much of Frick’s collecting was driven by grief for his daughter Martha. I have an uneasy feeling that if I were to dwell at length on what the Renoir meant to Frick—this cheerful autumn scene of a mother or governess, two girls and a doll—the place would start to seem like a temple of mourning, and I might want to cry out, “Enough, for God’s sake, let’s all move on, these paintings should be at the Met, not in this gloomy house museum.”

Fortunately, there are other things to think about when looking at the painting—the rosy cheeks, the dark eyes, the repetitions in diminishing scale. The cool colors of the background. The splendid Parisian costumes. And then, if you’ve read the book that Renoir the filmmaker wrote about his father the painter, you can try to remember Renoirisms. Has he been taken up by the ‘tradwife’ movement? He should be.

The nineteenth century believed in an elite and based its belief on the learning of such an elite. Renoir believed in the constantly renewed discovery of the world through direct contact with its physical elements, and the more accessible these elements are to us, the more important the discovery.

“Newton’s discovery of the law of falling bodies is all very fine, but that doesn’t mean that a mother’s discovery of how to hold her baby isn’t important too.”

When reminded that Newton was endowed with genius, he retorted that a farmer’s wife who knew how to make good cheese had just as much.

12

It turns out that Frank O’Hara was not the first poet to take an interest in the Polish Rider, or even the second. Shortly after Frick bought the painting, Francis Warre-Cornish, vice-provost of Eton College, wrote “Mr. Frick’s Rembrandt.” It was published in The Lotus Magazine in 1910 and reprinted in an early version of the handbook to the Frick Collection. It’s rhymed light verse, not so accomplished (“Ah, chivalrous Poland…”) but I’ll take it over O’Hara’s poem, which, though I acknowledge it is canonical, etc., is a little too cute or clever for me. Ten years after the publication of Warre-Cornish’s verses, another Polish Rider poem, anonymous this time, ran in Art in America. This second one, however, is too clumsy even for me to affect to like.

And here he was in Salon H of the Boston Marriott Copley Place, suggesting that the reason Antonello had not stayed in Venice was a policy of Venezia per i Veneziani, enforced by a Bellini Vivarini Cosa Nostra.1 In other words, maybe Venice wasn’t big enough, in 1475, for both Giovanni Bellini and a non-Venetian who painted just as well as he did. It was fine for a talented foreigner to work there for a little while, like an Erasmus student on a semester abroad, but you weren’t meant to stay. Antonello returned to Sicily in 1476.

*

Two months after the conference I was in Palermo looking at the Virgin Annunciate, an Annunciation by Antonello in which the presence of the Angel Gabriel is implicit. The work, which is dated (on stylistic grounds) to Antonello’s Venetian period or shortly after it, had been, so to speak, Exhibit A in Weller’s talk, an example of Antonello’s “revolutionary veracity and texture.” I wondered, could the naturalism of this young woman in blue have been so startling and so provocative that Venice’s painting establishment contrived to have the artist who painted her thrown out of the city?

There are really two questions here. First, was it plausibly the case in Venice in 1475 that a foreign painter could be deported on such grounds, for painting too well? And second, if so, would the Virgin Annunciate have attracted this kind of attention? I suspect the first question is unanswerable. If it were Florence, we’d probably know; Florentines kept good records. But this is Venice, a city where the career of one of the most famous artists, Giorgione, is so sparsely documented that unless you want to trust Vasari only four attributions are secure.2

The second question hardly needs to be asked. The laminated sheet provided by the Galleria Regionale della Sicilia puts it cogently, then adds a few celebrity quotes.

The painting reveals the full command of the values of the Italian Renaissance, such as perspective, the quest after balance and symmetry, the [y]earning to draw from the changing forms of Nature the everlasting rules of geometry, by placing man at the very center of the Universe. The painting testifies to Antonello’s deep knowledge of the techniques of Flemish painting always careful to reproduce reality with analytical attention, to reproduce the physical essence of materials: the white lectern, the moving pages of the book, the woman’s carefully penciled eyelashes and parted eyebrows…

From Roberto Longhi:

The most beautiful hand I have ever seen in art

And Leonardo Sciascia:

The spectator should notice the deep fold at the center of the forehead. While it was just a pictorial detail for the painter, to us it tells of an article of clothing that has been carefully kept in the chest together with other treasured things. This mantle is taken out on special occasions, on solemn festivities. Notice the marvelous contrast between the right hand suspended in a solemn gesture, and the other hand that is making a gesture quite usual to a peasant woman: she is folding the edges of the mantle. Look at the mysterious smile, the gaze full of the bodily awareness of maternity, of certainty […]

Sciascia probably gets carried away at the end—would anyone who didn’t know the subject of the painting be likely to say the woman’s gaze is full of the bodily awareness of maternity? I doubt it, but the other points are well-observed, and make me wonder what else he wrote about art.

So I commend the museum staff for this first-rate gallery sheet, worthy of the painting it describes, but also, it could use an update, as noted above there is one more highly-quotable celebrity who has spoken in praise of the work.

*

Of all the objects in the Palazzo Abatellis, the fifteenth century Palermo palace (and later convent) that houses the museum, Antonello’s Virgin might be the only one you know from reproductions. Unless, that is, you’re also familiar with the Triumph of Death, a fresco painted in the 1440s by an unknown artist, perhaps one who came to Sicily from Catalonia. An enormous work, the size of a small Manhattan apartment at twenty by twenty-one feet, it was made to decorate a courtyard wall of Palermo’s Palazzo Sclafani, a thirteenth century palace that in the 1430s was converted into the city’s principal hospital. The Palazzo Sclafani was bombed during World War II, but the fresco more or less survived; after the war it was brought to the museum, which had just opened.

The Triumph of Death must have made for an exciting hospital decoration, dominated as it is by the rampaging figure of Death, portrayed as a skeletal archer astride a pale horse that is at once emaciated, hollow-eyed and vigorous. Death’s volley of arrows has left high-ranking victims, most of them ecclesiastics, strewn about in the foreground. Several have been shot in the neck, a part of the body where plague sores tended to appear early. Another group, at left, all in relatively humble dress, seems to have been spared; one man in this group holds a brush, a likely self-portrait of the artist. He and another figure who could be his assistant look outward, engaging the viewer. A man just below this pair who seems not to have hands may be a leper. All the way to the right, two groups of gentlefolk are occupied with music, falconry and conversation. Some of them seem aware of the terrifying figure galloping their way, or have already been struck by one of his arrows; others remain absorbed in their pleasures.

Devoted admirers of Wim Wenders will have recognized the painting, as it plays a role in his 2008 film, Palermo Shooting.3 The main character, Finn, a German photographer trying to leave his troubled past behind, visits the museum and catches the attention of Flavia, an attractive conservator, not a Sicilian, it turns out, but a continentale who has come to Palermo to work on the Triumph of Death. She climbs down from her scaffolding to flirt. [I am annoyed that nothing like this happened to me at the Palazzo Abatellis, or anywhere else when I was in Italy in May, but never mind.] Here’s their conversation about the painting (and please humor me for including it, I’m going somewhere with this):

Flavia: This was painted in the early fifteenth century, by a local painter from Palermo, who remained anonymous except that he painted himself in there.

Finn: With a brush in his hand. Smart Guy. Looking straight into the camera

Flavia: Let’s say that he’s looking at us.

Finn: Who are the men down there, who already caught the arrow and died?

Flavia: There is Pope Nicholas, the actual pope at the time, together with the Antipope and the Archbishop of Palermo. And over there, Afonso V, King of Naples. At the time, Palermo belonged to his kingdom.

Finn: So the dead ones are all people of power.

Flavia: Yes. The VIPs of the time.

Finn: What about them, the common folk? The poor people?

Flavia: The official interpretation is that they are begging for death not to spare them and leave them in their misery.

Finn: The way death is painted, he doesn’t exactly look like a nice guy, does he?

Flavia: A guy? In my language ‘la morte’ is a woman.

Finn: He or she seems to be riding straight out of the apocalypse.

Flavia: People were afraid of death. And they still are.

Finn: And what about you?

Flavia: The face of death is the most important part to be restored. I’ve been struggling what to do with that face for a very long time.

Some of what Flavia says seems wrong. The consensus is that the painter was more likely foreign than local, and I haven’t found any confirmation of those identifications—what artist would dare paint his own king with an arrow through his neck? More likely they are types rather than individual portraits—pope, antipope, archbishop, king. But the interpretation of the group on the left, Flavia’s claim that these figures represent the forlorn of the earth, and that they implore death not to pass them by, is, if not ‘official,’ at least longstanding and conventional.

From La pittura del Rinascimento in Palermo, an 1899 study by the Jesuit art historian Gioacchino di Marzo:

…behind the running horse is a group of three old women and three old men, wretched and crippled, and among them a young man with mutilated hands, all supplicating Death, invoking her to put an end to their woes…4

And from Libero di Libero’s Il Trionfo della Morte, Galleria Nazionale della Sicilia, the first monograph on the painting, published in 1958:

…the supplicant beggars, perhaps only spared for the pleasure of making them suffer.5

Writing in the journal Marsyas in the early 1970s, Marian Burleigh, an Institute of Fine Arts graduate student who would later become a specialist in early Soviet art, brought the idea into English:

…a group of poor and crippled creatures look pleadingly towards him. With clasped hands they beg for his merciful arrows.

More recently, Michele Cometa, Professor of Comparative Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Palermo, wrote a book-length interpretation of the painting. He’s a bit more fanciful than the others:

The beggars, the crippled, the derelict are huddled in prayer at the edge of the fresco. Death has just passed them by with a leap. They invoke, they yearn for deliverance. Libera nos a malo. Wounds, bandages, suppurations and crutches torment them. They want to be consoled by a quick and dignified death. Their silent supplications—the scrolls and levitating inscriptions of Pisa and Florence are absent here—resound through the fresco, opposing the music coming from the garden and the fountain. Together with the harp accompanied by the gush of water, they are the soundtrack of Death.

To invoke the end of history. Ultimately, the fresco as a whole is this invocation. It is an apocalyptic hope: to leave the world. This is why the Palermo fresco is a triumph, not a danse macabre or an ars moriendi. Its prayer is philosophical. It amounts to thinking of Death as an alternative to History.6

I tend to enjoy this sort of belletristic art history writing. Maybe it veers in the course of a line or two from insightful to nonsensical to stating the obvious in a pretentious way—provided that it’s not mistaken for scholarship, but taken as a kind of dreamy speculation, why not?

Cometa’s mention of the scrolls and inscriptions of Pisa and Florence is a reference to two earlier paintings of the Triumph of Death, both from the fourteenth century, the plague century. In the one in Pisa, painted in the 1330s by Buonamico Buffalmaco, a group of lepers has unfurled a banner. It reads:

As prosperity has left us, oh Death, medicine of all evil, come and give us the last supper.7

Around the same Andrea di Cione, who is also known as Andrea Orcagna, painted a similar scene at the church of Santa Croce in Florence. Most of this work is lost, but a fragment of the section with pleading beggars survives.

There’s another example from the same period in South Tyrol, in the Dominican church in Bolzano, in which two beggars seem to regret having been spared, though in this case there is no accompanying text.

The meaning of the Pisa and Florence frescoes is indisputable, and that of the Bolzano one at least probable. No doubt it’s reasonable to suppose that there’s something similar going on in Palermo. But is it really so? I have a few doubts.

First, why would the painter insert himself and his assistant into such company? Granted, the two are looking outward at the viewer rather than towards Death, so they are not quite of the group, even if they are in it. But it’s hard to imagine an artist’s self-portrait included in the group of lepers in the Pisa fresco, or the more physically decrepit beggars of the one in Florence.

This raises another question. Are the figures in the Triumph of Death as wretched as all that? The supposed leper, far from expressing impatience to be relieved of the burden of life, seems contemplative. The women on either side of him could easily be seen as simply pious. Unless, that is, you follow the interpretation set out in Electrum Magazine in 2012 by Stanford classicist Patrick Hunt, who proposed that the group as a whole is comprised of an assortment of grateful plague survivors, and that the two women are wearing Jewish prayer shawls. If this is true, Hunt suggests, the man between them could be a Jewish doctor rather than a leper, his hands covered out of deference to the plague prescriptions set out in Leviticus 13.

There are Jewish prayer shawls in the Catalan painting of this era. In one panel of an altarpiece Jaume Huguet made for Barcelona Cathedral, Moses wears such a shawl. And Palermo did have a Jewish population—but would an artist have painted himself among a group of Jews? And wouldn’t it have been risky to portray Jews as plague survivors, a widespread belief that had led to pogroms and that was discouraged by authorities? In 1348 Pope Clement VI had issued the bull, Quamvis Perfidiam, condemning those who blamed Jews for the plague as “seduced by the that liar, the Devil.”8

Another proposal of Hunt’s is that the three figures below the ‘Jewish’ group are hermit monks, who could have survived “due to their remoteness from the congestion and unsanitary conditions of urban life.” If so, what are they doing in the painting? They have ambled in from their usual desert haunts to watch the spectacle? And if all these people are grateful for being spared, wouldn’t they rather be thanking Saint Sebastian, than Death?

Writing in Hyperallergic in 2018, the artist and critic Thomas Micchelli mentioned another proposal: that these are “peasant rebels celebrating the slaughter of the powerful.” I’m not sure what his source was, but I’m not surprised the theory exists, since art historians can be fond of ‘discovering’ radical artists in the distant past.9 For the rest, the more I think about it, the more I’m struck by the good sense of Flavia, the conservator in the Wim Wenders movie. By calling the prevailing view ‘official,’ she may be said to have given her companion permission to doubt. The most persuasive interpretation is not always terribly persuasive.

*

The Triumph of Death is in the second room of the museum. By the time I got to it, I had already had an unexpected, disorienting encounter with an artwork. This happened in the first room, which is devoted to Gothic sculpture. As I entered, I was not paying attention to what was on display, but to my parents and brother [this was a family trip, which might be why I failed to meet an alluring conservator] and someone on the periphery of my field of vision caught my attention. One’s sense of the boundaries of one’s personal space in a museum varies according to how crowded it is, and apart from a large school group the Palazzo Abatellis was pretty empty that day. So I was too close to someone, and also, the person I was too close to was oddly still. Could there be a mime?

Of course not—the source of my confusion was a polychrome wood sculpture of John the Evangelist, standing away from the wall on a little platform that gave him a few extra inches, just enough to put him in a plausible height range. I don’t think I’d ever been ‘tricked’ like this, or, to put it more carefully, I don’t think that by turning my head and bringing an object into focus I had caused what I thought was a person to turn into a work of art.

