Alexander the Great Meets Hebrew Priest

 An ancient  mosaic believed to depict Alexander the Great meeting a Hebrew high priest has been discovered in a 5th century synagog in Hoqoq,  Israel, unearthed by a team of archaeologists led by Professor Jodi Magness, of the University of North Carolina.

The scene shows a bearded soldier wearing battle dress and a purple cloak leading a bull by the horns, followed by other soldiers, and elephants with shields tied to their sides. He is meeting with a bearded elder who wears a ceremonial white tunic and mantle, accompanied by young men with sheathed swords, also in ceremonial clothes.

According to Professor Magness “Battle elephants were associated with Greek armies beginning with Alexander the Great, so this might be a depiction of a Jewish legend about the meeting between Alexander and the Jewish high priest.” 

An article in the Daily Mail describes other fabulous mosaics discovered previously during this excavation project, which began in 2012 in cooperation with a team from the Israel Antiquities Authority.

This is a unique and important discovery because of the high level of artistic skill it evidences, as well as the fact that the depiction of Alexander the Great is the first non-Biblical figure ever to be discovered in a mosaic in an ancient synagogue.

Seven Museums Celebrate Sin

Collaboration is in the cultural air this summer.   

Here in Santa Fe, we have the Summer of Color, with museums each featuring an exhibit celebrating a different color. For example, at the Museum of Internatinal Folk Art, The Red that Colored the World  (through September 13, 2015) is a beautifully curated exhibition that tells the story of the extraordinary global spread of cochineal after its first encounter by Spain in 16th century Mexico. Most people know red, but few know of its most prolific and enduring source: American Cochineal, a tiny scaled insect that produces carminic acid.

On the other side of the country, seven cultural institutions of the Fairfield/ Westchester Museum Alliance (FWMA) are doing a similar thing, concurrently presenting exhibitions that explore the Seven Deadly Sins. Interpretations range from Old Master paintings to cutting-edge contemporary art.

For example, at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich CT, The Seven Deadly Sins: Pride (through October 18) explores the heights of human hubris and vanity -- as well as the sometimes cataclysmic falls that have resulted -- through objects of art and material culture from the Renaissance into the contemporary period. In an exhibition of exquisite master prints, drawings, paintings, rare books, and a video installation the breadth and endurance of the imagery of this deadly sin of arrogance is explored, including the peacocks and lions that have long symbolized the sin.

The other museums participating in this collaboration are

• Sloth: Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum  - through September 19
• Envy: Hudson River Museum - through September 26
• Lust: Hudson Valley Center for Contemporary Art  -  through July 26
• Gluttony: Katonah Museum of Art - through October 10
• Greed: Neuberger Museum of Art  - through October 11
• Wrath: Wave Hill - through September 07, 2015

The FWMA museums are offering a two-for-the-price-of-one same-day pass. Print it and have it validated when you pay for admission at the admissions desk at any one of the participating museums. The pass will entitle you to free admission at any other one of the eight museums that same day. Simply present the validated pass to receive free admission.

Hot summer day?  Head for a museum!

Two Michelangelo Bronzes Discovered?

Michelangelo was a stone cutter … we know this from David and his other extraordinary sculptures in marble.

So how could a pair of  three-foot tall bronze sculptures be attributed to him recently? On what basis, when there is no other Michelangelo bronze to compare to, stylistically?

The figures are a non-matching pair of men riding in triumph on two sinuous panthers, one man older and lithe, the other young and athletic. They have long been admired for the beauty of their anatomy and expression, their first recorded attribution was to Michelangelo when they catalogued in the collection of Adolphe de Rothschild in the 19th century. But, since they there was no other documentation and they are unsigned, this attribution was dismissed and, for the past 120 years, the bronzes have been attributed to various other sculptors.

That changed last autumn when Prof Paul Joannides, Emeritus Professor of Art History at the University of Cambridge, connected the bronzes to a drawing by one of Michelangelo’s apprentices. The drawing is in the Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France.

