(Santa Barbara Museum of Art) We can thank the quaint Victorian belief in the improving power of art for the astutely assembled collection of Italian, Dutch, and Flemish art that Archibald McLellan bequeathed to the city of Glasgow upon his death in 1854. The bequest of 510 paintings came with a price. McLellan, who had made his money as a coachbuilder and then extended his interest to real estate development, had died insolvent, and the city had to come up with the funds to pay off his debts before it could get a hold of the paintings. Some on the Town Council questioned whether this was worth it, one councilman going so far as to dismiss the collection as rubbish and another expressing reservations about the nude figures in some of the pictures. In the end, however, more discerning heads prevailed with the aid of testimony from expert evaluators. The city ponied up and the collection passed into its hands along with the buildings that McLellan had intended to house it. In the subsequent century, the McLellan collection became a nucleus that attracted other bequests and enabled Glasgow Museums to amass holdings that encompassed a broad range of European art.
“Botticelli, Titian, and Beyond,” which opens February 8 and runs through May 3, highlights the 500-year range and exquisite quality of the Museums’ Italian holdings, a sizeable proportion of were part of McLellan’s legacy.
Visitors are likely to congregate most heavily to the first of the centenary sections of this exhibition, the one devoted to late 15th-century works by High Renaissance masters such as Botticelli, Signorelli, Bellini, and others. They will not be disappointed. Almost every item in this section is a gem and one that has unlikely ever been seen outside Glasgow since it was acquired. The Botticelli Annunciation shows the angel Gabriel bursting into the picture from the left edge to deliver the news to Mary that she is to become the mother of the Savior. In Botticelli’s inspired composition, the figures of the angel and Mary are dwarfed by the architectural space that encloses them and lean toward each other at the opposite ends of an imaginary arc that simultaneously unites (overarches) the two arched lobes of the picture and counterpoints the polyphony of archways whose traversal by the angel and the golden rays that enter with him strongly suggest an evocation of divine insemination. The Signorelli Lamentation over the Dead Christ (one of several Lamentations painted by the artist) besides being chromatic tour de force manages to transform the frenzy of grief into a rhythmic tableau populated by elegant, richly dressed figures worthy of strutting a runway in Milan. In contrast, the Bellini Virgin and Child is a paragon of understated piety in which the care lavished on the subtle modelling of the figures (and their arrangement into a strict pyramidal composition that nonetheless remains perfectly natural) is re-enacted in the delicacy with which the Virgin’s hands prop up the standing baby.
Titian’s Christ and the Adultress, is the best-known work in the collection and reveals that at the age of 20 the Venetian master was already a virtuoso of color and the depiction of finery. Sometime after this painting was finished, it was was cropped and the figure of a standing man gazing back at the viewer was excised. Part of that figure turned up for sale in 1971 in the form of a picture titled Head of a Man, was purchased by Glasgow Museums, and is displayed alongside the canvas from which it was removed.
McLellan’s collecting did suffer from limitations. Although he made it a point to try and amass representative works from each succeeding school of Italian painting, the works of 17th-century stars like Guido Reni and Caravaggio were out of his financial reach. He did try to acquire “Caravaggesque” works, such as The Virgin and Child with St. Anne by Antiveduto Gramatica, who was briefly Caravaggio’s teacher but only adopted the his former pupil’s manner after Caravaggio’s premature death left an unsatisfied demand for his work that could be exploited by pastiches. The Gramatica, however, merely serves to illustrate that what makes Caravaggio’s paintings indelibly memorable is not reducible to the formal devices Caravaggio employed. The real standouts in the 17th-century section are, therefore, a pair of Salvator Rosa landscapes illustrating New Testament themes, St. John the Baptist Revealing Christ to the Disciples and St. John the Baptist Baptizing Christ in the Jordan. As Professor Peter Humfrey notes in the handsome catalogue that accompanies this exhibition, despite the religious titles of these works (which were added after McLellan’s bequest), it is the wild, somber landscapes with their jagged rocks, splintered tree trunks, and billowing luminous clouds set in velvety blue predawn skies that impress.
As the exhibition moves forward into the 18th- and 19th- centuries, the quality of the work becomes more uneven. By the time of the Rococo and the invention of the aptly named galant style in music, fashion, and the visual arts, Italian painting was entering its long eclipse by its French counterpart. And yet, as a gorgeous and unusually large View of San Giorgio Maggiore by Francesco Guardi demonstrates, Italy in the 18th-century could still produce painters offering fresh takes on established genres.
By the end of the century, however, Italian painting had become, in Prof. Humfrey’s words, “undeniably provincial.” He lays the blame on the disappearance of traditional sources of patronage (the church and the aristocracy) without the emergence of a wealthy mercantile middle class to pick up the slack.
What this exhibition as a whole offers is an opportunity to relish the fusion of formal and theatrical invention that for 500 years enabled Italian painting to breathe new life into the retelling of the well-worn narratives, religious and mythological, that in the pre-modern era assured Europeans of all ranks of a dwelling in a fixed order of things. And yet, it would be the impetuous and obstinate curiosity of another Italian, Galileo Galilei, which would shake the foundations of that fixed order and eventually cause it to fall.
Published: Artscene, February 2015
Plastic Regime 