Random inspiration

Catalogue numbers: F 1665a, JH 834.

In Nuenen van Gogh was able to paint and draw more from the figure; the rural labourers of Brabant were often unemployed and, because they needed money, they agreed to pose for the painter. The most important work of this period in Nuenen was a multi-figure composition of peasants at home eating their meal - The Potato-Eaters. The picture was harshly criticized. Van Rappard, friend and fellow artist, questioned van Gogh’s right to claim comparison with Millet. To answer this, van Gogh began a series of large drawings of men and women digging, cutting wood, gleaning - tasks which Millet had represented in his series of drawings, Labours of the Fields.

The detail shows the self-portrait of the artist.

The painting was done while Rubens was in Genoa in 1606. It was cut down from a full-length portrait in which the young Marchesa (age 22) appears in the porch of a villa. We know this from a study drawing for the portrait, which is in the The Morgan Library and Museum, New York.

The sitter’s heavy eyelids and strong cheekbones are emphasized by the dramatic lighting, evidence of the continued popularity of Caravaggism in Rome.

Except for the artists who made the exact drawings and watercolours of birds, plants, insects, and shells which were so popular with ‘dilettanti’ of the period, the Dutch tradition of painting unpretentious still-lifes virtually died during the eighteenth century. Adriaen Coorte, a strong individualist who never adopted the rhetoric of his contemporaries, was one of the last practitioners of this intimate category.

The exquisite flowers and fruit, expensive vases and metalware, drapery and linen, and other props found in the over-abundant still-lifes painted during his day hardly ever appear in his work. His inclination was for common, reddish-brown earthenware pots, not imported porcelain bowls. Coorte’s pictures are always tiny, his subjects and compositions modest. His typical motifs are a bunch of asparagus, a few peaches, or three medlars with a butterfly on a bare ledge, like in this picture. Nothing more. Objects and light are studied intensely, and are painted with a wondrous tenderness which awakens more feelings about the mystery of our relation to the animate and inanimate world than the better-known show-pieces of the period.

Coorte is an isolated phenomenon. The main line of eighteenth-century Dutch still-life painting is represented by the Amsterdamers Rachel Ruysch and Jan van Huysum, who both specialized in elaborate flower and fruit pictures.

In the south of Germany, it was principally Dannecker of Stuttgart who proved capable of matching the mastery of the great Prussian sculptors. He saw himself in his self-portrait vigorous and self-assured, gazing into the distance as a free, independent artist living a life of his own making. There is a noticeably strong resemblance between it and the famous bust of Schiller (c. 1794), in which Dannecker reproduced the idealized image of the free artist.

The end wall of the Stanze del Cane (Room of the Dog) is decorated with an illusionistic landscape. Above, in the lunette, the Holy Family with St Catherine and the Infant St John is depicted. The room received its name owing to the presence of a small dog curled up on one side of the room.

This painting is a fine example of Tanzio’s accomplishment in the genre of private devotional images. It is among the artist’s last paintings.

This small private devotional panel has only recently been attributed to Giovanni di Lorenzo Larciani, an early 16th century Florentine Mannerist painter, a contemporary of other Florentine Mannerist painters such as Andrea del Sarto and Franciabigio.

In France, during the decades of 1660-80 few painters had devoted themselves exclusively to portraiture, which was considered of secondary importance. The personages of the time liked if possible to be shown in action, for instance as victorious general, or at least surrounded by appropriate and allegorical embellishments. But after about 1685 several important artists appear who specialized in portraiture and who created a new fashion in this field. The essential novelty of their style is the introduction of the technique and patterns of the Flemish school, particularly of van Dyck.

The oldest of these painters was Fran�ois de Troy who was soon outshone by two more brilliant painters of the same generation, Nicolas de Largilli�re and Hyacinthe Rigaud. Many of the works by these two artists belong in spirit and in date to the eighteenth century, but both made important contributions to the development of French painting well before 1700, and they must be considered as helping to create the transition from one century to the other. Both contributed to the elimination of the style of the Grand Si�cle, both belonged to the party of Colour; but in certain other respects they are sharply opposed: in their clent�le, their naturalism, and in their relation to the painting of the Netherlands.

Work on the Collegio di Propaganda Fide, a group of buildings which formed the headquarters of the missionary congregation went on for an extended period.Borromini was commissioned to produce new structures for and alterations to the College.