Probably no viewer in the fifteenth century was similarly deceived, because the sculpture was part of a larger group surrounding a crucifixion, likely too monumental to mislead anyone. Nor does my accidental illusion parallel the famous story told by Pliny the Elder, in which the Greek artist Zeuxis painted grapes so well that birds tried to eat them.10 I was not fooled by an artist, but by my own perception. Maybe the best way to think about it is as a prosaic inversion of the Pygmalion story—my statue did not come to life, but receded in an instant from life into inanimateness.

*

Apart from the Triumph of Death, which is housed in what was once a chapel, all of the paintings in the Palazzo Abatellis are upstairs. The largest gallery, a very grand late Gothic hall, is filled with religious art removed from the churches of Palermo and its surroundings. And this is appropriate—while the palace was built in the late fifteenth century for Francesco Abatelli, master of the port of Palermo, he left no heir, and following his death and the death of his wife the structure was converted into a convent.

But even if the palace was only briefly a private residence, still it is easy to imagine the walls of its largest room hung with family portraits in the manner described by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa in his memoir, Places of my Infancy.

These [doors] led into a broad entrance hall, its walls entirely covered with two ranks, one above the other, of pictures representing the Filangeri family from 1080 until my grandmother’s father; all lifesize standing figures in a great variety of costume, from a Crusader’s to a Gentleman’s-in-Waiting to Ferdinand II, pictures which in spite of their mediocre workmanship filled the big room with lively familiar presences. Beneath each, in white letters on a black background, were written their names and titles, and the chief events of their lives. “Riccardo, defended Antioch against the Infidels.” “Raimondo, wounded in the defence of Acre”…11

Not that I regret the display of religious art, but I would have loved to see a roomful of portraits like this.12 In fact, though, there are a few portraits in the room as it is. Kneeling donors were the most common form of painted portraiture in fifteenth century Europe, and there are three very small ones, almost mouse-sized, looking up at John the Evangelist in a work signed and dated by Tommaso de Vigilia in 1492. It was made for the Benedictine convent of Santa Maria Maddalena in Corleone, south of Palermo in the Sicilian interior.

*

The museum also possesses a number of painted crosses from the late fifteenth century, including two with pelican scenes. The pelican, in Christian art, represents charity or sacrifice, as the pelican was thought to feed her young with her own blood (in the original version of the legend, from the Physiologus, which is something like an early Christian natural history, the little pelicans attacked their parents, who killed them; on the third day the mother opened her side and bathed her chicks in her blood, bringing them back to life). There is nothing unusual about a pelican scene, there are countless such, though I’m not sure if any artist who made one actually ever saw a pelican (see examples here). What stuck me in one of the Palermo crosses was that its pelican scene also included a snake, winding its way up the top of Christ’s cross to threaten the chicks on the surmounting nest.

I wondered if there was another pelican legend, with a pelican mother fending off a snake—with her own blood? But no, most likely the snake is present for typological reasons (typology: the study of prefigurations of the New Testament in the Old). The serpent presumably indicates the Tree of Knowledge, which can be typologically linked to Christ’s cross. The idea of having the snake approach the nest may have been a clever conceit on the part of the artist, Riccardo Quartararo. In the cathedral of the Sicilian city of Termini, about twenty-five miles southeast of Palermo, there is another painted cross from the same period, this one by Pietro Ruzzolone. It too features pelican and snake, but Ruzzolone’s cross is divided into panels; the creatures are separated. Only Quartararo’s bird faces a home invasion.

*

Of course there’s more to the Palazzo Abatellis than fifteenth century art, but let me stope here, while this post is still at a semi-reasonable length. I’ll close with a final few objects, sans commentary.

3

You can watch Palermo Shooting on the Criterion Channel. I wouldn’t go so far as to recommend doing so, but it’s not the worst movie ever made. Towards the end, Death, played by Dennis Hopper in one of his final roles, visits the main character for a tête-à-tête. “Other people assist birth, they get praised, I do the same thing at the other end and get damned.” There’s also a cameo by Lou Reed. If you want to skip to the Triumph of Death scene, it starts at 1:05.

My parents are preparing to sell the house I grew up in, in Alexandria, Virginia, and to move across the country. My contribution to their project has been one month of labor, and there has turned out to be so much to do that I have had little time for this newsletter.1 In lieu of a full-length post on a museum, what follows is a short piece about some tapestries I have never seen.

*

Last May, looking into artworks connected to the Siamese embassy to France of 1686, I came across an old article from the Journal of the Siam Society about a bronze relief by the sculptor Antoine Coysevox. This was interesting because I knew about other works depicting the Siamese ambassadors, a dozen or so prints, a medal, a painting, even an ivory box, but I hadn’t heard of a relief.2 Originally part of the base of an equestrian statue of Louis XIV made for the Breton city of Rennes, the relief shows the personification of Brittany presenting a model of the statue to the king. The Siamese, identifiable by their tall, conical hats, look on.

Intrigued, and hoping to find an image better than the one in the article, I searched online for coysevox siam. The first hit was from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. I had a confused instant between seeing the link and clicking it—wouldn’t I know about this object if it belonged to the Met? But no, it’s not at the Met, the entry in the online catalogue is an old loan from the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Rennes. The relief had been in New York in 2018 for the Visitors to Versailles show. This jogged my memory and confused me more. Why had I forgotten? I knew the work, I could see myself standing in front of it, I remembered which room it had been in, and on which wall. I had probably even taken a picture of it.

If I concentrate I can vaguely remember other things I’ve seen in the same space over the years. Paintings by Degas and Manet and Sargent and Winslow Homer, Elizabethan portraits, a drawing of a sixteenth century copper mine—but I do have to concentrate, and when I say vaguely, I mean it. And if this is the state of my recall, how much am I really getting out of going to exhibitions? Not that there aren’t plenty I remember fondly, not that it isn’t fun to go, but drawing a blank in an online encounter with this relief so soon after seeing it made me wonder.

*

Around the same time, researching the fifteenth-century Portuguese painter Nuno Gonçalves (for Substack), I came across a theory that Gonçalves had been involved in the design of what are known as the Pastrana Tapestries. These are a set of four tapestries of the Moroccan conquests of King Alfonso V of Portugal in 1471. Like all the best tapestries of their age, they were made in Flanders. They’re enormous, each one thirty-six feet long and twelve feet high, and they’re full of detail and action. Knights with spears, swords and muskets, armored horses, heraldic banners flapping, crenelated turrets manned by moors, the masts and riggings of caravels, grass, flowers, even pine trees here and there. And the sea—dark blue for deep waters, a paler shade close to the shore and the walls of Tangier, waves throughout.

The name ‘Pastrana’ comes from the Spanish town where the tapestries have been since the mid-seventeenth century, first as the property of a church and now in a museum, the Museo Parroquial de Tapices de Pastrana. I remember when I first learned of their existence, it was early in the pandemic, during the months when everyone was staying home. Ever since then I’ve daydreamed of going to Pastrana, of seeing the four of them in a dim room or series of dim rooms. In my daydream they shimmer in the dark, and I am enchanted.

Pastrana—there is no public transportation—is an hour’s drive east of Madrid. As it happens, I’ll be in Madrid in January, for the first time in more than twenty years. Will I go see the tapestries? Unlikely. I’m teaching a class on Spanish art in the spring semester, and I’ll probably be too busy preparing for that to take the time to rent a car and drive to Pastrana. And then maybe my daydream is better left unrealized? Pessoa: “to dream of Bordeaux is not only better, but actually truer, than actually to arrive in Bordeaux.”3

By coincidence the Pastrana tapestries also appear in another of my daydreams. Or maybe it’s not a coincidence, I’m not sure, maybe I only imagine visiting them in Pastrana because I missed them in Washington. They were there, at the National Gallery of Art, from September 18, 2011 to January 8, 2012. According to the museum’s website, between those two dates 88,568 people saw the tapestries.

My second daydream is not of a trip I may someday take, but about one I could have taken, and didn’t.

I must have visited my parents for Christmas in 2011, and maybe Thanksgiving, too. I probably went to the National Gallery of Art. Could I have been one of the 88,568? If I was I have no memory of it. Still, I can see the tapestries there. In my vision, and how could it be otherwise, the missed exhibition is not like Visitors to Versailles or any show ever held in a place you can get to by Amtrak. Instead, it is a portal to the fifteenth century itself, to the dawn of the Age of Discovery, etc.

*

On the other hand, reading the catalogue from the National Gallery of Art exhibition, I learned that in a restoration of the tapestries in the 1950s, new strands of wool and silk were added. Moths, partial to substances that decompose over time, tend to ignore old fabric, but the new fibers in the rewoven sections attracted them, and once they had settled in they found the original threads worth eating as well. So before the exhibition in Washington the tapestries needed another, still more extensive, restoration. Portal to the Age of Discovery? Maybe. But also, a testament to the artistry of the conservators of the Royal Manufacturers De Wit, in Mechelen, Belgium, and to Rentokil, the British firm that exterminated the moths. They’re the global leader in pest control, with operations in more than seventy countries and $7.4 billion in revenue last year.

1

An example: there were several hundred bricks in a long, low, mossy, muddy pile in a corner of my parents’ backyard. I removed them from there, exposing in the process, to the delight of a catbird, many worms and centipedes. The catbird feasted; I spread out the bricks on the grass and sprayed them with a hose. The next day I turned the bricks over and sprayed them again. Then I stacked them on the wall of the patio, counted them, took pictures, made a “Free Bricks” post on Facebook Marketplace, corresponded with everyone who answered, found a taker, and helped him and his girlfriend put the bricks in their car.

The final bag was eighteen small corpses having a total weight of perhaps a pound. Crespi regarded this as a success, and an excellent return for the expenditure in ammunition and effort. The passion for hunting, he said, could come even before the pursuit of love, and be equally remote from the balance sheets of gain or loss. Ferdinand of Naples had spent the equivalent of several million pounds on building his palace at Capodimonte just because this hill was on the route of migrating beccafiche—warblers of all kinds—and having finished the palace, a road to Naples had to be built at the cost of another million or two. It was estimated, said Crespi, that every warbler eaten by the royal sportsmen had cost the nation a thousand ducats.1

Not that I remembered it perfectly, but I’ve been thinking about this paragraph since the summer of 2005, when I read it in Norman Lewis’s account of the Allied occupation of Naples. The extraordinary claim that the existence of the massive art museum on the hill overlooking the city could be attributed to the desire of a prince to hunt beccafiche seemed too farfetched to be true.2 Yet I also knew that one should never underestimate the passion of ancien régime royalty for shooting.

I never looked into the matter, choosing to live wondering rather than knowing, but once I decided to write about the Capodimonte Museum, it seemed appropriate to check.

*

It was not Ferdinand of Naples who had the palace built, but his father Charles, the first of the Bourbon kings of Naples and Sicily. Charles, born in Spain, was sent to Florence as a teenager, where he resided at the Pitti Palace. According to British diplomat Sir Horace Mann, “he amused himself by shooting with a bow and arrow at the birds in the fine tapestry-hangings of his rooms, and was become so very dexterous that he seldom missed the eye he aimed at.”3

Mann is quoted in Harold Acton’s The Bourbons of Naples, 1734–1825, a book with much to say about Charles’s passion for hunting, which was such that the life of his court “revolved around hunting and shooting to an inordinate degree.” The punishments for poachers were severe: seven years of confinement for nobles, seven years in the galleys for commoners. The discovery of a pheasant’s feather in a private home was considered grounds for torture. Acton does not mention beccafiche but he notes that cats were banned in the vicinity of royal hunting grounds, which points to an interest in catching songbirds.

A more scrupulous work of history than The Bourbons of Naples might tell us how often poachers were punished, and with what severity, rather than only giving the official penalty. Still, I’m inclined to trust Acton at least in general terms; the fact that he was a Bright Young Thing should not be held against him, and if the book lacks footnotes, it at least has a bibliography that lists plenty of primary texts.

My next source was an earlier one, an English translation from 1858 of Pietro Colletta’s Storia del reame di Napoli dal 1734 sino al 1825, originally published in 1834. I came across the beccafiche right away.

Almost at the same time the king planned the erection of another villa upon a height near the city called Capo-di-Monte, for no other reason than because he heard that the small birds called beccafichi abound in that place during the month of August. Many of the works of this monarch owed their origin to his inordinate passion for the chase; had his object been nobler, such as the promotion of the arts, the protection of the frontiers, or commerce, these enormous expenses would have been more worthy of a good prince, and have been more thankfully acquiesced in by the people.4

After reading this I returned to Acton, looking for references to Colletta. I found several, including one in which Colletta is accused of “[a] tendency to subordinate facts to phrases, with an added resolve consistently to blacken the Bourbons.”

Finally I found a history of the palace by Robin Thomas, an art historian at Penn State. There are no beccafiche in his account.

Begun as a hunting park with a proposed lodge in 1735, in 1737 the court instead approved a monumental palace for the site. Work began on this palace in 1738, but by the 1750s it was only partly completed, and at that time the truncated building was converted into a museum for the Farnese Collection.5

I emailed Thomas to see if he had any thoughts on the matter and he was kind enough to respond. An excerpt from his reply:

…there is maybe a kernel of truth in what Colletta says. He tends, on the whole, to favor reductive anecdotes to explain several of Charles’s commissions.

What we do know:

Capodimonte was begun as a hunting reserve near the city. It possessed some existing hunting grounds that belonged to one noble family (conceivably these woods were best for hunting birds). Other properties were added to make this smaller reserve into part of a larger hunting park (which was soon stocked with a variety of game). It would never have been regarded as a site just for hunting beccafichi.

The palace project came in a second moment a couple of years later. It was conceived as an architectural and artistic monument rather than a mere hunting lodge.

The expensive road to the palace (lamented by Lewis) was created in the Napoleonic period, so not by the Bourbons at all. Capodimonte was Joseph Bonaparte’s preferred residence, and the old roadway leading up the hill was judged too small and difficult to climb (it always had been).

I guess, then, that I’ll call it a masterful slander, an unforgettable, misleading story that, damning the Bourbons for frivolity, contains enough truth that it cannot be called a lie.

*

The Farnese Collection that Thomas mentions was brought to Naples by the same Charles who ordered the construction of the palace. He inherited it from his mother, Elisabeth Farnese, the last of her family. It had been formed over the previous two centuries, especially during the papacy of the Farnese pope, Paul III (1534–1549). Today the collection is divided between the Capodimonte Museum (modern works) and the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli (antiquities). There’s more below about the history of the collection but for present purposes let it suffice that (i) it is rich in Renaissance painting and (ii) it includes the work of few, if any, Neapolitan artists. That is, the founding collection of the Capodimonte Museum is Roman.

When I visited in May the museum was half a year away from the end of a long renovation. Many galleries were still closed; others had been rearranged so as to keep major works on view. This means I can’t be sure what the exact layout will be when it is fully reopened next January, but it’s safe to expect a division into three parts: (i) painting and sculpture from the Farnese Collection, plus later non-Neapolitan acquisitions; (ii) Neapolitan painting and sculpture; and (iii) everything else—porcelain, tapestries, arms and armor, the royal apartments, works on paper, contemporary art, and so on.