According to the press release issued by The FitzwilliamMuseum in Cambridge, England, “A sheet of studies with Virgin Embracing Infant Jesus, c.1508, is a student’s faithful copy of various slightly earlier lost sketches by Michelangelo. In one corner is a composition of a muscular youth riding a panther, which is very similar in pose to the bronzes, and drawn in the abrupt, forceful manner that Michelangelo employed in designs for sculpture. This suggests that Michelangelo was working up this very unusual theme for a work in three dimensions.”

So, the drawing provides a clue.  And – although none remain to us – there is the documented knowledge that Michelangelo did produce works in bronze. I’d say it that production of works in bronze was expected of a Renaissance sculptor of any standing. It’s known that one of two documented Michelangelo sculptures was destroyed during the French Revolution; the other, a twice life-size statue of Pope Julius II,  was melted down for artillery just three years after it was completed.

The recent  insight provided by the drawing triggered a program of concentrated art-historical research. When compared with other works by Michelangelo the bronzes were found to be very similar in style and anatomy to his works of 1500-1510. That dating was confirmed by preliminary interpretation of initial scientific analysis. Interdisciplinary research continues. 

Dr Victoria Avery, Keeper of the Applied Arts Department of the Fitzwilliam Museum says, "It has been fantastically exciting to have been able to participate in this ground-breaking project, which has involved input from many art-historians in the UK, Europe and the States, and to draw on evidence from conservation scientists and anatomists.

The bronzes and a selection of the evidence are now on display in the Italian galleries at the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, from February 3 until 9 August 2015.

A Surprise! The Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University

A “WHO KNEW?” surprise at another of America’s lesser-known, university-based museums …

The Meadows Museum at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, TX, houses one of the largest and most comprehensive collections of Spanish art outside of Spain. With works dating from the 10th to the 21st century, the internationally renowned collection presents a broad spectrum of art covering a thousand years of Spanish heritage.

During business trips to Spain in the 1950s, Texas philanthropist and oil financier Algur H. Meadows spent many hours at the Prado Museum in Madrid. The Prado’s spectacular collection of Spanish masterpieces inspired him to begin his own collection of Spanish art. In 1962, through The Meadows Foundation, he gave SMU funds for the construction and endowment of a museum to house his Spanish collection. The Meadows Museum opened in 1965 as part of a new arts center at SMU. Until his death in 1978, Algur Meadows provided the impetus and funds for an aggressive but highly selective acquisitions program through which an extraordinary collection was developed in a remarkably short period of time. The Foundation continues to provide ongoing support for collection-development, education, and more.

The Meadows Museum collection includes masterpieces by some of the world’s greatest painters: El Greco, Velázquez, Ribera, Murillo (St. Justa), Goya, Miró, Gris (Cubist Landscape) and Picasso. Highlights of the collection include Renaissance altarpieces, monumental Baroque canvases, exquisite Rococo oil sketches, polychrome wood sculptures, Impressionist landscapes, modernist abstractions, a comprehensive collection of the graphic works of Goya, and a select group of sculptures by major 20th-century masters, including Auguste Rodin, Jacques Lipchitz, Henry Moore, Claes Oldenburg, David Smith and Fritz Wotruba. At the base of the plaza is a 40-by-90 foot moving sculpture, Wave, designed by Santiago Calatrava.

And, now through August 2^nd,  
The Abelló Collection: A ModernTaste for European Masters makes its international debut 
at the Meadows Museum.   
 
Ranked among the top of private art holdings of Spain, the Juan Abelló Collection comprises works by some of the greatest artists from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. For more than thirty years, impresario Juan Abelló and his wife, Anna Gamazo, have collected the finest and rarest of masterpieces by Spanish artists such as El Greco, Francisco de Goya, Pablo Picasso, and Juan Gris. In several instances, Mr. Abelló and Mrs. Gamazo spent several years in search of particular works, to bring back to Spain national masterpieces dispersed over the course of history.

