Titian, Angel, c. 1559-65, Florence, Uffizi

I have a new article out, on Titian’s use of drawing for his narrative works. It attempts to reassess what we know in light especially of a series of new and eye-opening technical discoveries regarding the underdrawing and revisions to his paintings made over recent decades. The volume it’s in, Venetian Disegno. out from Paul Holberton, is really excellent in my opinion, with many interesting contributions. Kudos to editors Maria Aresin, Thomas Dalla Costa, as well as Genevieve Verdigel who co-organised the online conference that started it all, back when we were all locked down.

Maria Aresin and Thomas Dalla Costa, eds., Venetian Disegno – New Frontiers c. 1420-1620, London, Paul Holberton Publishing 2024. It retails at a somewhat reasonable price — more here!

Over the past months, I’ve been working with colleagues across the National Gallery, particularly my two curatorial colleagues Maria Alambritis and Charlotte Wytema, on a new temporary presentation of a selection of the Gallery’s Venetian paintings from Giovanni Bellini to Titian, roughly. The display was conceived to inaugurate the newly – and beautifully – refurbished room 29 as part of our bicentenary NG200 celebrations. It is poignant, I think, that room 29 which first opened in 1930 was originally designed precisely for the Venetian paintings.

Although a collection display, our presentation is organised like a exhibition, presenting the story of Venetian painting in the period, the lives of the artists, the social, religious and political context with a view to elucidating why it was so pivotal in the development of Western painting, collected so assiduously in Britain (and elsewhere) in the nineteenth century and thus why it is so core to the National Gallery’s collections.

In the video above, my colleague Carlo Corsato introduces a number of the key players in the organisation of the display, including of course yours truly. Do come have a look if you’re in London and let me know what you think!

Lorenzo Lotto, Portrait of a man, probably 1540s, black chalk, 250 x 186 mm. Florence, Gallerie degli Uffizi

As you may remember I was involved in organising an exhibition on the portraits of renaissance artist Lorenzo Lotto back in 2018-19 with my colleagues Miguel Falomi­r and Enrico Maria Dal Pozzolo. It was shown at the Museo del Prado in Madrid and the National Gallery in London. An international conference was held at the Prado in 2018 and I presented there a paper on Lotto’s drawings. It has now been published by the Prado as part of the conference proceedings.

I’m thrilled to see it in print, even if I’m even less certain of the observations I make in it than I was when I was writing it. Very few sheets from Lotto’s hand survive, even if he must have been a prolific draughtsman — and clearly was a great one — so it is extremely hard to establish a reliable corpus of drawings securely attributable to him. Uncertainty has been a constant in scholarship on the subject and my article is no exception. Still, I hope it will prove useful, if nothing else as a summary of where we are on the subject, and also as a case study in the challenges and usefulness of connoisseurship. Do check it out.

Portrait of a Merchant (Jan Jacobsz. Snoek?), c. 1530, oil on panel, 63.6 x 47.5 cm. Washington DC, National Gallery of Art

Jan van Eyck, Portrait of Giovanni(?) Arnolfini and his Wife, 1434, oil on panel, 82.2 x 60 cm, London, National Gallery

The Roman naturalist Pliny describes how the legendary Greek painters Zeuxis and Parrhasios held a competition to determine who was better able at rendering the real. Zeuxis painted a grapevine so true to life that a flock of birds attempted to eat the grapes. He then asked Parrhasios to remove the curtain hiding his picture. Parrhasios revealed that the curtain was the picture, and Zeuxis had to admit defeat.

Van Eyck and Shakespeare thus inscribe themselves in a central tradition in Western art. And they are aware of Parrhasios’ curtain: van Eyck emphasizes his presence at the creation of his painting and thereby reveals it as a construction, and Shakespeare has Hamlet wonder at the ability of the actor, performing in what is an obvious fiction, to make the Trojan Queen Hecuba come alive for the viewer. It is through awareness of the work’s artifice that we grasp most strongly its closeness to reality. The Arnolfini couple is depicted in a fictive space that mirrors a recognizable reality, but is ultimately born of van Eyck’s imagination.

