‘Raphael and Urbino’ at Palazzo Ducale

By Rachel Spence
April 18 2009

Raphael’s ‘Small Cowper Madonna'

"Leonardo promises heaven,” said Picasso. “but Raphael, he gives it to us.” It is just one of a myriad tributes to the painter whose unique fusion of figurative skill with sublime vision made him the champion of Renaissance artists. History has been less kind to his father. Giovanni Santi (1439-84) was the court painter to the Duke of Urbino, Federico di Montefeltro. A ruthless mercenary soldier with a passion for Renaissance humanism, this intriguing personality ruled his duchy from a hilltop citadel in Italy’s Marches region. His patronage of Santi’s workshop ensured that, by the time Raphael was born in 1483, it was the largest and most successful in Urbino. Nevetheless the critical fate of Raphael’s father was sealed when the 16th-century biographer Giorgio Vasari denigrated him as a “painter of no great talent”. According to Vasari, Santi packed Raphael off to the Umbrian maestro, Perugino, and there the boy apprentice – his father died when he was just 11 – learnt the basics of his craft before going to Florence where, inspired by Leonardo and Michelangelo, he blossomed into the painter described by Vasari as “Nature’s gift to the world”.

This exhibition aims to prove that Vasari, and generations of art historians who have followed his lead, got it wrong. By juxtaposing works by Santi and his contemporaries with 40 paintings and drawings by the young Raphael, it makes a convincing case for the theory that the roots of his genius are planted in his hometown. Boosting the hypothesis is the recent discovery of documents showing that Raphael was regularly in Urbino until leaving for Florence in 1504. Perhaps he never worked in Perugino’s studio at all. Both Santi’s paintings and Federico’s palace, in which the show is held, reveal that Renaissance Urbino offered plenty of stylistic inspiration. Painted by Santi to decorate a room in the palace dedicated to the Greek artistic deities, the figures in “The Muses” (1480-90) have a languid, Botticelli-like grace but the elaborate details – ornately patterned dresses, pebble-strewn foregrounds and undulating horizons – testify to the influence of the Flemish painters, such as Giusto di Gand, at the Duke’s court. Federico was particularly fascinated by the age’s new mathematical discoveries. Both the scholar Leon Battista Alberti – who translated mathematical principles into artistic method – and the great artistic maestro and geometrician Piero della Francesca stayed at his court and his palace’s peerless architecture was based on strict geometric rules.

The desire for geometric harmony is a leitmotif in Santi’s paintings. Among the most simple and effective are five panels depicting the Apostles, c1475. Framed by deep niches, the three-dimensional figures enjoy the limpid, architectural clarity that was Della Francesca’s trademark. Either absorbed in a book or clasping one like a talisman, these alert, dignified gentlemen epitomise the culture of learning that was the signature of Renaissance humanism. In Santi’s larger altarpieces his striving for perspective strains his draughtsmanship. At times, the crisply modelled loggias, imposing thrones and immaculately plotted landscapes threaten to overwhelm the human story. Nevertheless the majestic settings and complex choreography do feel like visual ancestors to Raphael’s great Roman fresco cycles. Yet the first works by Raphael suggest that he avoided trying to emulate his father’s somewhat forced monumentality. Instead, he mastered the curving, linear rhythms that animate Santi’s muses and the coy, windswept angels hovering above his Madonnas. Such daintiness, a legacy of Gothic art, is also a defining characteristic of Perugino’s style, as demonstrated by the ethereal damsels fluttering across the Umbrian’s predella, “Scenes from the Life of Mary”. Yet Perugino could never have achieved the exquisitely articulated distance between God and the crown He holds, in Raphael’s “The Coronation of San Nicolo da Tolentino” (1500-01). This is Raphael’s first signed work and it is a tribute to the curators that they have managed to reunite three of its elements – two angels and the crown-fingering God – for the first time here.


Painted by Raphael in 1503, portraits of the Duke of Urbino and his wife Elizabetta Gonzaga reinforce the links between the artist and his birthplace. Equally telling is the letter of recommendation written by Guido’s aunt, Giovanna Feltria, when Raphael left for Florence in 1504. “I love him very much, and wish him to reach good perfection,” wrote the woman whose face may serve as the model for the enigmatic portrait, “The Mute” (1505-07). By now, Raphael’s unrivalled draughtsmanship permitted him a freedom of composition that was beyond either Santi or Perugino. The questing, experimental lines of the early drawings on display are testaments to his ceaseless pursuit of the perfect form, the ideal contour, the loveliest face.
More obviously dazzling is “The Knight’s Dream” (c1504), from London’s National Gallery. Under the gaze of crumpled, violet mountains and rolling, sage-green hills, the slumbering knight is flanked by Minerva and Aphrodite. Will he choose to follow the path of war and wisdom? Or beauty, idleness and pleasure? A typical classical conundrum, the painting has always been seen as one of the early fruits of Raphael’s exposure to the High Renaissance culture of Florence. Yet the catalogue suggests it is actually inspired by the “blue remembered hills” of Raphael’s birthplace, while the somnolent cavalier was based on Federico di Montefeltro, whose fusion of military and intellectual prowess made him a true Renaissance man.