Among the works in this special exhibit are works by Juan de Flandes (c. 1465-1519) as well as The Virgin with the Christ Child, or The Virgin of the Milk (c. 1485-90) by the Palencian master Pedro de Berruguete (c. 1450-1504), masterpieces by Fernando Yañez de la Almedina (c. 1475-1540) and El Greco (1541-1614) including The Stigmatization of Saint Francis (c. 1580).  The baroque period is represented by Spain’s great expatriate artist Jusepe de Ribera (1591-1652), The Sense of Smell (c. 1615) from his Five Senses, and from his later period, Saint Peter (c. 1644), which relates to the artist’s series of apostles and philosophers. Also included are magnificent examples of still life, a genre that flourished during seventeenth-century. From farther afield, vedute by Francesco Guardi  (1712-1793) and Canaletto (1697-1768) capture dazzling, sun-drenched visions of Venice. Goya’s nineteenth-century portraiture is represented in two works.

The Abelló collection also holds an impressive array of twentieth-century works. The display from this period is about as varied as the number of art theories and movements spanning that era. Several of Spain’s most important artistic representatives of the past century play a prominent role. Included are masterpieces by Juan Gris, Salvador Dalí, Miquel Barceló, and a suite of rare drawings by Picasso.  Non-Spanish artists of the twentieth century are also included, such as Braque, Léger, Matisse, Modigliani (Portrait of Brancusi), and Francis Bacon.

The Tortured Soul of Borromini's Architecture

One of my favorite “secret” spots in Rome – right in the congested center – is Francesco Borromini’s Sant’Ivo alla Sapienza, which he designed in the 1640s. Hidden away at the end of a long courtyard (designed by Giacomo della Porta), it is a unique little gem of curves and unusual geometry, topped by a corkscrew bell tower.

 

The interior of  little church is equally charming. The vault of the cupola supporting the bell tower is a kaleidoscopic froth of pleats and bulges and light and shadow.

Borromini’s style of Roman Baroque architecture could be said to reflect his tortured soul. His work was pure genius, but too unconventional to have long-lasting impact on later architects. He was a melancholy man with a quick temper which limited his career, and he died by his own hand in 1667.

I’m amused by the reproachful statement of the Neoclassic art historian Francesco Milizia (in his 1781 Memorie degli architetti antichi e moderni) who criticized Borromini thusly: “Questo artista non poteva soffrire il retto” (“This artist could not stand straight lines”).  Like that was a bad thing!

Rubens and Temporal Chauvinism

         The current show, Rubens and his Legacy, at the Royal Academy, London (until April 10^th) is intended to illuminate the Old Master’s influence on later artists … but in her review, Jackie Wullschlager says “the Royal Academy set itself a challenge which could have been magnificently met, but has resulted in the most misjudged Old Master show I have ever encountered." 

I haven’t seen the show, so I can’t agree or not. I mention the review primarily because I think both the analysis and writing are exemplary. Too many reviews of exhibits seem intended more to display the erudition of the reviewer and less to inform the reader.

Wullschlager goes on to say, “… no Old Master is in greater need of reviving for contemporary taste and rescuing from clichéd response than Peter Paul Rubens, the eloquent, erudite and now remote pioneer of the Flemish baroque. He has been out of fashion for generations. Van Gogh called him “superficial, hollow, bombastic”, and, to audiences reared on modernism’s introspection and angst, Rubens’ easy self-confidence was anathema.”

Being “out of fashion” is one thing … tastes change. But to criticize Rubens as “superficial, hollow, bombastic” displays temporal chauvinism … my term for judging a thing in today’s terms rather than in the context of its own times.

The reviewer compares two works in the exhibit: Rubens’ “The Garden of Love” (1633, Prado) and Watteau’s “The Pleasures of the Ball” (1714, Dulwich Picture Gallery)

Speaking of the Rubens painting: “It is a voyeur’s paradise — buoyant, celebratory, but touched with moral seriousness: an allegory of joys — bourgeois order, affluent display — that seem alien today. Lacking is a frisson of qualities we value more: the mystery, fragility, melancholy underlying a similar scene exhibited nearby, Watteau’s The Pleasures of the Ball.”