Given this division, the visitor faces a dilemma: whether to start with the Farnese Collection or the Neapolitan one.6 The decision matters because both collections are large; if you choose to see the Farnese works first, you’ll be more than half exhausted by the time you get to the Neapolitan ones, and vice versa.

The Farnese Collection has renowned masterpieces of the sixteenth century by, among others, Raphael, Titian, Parmigianino and Bruegel. The Neapolitan collection on the other hand has only a handful of well-known paintings—one by Caravaggio and two or three by Jusepe de Ribera. But as anyone who has been to the museum knows, there is far more to Neapolitan art than Caravaggio and Ribera. Is it better to stumble upon the work of Luca Giordano or Mattia Preti than it is to get close to Titians and Bruegels already familiar from reproductions? I don’t know the answer. In this post I’ll split the difference by mostly writing about Neapolitan works, but starting with two Farnese ones.

*

Specifically, I’ll start with Bruegel, because this was always my other question about the Capodimonte Museum—as well as wondering about the beccafiche, I wanted to know how the museum’s two Bruegels got there.

Pieter Bruegel the Elder is not an artist whose work was sought after by Italian collectors. Most of his paintings, today, remain in Northern Europe. The ones in Naples, The Blind Leading the Blind and The Misanthrope, are first documented in 1612, in an inventory of the possessions of Count Giovan Masi of Parma. He must have inherited them from his father Cosimo, an art collector who had spent a few years in Brussels in the 1590s in the employ of the Farnese, and who had returned to Parma with some paintings. Count Masi ended up losing his father’s Bruegels, not to mention his head, because in 1611 he joined a conspiracy to assassinate Ranuccio I Farnese, Duke of Parma and Piacenza—the 1612 inventory in which the paintings are recorded was taken to document the confiscation of his possessions.7

I will say only one thing about the paintings themselves, namely, that they surprised me because most Bruegels, painted in oil on panel, are vividly colored, and these on the other hand are uncharacteristically muted. It turns out they are Tüchleins, works on canvas bound with hide glue. Many Tüchleins were made in the Netherlands in Bruegel’s times and earlier, but they are fragile, and few have survived. Perhaps the essential factor that preserved these was the good custodianship of the Farnese and the Bourbons, or else the Italian climate?8

*

The best-known Neapolitan art was made by artists who came to Naples from somewhere else. Caravaggio worked there twice, first right after he fled Rome, in 1606, and then again in 1609; both stays were brief, but his influence was felt in the city for decades to come. The Spaniard Ribera, a native of Valencia, arrived in Naples at the age of twenty-five in 1616, and remained until his death in 1652.

I won’t include the here the Capodimonte Museum’s sole Caravaggio, the Flagellation of Christ, as it was on loan when I was there, to the Palazzo Barberini in Rome for its Caravaggio exhibition. Ribera I will get to shortly, but the painter to start with is one you likely haven’t heard of, an artist active in Naples in the mid-fifteenth century, Niccolò Antonio Colantonio. The Capodimonte Museum had two of his works on view when I was there; a third one, a sign indicated, was undergoing restoration; I believe there is also a fourth.

The history of Naples is complicated. Colantonio may have worked in the city both before and after 1442, the year it went from being an Angevin possession (that is, ruled by the king of Anjou) to an Aragonese one. No one knows for sure, but the best way to explain his style, which is such that it makes one wonder if Naples was somehow closer to Bruges than it was to Florence, is to say that he was influenced by Barthélemy van Eyck, a Flemish painter in the service of King Réné of Anjou. The theory goes that Barthélemy must have been sent to Naples for a commission, or else paintings by him were brought there, and that contact with Barthélemy, or if not him then with his precise, Flemish style, was formative for Colantonio. Much hangs on the question because in addition to having left his own small body of work to posterity, Colantonio trained another artist, the great Sicilian Antonello da Messina. The question, how did Colantonio learn to paint like that? is thus an essential one for admirers of Antonello.

According to the Golden Legend and other hagiographies, Saint Jerome once pulled a thorn from the paw of a lion that wandered into his monastery. Jerome is not said to have been in his study at the time (“One day toward evening, when he was seated with the brethren to hear the sacred lessons read, a lion suddenly limped into the monastery.”9), but because he is associated with scholarship, paintings of Jerome and the Lion are sometimes set in his study—or I maybe I should turn that around and instead say, paintings of Jerome in his study sometimes incorporate the lion.

Either way, this is the scene shown in my favorite Colantonio painting, originally one panel of a large altarpiece in San Lorenzo Maggiore, one the Franciscan churches of Naples (Jerome is considered to be a proto-Franciscan). What’s most remarkable here is all the paper. The wall label dates the painting to c. 1445, which is after Gutenberg had invented the printing press, but before many books had been printed with it. The books on the shelves behind Jerome, then, must be in manuscript, and are likely on parchment rather than paper. But even if they are on parchment, there are sheets and scraps of paper scattered among these books, on and around Jerome’s desk, and even on the floor.

I wanted to propose that Jerome, surrounded by paper in this fashion, is an early adopter, but on looking into the matter it seems that he is not. It is true that paper came late to Christian Europe, more than a thousand years after it was invented in China, and centuries after it spread throughout the Islamic world, but the first Italian paper mill opened in 1276, and during the fourteenth century Italians supplied paper to the rest of Western Europe.10 What this likely means is that in Colantonio’s time paper may still have been a luxury good in some places, but not in Italy. Jerome, then, is probably not represented here as a scholar who has made a point of embracing the latest technology. He is, though, rather well-off, and, of course, notably fearless.

Another of the Colantonios at the Capodimonte Museum is the Delivery of the Franciscan Rule, a larger panel from the same altar as Jerome in his study. This is the one that was in the conservation studio. I can’t wait to see it on my next visit, whenever that may be.

*

As I suggested above, the painter most associated with seventeenth century Naples is Ribera, Lo Spagnoletto (‘the Little Spaniard’). It would be unfair to his originality and versatility as an artist to call him a follower of Caravaggio, but at the very least he was a sometime imitator. His works are dispersed far and wide, but some of the best ones are still in Naples. There’s the large painting of the city’s patron saint in Naples Cathedral, Saint Januarius Emerges Unscathed from the Furnace; there are the fourteen prophets and patriarchs in the arches of the nave of the church in the Carthusian monastery; and there are the Riberas at the Capodimonte Museum, among them a kitchen still life with a bloody goat’s head and a basket of eggs, and the Drunken Silenus, which is so ingeniously constructed, so richly detailed, and so hard to look away from, that I suspect that if one were to travel back to 1626 to inform Ribera of the work’s fame today, he wouldn’t be surprised. What other reputation could such a painting acquire? Again and again I look from Silenus at the center to the braying donkey at upper left, and then back down to Silenus; I never fail to smile.

These two are probably my favorites, but there’s one more Ribera I want to mention. In a room set aside for paintings dislodged from their normal galleries by the renovation, Ribera’s Apollo and Marsyas of 1637 hangs next to another interpretation of the same scene (Apollo, having vanquished the satyr Marsyas in a musical competition, begins to flay him). The second painting was made two decades later by Luca Giordano, an artist whose career somewhat inverts Ribera’s. Ribera came to Naples from Spain; Giordano by contrast spent most of his life in his native Naples, but in 1692 went to Spain for a decade to paint for Charles II.

I like both paintings, but on close inspection am inclined to prefer Giordano’s version, because his Apollo, to steady himself as he cuts into the flesh of Marsyas, places a blue-sandaled foot on the satyr, revealing—perfect, gritty Neapolitan detail—dirty toenails. Early in the century Caravaggio had caused a minor scandal in Rome when he painted an altarpiece featuring a pilgrim with dirty feet; I wonder if anyone objected to Giordano’s still earthier portrayal of a Greek God.

*

Around the time I got to Naples I received an email about an event at the Capodimonte Museum, the fourteenth annual Italian Art Society/Kress Lecture, given this year by Jesse Locker of Portland State University. The timing didn’t work; the lecture was on May 30, the day after my train to Rome, but I am glad I was at least able to read the abstract.

It is emblematic of the sometimes-impenetrable history of Naples that one of the city’s leading painters of the seventeenth century remains nameless: this is the Master of the Annunciation to the Shepherds, so-called for his portrayals of ragged, dignified shepherds painted with a thick impasto, murky earth tones, and strong contrasts of light and dark. Despite no consensus on his name, through his paintings we have a remarkably tactile and specific representation of the world he inhabited and the objects he owned: We can identify specific books and plaster casts he owned, recognize musical instruments, carpets, mirrors, costumes, copper pots and pans, maiolica pitchers, pewter vessels, and other wares, as well as apprentices and a range of models. Given that nothing else is known about the artist, these mundane objects can hold an important key to understanding both his art and place in the world of Neapolitan painting more broadly.

For those unfamiliar with the process at work here, a body of paintings has been identified by art historians as seemingly made a single, unknown artist. Until an identification is made, the artist is known as the Master of X, with X referring either to a specific painting (in this case, a painting of the annunciation to the shepherds), or to the place where the artist worked. Sometimes these puzzles are solved. The artist once known as the Master of the Barberini Panels is now agreed to be Fra Carnevale; the Master of Flémalle is Robert Campin.

In the case of the unknown Neapolitan, two paintings of the annunciation to the shepherds are attributed to him. There’s a large one in Birmingham, England and a small one at the Capodimonte Museum. Judging by the latter, it’s easy to see what the excitement is about. I hope Locker’s talk will be published soon.

*

There’s one more semi-Neapolitan artist I want to mention, Mattia Preti. Preti was a Calabrian who, after working in Rome in his youth, spent most of the 1650s in Naples. I say only the bare minimum here, in order to save him in case I ever visit the art museum in Toledo, Ohio, which has his Feast of Herod. There are three more feast scenes by Preti at the Capodimonte Museum—the Feast of Absalom (below), the Feast of Belshazzar and the Return of the Prodigal Son, and it turns out there’s a another in London, the Marriage at Cana, and still another in a private collection, David Playing the Harp before Saul. I don’t know what kind of crowds an exhibition of “Preti’s Feasts” would draw—as I said above, Ribera is the only big name of the Neapolitan seventeenth century. But on the other hand the Met’s 2017 show devoted to Valentin de Boulogne, the French follower of Caravaggio, was a success, so why wouldn’t Preti do just as well, if these big, action-packed canvases could be brought together?

*

And a final Naples painting, by the French eighteenth century artist Pierre-Jacques Volaire, who settled in the city in 1767 and established himself as a painter of scenes of the city’s surroundings, souvenirs for Northern European tourists. He is best known for views of Vesuvius erupting, and there was one such work on display in May, but I choose instead an image of the Solfatara, a sulfur-spewing crater near the town of Pozzuoli that was an essential stop on the Grand Tour in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Goethe was in the vicinity on March 1, 1787.

A boat trip to Pozzuoli, easy drives on land, pleasant walks through the most amazing region in the world. The clearest sky above, the most unstable ground below. Ruins of what was unimaginable affluence, mutilated and depressing. Boiling waters, holes exhaling sulfur, slag heaps resistant to plant life, bare, loathsome areas, but then at last an always lush vegetation, taking hold wherever it can, rising over all the dead things, surrounding the lakes and brooks, even maintaining the most magnificent oak forest on the walls of an ancient crater.11

*

The Farnese Collection is so good that it would be a shame to include only the two Bruegels, so I will finish this post with one more Farnese work, a painting that shows the founding of the church it was made for, the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome. By Tommaso di Cristoforo Fini, usually known as Masolino da Panicale (which can be rendered in English as ‘Tommy from Panicale’), it was one of the central panels of a two-sided polyptych that Masolino collaborated on with the great Florentine, Masaccio.

The painting shows a miracle that took place either in August 352 or August 358 (accounts vary), when, in spite of the Roman summer heat, there was a snowfall. In one version of the story, the snow outlined the footprint of a basilica, which Pope Liberius (r. 352–66) proceeded to found as Santa Maria Maggiore; in another the snow fell generally over Rome, and it was Liberius who traced the shape of the church. It is hard to say which version Masolino’s painting portrays; the snow, though it continues to fall from a large disc of a cloud overhead, has already taken the shape of the church, but then Liberius wields a spade, so perhaps this is his handiwork we are seeing. Above the cloud, Christ and the Virgin preside over the scene; smaller discs similar in shape to the central one fill out the golden sky, but it is unclear whether or not these, too, are snow clouds.

The altarpiece was commissioned by Martin V (1417–31), the pope who ended the western schism (r. 1378–1417), a period when there were multiple claimants to the papacy. After his election in Constance, Martin made his way to Rome via Florence, where he may have encountered Masolino. Martin is known for his efforts to beautify Rome; it is likely that the scene with Liberius and the snowfall contains an implicit reference to this aspect of his papacy.

Though it was originally the main altarpiece of Santa Maria Maggiore, by the early seventeenth century the polyptych had passed from the church into the hands of the Farnese, its main three panels sawed in two to create six paintings rather than three. The side panels (today in Philadelphia and London) were sold off, but this central one, along with its verso companion, the Assumption of the Virgin, were still with the Farnese (with both works attributed to Fra Angelico) when the family collection was brought to Naples.

It is a splendid subject for a painting. There are a few more versions, including the one that replaced Masolino’s at Santa Maria Maggiore, a Mannerist work by Jacopo Zucchi, now in the Pinacoteca Vaticana. There’s also a small painting of the miracle by Pietro Perugino that is now in an English country house. Both the Zucchi and the Perugino are interesting, but it is a scene so rich in possibility that I long to see what other artists might have done with it, especially Flemish artists, especially Bruegel.

In the end, though, I decided that rather than try your patience by writing about the same museum again and again and again, it would be better to try your patience with a one long post incorporating all of the above. So here it is. Let its length make up for the fact that I skipped February.

(You can read my first post on the MFA here.)

Part 2: Long-term loans

It was only after years of regular visits to the Met that I began to notice how many paintings there are on long-term loan from private collections. But it makes sense. Suppose you spent £44,882,500 on a very grand painting by Peter Paul Rubens—as Facebook co-founder Sean Parker did in 2016—where would you put it? Would you feel comfortable having it in your house, or hanging it in a conference room in your philanthropic foundation? What if there was a fire? And then one never knows what a drunken party guest, or else a disgruntled employee, might be capable of. Of course it would be indecent to keep a work like that in storage, treating it like a stack of bullion bars, but also—it has to go somewhere. Isn’t a gallery in a major museum the best of all possible somewheres? If an owner values discretion the label can only say private collection and the object can be kept off the museum’s website, as was the case for the bronze tapir from China’s Warring States period that I included in last month’s post about the MFA. For the less bashful, the label and website entry might read, “Courtesy of the Parker Foundation.”