The final section gathers together a stellar clutch of early Florentine masterpieces including the Leonardesque “Holy Family”, whose spiralling rhythms and whimsical iconography see Baby Jesus actually astride the lamb. Even more famous is the “Small Cowper Madonna” (c1506), from Washington’s National Gallery. Ideal yet intensely human, motherly yet maidenly, vulnerable yet robust, this blooming, flaxen-haired Madonna transcends her predecessors to become one of the first truly great Raphaels. Yet even at this juncture of his career, the painter clung on to his roots. The church behind her is almost certainly that of San Bernardino in Urbino. The best way to find out for sure is to go and see it, and this riveting exhibition, for yourself.


Raphael and Urbino, until July 12, Palazzo Ducale, Urbino, http://www.palazzoducaleurbino.it/

Madness and the artistic imagination

By Neville Hawcock
Published: April 18 2009

Josef Karl Rädler’s self-portrait

No wonder Lotte Franzos didn’t like the portrait Oskar Kokoschka painted of her in 1909. Her skin is blotchy, her expression downcast; her skinny hands look awkward, with the middle and index fingers of the left drawn tensely back; the background has all the hues of a livid bruise.
Although Franzos was a friend of the Viennese artist, she wrote to him to complain about the likeness. Her reaction was vindicated by the reception that critics gave the picture when it was exhibited in Vienna in 1911: “What a foul smell emanates from the picture of Frau Dr Franzos!” exclaimed one. But Frau Dr Franzos was at odds with the zeitgeist, or so Madness and Modernity, on show at the Wellcome Collection argues: many a wealthy, arty Viennese was only too happy to have a portrait painted in this anguished style. Kokoschka’s show included some 23 portraits of Viennese intellectuals, depicted, as a contemporary critic put it, “with all the signs of quiet or raving madness”. In the years leading up to the first world war, the Austro-Hungarian capital was a city of the highly strung, revelling in their own anxieties like miserablist teenagers. If 1900s Vienna, city of Klimt, Freud and Mahler, was the cradle of modernism, it was hardly a joyous birth.

Other pictures at the Wellcome attest to this pathological aesthetic. Like Franzos, the writer Heinrich Mann looks down in Max Oppenheimer’s portrait, his face gaunt and gloomy, contemplating the clawlike hand that he has raised to the level of his midriff, the murky khaki tones of the background lightening around his head to produce an aura of contemplative intensity. Similar tricks are played in the next portrait, also by Oppenheimer – Kokoschka’s arch-rival in the “psychological portrait” market – of the essayist Franz Blei, whose skinny hands are artfully crossed, corpse-like, on his chest. The attention to hands, in fact, is striking, and seen too in a sequence of self-portraits by Egon Schiele. These are mannered, nervous, attenuated hands – hands that suggest a shrinking away from the world rather than a readiness to grasp it.

Oskar Kokoschka’s 1909 portrait of Lotte Franzos

The show doesn’t delve deeply into just why the city’s intelligentsia should have been obsessed with its nerves. One could point to urbanisation and immigration, to political troubles in the empire, but such factors were not unique to Vienna, and artists elsewhere in Europe, notably Edvard Munch (much admired in Vienna), had explored similarly anxious terrain. It’s hard not to draw parallels with our own insecure, high-tech, stressed-out times. But the curators’ more modest aim is to emphasise the degree to which the worlds of art and design and of psychiatry intersected. As progressive architects such as Otto Wagner designed new institutions for the mentally ill, so artists drew inspiration from the theories and practices of psychiatrists. The Schiele sequence, for example, hangs near a set of photographs by the French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, depicting naked male patients with various conditions; the awkward, angular poses of these figures find a clear echo in Schiele’s tortured images of himself.