Apparently, Constable’s comment when he saw Watteau’s ephemeral figures and light brushstrokes: “So mellow, so tender, so soft and so delicious . . . this inscrutable and exquisite thing would vulgarise even Rubens.” 

If you have a few minutes, I recommend reading the review.

 

Georgia O'Keefe's Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1

They’ve been celebrating at the Georgia O’Keefe Museum here in Santa Fe for the past couple of days!  

The 17-year-old museum decided to sell three paintings from its collection of 1,149 works by G.O’K. The museum holds half the artist’s lifetime output.  But, because “there are gaps that need to be filled,” in September the decision was made to sell three pieces to benefit the Acquisitions Fund. 

One of the three, Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1, is one of the most well-known examples of O’Keeffe’s celebrated flower paintings, which are among the most recognizable images in art history and popular culture. 

Here’s a video clip produced by Sotheby's that expresses G.O’K.s  feelings about Jimson Weed. 

http://www.sothebys.com/content/sothebys/en/news-video/videos/2014/11/american-icon-georgia-okeeffee-jimson-weed.html

Here's why they're celebrating: the work was expected to sell for an estimated $10/15MM. In the end, it sold on Thursday for $44.4 million! The buyer’s identity is unknown, but the auction opened with seven bidders vying for the work before settling into a lengthy two-way battle, with the winning bid made on the phone. 

Jimson Weed/White Flower No. 1 was owned originally by the artist’s sister, Anita O’Keeffe Young, whose estate was sold at Sotheby’s in 1987. At that time the painting sold for $990,000. In 1994 it was sold again into a private collection for $1MM. It was donated to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum by The Burnett Foundation in 1996. It spent 6 years on the dining room wall in the Bush White House and has been featured in nearly every major O’Keefe retrospective, including those at MOMA in New York and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

I wonder how long it will be before the buyer's identity is revealed.

“When Georgia O’Keeffe paints flowers, she does not paint fifty flowers stuffed into a dish. On most of her canvases there appeared one gigantic bloom, its huge feathery petals furled into some astonishing pattern of color and shade and line…It is enough to say that Miss O’Keeffe’s paintings are as full of passion as the verses of Solomon’s Song.”   Time, 1928

Trevi Fountain "In Restauro"

It’s inevitable that  something you really want to see when visiting Italy will be “in restauro”, rendered inaccessible or blocked from view by scaffolding and protective fencing. I’ve been thwarted many times when trying to research or photograph monuments and artworks for Jane's Smart Art Guides, being barred entrance to chapels and once even an entire building (the Borghese Gallery), unable to take photographs of fountains, and finding frescoes behind great sheets of canvas. 

So -- other than the coincidence of timing – it came as no surprise to learn, the day after launching the Jane's Smart Art Guides audio guide to the Fountains of Rome, Part 1: Acqua Vergine, that the principal fountain -  the Trevi Fountain – is “in restauro”!  If I actually lived in Rome, instead of just dreaming of living there, I would have known! 

One night in June of 2012, chunks of stone and stucco fell from a cornice on the left hand side of the Trevi Fountain.  It is thought that the monument was weakened by the snow and the unusually cold spell that Rome experienced the preceding winter, and by the particularly rainy spring that followed. Of course, ice would have worsened any cracks and fractures that were already present in the structure.

"We intervened on Saturday evening, as soon as we knew about the damage," said Rome's superintendent of heritage, Umberto Broccoli. Immediately part of the fountain was fenced off and workers used a mobile crane to assess the damage. During this assessment, additional pieces of the cornice were removed because they appeared to be on the verge of collapse. The city undertook emergency work at a cost of  €320,000.

Fast forward two years (and in Italy, a mere two years really is fast forward!) … contractors have been hired, the water’s been turned off and the fountain drained. Happily, the protective barrier that’s been set up around the perimeter is transparent, and a footbridge over the basin has been installed to allows visitors to see the work and get closer to the structure. Apparently the entire restoration will be conducted in public view.