I say all this to introduce a privately-owned painting that may not be the best or the most famous one on view at the MFA, but that is, I think, the most magnificent, and maybe also the most unexpected, namely, Gerrit van Honthorst’s Triumph of the Winter Queen. It’s been at the museum since 2011, first for two years in the conservation studio, where its treatment was documented in a series of well-illustrated blog posts—in the inaugural one the painting enters the museum rolled up in a super-sized version of the kind of tube a movie poster comes in—and since 2013 in its own gallery that’s just right for a single painting measuring ten by fifteen feet. How long will it stay? And whose is it? All I can say that as of 1998, when the Honthorst catalogue raisonné was published, the work belonged to Prince Ernst August von Hannover, and that this prince, in a Sotheby’s sale in 2005, sold a great deal of art, though not, it seems, the painting in question.

Honthorst was one of the ‘Utrecht Caravaggisti,’ a group of three painters from Utrecht who lived and worked in Rome in the 1610s, where they learned to paint in the manner of Caravaggio. As the other two, Dirck van Baburen and Hendrick ter Brugghen, died fairly young, only Honthorst lived long enough to abandon tenebrism when it went out of fashion. His fame rests on his early work, so he is still known by the old nickname, Gherardo delle Notti, given to him sometime after his death for his many candlelit scenes, but there is another Honthorst, an ambitious, mature painter with a classical style that attracted royal patrons.

Not that royal patrons were in plentiful supply in the Dutch Republic, Europe’s parvenu state, but there was Elizabeth Stuart, the “Winter Queen,” so-called for her brief tenure as Queen of Bohemia. The daughter of one English king (James I) and the sister of another (Charles I), Elizabeth was sixteen years old when in 1613 she married Palatine Elector Frederick V and settled with him in Heidelberg, where she devoted herself to two pursuits she excelled at, hunting and child-bearing. In a tranquil era this might have been the story of her life, but meanwhile in Bohemia Protestant nobles were rebelling against their Austrian overlords. In 1618 they tossed two Catholic regents and a secretary out of a third floor window of Prague Castle, and in the following year they refused to accept Holy Roman Emperor Ferdinand II as their king, offering the Bohemian crown to Frederick instead. With Elizabeth’s encouragement Frederick overcame his sensible reluctance about this 1619 project, and the pair, now royal rather than merely electoral, left Heidelberg for Prague.

Ferdinand, of course, struck back. On November 8, 1620, a year after Frederick’s coronation, the poorly equipped Bohemian army was defeated at Bílá hora, the White Mountain; the imperial army that occupied Prague the next day stayed there right up to 1918, when the Kingdom of Bohemia was dissolved by Woodrow Wilson and Tomáš Masaryk.1 Meanwhile the Palatinate had fallen into Spanish hands, so there was no going back to Heidelberg. Frederick and Elizabeth accepted an invitation from the Prince of Orange to settle in The Hague, where they lived until Frederick’s death in 1632. Elizabeth remained for another three decades, only returning to her native England in 1661. She died in the following year, aged sixty-five, survived by six of her thirteen children.

She worked tirelessly in her exile, first to press her husband’s claims on Bohemia and the Palatinate, and after his death doing the same for her son Charles Louis. The caution others felt about her causes exasperated her, as she wrote in a fit of fury to the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1636 after it became clear England would not take up arms on behalf of her son’s claim:

I remember never to have read in the Chronicles of my ancestours, that anie king of England gott anie good by treaties but most commonlie lost by them, and on the contrarie by warrs made always good peaces2

It was in this state of indignation that Elisabeth commissioned the Triumph of the Winter Queen. Would she have preferred it to be done by Rubens or van Dyck? Presumably, and one imagines that Honthorst, for his part, would rather have continued to work for her brother (he had spent much of 1628 in London, painting for Charles, and had returned to Utrecht that December with 3,000 guilders, a silver service for twelve, and an annual pension of one hundred pounds). But I think they were lucky to have each other.

In the painting, Elizabeth, clad in an ermine cape and holding the scepter of Bohemia, sits in a chariot drawn by lions, one each for England, the Palatinate and the Dutch Republic. Crushed under the chariot’s wheels are Neptune, Medusa and Death. The deceased of the family look down from the gates of heaven at upper left; this group includes Elizabeth’s first-born son, Frederick Henry, whose 1629 drowning in a boat accident explains why Neptune had to go under the chariot. Elizabeth is accompanied in her progress by her ten living children, six sons and four daughters. The two youngest get special treatment. Gustavus Adolphus, in the guise of Cupid, directs the lions up a set of steps (one signed by Honthorst) towards heaven. Little Sophia floats above, poised to place a laurel wreath on her mother’s head. Charles Louis, flanked by two other brothers, stands behind the chariot wearing the hat of the Palatine Elector. The papers held by Elizabeth’s second-youngest daughter, Henriette, may be a reference to a manifesto that Elizabeth was on the verge of publishing.

And what to make of all this? I am not always so fond of magnificent paintings, as I am of this one, and I wonder if half my affection here comes from the incongruities, for example the fact that the work is in a private collection. What an odd object for someone to possess, if these aren’t your ancestors, and what an unexpected place for it to end up. There is a link: Boston itself, give or take a few years, is the same age as the painting. John Winthrop was a contemporary of Elizabeth and Honthorst. But wasn’t Boston founded in a spirit of Goodbye to All That? If the Triumph of the Winter Queen must reside in North America, wouldn’t it have made more sense to deposit it in a museum in Virginia, where the colonists of the seventeenth century held the Elizabeth Stuarts of the world in higher regard, and where in fact there is a six-mile tidal estuary named in her honor?

*

One of the clichés of an art history survey course is that Albrecht Dürer’s misconceptions about rhinoceros anatomy—the plate armor skin, the scales, the additional, dorsal horn—shaped European representations of the rhinoceros for centuries. As seen on a slide I showed to my students this semester, with Dürer’s woodcut and a Meissen rhino from 1730.3

Europeans of course having had ample opportunity in the interval to correct Dürer’s mistakes, the comparison is meant to demonstrate the durability of a viral image, however misleading—or, to quote from Umberto Eco’s Theory of Semiotics:

…this image of the rhinoceros remained constant for at least two centuries and reappeared in the books of explorers and zoologists… they knew that only these conventionalized graphic signs could denote «rhinoceros» to the person interpreting the iconic sign.

A compelling statement, but is it true? Two rhinos at the MFA made me wonder. They are among the many animals in pietra dura (hardstone mosaic) that adorn a pair of cabinets, dating to the 1670s, that constitute another long-term loan from a private collection. At the center of each cabinet, set in an elaborate, columned encasement of tortoiseshell and red coral, is a panel of Orpheus charming animals with a viol; this in turn is flanked on each side by eight more panels of individual animals, the full spectrum from domestic (cows, goats) to exotic (camels, elephants, rhinos) to mythical (unicorns, centaurs, dragons). The cabinets were made in Palermo using coral from Trapani; the animal mosaics were imported from Florence, the center of pietra dura production since the founding of the Galleria dei Lavori manufactory in 1588.

Each cabinet has a rhino that is not based on Dürer, and it turns out there are more where these came from, Orpheus cabinets having been all the rage in the seventeenth century. The Detroit Institute of Arts also has one with a rhino, there’s another similar cabinet on the art market (Thomas Coulborn & Sons, London, price on request), and a third, at the Met, features scenes from Aesop’s Fables rather than individual animals (no rhino there). Plenty more have turned up at Christie’s and Sotheby’s over the years, only to disappear back into private collections.4

So what was the model for these Florentine mosaic rhinos, if not Dürer? The answer may be that they are based on an engraving of Abada, a female Indian rhino who was the second one to come to Europe in modern times. Abada arrived in Lisbon in 1577, probably as a gift of the viceroy of Goa to King Sebastian I of Portugal. Sebastian I died soon afterwards; his successor, Henry I, only reigned for two years. On his death the throne of Portugal was taken over by Philip II of Spain, who had Abada sent to his menagerie in Madrid, together with an unnamed Indian elephant. The two animals were later moved to the Escorial, where Abada died sometime in the late 1580s.

Thanks to a database of nearly seven thousand images maintained by the Rhino Resource Center, I feel confident stating that Abada was portrayed in print only twice, first in a woodcut of 1585 that heads a chapter in a manual for artists by the Madrid goldsmith and printmaker Juan de Arphe y Villafañe, and then in 1586 in an engraving by the Amsterdam printmaker Philip Galle, presumably after a now-lost drawing of Abada that was sent to Galle from Spain. Both artists dispense with the dorsal horn (though Arphe-Villafañe’s rhino otherwise resembles Dürer’s). It seems doubtful that the woodcut circulated far beyond Madrid, but Amsterdam at the time was at the dawn of its long reign as a center of art and trade. Prints made there were likely to be seen throughout Europe. Copies after Galle’s rhinoceros by two more printmakers, Lazarus Roeting and Galle’s nephew Adriaen Collaert, were incorporated into natural history texts. Collaert’s version, in turn, was copied by still other artists. As the Rhino Resource Center puts it—pace the art historians and pace the semioticians—“Dürer had no monopoly.”

Part 3: European and American paintings

Of course sponsorship makes sense for institutions, but it’s a pity to lose an old, plain name. I have confirmed, from the title of a drawing made by Barbara Westman in 1975, that the William I. Koch Gallery, where the MFA displays about three dozen paintings, mostly from the seventeenth century, was formerly the Great Hall.5 The walls used to be bare marble, but I think the choice to hang it with red velvet (or is it damask?) in the summer of 2012 was a good one. In a time-lapse video of the renovation the room seems more spacious by the end. When it reopened with its new look, the critic Judith Dobrzynski reproached the museum for installing a pyramid of Hanoverian silver, “a huge, garish display” that in her view demeaned the adjacent paintings.

As much as anyone can admire silver, it doesn’t really rise to the artistic and aesthetic value of masterpiece paintings, does it?

If I had given the pyramid two glances I might have come to a similar conclusion, but since I didn’t, I guess it’s possible to ignore it? So sure: it would probably be better to put the silver somewhere else, and hang four or five more paintings, but there’s plenty to see here as it is.

There is no work in the Koch Gallery that I would call canonical, but there are at least two that could be, and both of them would make the canon more interesting if they were. Juan de Pareja is a great and important painting, and the Met’s decision to spend a record-breaking sum on it in 1970 looks better all the time, but as paintings by Velázquez go, is it all that interesting? I don’t think it’s even close to as interesting as the MFA’s Don Baltasar Carlos and an Attendant (or, as it was known until recently, Don Baltasar Carlos with a Dwarf6).

Born in 1629, Baltasar Carlos was the only son of the union of King Philip IV of Spain and his queen, Elisabeth of France. When Baltasar Carlos died of smallpox in 1646, the Spanish crown was left without an heir. Elisabeth having died in 1644, it became necessary for Philip to remarry, which he did, in 1649. His second wife, Mariana, was the Austrian princess originally promised to his son

All of this was in the future in 1631, when Velázquez, just returned to Madrid from a long embassy in Rome, painted Baltasar Carlos with one of the resident dwarves of the Spanish court. The identity of the dwarf has never been determined, nor has the gender, though one plausible analysis, based on costume, suggests female.

The identity of a dwarf in a Velázquez painting—only a specialist on the Spanish court could take an interest in such a question. There’s another mystery here, though. It is striking how much more alive the figure of the dwarf is, than that of the prince. Not only do the two not interact, they barely seem to occupy the same physical space. In a catalogue entry for a 1989 exhibition at the Met, the Spanish art historian Julián Gállego made a tantalizing proposition. Having observed a horizontal line dividing the carpet in the foreground into sections, he suggested this is a panting of a painting—the dwarf is standing before, to quote Gállego, “a replica of a hypothetical 1631 portrait by Velázquez.”

Velázquez experimented with conceits of this nature early in his career, in two of the kitchen scenes (bodegones) he made before he left Seville for Madrid, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary and The Supper at Emmaus. In both paintings there is ambiguity about the biblical scene in the background—is it depicted in a painting on the wall, or is it taking place in the next room? Late in his life he revisited the format. There is a tapestry version of Titian’s Triumph of Bacchus in the The Spinners (Las Hilanderas), and then, of course, there is the most celebrated painting within a painting in the history of Western art—the canvas, seen only from behind, on which, in Las Meninas, Velázquez himself is at work.

But maybe Gállego was just reading too much Foucault? I can’t help noticing that the tasseled pillow on the right, which, if Gállego is on to something, should be part of the painting within the painting, seems to occupy the same space as the dwarf. If it does, there can be no painting within the painting. An alternate theory has Velázquez adding the dwarf in 1634, in which case it could represent Francisco Lezcano, who came to the court that year. And it may rather be that, instead of being embedded as a portrait, Baltasar Carlos is expressing, to quote Gállego again, “that lofty remoteness characteristic of the Habsburg sovereigns.”

But then, why would Velázquez add a dwarf two years later? And is there any denying that the perspective seems to shift at the line dividing the two sections of carpet? How else to account for that? The art historical consideration that the painting, if the theory is true, fits neatly into the career of Velázquez by linking the bodegones of his Seville days to the late masterpieces, is hardly persuasive on its own, but it doesn’t hurt. So in short: I love Gállego’s theory, I want it to be true, and who knows, maybe it is.

*

No living man or woman can remember a time when Velázquez was not considered the greatest of seventeenth century Spanish painters, but if you were to run the artistic stock market back a little further the reputation of Velázquez would start to sink, and that of another artist from Seville, Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, would correspondingly rise. As the Scottish artist and writer William Bell Scott put it in his 1872 Murillo and the Spanish School of Painting, Murillo was

…in the estimate of nearly every writer on the Spanish Schools, and of every public and private collector in Europe, the greatest painter Spain has produced. Compared to him there are three who may be preferred by those who are exclusive or peculiar in taste, or who object to the common nature of Murillo: these are Zurbaran, whose sympathies were in the cloister; Ribera, whose power of hand is as great as that of Tintoretto, whose sympathies were cruel; and Velazquez, who was essentially a portrait-painter. But Murillo was wider than either or all of them perhaps, and the beauty of his treatment, and mastery of his technique, has made him, in spite of a commonplace character and coarseness of mind that places him below the greatest of the Italian masters, the representative name in the art of Spain.7

Clumsy prose, but you get the idea. A decade later the New York merchant and connoisseur Charles Boyd Curtis, in a joint catalogue of the paintings of Velázquez and Murillo, noted with skepticism “the fashion now-a-days with a certain class, to exalt Velazquez and decry Murillo.” Defending conventional wisdom, he observed that “the best pictures of Murillo have sold, and will sell, for more than those of any artist except Raphael”—and this he considered conclusive evidence, for “in the long run a man passes for what he is worth… there is no test of merit so safe and decisive as success.”8 And he was convinced the status quo was stable: “Murillo has always possessed, as without doubt he always will possess, the public esteem.” I suppose we are just as sure about Velázquez today.