Van Eyck’s follower Jan Gossart (active 1503, died 1532), also called ‘Mabuse’ after his natal town Maubeuge, was the subject of a major retrospective in New York and London (where I saw it) from 2010 to early 2011. He works quite consciously in this Northern European tradition for artistic self-reflection. In these postmodern times, where our intersubjective constitution of meaning has become a central issue and truth a relative concept, his challenge to our distinction between truth and art is an inspiring proposition.

The Portrait of a Merchant (c. 1530, illustration at top) was the centerpiece of a room devoted to Gossart’s portraits; probably the part of his work that speaks to us most directly today. The man is dressed in luxuriously ample clothes and surrounded by objects signaling his profession: quill pens and sealing wax, gold scales and loose change; a neat inkwell; correspondence scrupulously archived in a hanging system, carefully “miscellaneous drafts” and “miscellaneous letters”; a dagger. He looks at us reservedly but not dismissively, momentarily interrupted. We sit across from him, at his desk, perhaps with a business proposal.

It is an animated portrait, executed with a real sense of presence. Only upon further scrutiny does one remark how much of a construction it is. This kind of “professional portrait” was an established genre, but the arrangement was quite new at the time: the sitter is presented inside a narrow, almost camera obscura-like space for us to view. This device is common to several painters of Gossart’s generation, and perhaps most notably appears in the work of Hans Holbein the Younger (1497/98:1543) whose unforgettable Portrait of Erasmus of Rotterdam in the Louvre is but the best-known of a number of portraits conceived in this manner.

The tension between the natural and the staged is also apparent in Gossart’s narrative pictures. As court painter to Duke Philip of Burgundy he went to Rome in 1508:9 as part of a diplomatic delegation. He spent much of his time there orienting himself among the antique statuary and monuments, many of which he recorded in his sketchbooks. These sketches became foundational to his further work, which developed as a synthesis of Italian idealism and Flemish naturalism.

Jan The Adoration of the Kings, 1510-15, oil on panel, 177.2 x 161.3 cm. London, The National Gallery

The composition is organized according to the principles of central perspective with the vanishing point appropriately placed in the face of the Madonna. Mountains offset the horizon in a cool blue haze and angles hover weightlessly in the sky, slightly backlit, but apart from that the depth of field is encompassing, with everything in sharp focus. There is something disembodied about this clarity : the painting appears like a simulation of reality, arranged like a diorama. As in the portrait of the merchant we are dealing with a constructed reality, which gains its credibility from painstakingly orchestrated, seemingly naturalistic artifice.

Portrait of Christian II, c. 1523, pen and brown ink on paper, Paris, Institut Neerlandais

The following year he also painted portraits of the king’s children, whom Christian had left with Margaret when he traveled back to Denmark. One picture presumably shows the oldest princess, Dorothea, at ten years of age (c. 1530). She is sumptuously dressed in velvets and wears fine pearl. She holds in her hand an armillary sphere, i.e. a model of the heavens with the Earth at the center. In symbolic reference to her disrupted life, she has turned it upside-down and gestures to one of its outer rings at a point around 56 degrees above the Equator : or at Copenhagen, her home.

Portrait of a Princess (Dorothea of Danmark?), c. 1530, oil on panel, 38.1 x 28.9 cm., London, The National Gallery

Gossaert here employs a device that he used increasingly in his late portraits: he paints the girl in front of a picture frame. This break in the naturalist logic of the picture surface emphasizes how lifelike the portrait is : the princess appears as if she had stepped out of the picture : while simultaneously making evident its nature as construction : she is still contained within the painting’s actual frame, portrayed in half-length with her elbows cropped at its edges. Accentuating this dichotomy further, her head is modeled three-dimensionally while the lines described by her dress and jewelry are drawn flatly on the surface.

Gossaert is aware of the significance of Parrhasios’ curtain. By imitating the world around him and at the same time exposing what he is doing, he makes us aware of reality and invites us to think about how we understand it.

St. Luke Painting the Madonna and Child, c. 1520-22, oil on panel, 109.5 x 82 cm., Vienna, Kunsthistorisches Museum

Review originally published in Danish in Weekendavisen, week 21 2011.