The most sane portrait is of Freud, pupil of Charcot and father of psychoanalysis, looking at us with calm gravitas from another Oppenheimer canvas. (Not that you’d want your therapist to appear as anything other than a safe pair of hands.) It would be too perverse for the show not to mention him – yet Freud, with his analysis of neurosis in terms of repressed childhood trauma, was at this time a marginal figure. There is a couch on display, a richly patterned Persian rug thrown over it, and a selection of archaic figurines on loan from the Freud museum in Hampstead, but this moody antique clutter points up a contrast with the prevailing model of psychotherapy in Vienna, which saw nervous ailments as arising from physical causes and therefore susceptible to physical treatment. Near the couch are an exercise chair, a sturdily elegant piece of gym equipment with plush velvet seat and big steel flywheels, and an electrotherapy cage, an octagonal wooden structure studded with porcelain insulators and circled with electric cables; patients would sit within it and soak up the supposedly therapeutic electric field generated when the current was switched on. So much for talking cures.

Architecture was a crucial part of this mens sana in corpore sano approach. Clean, modern lines could bring psychological benefits, as at Josef Hoffmann’s Purkersdorf Sanatorium, built in 1904-05 on the outskirts of the city. A coolly functional building, all squares, rectangles and no frills, it featured large windows to bring light and air to its enervated inmates and flat, unornamented surfaces to facilitate hygiene and to promote calm. Every detail was carefully thought out, furniture, light fittings, fabrics: this was the health resort as Gesamtkunstwerk, a place where the best of modern design and technology – a photograph shows the lofty mechanotherapy room, with exercise chairs like the one on display – could alleviate the stresses of modern urban life.

A poster advertising the Steinhof complexPurkersdorf, though, was not for everyone.

More seriously disturbed – and poorer – patients would be treated in the state asylums, but similar design principles applied. Things had moved on since the 18th century, when, as we learn at the start of the show, the city had built its remarkable Narrenturm (“Fools’ Tower”), a circular structure intended simply to confine the insane. Otto Wagner, Hoffmann’s mentor, laid out the huge Steinhof asylum complex, opened in 1907, as a spacious arrangement of villas in landscaped parkland; at the highest point is one of the masterpieces of early modernism, the St Leopold church, which, while far more ornamented than Purkersdorf, shares its monumental blockiness. Steinhof aimed to serve (and profit from) the neurotic bourgeoisie with a state-of-the-art sanatorium: a poster on show extols its many comforts, including a billiard room and ladies’ salon. In one of the many arresting juxtapositions at this exhibition – and, for that matter, at Wellcome shows in general – it hangs next to a massive, battered wooden door, with a small glass aperture, behind which Steinhof’s doctors would confine dangerous patients. But perhaps the most striking contrast in Madness and Modernity comes at the end – after the mannered neuroticism of the portraits by Kokoschka and Oppenheimer is an extraordinary display of paintings by the genuinely mentally ill artist Josef Karl Rädler.

Rädler, a master porcelain painter and schizophrenic who was confined to psychiatric hospitals for many years until his death in 1917, painted watercolour portraits of his fellow patients, annotated with rambling reflections and framed within intricate patterns. Some of the outdoor scenes, with recurrent images of birds and dark trees set against a twilight sky, have a faintly menacing air, but the portraits are gentler affairs, painted in a naive, sympathetic style. It’s moving to look at the forgotten individuals who passed through these anonymising institutions. And, unlike Vienna’s anxious elite, these men look straight at you.

‘Madness and Modernity: Mental Illness and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900’, Wellcome Collection, London NW1, to June 28. Tel: +44 (0)20 7611 8888, http://www.wellcomecollection.org/exhibitionsandevents/exhibitions/Madness-and-Modernity/index.htm

The Financial Times Limited 2009

A Father of Modern Art and His Many Progeny

APRIL 8, 2009

By MARY TOMPKINS LEWIS
The Wall Street Journal

(Philadelphia) For many modern artists Paul Cézanne was a talismanic figure, the shadow of his painting as impossible to escape as his achievement was to define. Throughout the 20th century, as scholars labored to construct a viable history of modern art, Cézanne (along with Manet, Courbet and a handful of transgressive others) was posited as its fountainhead, the protean begetter whose countless artistic progeny shaped a new aesthetic that placed vision and touch above traditional formal and narrative concerns.