A few decades later what had for centuries gone down as sweet in just the right way—the street urchins, the Immaculate Conceptions, the Biblical scenes—now seemed cloying. Murillo paintings were everywhere, reproduced on wax plaques, cheap porcelain, gaudy postcards. In Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, published in 1915, the protagonist’s circle of young painters—or maybe they’re only yappers—disparage Murillo and his city as they compare artists and plot trips to Spain. “[Seville’s] facile charm can offer permanent entertainment only to an intelligence which is superficial… there is nothing but the obvious there; and it is all finger-marked and frayed. Murillo is its painter.”

Today his shares are back up a bit. Murillo is admired for his drawings; he has come to be seen as a cosmopolitan artist attentive to developments in other countries (as one might expect of a painter working in a port city that, though it was in precipitous decline throughout his life, even in its reduced state remained one of the principal cities of Europe); and some of his secular works have turned out to be maybe not so sweet, after all. What I want to propose is that it is possible not all of his religious works are sweet, either.

I didn’t go through the MFA’s European galleries in chronological order. When I found myself in front of Murillo’s Christ after the Flagellation, I had just been looking at Symbolist paintings, the big, famous Gauguin, an odd, semi-demonic creature by Odilon Redon, and a mysterious vision of a woman on a Scandinavian midsummer night by Edvard Munch. This is the kind of art the youths in Of Human Bondage probably would have liked had they been a little less provincial, if they had they been up on the latest Continental trends rather than a few decades behind.

Looking at this Christ—more bewildered than bloody, alone, silent, unaware of the angels looking on—I wondered if, by not overdoing it with the blood, by making a painting of confusion and loss rather than one of physical suffering, Murillo had not beaten the Symbolists at their own game.9

*

My first idea for writing about the MFA’s Dutch and Flemish art, a collection enriched in 2017 by two gifts from Boston-area collectors that together amounted to 114 paintings, was to focus on what the MFA has that the Met lacks—the examples I had in mind were two still lifes by Adriaen Coorte (to the Met’s zero), three church interiors by Pieter Jansz. Saenredam (again to the Met’s zero), and a landscape by Jacob van Ruisdael in which sheets of linen have been put in the sun for bleaching (both the MFA and the Met have Ruisdaels but only the MFA has one of the linen bleaching paintings). Unfortunately, both Coortes were off view, as was the Ruisdael and one of the Saenredams.10

I also considered writing about Aelbert Cuyp’s Orpheus Charming the Animals, together with a nineteenth-century American painting, Erastus Salisbury Field’s Garden of Eden. This would have continued the Orpheus theme from the cabinets with rhinos discussed above, and, both paintings being full of birds, also the ornithological theme from my first post about the MFA (the cockatoo painting, the print with sparrows, the bowl with pelicans). But then: while my penchant for writing on Substack about birds in paintings has in fact led to a forthcoming academic article, and while I am fond of both of these works, it is possible to overdo it with animal art.11

Since starting this newsletter I’ve mostly ignored works on paper. This is not because I don’t find them interesting (my dissertation was on prints), but rather because implicit in the name Permanent Collections is, if not a promise, then at least a hope, that if you go to a museum after reading about it here, most of what I wrote about will be on display. Since even small museums have thousands of works on paper, and larger ones have tens or hundreds of thousands, rotation is inevitable; even the standout works in a collection might only be up for a few months in the course of a decade. (Incidentally, it would be an interesting curatorial experiment for the Met to put everything else in storage for a year, and give the entire museum over to its Department of Drawings and Prints.)

So works on paper would seem to be out, but looking over the pictures I took in Boston another way to write about them occurred to me. Sometimes paintings are based on prints, and sometimes there are prints in paintings. A famous example of the latter is Caspar Netscher’s Lacemaker, at the Wallace Collection in London, in which a landscape print, signed and dated by the artist but likely based on a reproduction after Adam Elsheimer, is pinned to a wall beside which a woman is at work on a piece of lace. Or I should say, so as not to mislead, the painting is famous, but its fame is not based on the print on the wall, that’s just why it’s famous to me. I like the way it seems to let the viewer in on a secret: here is how prints were actually used.

I come across another such work at the MFA, the Butcher Shop of the Flemish artist David Teniers the Younger, painted in 1642 during the first half of the career of Teniers, the Antwerp half, before he moved to Brussels in 1650 to be court painter to Archduke Leopold Wilhelm, Governor General of the Spanish Netherlands. Today Teniers is probably best known for genre paintings, which he made throughout his career, but he is also a key figure in the history of reproductions of artworks, thanks to his Theatrum pictorium, an illustrated catalogue of 243 Italian paintings in the Archduke’s collection that was published in 1660. It was the first such catalogue. To help the dozen engravers who worked on the project, Teniers made a reduced version (modello) of each painting. Three and a half centuries later, those of the modelli that survive are dispersed. Most of the Archduke’s paintings, however, remain together—they’ve been in Vienna since the Archduke left Brussels in 1656, and are now at the Kunsthistorisches Museum.

Anyway, the Butcher Shop—no one writing about this painting has paid much attention to the sheet of paper on the right wall, depicting a figure in a hat holding a glass and dated 1642. Understandable, given how much else there is to take in. First, there’s the carcass of an ox, hanging from a beam suspended from the ceiling, dripping blood into a bowl, which—sorry—a dog laps up. The creature’s head and pelt (complete with horns) are nearby on the left, and the tongue is pinned to the adjacent wall. To the right, to use the words of the catalogue prepared for the painting’s sale in Paris in 1880, “une jeune et jolie fille débite les poumons et le foie d'un bœuf gigantesque” (“a young and pretty girl carves up the lungs and liver of a gigantic ox”). Still more: a man (the butcher?) and a woman stand by a fireplace in the background, another man walks out the door, a duck hangs upside down from the ceiling, there is a sieve affixed to the wall by the tongue.

And then what to make of the white cloth that hangs from a rod that holds open the carcass? The rod itself is easily explained. To quote a scholar writing about the one in Rembrandt’s Slaughtered Ox, it “widens the cavity to cool the animal down and allows the butcher to pull out the viscera.”12 But there is no cloth hanging on the rod that pries open Rembrandt’s ox’s, and the cloth in the Teniers painting goes unmentioned in the descriptions I found.

The best of the descriptions, from the catalogue of the MFA’s 1993 “Age of Rubens” exhibition, links the slaughtering of oxen to the virtue of prudence and month of November, November being a sensible time to store up meat. There may also be a connection to the fatted calf in the parable of the Prodigal Son. As for the sheet of paper, the same catalogue entry describes it as “a bust-length drawing of a peasant holding a glass.” I don’t know, though, why it should be thought of as a drawing rather than a print, since prints were likelier decorations for such premises.

In any event, the sheet on the wall may not be as interesting as I hoped. Looking at more paintings by Teniers, I found that he had a habit of putting such sheets on walls (see here, here and here), and he never did it with the kind of specificity apparent in Netscher’s Lacemaker, or for that matter with the specificity of his ox carcass. Rather than investigating the interior decorating preferences of seventeenth century Flemish butchers, as I had hoped, I seem to have written about one more animal painting, after all.

*

My choice of a second print-related work also turned out to be not as print-related as I had thought. It is a portrayal by Rubens of Mulay Ahmad, who in the mid-sixteenth century was the king of Tunis (more properly: caliph of the Hafsid Sultanate). Mulay Ahmad’s father, Mulay Hasan, was driven out of Tunis in 1534 by the Ottoman-sponsored corsair Barbarossa. Hasan, in exile in Spain, appealed to Charles V, who was persuaded not only to launch an invasion to reinstall Hasan, but to command it himself. In May 1535 over two hundred Spanish, Portuguese and Genoese ships carrying thousands of soldiers set off for Tunis from Barcelona.

Tunis was conquered, and Hasan returned to power; meanwhile the Flemish artist Jan Cornelisz. Vermeyen, brought along to document the expedition, made drawings. These have been lost, but about a decade after the victory Charles V asked Vermeyen to design a commemorative tapestry set. The resulting dozen tapestries, woven in Brussels by the Pannemaeker workshop, set a new standard for royal propaganda.

In addition to the tapestries and the lost drawings, Vermeyen made a few prints related to Tunis, including a portrait of Mulay Ahmad and a scene of Mulay Hasan dining with his retinue by candlelight. I had long assumed, hence my decision to write about it here, that Rubens based his painting on the print. No—Rubens’s source was not the print, but a lost painting by Vermeyen. There is evidence for the existence of such a painting (and also one of Mulay Ahmad), but even without any evidence its existence could be guessed at, since the Rubens painting reverses the print—and if Rubens had been working from the print, there would have been no reason to reverse it.

Rubens held on to Mulay Ahmad as a tronie, or stock character, to insert in other works. The figure appears, for example, in an Adoration of the Magi Rubens painted for Mechelen Cathedral around 1617. It’s easy to understand why he liked the painting, Ahmad ready with his sword, eyes askance, Carthaginian ruins in the background—but don’t you prefer the print, so much more sharply defined, and inscribed in Latin and Arabic?13 And wouldn’t it be splendid if there were an impression of it for the MFA to hang next to the painting? Sad to say, it’s such a rare print that there may not be one floating around. I found only two in museums, the one at the Albertina illustrated here and a second in Rotterdam. Still, if another turns up on the market, I defy you to think of a better use of a hundred thousand dollars (a different but comparably scarce Vermeyen print went for £52,500 in 2015) than to buy it and either donate or make an anonymous or not-so-anonymous loan.

*

In June 1774 John Singleton Copley, thirty-five years old, left Massachusetts for good, settling in London the following year after a Continental tour. As he worked well into his seventies, his British career was longer than his American one, but in the long run London has proved indifferent to Copley. There is no painting of his at the National Gallery, not even in storage, and of the Tate Britain’s five Copleys just one is presently on view. Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the Met displays nine Copleys, the National Gallery of Art eleven and the MFA thirty-three—and I’m not counting the miniatures. Of course we need him for our eighteenth century more than they do for theirs. They have Reynolds, Gainsborough, and the rest.

We have Copley’s colonial-era paintings in our museums, and as there has been a long, steady flow of his later work to North America, we have many of his London paintings, too.14 “No present could have been more acceptable,” wrote Abigail Adams to her son John Quincy in 1797, upon receiving the Copley portrait Adams sat for during his tenure as United States Minister to the Netherlands. And then there is the famous Watson and the Shark, which hung in a London hospital until the National Gallery of Art bought it in 1963.15

My favorite of the Copleys at the MFA is neither a colonial nor a London painting. Soon after arriving in Europe in 1774 Copley met, in Florence, the Charleston merchant and planter Ralph Izard and his wife Alice (née De Lancey, from the family that gave its name to the street in Lower Manhattan). There’s a lecture from 2011, I chanced to hear part of it late at night on C-SPAN radio at some point, in which David McCullough speaks of the fellowship Americans can feel when they meet abroad.

Now when we travel abroad, and we've almost all of us had this experience, and you run into another American or some other Americans, you very often strike up a friendship that's different from otherwise would have happened. There's something about being away from the home and the homeland that when you see someone else, you bond pretty quickly.16

This must have been the story of Copley and the Izards. In January 1775 the three traveled together to Naples, where they visited (and it has been suggested that they were the first Americans to do so) Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Paestum. Then, after they moved on to Rome, Copley painted for the couple a souvenir of their trip, a large canvas in which the Izards are seated at a porphyry table. Behind them is a sculptural group that has been identified as a reduced copy of a sculpture of Orestes and Electra that is now at the Palazzo Massimo, and Ralph holds in one hand a drawing of the group, presumably his own. There’s also a Greek vase, a green marble column, the Colosseum in the distance, and a dozen other references to the Izards’ (and, implicitly, Copley’s) taste and connoisseurship.

Copley had not finished the painting when the Izards left Rome to return to London, where they had been living prior to their trip to the Continent. By the time he brought it there later in the year Lexington and Concord had happened and Ralph Izard’s circumstances had changed. He had been the richest man in Charleston, and the only one to own property in London; now the remittances stopped arriving, and, unable to book a passage back across the Atlantic, he sold his house on Berners Street in London’s West End and moved with his wife and their two daughters, first to a suburb, where a son was born, and then, in 1777, to France, where he hoped for an appointment receiving American rice. The Continental Congress instructed him to go to Florence instead, where it was hoped he would be able to procure a loan from the Grand Duke of Tuscany. This loan seeming an unlikely prospect, he remained in Paris to feud with Benjamin Franklin over the provision for molasses duties in the trade agreement then being negotiated with France.

Izard crossed the Atlantic in 1780, leaving his wife and children in Paris; they finally joined him in Charleston in 1783. By then he had been involved in the war for independence for the better part of a decade; his time sightseeing with Copley must have seemed like a memory from another life. Even after his finances were back in order he may have been too busy to try to get his painting. He represented South Carolina in the Congress of the Confederation, and then in the First United States Congress, as senator. It would be fair to say he was a figure in the early history of the republic. A minor figure, but also the only one to have been depicted as a cultivated man of leisure on a Grand Tour, sitting with his wife in view of the Colosseum.

It probably suited Copley that the Izards never took possession of the painting. He exhibited it at the Royal Academy in 1776, and he likely kept it on view in his studio thereafter as an advertisement of his skill in portraiture. It was still there when Copley died in 1815; a decade later, in 1824, his widow sold it to Ralph Izard’s grandson, Charles Izard Manigault. The painting was at last brought to Charleston, where it remained until 1903, when, four years after the death of Charles’s son, Dr. Gabriel Edward Manigault, the MFA purchased it from his estate for $7,250.17

While looking at Copley’s painting of the Izards in Boston I was reminded of another Grand Tour souvenir I saw a few years ago, at the Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston. And for good reason, it turns out. The Charleston painting, done in Rome in 1831 by Ferdinando Cavalleri, depicts the family of Charles Izard Manigault, the same Charles Izard Manigault who retrieved Copley’s painting of his grandparents from London!

It is tempting, from here, to use the two paintings to open a discussion of the differences between the Grand Tour of the eighteenth century and that of the nineteenth, but no—let that wait for the catalogue of the exhibition that brings these two works together, which I am now determined to make happen (someday). Another possible topic for the catalogue: I would like to find out how Copley and the Izards got along in London between the time of Copley’s arrival there with the painting in the second half of 1775 and the Izards’ departure for France in 1777. Could they have remained as close as they had been in Italy? Or did they quarrel about the war? This I doubt—Copley had married into a Loyalist family, but he was not a strong partisan himself, and as for Izard, he was less a republican than a man a who had property in South Carolina. Could Copley have snubbed the Izards when they ran out of money? If, as seems to have been the case, Ralph Izard never tried to get the painting, not even after he had more or less regained his old prosperity after 1790, might that be interpreted as a sign of bad feelings between the two men?