Actually, I wish I could be there to see it this way … a unique opportunity to get really close to the fountain, to see it from a totally different perspective. What a great way to fully understand the scale of this monument!  I remember being quite thrilled by how close we were able to get to Michelangelo’s Moses in San Pietro in Vincoli while it was being restored. The elevated walkway took us right past Moses at eye level … closer than I will ever be again.

In addition to restoring the façade that forms the backdrop against the south wall of the Palazzo Poli, the sculptural elements will be cleaned and new pumps, artistic lighting, and barriers to deter pigeons will be installed. The last major restoration was in 1990, but new techniques will make this the most thorough in the fountain's history.

They say that the work will be completed in about a year and a half. "We hope to restore this treasured landmark to the city in the autumn of 2015,” Ignazio Marino, the Mayor of Rome said.  But I think that may have been back in April when the work was supposed to start!  Oh, me of little faith … but I don’t think we should get our hearts set on seeing the work completed before some time in 2016!  Perhaps they’ll prove me wrong. 

 

If you know how cash-strapped Italy’s cultural heritage authorities are, you might well ask, “Where’d they find the funds?”  In the past few years, Italy has more and more been looking to private sponsors to help repair long-neglected monuments and archaeological sites. Dependence on private industry to pay for needed restoration has become the norm. 

Entitled Fendi for Fountains, in addition to sponsoring the restoration of the Trevi Fountain, this initiative also includes the restoration of the Quattro Fontane -- four fountains that face each other on the corners of Via delle Quattro Fontane and Via del Quirinale. (These fountains, dating to 1590, will be included in my Fountains of Rome, Part 2: Acqua Felice audio guide.) This is a busy intersection, and the fountains have been dirtied over the years by the emissions of the thousands of cars that pass by every day. Conservation work on the Four Fountains has also begun. New hydraulics and lighting will be installed. The project is expected to be completed in Spring 2015.

The work on the Trevi and Quattro Fontane is the latest in a series of privately-funded restorations of Italy's prized landmarks.  The Colosseum (Tod's), the Spanish Steps (Bulgari), the Rialto Bridge in Venice (Diesel Jeans), are some of the important historic monuments currently being worked on. In addition, Finmeccanica, a Defense group, has pledged staff and technology worth up to €2 million to a project to prop up the crumbling town of Pompeii.

Adam After The Fall, Nov 11

If the pedestal supporting a priceless 15^th century marble sculpture collapses, and nobody hears the statue smash on the hard marble floor, did it actually break into 28 large pieces and hundreds of small fragments?  Unfortunately, yes. 

A security guard doing his normal rounds at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art on Sunday, October 6th, 2002 was first to come upon the shockingly unexpected scene at around 9:00 PM.

Sometime that evening the plywood pedestal supporting Tullio Lombardo’s 15th century marble statue of Adam collapsed, dropping all 770 pounds of the 6’3” figure to the ground.  Adam was decapitated, the torso flung across the floor, the left arm broken into seven pieces, the right leg into six. 

Until that moment, the smooth unblemished surface of the carving had been one of Adam‘s most illustrious features.  

Originally commissioned for the tomb of the Doge Andrea Vendramin (d. 1478) in the church of Santa Maria dei Servi in Venice, Lombardo’s Adam was placed in a niche next to the sarcophagus of the Doge in the center of the monument. A statue of Eve, attributed Francesco Segala, stood in the balancing niche on the other side. 

When the church of the Servi was demolished by Napoleon in 1812, the Vendramin tomb was moved to the choir of the church of Saints Giovanni e Paolo, but without Adam and Eve. In keeping with the times, the classical nudes were deemed indiscreet, and they were replaced by two warrior figures. 

Adam and Eve were moved to the Palazzo Vendramin Calergi where Eve remains to this day.  But in 1865 Adam was sold at auction in Paris, and eventually made it’s way into the collection of the Metropolitan Museum, in 1936.  The acquisition was a triumph: Adam is widely considered to be the most important Italian Renaissance sculpture in North America.

