God, Mammon and the art they wrought
The worst that can be said of the Wadsworth Atheneum’s “Faith and Fortune,” a sprawling survey of 500 years of European art, is that it is too big.
The best that can be said is that that is too bad. Everybody should see it.
“Everybody” in this case, refers to anybody who has never set foot in a museum before as well as those for whom the return of Giovanni Paolo Panini to the Wadsworth walls inspires a devotional pilgrimage. That’s because the pleasures of “Faith and Fortune” are multifarious. It is at once a magnificent primer on art before the modern age, and a sobering reminder of the diminishing role of sacred art, which has been supplanted by the ascendancy of the individual.
For that reason, a pithy sub-title for the exhibit might be “How fortune replaced faith as a manifestation of divine intervention.” Or perhaps, “How I got over my guilt over money and learned to love my dough.”
In the scope of 400 years, the individual has elbowed his way first into the artist canvas and, by the end of the 19th century, conquered them. In the last gallery, filled with wall-to ceiling life-size portraits, the sitter needs little more than a single prop or icy stare to signify his own steely dominion — over his destiny and that of others.
The Wadsworth doesn’t explore this conquest, for obvious reasons. Instead, it sticks to it’s the art, a splendid assortment of paintings, sculptures and decorative objects, spanning centuries and countries for as rich an compendium of art works that one is likely to see in this state. All of them are drawn from the Wadsworth’s own collection, which should make them feel cheeky. Still, what is fascinating is how humility evolves into hubris. In the 15th century, when Renaissance rediscovered antiquity and thus the power of the individual, sacred art made way for a new kind of art: genre paintings and landscapes, showing individual pleasures and naturalistic vistas. What’s intriguing is how artists convey the aristocracy in ways that aroughly mirror the way they treat sacred figures. Alessandro Allori’s “Portrait of a Noblewoman and her son,” presents the figures in their luxurious garments but their formalized faces reveal a humility and passivity that roughly mirrors the typical treatment of the Virgin Mary with the Baby Jesus. There are plenty of these in the exhibit, of course, but one of the most moving is the marvelous della Robbia Madonna and child with its blazing ivory white against a cerulean background. This is the type of ornament a middle-class Florentine would have in his home.
Fortunately, the exhibit is flush with eye-popping ornaments no ordinary person could conceivably own. There include pieces of porcelain so fine and delicate that they seem constructed out of some confectionary whim, as well as pieces of silver, including one garlanded silver centerpiece, animated with a center tier set piece of musicians playing as in a gazebo, that is worth the price of admission alone.
Viewers are first greeted with the indulgences of the 16th and 17th century – scientific knickknacks from the natural world. The Wadsworth has displayed precious curiosity cabinets, including one formidable ebony and ivory one, in which wealthy patricians would display everything from minerals, fossils, scientific instrument, to the jaws of enormous fish or skeletons of ghoulish sea creatures. These are the Renaissance equivalent of curio cabinets, except that instead of showcasing your fondness for, say Hummels, the Kunst-und Wunderkammer, as they were called, signified your degree of modernity, and therefore enlightenment.
There are so many of these stunning objects throughout the exhaustive exhibit that it’s tempting to wish curator Edward Zafran had relegated decorative objects to a separate room. But the further one goes into the rooms, the more canny the decision becomes. These objects, whether silver candlesticks or fancy new telescopes, not only were ostentatious; possession of these things begin to animate the canvases and the minds of the owners and artists. The Kunst-und Wunderkammer in particular sp
eak to the increasing primacy of empirical evidence, a tendency that begins in the 12th century with Roger Bacon and continues with Francis Bacon in the 15th.
The tension between these drives – the desire to know by rational, observable evidence and the inclination to know through faith are the warp and woof of the era. So, too, is the issue of wealth and how it reflects, or dilutes the its bearer’s faith. The Dutch, surprisingly, were among the worst to worry about the effects of too much wealth on burghers desperate for salvation. That may be because the Florentines spent so much of theirs on sacred art and the newly established Dutch Republic was Calvinist and dismissed religious art. But it may have been because the Dutch got so rich so fast.