*

All this about Copley and the Izards is fascinating, and it’s true that the painting was my favorite of the Copleys I saw at the MFA, but how much is that saying? I doubt anyone has ever been hospitalized with a case of John Singleton Copley-induced Stendhal Syndrome. If I were to make a Venn Diagram with circles for artworks I find interesting and artworks I love, the Copley, like much of what I write about on Substack, would be in the first circle but not the second. There are also cases of overlap, artworks I love and want to learn about, or else artworks I grow to love through learning about them, but I wonder if there are any I prefer to love in ignorance. I’m tempted to say that Dana Smith’s New Hampshire Panorama belongs to the last category. I feel no scholarly compulsion here, but then there’s no way to be sure, since all I found out about Smith was this:

Very little is known about Dana Smith, the supposed painter of the National Gallery's painting Southern Resort Town (1971.83.11) and New Hampshire Panorama (also a Garbisch gift, to the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston). According to the Garbisch records, he was born in New Hampshire in 1805, lived in Franklin where he painted local scenes and died in 1901, but no trace of him has been found in Franklin genealogical sources. The origin of the Smith attributions is unknown.18

Perhaps there never was such an artist? No matter; it is a painting to get lost in.

Part 4: What I missed at the MFA

On December 15, 2021 I went to Boston for the day to see the Poesie, the series of mythological paintings, that Titian made for Philip II of Spain. They had been brought together at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum for “Titian: Women, Myth & Power.” Pretentious, but never mind, to get worked up over exhibition titles is no way to live, better to be glad to have seen the paintings in one place—the room shimmers in my memory, all that lush color on one of the darkest days of the year. After seeing the Titians and having lunch at the Gardner I walked over to the MFA and came across Running before the Storm, a painting from about 1870 by an unknown American artist. The label explained that it was based on a print by John Sartain. I wondered who that was, and what the print was like, but never got around to checking.

This time, in 2025, Running before the Storm was not on view. I was surprised—who could put such a painting in storage? But someone did. Luckily I have my pictures from 2021.

Why isn’t this painting known far and wide? The pair of prancing horses, the man’s hat seized by a gust, the laundry flapping on the line, the bolts of lightning—is this not the real thing? Has any artist ever come closer to the spirit of the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Pastorale?

The original for the painting (and after my failures with Teniers and Rubens to connect the two media, here is a painting that does have a print-original) ran in a book by Herbert W. Morris, Work-Days of God, or, Science and the Bible. This book, published in Philadelphia in 1877, is pretty much what you’d expect from the title. As Morris writes in his preface:

Two great Volumes have been laid before man for his instruction, and from which his ideas and science all have been derived—the material Works, and the inspired Word of God. These being the productions of the same wise and unchangeable Author, the harmony subsisting between them is universal and complete. Both have for their end the manifestation of the invisible Deity. While in the Bible we have a verbal revelation of the wisdom and power and goodness of God, in material Nature we have a pictorial revelation of the same…

Sartain’s print, Thunderstorm, illustrates a chapter on electricity. Morris again:

It is when the volleys of the bursting cloud cleave the firmament, and the thunders of the discharge are pealing their dreadful notes above our heads, that the chemical combinations of the noxious exhalations arising from decaying animal and vegetable substances, are effected, and the elements, fitted for the purposes of animal health and vegetable growth, are formed and brought to the ground in the heavy rains which usually attend these storms. It is by these convulsions that the atmosphere regains its balance, and renews its salubrity. Thus Science unites with Revelation in teaching us, that our Father in heaven is no less loving and kind in launching forth the “winged bolt,” than in sending down the gentle sunbeam.

Fine. But the print is a bit of a letdown. The man’s hat is still on his head. There is no laundry line in the yard. The wind blows, but maybe not with the same intensity as it does in the painting, where every branch seems stretched almost to breaking point.

As for Sartain, he was an English-born printmaker who had a long and successful career in Philadelphia. He was a friend of Edgar Allen Poe (Annabel Lee was first published in the short-lived Sartain’s Union Magazine) and the author of a late memoir, The Reminiscences of a Very Old Man, 1808–1897. Sartain’s Wikipedia entry claims that this work is “of unusual interest.” Maybe it’s even true. Here’s Sartain on the death of Poe:

The accepted statement that Poe died in a drunken debauch is attested by Dr. Moran to be a calumny. He died from a chill caused by exposure during the night under a cold October sky, clad only in the old thin bombazine coat and trousers which had been substituted for his own warm clothing.19

I decline to adjudicate, but I’m glad to learn the word bombazine. It’s a dense weave, often of silk or wool combined with cotton.

*

Another work off view at the MFA is Saint Jerome, by the Venetian artist Jacopo da Valenza. The painting is distinctive for the rocky bridgescape(?) that extends into the sky behind the meditating saint. This is not something I saw on a previous visit. I know about it because it was the subject of a talk at the conference I was in Boston for, given by Gianmarco Russo of the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa. Russo identified a few possible influences for this strange vision, including Vittore Carpaccio’s Virgin and Child with Four Saints at the Musée du Petit Palais in Avignon. May his talk inspire the museum to take Jacopo out of storage, or even to organize an exhibition of landscape in Venetian painting.

*

I always assumed the vases that flank the painting in the image below were Chinese, but I’ve just looked them up and found that they’re actually Japanese (links: left vase; right vase). They are the same vases that appear in the painting that normally hangs between them, John Singer Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit, a work that has been called “the American Las Meninas.”

The painting was not on view in March because it was in New York, or on its way there, for the Sargent exhibition at the Met. In its place hung a similarly sized and almost contemporary painting by Édouard Manet, the Execution of the Emperor Maximilian. An odd juxtaposition, the vases and the firing squad, but I can think of a few points in favor of it beyond the practical ones of size and date. Both the Sargent and the Manet owe a debt to a Spanish painting—in the latter case it’s not Velázquez, but Goya’s Third of May 1808. And then, Sargent was American (Florence-born, but still), and this is a gallery for American art, but might a European painting of an event in Mexico be granted temporary American status? Well, why not?

To conclude. At the beginning of last month’s post I wondered where in the hierarchy of American museums the MFA belonged. I proposed that five of our museums—the Met, MoMA, the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Getty— were “self-evidently magnificent”; I wasn’t sure if the MFA could be said to be in the same group. Now, almost fifteen thousand words later, I have two thoughts. One: as an encyclopedic museum, the MFA is second only to the Met.20 Two: the MFA could use a few more galleries, especially for Japanese and Dutch art.

As if its hours had been arranged to satisfy this desire, the Museum of Fine Arts is open until ten, not just on Thursday evenings, but on Friday evenings, too. So I knew that I could dawdle as much as I liked in the non-Western galleries on my first visit, because there could also be a second one. Maybe I would be more in the mood for the Renaissance and its successor centuries then.

And that’s how it went. As well as an afternoon there in December 2021 I have now had two full evenings at the museum, enough time to wonder if the MFA should be a little more cherished than it is. It drew just under a million visitors in 2024. Meanwhile the numbers for the Met and the National Gallery of Art were, respectively, 5.3 and 3.9 million. MoMA had 2.7 million, and then the Getty and the Art Institute of Chicago 1.3 million each.1

It may in part be that no one likes to visit Boston. I suppose it must be pleasant in the summer, but I’ve only ever been in weather that was drab or worse. It’s out of the way in the corner of the country. It’s expensive; the food is mediocre; the locals are sullen. You go there if you have to. On top of this, the other museums I mentioned are, in one way or another, self-evidently magnificent. Isn’t the public right to prefer the Met, the National Gallery, MoMA, the Getty, and the AIC? Aren’t these our world-class institutions, and isn’t the MFA a shade below that standard? Let’s see.

*

Apart from the ancient grave goods, Asian art, in American museums, tends to be displayed in rotations. The obvious reason for this is sensitivity to light, but it’s also the case that the collections are vast, and compared to other departments exhibition space is limited. Even with two large galleries closed for renovation, the MFA has a quarter of its 1,460 pre-World War II European paintings on view, and the numbers for American paintings are similar. In both cases you can count on being able to see the most famous works whenever you visit, unless they’re on loan or undergoing conservation treatment.

The situation for Asian art is very different. Again using 1939 as the cutoff, out of the MFA’s 5,511 Asian paintings, just 46 are currently up. That’s under one percent. The museum thus has no way to give the casual visitor a sense of the depth of its holdings. In the case of Japanese art, the collection is considered the finest outside of Japan, but you probably wouldn’t know it from the five Japanese galleries.

This means you could probably go once or twice a year for the rest of your life and rarely or never see the same works; whether that’s a positive or a negative thing depends on what you want from a museum. I like the idea that whenever I return to Boston I’ll find something new here, but I hate the thought of not getting another look at the white cockatoo painted by Itō Jakuchū (1716–1800).

It turns out that Jakuchū—I had not heard of him—is one of the best-known and loved of Japanese artists. In 2011, to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of the city of Tokyo’s gift of cherry trees for Washington, DC’s Tidal Basin, the thirty hanging scrolls that form his series, Colorful Realm of Living Beings, was sent from the Museum of the Imperial Collections in Tokyo to the National Gallery of Art.

Now I know: Jakuchū, who grew up in the market district of Kyoto, the son of a grocer, was the greatest painter of chickens ever to walk the earth. According to the epitaph written by the Buddhist monk Baisō Kenjō (1719–1801), Jakuchū, when a young man contemplating his future as an artist, thought to himself:

“…the figures of Chinese antiquity are no longer. And I could not possibly bear to depict Japanese figure subjects. As far as scenery that can actually be seen, I have never encountered anything worthy of depiction. Only flora and fauna are left. However, it is not as if one can regularly observe peacocks, kingfishers, cockatoos, or pheasants. Chickens, on the other hand, are raised in the villages, and the color of their plumage is beautiful. I will begin with them.” Henceforth Jakuchū raised dozens of chickens in his own yard and spent several years observing their forms and sketching them from life. Afterward he expanded [his subjects] to all manner of grasses and trees, birds and beasts, fish and insects, exploring to the fullest their formal appearance and inner essence, until his brush moved as his heart commanded.2

Looking at the works that comprise the Colorful Realm—its fish, insects and reptiles, pheasants in snow, sparrows and millet, maples and songbirds, roses and songbirds, and peonies and songbirds, the claim that he found the inner essence of his subjects seems just. Not for Jakuchū the taxidermical poses of John James Audubon or the clinical touch of Albrecht Dürer. Those artists studied animals; Jakuchū got to know them.

Unlike the fauna of the Colorful Realm, this bird is a pet. Native to Eastern Indonesia, white cockatoos had a long history in East Asia as cherished exotics. Even during the centuries when Japan was nearly closed to the world, the occasional cockatoo was brought to Nagasaki. Jakuchū seems to have been the first artist to paint them regularly. And he worked fast. The Confucian scholar Minagawa Kien wrote in a poem that Jakuchū obliged in a single day his request for a cockatoo painting. Kien was pleased with the result: “the white of the wings is so bright that they seem about to move. There is divinity contained in it, which shines through from the back.”3

So perhaps my initial worry was misplaced, maybe the Cockatoo is among those works in the MFA’s collection that are brought out more than once in a while, and I’ll see it again. It seems less likely that I’ll have a second encounter with Ichiyusai Kuniyoshi’s Yūgao: Yazama's Wife Orie. The MFA has 45,000 Japanese prints, of which 3,000 are by Kuniyoshi, a nineteenth century painter and printmaker whose name, like Jakuchū’s, I didn’t know. Should I have known? Maybe, but I’m suspicious of the concept; who is to say what anyone should know? In any case, I’m glad to know now, and also glad to have discovered the Kuniyoshi Project, a website of appealingly archaic design devoted to cataloguing his prints.

The Yūgao image is part of a series inspired by Lady Murasaki Shikibu’s eleventh century novel, The Tale of Genji. In the mid-1840s Kuniyoshi made a print for each of the novel’s fifty-four chapters. Rather than portraying events from the novel, Kuniyoshi found scenes from later centuries that parallel or parody its action. Yūgao (‘The Lady of the Evening Faces’) is the title of the fourth chapter, in which Prince Genji, on his way to visit his former nurse, meets an elegant, mysterious woman who lives in a dilapidated house surrounded by moon-flowers. They arrange an assignation at a rural palace, where the woman dies suddenly, victim of an attack by the spirit of one of Genji’s former lovers.

Kuniyoshi’s ‘evening face’ is Orie, the estranged wife of Yazama, who was one of forty-seven samurai whose master was forced to commit seppuku in April 1701 after he assaulted a court official who had insulted him. The forty-seven, now lordless samurai, or rōnin, avenged the honor of their master by killing the official, or rather forty-six of them did, as one was sent as a messenger to report the deed. There was little tolerance for vengeance killings in Edo Japan, so the men expected to be put to death, but an upsurge of popular support persuaded authorities to permit the forty-six (the messenger was spared) to die instead by seppuku, which they did on March 20, 1703. Within weeks, the events became the subject of a Kabuki play, and ever since have remained a favorite subject in Japanese drama and visual arts.

During the interval between the seppuku of the master and the revenge of the forty-seven rōnin, Orie worked as a prostitute. In Kuniyoshi’s print she is seen walking the street on a snowy night, accompanied by a large dog and holding a rolled-up straw mat. Half a dozen tree sparrows are flying around her, in poses that remind me of Giotto’s somersaulting angels in the Scrovegni Chapel. Above is a scroll with a moonflower and a poem.

By coming closer
Might you see, indeed, what face
That flower may have,
Whom in the glimmering of dusk
You glimpsed so faintly faint4

Buyers of the print would have known from a Kabuki play, The Loyal Samurai, that Orie is about to have a chance encounter with her husband, which both of them will recognize as their last. But what does this Orie have to do with the mysterious woman in the Tale of Genji? If you don’t quite get it, you aren’t alone. According to the catalogue of an exhibition of Genji-related art held at the Met in 2019, Kuniyoshi excelled at creating such puzzles—“a bit of cogitation will allow connections, however tenuous, to be made.”5

*

Both of these works, the painting and the print, came to the MFA from the collection of William Sturgis Bigelow (1850–1926), the son of Harvard surgery professor Henry Jacob Bigelow. The younger Bigelow started out on his father’s path. After receiving a degree in medicine in 1874 he went to Paris to continue his studies, but quit them when his father opposed his ambition to pursue a career in bacteriology rather than surgery. Back in Boston, Bigelow attended lectures by Edward Sylvester Morse, a zoologist who had taken an interest in Japanese archaeology when visiting the country to research brachiopods. Morse’s lectures seem to have been a cultural coup de foudre for the young medical dropout. Bigelow accompanied Morse to Japan in 1882 and stayed there for seven years. Following his repatriation in 1889 he donated more than 75,000 works of Japanese art to the MFA. An early Western convert to Buddhism, he was said to have “returned to Boston, full of Buddhist lore, believing he had been aware of his former incarnations.”6 He later sought, by formulating a concept of spiritual evolution, to reconcile Buddhist teachings with the theory of natural selection.7

Bigelow was also a great misogynist. Women were forbidden from visiting his summer retreat on the island of Tuckernuck, next to Nantucket. There was swimming, there was tennis, and there was a well-stocked library, where he would hold court in his kimono for the male luminaries of New England. The main attraction, though, was nudity, which was encouraged (except during dinner). As Senator Henry Cabot Lodge wrote, looking forward to a visit, “Surf, Sir! And sun, Sir! And Nakedness! Oh Lord, how I want to get my clothes off!” Meanwhile Edith Wharton, forbidden from setting foot on this Fire Island avant la lettre, noted of Bigelow that “his erudition far exceeded his mental capacity.”8

*

If I hadn’t known how rich the MFA’s collection of Japanese art is, I would have thought it inferior to the Chinese collection, which is displayed in a somewhat larger series of galleries nearby. On reflection, the main reasons the latter galleries seem more impressive are (i) Japan lacks stone for sculpture; and (ii) Chinese art history starts earlier than Japanese art history. The earliest Japanese work presently on display is a Bodhisattva in cypress from the eighth or ninth century. Several galleries of Chinese art, much of it on a grand scale, predate this.