Not just “another Renaissance sculpture”, Tullio’s Adam was recognized not only as the first classically-inspired monumental nude carved since antiquity, but as a masterpiece in its own right. 

But according to the fascinating entry on The History Blog, the conservators subsequently decided “to take a far more meticulous approach, studying every aspect of the reconstruction in detail before drilling holes in it and piecing it together with adhesives and pins. Instead of two years it took 12, but they were 12 years well spent”. 

On November 11th, Adam is going back on display at the Met, and the story of the restoration is part of the exhibition. The statue, originally intended for a niche and therefore less worked in the back than in the front, will now be viewed in the round so people can see it the same way the conservators did. The Met has made some videos explaining the epic 12-year conservation project …. and you can preview them now . They are fascinating.

Sanford Robinson Gifford's Luminous Landscapes

Mount Rainier, Bay of Tacoma – Puget Sound, 1875

Oil on Canvas
Sanford Robinson Gifford, American, 1823-1880

Our recent trip to the Pacific Northwest of course included a visit to the Seattle Art Museum where I was happy to see this landscape by one of my favorite 19th-century American landscape artists, Sanford Robinson Gifford.  

The label adjacent to the picture says this: 

In the summer of 1874 … Gifford travelled the length of Puget Sound and was able to see the great domes of the Cascades.  The appearance of the ethereal-seeming, majestic Mt Rainier on an August afternoon clearly enchanted him.  He thrilled to the particular spirit of this place of grand volcanic peaks and ancient peoples, where, at times, when the skies clear and Rainier emerges out of the mist, we are granted the privelege of glimpsing what seems the heavenly home of the gods.

Sanford Robinson Gifford (1823 – 1880) was an American landscape painter and one of the leading members of the Hudson River School. Gifford's landscapes are known for their emphasis on light and soft atmospheric effects, and he is regarded as a practitioner of Luminism, an offshoot style of the Hudson River School. It’s his luminist paintings that I really love. 

Just look at the light on his Clay Bluffs On No Man's Land (1877) and the gleam on the water in Sunset, Bay of New York (1878). 

Gifford grew up in Hudson, New York, the son of an iron foundry owner. He attended Brown University briefly but dropped out to study art in New York City in the mid-1840s. He exhibited his first landscape at the National Academy of Design in New York in 1847, was elected an associate in 1851, and an academician in 1854. When the Civil War broke out in 1861, he joined the Union Army and served as a corporal in the Seventh Regiment.

Like most Hudson River School artists, Gifford traveled extensively to find scenic landscapes to sketch and paint. In addition to exploring New England and upstate New York, Gifford travelled abroad. His first trip to Europe (1855-57) to study European art and sketch subjects for future paintings lasted more than two years.  Another venture abroad took him across Europe in 1868 and then to the Middle East, including Egypt, in 1869. 

In the summer of the following year, Gifford journeyed to the Rocky Mountains in the western United States, at which time he produced the sketch of Mt. Rainier that resulted in the painting that now hangs in the Seattle Art Gallery. Like most of the Hudson River School artists, Gifford would first sketch rough, small works in oil paint from his sketchbook pencil drawings. Those scenes he most favored he then developed into small finished paintings, then into larger finished paintings.

Gifford referred to the best of his landscapes as his "chief pictures". Many of his chief pictures are characterized by a hazy atmosphere with soft, suffused sunlight. Mount Rainier, Bay of Tacoma – Puget Sound demonstrates this luminosity, as well as one of Gifford’s favorite compositional arrangements, wherein in the foreground he painted a body of water, in which the distant landscape is gently reflected.

On August 29, 1880, Gifford died in New York City of what is thought to have been malaria . In a testament to his stature, that autumn the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City celebrated his life with a memorial exhibition of 160 paintings. A catalog of his work published shortly after his death recorded in excess of 700 paintings produced during his career. At his death. His paintings were selling for about $300, give or take.  Recently, on Antiques Road Show, a small Gifford oil on canvas was valued at $300,000.