'Cézanne and Beyond'
View SlideshowMuseum of Fine Arts Boston

Both Matisse and Picasso would claim Cézanne as a father, and almost every variant of 20th-century art could trace some aspect of its origins to his painting. Cézanne's effect on later artists has become the stuff of exquisite exhibitions, heated debate, and a linear notion of modernism. Without thoroughly disrupting that tidy critical trajectory, the Philadelphia Museum of Art's current exhibition, "Cézanne and Beyond," moves it onto more fluid and fertile ground, and the results are highly satisfying and visually thrilling. Even in his own day Cézanne was, perhaps above all else, a painter's painter, receiving his first, most unfailing and most perceptive expressions of support from fellow artists. And artists again lead us through this revelatory exhibition, one whose thematic, rather than chronological, display allows a richer reading of both Cézanne's art and their own. In the opening gallery, for example, the photographer Jeff Wall's "The Crooked Path" (1991) is paired with Cézanne's "Turn in the Road" (c. 1881) to argue that both the unique visual sensations that Cézanne sought to capture and the ideal pictorial tradition this landscape embodied can resonate as one in a contemporary photographic tableau. A second room finds Cézanne's late canvases of peasants and his "Cardplayers" sharing space with figures by Fernand Léger, the sculptor Alberto Giacometti and the American modernist Marsden Hartley. Their visual affinities are unmistakable, but the later works share as well a sense of the magnetic vitality Cézanne brought to his depictions of these stolid rural types. The massive accompanying catalog, whose heft is scholarly as well as literal, explores all of this in depth. While Cézanne is hardly diminished by the company he keeps here, it is clear that his example seems to have spurred artists in every medium and era to heroic feats. Questions of influence, long key to modernist chronologies, recede as one discovers that the best "students" of the Aixois master can hold their own in his formidable presence.

Cézanne's acute sense of his place in history -- in the late Impressionist moment but also in the grand tradition of French art -- brought to his painting a profundity that belies its seemingly familiar subject matter. In a gallery devoted to still lifes, Cézanne upends that implicitly stable genre to embrace questions of precarious balance, lack of finish and fragmented form and so reveals its renewed relevance for 20th-century artists, as witnessed in works as disparate as Matisse's monumental, flattened "Bowl of Apples on a Table" (1916) or Charles Demuth's smaller, delicate watercolors. (A separate gallery, distant from the rest but not to be missed, draws together admirers of Cézanne's still lifes of skulls.) Yet, though his painting offered limitless avenues for experimentation, it could also provide a lens through which artists could see their storied past: Giacometti's "Still Life With Apple" (1937), for example, summons not only Cézanne but his revered 18th-century predecessor, Chardin. The thematic organization of the show consistently underscores the fact that Cézanne conceived of his art as falling into distinctly different genres, each demanding its own ingenious mode. Alone among his contemporaries, he tackled them all. Among his many portraits, those of his wife, Hortense Fiquet, occupied a special place. In a niche befitting her iconic status here, "Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair" (c. 1877) presides, queenlike, over her varied offspring: Picasso's 1932 portrait of his lover Marie-Thérèse and Matisse's "Woman in Blue" (1937) reflect the persistent presence of Cézanne's inscrutable muse in early modernist circles. Even more potent, however, was the lingering memory of his bathers, those rare, hybrid creatures marked by a primal awkwardness and also an incipient classicism. Emulated and acquired by many of the artists assembled here, they would transform the modern conception of the female nude. Matisse, for example, always treasured the small canvas he bought in 1899 of "Three Bathers" (c. 1879-82). He would reflect in his own lyrical "Le Luxe I" (1907) and far more forceful "Bather" (1909) not so much an influence felt as an homage owed to the possibilities that Cézanne's nudes allowed.

Just beyond the dark, imaginary thickets inhabited by Cézanne's bathers, a long gallery of his sunlit Provençal landscapes aligns Cézanne's work with that of more recent artists. Their responses to his example again enhance our reading of both sides of this illuminating, and still evolving, dialogue. Jasper Johns's paintings of "Maps" evince both the obsessive repetition of known motifs that make Cézanne's views of his native Provence so recognizable to modern viewers and Mr. Johns's fascination with Cézanne's encrusted, tactile surfaces, which Mr. Johns would refer to in his own work by employing the wax-based medium of encaustic. Likewise, Ellsworth Kelly and Brice Marden found huge formal impetus in his landscapes. In their abstract, flattened canvases of dense color planes, they acknowledge the brilliant passages of pigment that lend a material "airy weightiness," as Mr. Marden has described it, to Cézanne's views of the Mediterranean. Although a few artists, such as Marcel Duchamp and Willem de Kooning, would also be welcome here, it seems pedantic to complain of absences in the presence of such a deeply distinguished cast. The good news from Philadelphia, home to so many Cézannes both here and at the nearby Barnes Foundation, is that the painter was a greater wellspring for artists than almost any of us had imagined, and that well is not about to run dry.

Ms. Lewis, who writes frequently about the arts, teaches art history at Trinity College, Hartford.