A work like “Allegory of Worldly Riches,” 1600 captivates with its shimmering pieces of gold, silver goblets and ledger books – until one looks in the corner to see the wealthy owner selling his soul to some amphibious-looking devils. Lots of allegories of the fall of man animate Italian painting, but a Dutch master like Gerard Dou can make the point with such subtlety and sobriety in “Still Life with Ourglass (1647) a small horizontal work of an inkwell sitting on an artist drawing, while a the cinnamon grains from the auburn hourglass sift unremittingly in the corner. Art will stay, says Dou, and writing. But what of the rest of us?
By the 17th century, not only Luther, but Calvin and others had begun to drain the authority of the Catholic Church, but Rome fought back, with vigorous artistic commissions that insisted on the duality of Jesus’ nature, focusing increasingly on his humanity. The Baroque art it engendered blazed through central Europe with an immediacy, grittiness and ferocious humanity. Leading the charge was Michelangelo da Caravagggio, an artist whose insistence on the earthy, crude, dirty, but ultimately divine spirit of man ushered in a new definition of beauty that continues to resonate today.
The Caravaggio the Wadsworth has here is one of the best, and to get an idea of how revolutionary it is, compare Caravaggio’s “Saint Francis,” (1595) to Francisco Ribalta’s “The Ecstacy of St. Francis: The Vision of the Musical Angel” (1620-25) nearby.
Ribalta’s saint is overstuffed and feathery; his ecstasy is crowded and frothy. Caravaggio’s is spare, bleak and and transcendent. His Saint Francis is all alone and we do not see what he sees; only the Angel, whose arms support the swooning Francis and whose gaze, so rich with compassion and patience, is as close to divinity as an artist could reasonably capture. This is a saint who is ordinary, and yet extraordinary, whose sees visions while we see only inky blankness.
Caravaggio was a murderer and a blackguard, but he painted like an angel. The Fra Angelico “Head of an Angel” on display is beautiful and exotic, but removed. Caravaggio bridged the gap between the sacred and secular, and his influence continued to dominate Europe for centuries. Francisco de Zurbaran’s “Saint Serapion,” in which the martyred saint is shown hanging by his wrists in a Christ-like pose, could not have been possible without Caravaggio. The treatment of the saint’s flopped head, his gnarled hands and the play of light and dark on his creamy linen robe, all suggests Caravaggio.
So, too, with the Dutch painter Michael Sweerts, who appropriates the dynamic interplay between light and dark, the inherent beauty in an ordinary boy, a reductive simplicity of composition- all of that is found on his canvases. So emotive and crepuscular is the Flemish painter’s “The Burial of the Dead,” part of his Seven Acts of Mercy series, that one would swear it was a Caravaggio. But the landscape is too articulated and the faces just slightly too obscure. It remains one of the most haunting works in the collection.
The convenience of dividing up these 400 paintings as Zafran has done allows visitors to pick and choose. Those are interested in Italian Renaissance art are able to make a bee-line to the lucidly painted, gruesome narrative of “The Feast of Herod,” by Lucas Cranach the Elder. Or the balletic grace of Lelio Orsi’s “Noli me Tangere,” whose weird colors and dramatic posing recall El Greco. Dutch masters, porcelain and still life is given its own gallery. For the English landscape enthusiasts, there is a swirling Turner seascape and a small but evocative John Constable. There is even a weird Joseph, Wright of Darby that seems right out of Fuesseli. And there is plenty of breathless, feathery confections of French art, largely from the rococo period that encouraged frivolity, lightheartedness and pleasure.
Increasingly, the spiritual is less literal and more suggestive. We’re aware that Louis Leopold Boilly’s “The Mockery,” a coy seduction scene, is as much titillating as it is cautionary. Neoclassicism replaces the mystic with the mythic, but, in the end, the point is very much the same. It is, all of it, gorgeous art work. Whether divinity is its object or humanity is, the beauty and power to move remain poignantly similar.
c. Republican-American