Objects in these galleries have labels, but not much in the way of wall texts, and I am sorry to report that the MFA’s website is not one of the best I’ve spent time with. Many entries lack a catalogue essay, bibliography and exhibition history; some even lack images or provenance. But then, must I prattle on about every object I post a picture of? Maybe not. So I’ll only say two things about the five works below, all of which are from the early Chinese galleries.

• Out of the five, only one had a label with text: the tapir-shaped bronze wine vessel (zun) with gold, silver and turquoise inlay tapir. I learned that bronze tapirs have been treasured in China for a millennium, and that the Qianlong Emperor, renowned for his connoisseurship, owned ten such works. The one in the picture does not belong to the MFA, but is on loan from a private collection.

• The wall panel relief of a palace lady is one of a pair sold to the museum by C. T. Loo, the legendary (to some, infamous) dealer I wrote about last summer in my discussion of two Tang dynasty horse reliefs at the Penn Museum.

I included the seventh century bullock cart because there are more such carts in a twelfth century painting in an adjacent gallery, Zhu Rui’s Bullock Carts Traveling over Rivers and Mountains. Chinese paintings in museums are difficult to photograph; getting all of this one—it’s forty inches tall by twenty inches wide—into a single picture taken with my phone was out of the question, but the detail below, of a cart pulled by three bullocks (oxen) making a treacherous river crossing, came out with only a few flashes of glare. To get a sense of the painting’s scale you should probably go to Boston, but its precision and misty atmosphere are evident here, though you may have to squint to make out the man holding one of the cart’s wheels to guide it.

Bullock cart paintings, known as panche tu, were a genre in the Northern Song dynasty, a time when the transport of grain from the south over mountainous terrain to outposts on the northern and northwestern frontiers was vital for national security. Some panche tu paintings are inscribed with verses, such as the ones added to another such work around 1500 by the Ming dynasty poet Liu Ji.

[Bullock carts] go up and down hills, a thousand times a day; [they] never leave the side of Taihang Mountain.
The carts are fully loaded with the salt of Wu and grain of Shu [provinces]; the healthy oxen are strong.
Merchants value their goods and profits and are not afraid or tigers; feeding their oxen and sleeping alongside their carts night after night.9

Zhu Rui is a transitional figure; it is unclear whether Bullock Carts Traveling over Rivers and Mountains belongs to the Northern or Southern Song dynasty. The distinction is both confusing and important. The confusion results from the fact that the dynasties are successive as well geographically distinct. The Song dynasty (960–1279), is divided into two periods, with the break at 1127 when the Jurchens, a Manchurian people, invaded and incorporated into their own Jin dynasty the northern Song lands, including the capital, Bianjing (now Kaifeng). ‘Northern Song’ could also be called ‘Early Song,’ since it refers to the period prior to the Jurchen invasion. ‘Southern Song’ could be ‘Later Song,’ because it cover the years from the Song court’s retreat south to Lin’an (now Hangzhou) in 1127 to the Mongol conquest of 1279.

If the painting dates to the Northern Song dynasty, that is, if Zhu painted it before 1127, it depicts a moment when grain transports were of the utmost significance. Without grain, garrison soldiers would not be able to keep the Jurchens at bay. On the other hand, if the painting was made after 1127, it is a melancholy tribute to an effort that ultimately failed.

*

Until it came to the MFA in 2011, the largest classical sculpture in the United States, a colossal marble muse with the head of Juno, thirteen feet tall and weighing seven tons, was in private hands, on the grounds of the Brandegee Estate in Brookline, Massachusetts, just outside Boston. In 1897 Mary Pratt Sprague (later Mary Pratt Brandegee) bought the work from the Ludovisi family of Rome, who had possessed it since at least 1633, the first year it turns up in a Ludovisi inventory (“Una statua colosea due volte del naturale…”). It was sometime in those days—pre-romantic antiquarians being oblivious to the allure of headless statues—that to the body, now thought to have been part of a set of nine muses commissioned for the Theater of Pompey around 32 BC by the future Emperor Augustus, was added a head of the goddess Juno, dating to a century or two later and made of a different type of marble.

In its Ludovisi days the statue was installed at the end of a path on the grounds of the family palace. Archival photographs illustrating an excellent 2013 blog post on the Archivio Digitale Boncompagni Ludovisi suggest its place was a prominent one, but the Ludovisi property may have been too large for anything to stand out. Nathaniel Hawthorne, at least, failed to take special note of it when when he visited on March 26, 1858.

…[we] wandered among the grounds, threading interminable alleys of cypress, through the long vistas of which we could see here and there a statue, an urn, a pillar, a temple, or garden-house, or a bas-relief against the wall.10

Nor was much made of the Juno-muse after its arrival in Massachusetts. The American archaeologist Richard Norton, who helped to arrange the sale, expected the work’s fame to spread, but the opposite happened—it disappeared into the Brandegee Estate. It seems there is no published photograph of it from the more than a century it was there. And even now, although it towers in its gallery, I doubt anyone would consider it the room’s most interesting object. A more likely choice for that honor might be the so-called Boston Throne, a relief sculpture one of whose three sides is visible on the left in the above picture.

It is thought (by some) that the Boston Throne is Greek rather than Roman, and that it dates to the Classical period of the fifth century BC. It may originally have been a decorative screen for an altar in one of the Greek colonies of Southern Italy. If so, it was later taken to Rome, and dug up in 1894.

In the central relief a winged male figure, standing in the nude, is flanked by two seated women, one weeping and the other pleased. The three are tentatively identified as (left to right) Aphrodite, Eros, and, thanks to the pomegranate at far lower right, either Demeter or Persephone. Cuts in the marble indicate the absence of what once completed the work, a metal scale held in the right hand of Eros. It weighed two men who are seen, their hands bound, in narrow, pyramidal reliefs adjacent to the legs of the goddesses. The one on Aphrodite’s side is the heavier of the two. A persuasive interpretation of the scene has eluded scholars, as evidenced by the conflicting stories told in the wall text and on the museum’s website. According to the wall text, Aphrodite and Persephone are engaged in a contest for Adonis, whereas the website proposes that Aphrodite looks on as Demeter learns that her daughter is fated to spend part of each year in Hades. Another theory: the women are not goddesses at all, but rather two wives, only one of whose husbands will return home (but if that were the subject, the heavier side of the scale should provoke mourning, not the lighter side).

Nor is there consensus that the work belongs to the Greek Classical period. It has also been thought to be Roman copy of a Greek original, or else, as the Norwegian scholar Siri Sande argued in 2017, a nineteenth century forgery. “Hardly a feature,” she observes, “has been free from attack.”11

Unequipped with a connoisseurial scale that would allow me to weigh in on the question myself, I will only note the MFA’s adherence to a principle I have also observed in other museums—the principle of declining to acknowledge, either on wall label or website entry, scholarly doubts about a work’s authenticity.

*

The Met is generally considered to have North America’s premier display of Egyptian art, but the MFA’s collection is bigger in terms of sheer number of objects, and the MFA also has what is probably our single most renowned Egyptian work, Menkaure and his Queen, excavated the Menkaure Valley Temple at Giza temple by a Harvard archaeological expedition in 1911 (the last and smallest of Giza’s three pyramids is Menkaure’s).

“It belongs in a museum”—I took to heart, when I was a boy, the words of Indiana Jones, but in Boston I found myself uninterested in this famous pair, and now I’m wondering if it might not be just as well to see them in a classroom, on a PowerPoint slide. From time to time over the course of a semester I tell my students that we are only looking at photographs on a screen, and that much is lost in the translation. Generally speaking, I believe it, but if it’s true, as it must be, that some works lose more than others, doesn’t it follow that some lose very little?

To be sure, it’s a splendid sculpture—the determined advance, the fixed gazes, the hard greywacke (6 to 7 on the Mohs scale) sculpted smooth, and all this belied by the queen’s gentle touch. But does seeing it in person make a difference? It didn’t for me, though of course it’s also true that of all the objects in the room, it was the only one I was familiar with. How much more interesting to discover another Menkaure from the same temple in Giza, or at least the lower third of him, in alabaster and seated on a throne with hieroglyphs. And nearby, on an adjacent wall, part of a relief from the tomb of a prince, in which a man on a boat is returning from a hunt in the marshes. He has two crates of ducks, caught with the assistance of a decoy heron. This bird, which would have been made of clay, is a reminder, in a room filled with objects made for tombs, that there was more to Ancient Egyptian art than what we can see in our museums. If we don’t have any decoy herons, it’s because they were used rather than buried.

*

Finally, a wooden bowl from the Lozi people of Zambia, on whose lid a man is seated behind six pelicans in two columns of three. He can’t be driving them, can he? An adult pelican weighs about twenty pounds. Could six of them pull a man in a boat? I think not. Still, they seem somehow to be in his charge. Looking around online, I confirmed the existence of pelicans in Zambia (though not their domestication); found more Lozi pelican objects at the British Museum, several bowls, a spoon, and a stool (none of these with a man, though); and learned that waterfowl decorate implements used by the wives of Lozi chiefs (the corresponding animal for a chief is the elephant).

As the MFA’s wall label mentions, Lewanika (1842–1916), King of Barotseland, as the Lozi lands were then known, was both an artist himself and a canny judge of what sort of objects appealed to Western visitors. In 1902 he traveled to London for the coronation of Edward VII (according to his New York Times obituary, which ran on February 16, 1916, he was “one of the most interesting guests”); he also toured England and Scotland. On his return he opened a “native curios store” on the Zambian side of Victoria Falls to sell objects made in the workshops he had set up in Barotseland. This, presumably, is the source of most Lozi art in museums today.

I wanted to write, just now, …to sell traditional objects made in the workshops he had set up… but it’s unclear how traditional any of this was at the time. As Karen E. Milbourne argued in a book chapter in 2013:

…the stereotype of one kingdom’s style appears to have been produced purposefully, in order to make a name for—or promote a vision of—Lewanika and his nation… Lewanika and his successors have, literally, crafted Lozi identity and exported it worldwide.12

ntriguing, but I hoped the word ‘pelican’ would appear in this text. It does not.

Next month: Part 2 on the MFA, European and American art

The fair spring weather and the luxuriant vegetation lent an air of grace and peace to the whole valley, which our stupid guide proceeded to ruin with his erudition, for he started telling us in great detail how, long ago, Hannibal had given battle here and what stupendous feats of valour had taken place on this very spot. I angrily rebuked him for such an odious evocation of defunct ghosts. It was bad enough, I said, that from time to time crops have to be trampled down, if not always by elephants, still by horses and men, but at least one need not shock the imagination out of its peaceful dreams by recalling scenes of savage violence from the past.

He was very astonished that I, on such a spot, should not want to hear anything about classical times, and, of course, I could not make him understand my objections to this mixing-up of the past and the present.

He must have thought me still more of an eccentric when he saw me searching for pebbles in the shoals which the river had left high and dry, especially when I pocketed several specimens. Again, I could not explain to him that the quickest way to get an idea of any mountainous region is to examine the types of rock fragments washed down by its streams, or that there was any point in studying rubble to get the idea of these eternal classical heights of the prehistoric earth.

My haul from the river turned out to be a rich one. I collected nearly forty specimens, though I must admit they could possibly all be classified under a few rubrics. The majority are probably some kind of jasper or chert or schist. Some were round and smooth, some shapeless rubble, some rhomboid in form and of many colours. There was no lack, either, of pebbles of shell-limestone.1

*

Apart from a few visits to the library at the Met for research, and a quick look at the new Caspar David Friedrich exhibition there, I haven’t had time for museums lately. I wasn’t sure I could come up with anything for this newsletter, and was on the verge of skipping February, but then I read the above passage in Goethe’s Italian Journey, in which he scolds his guide for talking about Hannibal at the wrong moment and collects rocks by a river.

As the passage suggests, Goethe had a keen interest in geology. Later in the same month, passing through Caltanissetta in Sicily’s interior, he finds pectinites in the town’s paving stones. In Catania he collects lava, hoping the specimens may help to settle a dispute then raging in Germany over the nature of basalt. He is also granted access to a princely collection of amber. “Sicilian amber,” he writes, is different from northern amber in that “it passes from the color of transparent or opaque wax or honey through all possible shades of yellow to a most beautiful hyacinthe red.”2 I could go on. There are the zeolites of Jaci, there’s the pyrite he finds on the way to Messina, and of course there’s Mount Etna itself.

So I thought, if he could do it, why shouldn’t I try the same, especially since the one museum I can always find a moment for, the only one I walk past several times a week, is the Rutgers Geology Museum, in New Brunswick, New Jersey. This, to be sure, is taking a few steps down from the Louvre, but in its way it’s a storied institution. Its founding in 1872 predates that of several other museums I’ve written about, and it remains in its original home on the second and third floors of Geological Hall, a handsome building of Connecticut brownstone located in Old Queens, the oldest part of the Rutgers campus.

It’s old-fashioned as well as storied. In an age when many natural history museums have embraced the latest technology, the absence of digital screens here is refreshing. While it is not the case that the museum hasn’t changed a bit since the below photograph was taken—the whale skeleton is gone, and the old trapezoidal cabinets have been removed—the general scheme of display is the same.

The whale, a North Atlantic right whale (Eubalaena glacialis), was found stranded in the Raritan River, just upstream from South Amboy, in May 1874. The incident is recounted in the Forest & Stream of June 4 of that year, with a long quote lifted from a story that ran in the New York Sun.