Bernini built a small chapel in the palace for Pope Urban VIII; after the Pope’s death Bernini fell into disgrace and Borromini was asked to replace it with a larger chapel which was completed in 1664. Similar to what he had done for Oratorio dei Filippini, Borromini included the chapel in the overall design of the palace, so that its existence is not evident from the outside; the chapel has an unusual rectangular shape with a fine stucco ceiling. The dedication to the Magi was decided by Cardinal Barberini on the assumption that the three kings could be regarded as the first pagans who embraced the Christian faith; their conversion could therefore be considered as a symbol of those promoted by the congregation.

The photo shows the interior of the Re Magi Chapel.

Because of the emphasis on the classical tradition, medieval forms were far less readily adopted in the 19th century in Italy than in northern Europe. One of the most lavish representatives of the Gothic Revival in the realm of landscape gardening is the Margheria attached to the residence of the Prince of Carignano in Racconigi in Piedmont. The courtyard layout, erected between 1834-49 on the edge of an extensive English garden planned by Savoy court gardener Saverio Kurten, goes back to designs by architect and stage designer Pelagio Palagi. While the complex silhouette, with its corner towers, battlements and pinnacled pediments, is clearly inspired by English models, the ground plan with three wings round a court is unmistakably derived from baroque villas. The cortile, on the other hand, enclosed by pointed arches, is reminiscent of a cloister garth.

The photo shows the main fa�ade.

The St Sylvester cycle begins in the lunette on the left (north) wall with Constantine’s refusal to bathe in the blood of the innocents to cure himself of leprosy.

In spite of its title, the scene actually represents the horses waiting before the famous race of the Barberi that closes the Roman carnival, and which G�ricault witnessed during his stay in Italy from 1816 to 1819. The work is probably the source of two paintings on the same subject.

The trumpeter on the left is one of Piero’s most famous figures.

Chiari was Carlo Maratti’s close collaborator in the latter three decades of Maratti’s life. The present composition derives from Maratti’s designs for his paintings of the same subject.

Vecchietta’s final commission (1480) was for painted wood reliefs of the Death of the Virgin and Assumption of the Virgin (Villa Guinigi, Lucca), but he lived to execute only the first, the Assumption being completed by Neroccio de’ Landi. This is a final instance of how Vecchietta helped to mould two generations of Sienese artists, but his greatest legacies were the works for his own chapel.

The circumstances of the commission of this painting are slightly unusual. According to the Bolognese connoisseur, Malvasia, the painting was one of four half-length figures undertaken in a competitive spirit for the Venetian merchant Boselli by Palma Giovane, Niccolò Renieri, Guercino and Guido Reni. Palma Giovane seems to have acted as the intermediary in the negotiations and, since he died in 1628, it can be deduced that the related paintings date from towards the close of the 1620s or the early 1630s. After Boselli’s death, the Cleopatra passed into the collection of Renieri and shortly afterwards into that of Domenico Fontana. Several copies are known.

The subject of Cleopatra with the asp was popular during the seventeenth century and Reni evolved a number of half- and three-quarter-length interpretations. The sequence begins with the depiction of a more regal Cleopatra in Potsdam (Sanssouci), dating from about 1625-26, continues with the present painting, and is developed in those in Florence (Palazzo Pitti), London (private collection) and Rome (Capitoline Museum), all of which date from the late 1630s or early 1640s. A three-quarter-length composition was again chosen by the artist for his treatment of Lucretia and the Magdalen.

In this Cleopatra Reni demonstrates his skill as a draughtsman in the foreshortening of the head seen from below, and his competence as a designer in his use of diagonals. There is also an abundance of skill in the portrayal of the expression, the modelling of the flesh, the swathes of drapery, and the use of fresh, light colours - pink and white - set against a dark background. All these elements are components of the classicism associated with the followers of Annibale Carracci, of which Reni was a leading exponent. It was a style for which he was universally admired both during his own time and in the eighteenth century, at the end of which his reputation waned. Reni’s art was appreciated for its grace and finesse, the result of sound jjudgment and flowing brushwork.

The subject is taken from the Lives of the Caesars by Plutarch, in which Cleopatra’s suicide in 30 BC is described. Following Mark Antony’s defeat by Octavian at the Battle of Actium, an asp was smuggled in to Cleopatra in a basket of figs. Her death resulted from its bite. Mark Antony also committed suicide.