Many old fishermen, who by virtue of their calling were supposed to know all about whales, though none of them had ever seen one, cherished a pleasant fiction that the creature, being essentially a denizen of the briny ocean, getting accidentally into the river, had become blinded and bewildered with the unwonted effects of the fresh water, and moved on blindly to its fate without knowing where it was going to.

It is unclear to this twenty-first century reader what is pleasant about the fiction, but as a taste of Reconstruction-era journalese, with its cynical tone and superfluous adverbs, the passage is a treat. The Sun goes on to describe the whale’s unfortunate end.

The poor creature was shot with a rifle, hacked at with an ax, and at last killed with a harpoon.

Watching a lecture given by the museum’s director, Dr. Lauren Adamo, on the occasion of its fiftieth annual open house, I learned that whale bones are high in blubber content and rot unless treated. They are also heavy. Hang them from your ceiling at your peril. At some point Rutgers took the skeleton down; eventually it was given to Yale’s Peabody Museum. Today it is in the Boston Aquarium, though I’m not sure what remains of the original, the Ship of Theseus problem may apply here.

The other two big creatures in the 1896 photograph, the mastodon skeleton and the mounted crab on the far wall, are still at the museum. The latter, eleven feet from claw to claw, is a spider crab that the Japanese government sent to Rutgers as a token of appreciation. Quite a few Japanese attended the school in the nineteenth century, beginning in the late 1860s.3 As for the mastodon, a farmer dug it up in a New Jersey marl pit in 1869; George Cook, the founder of the museum, bought it for three hundred dollars.

But it would be contrary to the guiding spirit of the institution to devote too much space to these wonders. As William Valiant observed:

A museum adds dignity to a trifle; a pebble teaches the same lesson with the hundred ton boulder; the skeleton of a mouse occupies as much space in science as does the mastodon's huge frame.

Rutgers Museum is not a collection of freaks and curios, but a collection of scientific specimens, each one illustrating some important part of the sciences taught.

Valiant, born in Rome, New York in 1845, began hunting “stone trophies,” especially trilobites, at an early age. His formal education was limited—after losing his left arm in a mill accident at sixteen, he briefly attended school, but soon returned to the mill. He eventually began corresponding with trained geologists, and after making important trilobite discoveries in the early 1890s was offered the job of assistant curator at the Rutgers museum. Though he was later promoted to full curator, he never in his lifetime achieved the recognition he felt was his due. His disability and his lack of formal education left the choicest jobs, such as New Jersey State Geologist, out of reach. Today, however, he is credited with raising the museum’s standards of cataloguing and display. And how many of the state geologists of yesteryear ever get written up on Substack?4

*

By now I’ve been studying and teaching in New Jersey for the better part of a decade, but I still don’t know much about the state. American Pastoral taught me that Trenton has good water, and that this is important for two industries in particular, leather and beer. I’m sure I also picked up a few things from the Sopranos, but for the most part the New Jersey in my mind is as blank as the interior of Africa on a portolan chart.

No surprise, than, that prior to visiting the Rutgers Geology Museum I was unaware of the state’s mining history. Dutch settlers took an interest in New Jersey’s mineral deposits in the seventeenth century, and in the eighteenth, around the same time that Goethe toured Sicily, samples from Sterling Hill in the northwest of the state were sent for testing to Wales, where it was determined that the ore in question did not contain enough copper or iron to be smelted profitably.

Later examination revealed plentiful zinc, which among its other uses is a component of brass. Serious mining began at Sterling Hill in the 1830s, 1.15 billion years after the Grenville orogeny, the geologic event that brought the ore into being in the first place. When the operation closed in the 1980s there were thirty-five miles of tunnels reaching 2,675 feet below ground.

Many of the several hundred types of mineral in the deposits at Sterling Hill are rare; thirty-five have never been found elsewhere, apart from nearby Franklin. It was in Franklin, at the New Jersey Zinc Company, that George Rowe was mine captain for twenty-eight years. Rowe, born in 1868 in Cornwall, England, started his mining career at eleven, not when he was deemed old enough for shifts at the local copper mine, that could have happened earlier, but when his younger siblings (there were fifteen Rowes in all) were judged capable of taking over his duties in the family shop.

There were Cornish men working in mines throughout the United States, sending money back to their families in Cornwall; by the time Rowe was sixteen this group included some of his former colleagues. At eighteen it was his turn. He describes his departure in a memoir that was excerpted in Rocks & Minerals in 1986.

I purchased a carpet sack and got my belongings together, taking only the things I needed, as I planned to get more clothes when I arrived in America and could purchase a trunk to keep them in. The day set for leaving home was a time of sorrow and tears. We traveled the four miles to the railroad station with several of our friends and relatives. We took a train to Liverpool and said our final goodbyes. For some of us those goodbyes were truly final, as we never again saw those who waved from the platform.

Rowe spent his first twenty American years in Michigan, working in iron mines. He married the daughter of a coal dealer and started a family, before leaving for New Jersey and his new role as a mine captain in Franklin. Much of the memoir excerpt concerns the many changes in mining practices he observed in his long career, and the range of roles he held. He also takes pride in the public improvements he saw in Franklin, which included its first hospital and theater, a new school, and a Presbyterian church. He speaks disdainfully of the “labor agitators” who organized a strike, but in the paragraph after mentioning the strike he notes that the mine soon reduced the workday from ten to eight hours, without a proportional reduction in wages. The excerpt does not touch on the large mineral collection Rowe donated to the Rutgers museum in 1941, but in its final paragraph, speaking of the pleasures of retirement, he mentions his flowers.

I have some time to play in my flowers and watch the works of nature unfolding the handiwork of the Great Creator.

I’ve enjoyed learning about Valiant, the one-armed autodidact and trilobite hunter, and Rowe, the mine captain from Cornwall. They remind me of art collectors, and there may be an interesting analogy here. If Etta Cone is to the paintings of Henri Matisse as William Valiant is to trilobites, the acquisitive passions that drove Cone and Valiant may be compared. But can one also compare the creative urge that made Matisse paint to the fossilization of a Paleozoic arthropod? What does a Matisse have to do with a trilobite?

Maybe a lot, if the trilobite is the handiwork of the Great Creator. This, in fact, is the reasoning Baldassare Castiglione uses to explain why one should love art in his Book of the Courtier, published in 1528.

And truly he who does not esteem this art, seems to me very unreasonable; for this universal fabric that we see,—with the vast heaven so richly adorned with shining stars, and in the midst the earth girdled by the seas, varied with mountains, valleys and rivers, and bedecked with so many divers trees, beautiful flowers and grasses,—may be said to be a great and noble picture, composed by the hand of nature and of God; and whoever is able to imitate it, seems to me deserving of great praise: nor can it be imitated without knowledge of many things, as he knows well who tries.5

For a Renaissance Christian like Castiglione, the trilobite, like all of nature, is part of Gods’s “great and noble picture.” Matisse’s merit as an artist derives from his ability to imitate that picture.

This was not quite how Goethe saw things. Goethe never mentions a Creator, and he discriminates—his nature is one that at times may be improved on by a painter, and one in which some hills are devoid of mineralogical significance. Still, there is a reverence in his desire to observe and understand that seems inherited from the age of Castiglione. The division of the Renaissance cabinet of curiosities into the natural history museum and the art museum was well underway by the 1770s, but not for Goethe, at least to judge from his assessment of the Jesuit church in Messina.

My knowledge of the various substances out of which this splendour was composed helped me to discover that the so-called lapis lazuli was only calcara, but of a beautiful color I had not seen before, and assembled with superb skill.6

By now the division is complete. Fossils belong on the other side of Central Park, or down the Mall, or across the Maria-Theresien-Platz, in museums that are more for kids than adults. If you see a fossil in an art museum these days, you can be sure its label will explain that once upon a time there were cabinets of curiosities.

Not that the cultivated adults of the twenty-first century don’t revere nature, many do, but they are not so curious about it. A vague awareness of concepts like geologic time and natural selection is held to be sufficient; anything more than that is for specialists. One would be startled to find, in the letters page of the London Review of Books, an author’s barbed response to a critic’s condescending review of the latest work on basalt.7

So if I, visiting and writing about the Rutgers Geology Museum, have been unable to channel Goethe’s spirit of curiosity, if I would rather look at Etta Cone’s Matisses than William Valiant’s trilobites, maybe in part it’s because I’m a creature of my time, a time of humanistic snobbery towards the hard sciences. Maybe I am prevented from attaining universal curiosity because I flatter myself as having put away childish things. When looking up Goethe’s words, one of them brought back an early memory. A pectinite is a fossilized scallop shell. Such shells are plentiful at Calvert Cliffs State Park, in Maryland, which I visited as a child. It is said of Calvert Cliffs that there are fossil sharks’ teeth there as well as pectinites. You may imagine the bitterness of my disappointment when my parents took me there and I did not find one.

All of which is to say, a display of fossils and minerals like the one at the Rutgers Geology Museum has a special value for those of us who fail to take an interest in it. It gives us an opportunity to wonder if the failure constitutes a flaw.

*

In 1977 Jeanne Filler Scott, an art major at Rutgers who was a regular visitor to the museum, was given a commission to paint a Mosasaurus, an aquatic dinosaur whose fossils are found in New Jersey. The director of the museum at the time, Bill Selden, suggested she include ammonites, prehistoric cephalopods on whose fossils Mosasaurus tooth marks have been found, as prey. Am I wrong to think that if it were installed in the Modern galleries at the Met, next to a Warhol or a Frankenthaler, it would quickly become one of the most popular paintings in the museum?

I found Scott’s website (she’s still an animal painter, but no longer takes commissions) and wrote to ask if she would be willing to share memories of the commission. A quote from her reply:

I drew the mosasaurus as if you were underwater looking at the animal. I did not know it at the time, but when I went back to Rutgers for the unveiling of the restored painting in 2022 (45 years later!) he told me that he had not expected that kind of pose, that he had expected I would show the mosasaurus partially submerged on the surface. He never said anything about that at the time. I have not seen another painting that showed a mosasaur fully underwater, come to think of it. He said he would like me to put in some prehistoric fish as well as ammonites which I did. I know I brought the painting in to show him at least once while working on it to get his input. He said no one knew what color they were in real life.

In addition to Scott’s Mosasaurus painting, there’s also a sculpture of a Grallator, which is not a species but an ichnogenus, that is, a type known from footprints. From the ubiquity of their three-toed tracks in local fossil deposits it is clear that Grallators were once abundant in the region. No one at the museum knew the name of the sculptor.

*

Finally, two maps of the state. The first one shows ‘Maximum Ice Coverage in New Jersey during the Last Ice Age.’ Can the division of the ice-bound and ice-free zones really have fallen right along the line of the Northeast Corridor, with the train tracks following it so precisely that, looking out the window on the north side of the train, one might imagine a saber-toothed tiger chasing a juvenile mastodon across the glacial sheet, and then with a turn of the head have a vision of wildflowers on the bank of a running stream? As the saying goes, se non è vero, è molto ben trovato.

The second map, which is not in the museum but on the ground floor of the building, opposite the entrance, is a relief map of New Jersey from 1893, with one inch corresponding to one mile and yellow lines for railroad tracks. The flatness of the neighboring states makes for a rejoinder to Saul Steinberg’s famous New Yorker cover. No, Mr. Steinberg, that’s not Kansas City you see from 9th Avenue. It’s not even Scranton.

But the Louvre—how to do it, how to write about the largest and greatest museum in the world? I’ve enjoyed myself, in the last year, learning about the men and women whose collecting made American museums worth visiting—people like Jacob Epstein and the Cone Sisters in Baltimore, and, at Yale, James Jackson Jarves and Katherine Dreier. If I were to do the same for the Louvre, however, it would be a question of King Francis I, Cardinal Mazarin, Jean-Baptiste Colbert and Napoleon Bonaparte. Which is to say, ground too trodden for me.

So provenances are out. Likewise, there’s no sense in running through the highlights. From the Seated Scribe to the Raft of the Medusa, they’re all in the survey textbooks. Nor do I want to present strategies, give a series of tips for how to conquer the Louvre in two hours, four hours, six hours, or explain where to find a bathroom without a line. Instead I’ll limit myself to two bits of advice, and present some of what I found going through my old pictures. First, the advice.

(i.) Before going to the Louvre, decide whether or not you want to memorize the floor plan. There’s much to be said for doing this, and since it’s not that complicated half an hour of studying should be enough. If you do it, you can be systematic. You’ll know where to find the British paintings, the statues of Gudea, the Sèvres porcelain. You can decide what to see, and see it.1 But also, there’s much to be said for wandering aimlessly. If that’s your preference, don’t memorize the floor plan.

(ii.) Resolve in advance not to mind the crowds. It’s the Louvre. Unless you’re Parisian you’re lucky to be there. So is everyone around you. Fill yourself with patience, tolerance, love of fellow humanity, whatever it takes. If you must escape, almost everyone is in the Denon Wing, the one closest to the river. The Sully and Richelieu wings you can have to yourself.

*

Looking through my pictures, I discovered a personal canon of five paintings I am unable to resist, works I’ve photographed over the years, even on visits where I took only a few pictures. One is the Botticelli fresco above, Venus and the Three Graces Presenting Gifts to a Young Woman. This much I expected: I’ve been under its spell since my first visit to the Louvre in the spring of 2004. If it comes to pass that I drop dead in a museum, let it be right here.

It was news to me, though, that in a nearby gallery there’s a small painting that, judging by number of pictures I’ve taken of it, I am almost as fond of as the Botticelli. It’s a fifteenth century panel by the Sienese artist Sassetta, The Blessed Ranieri Frees the Poor from a Prison in Florence. The story is not well documented, nor are the other events in the life of the Blessed Ranieri, aside from his death in 1304 in his native Sansepolcro. From then on he has been considered a saint locally, but he was never canonized, and he was beatified only in 1802. As for the scene in the painting, it seems that the debtors of the Florentine prison of Stinche wrote a letter to Ranieri in Sansepolcro, asking for his help. He appeared before the prison in an instance of miraculous bilocation and freed ninety of them, including the chap in yellow. I was surprised to learn, though perhaps I shouldn’t have been, that, at least judging from a painting made in 1850, Sassetta’s portrayal of Stinche as a windowless cube appears to have been faithful to the building’s appearance. In addition to possessing immense charm, the painting may be a valuable documentation of carceral architecture in late Medieval Europe.

The other three works in my personal canon are French: Enguerrand Quarton’s The Pietà of Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, Valentin de Boulogne’s Concert with a Bas Relief, and The Two Cousins by Antoine Watteau. I know one of the three from New York. The Valentin was at the Met in the fall of 2016. Looking at the curatorial note in the Louvre’s catalogue entry, I nodded in agreement at “L’atmosphère est empreinte de gravité et de mystère.” Reading on, I discovered that the bas relief in the painting is based on a Roman terracotta plaque, and that this, too, is at the Louvre. Unfortunately it’s in several pieces, and not on view.