Vivante Drawings

Silhouetted and Silhouettes

August 22nd, 2010 § 0

Long before Etienne de Silhouette (1709-67), whose name was appropriated for black cut-out images, collectors were snipping the outlines of drawings. The father of all old master drawing collectors, Giorgio Vasari (1511-74), engaged in what nowadays would be called vandalism. The Filippino Lippi (c. 1457-1504) drawing of an angel below was cut out from a drawing and pasted on one of the few intact pages from his Libro de’ Disegni (8+ albums).

Page from Giorgio Vasari's Libro de' Disegni | Drawings by Filippino Lippi, Botticelli, and Rafaellino del Garbo | 567 x 457 mm. | National Gallery of Art | United States

The formatting of the album pages is so architectural, that a better word for their being taken apart might be dismantling or razing. The angel is used, along with a pair of snipped angels at the right, to create a symmetrical confection, framing the central child. It also has to be said that it is a magnificent sheet, that Vasari mostly left his drawings intact, and he did much more to conserve drawings than not.

Another drawing by Filippino Lippi, said to be from Vasari’s Libro (the ornament looks later to me), shows a male figure, carefully cut along the contour. I’m posting this drawing because the silhouetting makes the reading of the drawing ambiguous.

There are those that see it as a man hanged upside by his right foot, as in tortured, and those who see it as a performer. The facial expression could be seen as a grimace of pain or the exaggerated mask of a performer. Its being silhouetted, and taken from its context, makes it difficult to decide for certain.

In Sweden’s National Museum, there are a group of early drawings created in France which have been silhouetted. The Frog Man, probably a study for a performance or spectacle costume, below, is by Niccolò dell’Abbate (c. 1509-71 c.).

The silhouetting treatment was also used on drawings by Antoine Caron (c. 1527-99), Jacques Bellange (active c. 1600-16), and Georges Lallemand (1575-1636). The drawings have the same provenance, Prince Victor-Amédée de Carignan (1680-1741) to Carl Gustaf Tessin (1695-1770). I haven’t read an explanation of why this was done, but it probably has to do with wanting to see these drawings as a group, to create a visual link between the works.

Drawings weren’t the only snipped works. Medieval manuscripts have been clipped, even for making lampshades. Starting in the early 18th century prints were trimmed, glued to furniture and decorative objects, then varnished, creating the look of lacquered items. Sometimes the prints were made on purpose to be cut out for decorative projects. The descriptive word decoupage was the name for it and the leisure class took it up as a pass time–crafting for fun. The following is from an entertaining article by D.O. Kisluk-Grosheide of the Metropolitan Museum, where she quotes Charlotte Aïssé (1693-1733), a letter-writer whose letters were edited by Voltaire, on decoupage:

“We are here in the height of a new passion for cutting up coloured engravings…Everyone, great and small, is snipping away. These cuttings are pasted on sheets of cardboard and then varnished. They are made into wall panels, screens, and fire boards. There are books and engravings costing up to 200 livres; women are mad enough to cut up engravings worth 100 livres apiece. If this fashion continues, they will cut up Raphaels!”

Etienne de Silhouette, the budget-minded Controller General of France’s Finances (1759) was known for cost cutting, to the point of calling for pocketless trousers. His name became associated with frugality and “à la silhouette” meant something that was no-frills. The cut-outs, generally portraits, were first known as “portraits à la silhouette,” then simply as silhouetttes. The big difference is that blank paper was used. This example just below is by an anonymous cutter and is of Gerard van Swieten (1700-72), the personal doctor of Maria Theresa (1717-80), an important figure in developing the University of Vienna’s Medical School and a debunker of belief in vampires.

Anonymous Cutter | Profile Bust of Gerard Van Sweiten | Black paper silhouette mounted on cream paper | 124 x 114 mm. | Private Collection

It wasn’t just the inexpensiveness that made silhouettes attractive. The raison d’être was that people in the 18th and 19th centuries had a great fascination with profiles, believing that a profile was a window to character. In reading period novels, profiles come right after income prospects in importance when choosing a marriage partner.

While most silhouettes are portrait profiles, if I were to think of two of the most well known artists engaged in silhouetting, they would be Philipp Otto Runge (1777-1810) and the contemporary Kara Walker. Runge, although he did portraits and genre scenes, he is best known for silhouettes of flowers, see below, and Kara Walker (born 1969) for scenes of injustice. Here is a link to Walker’s gallery.

Philipp Otto Runge | Fire Lily | White Paper silhouette mounted on black paper | 650 x 500 mm. | Hamburg Kunsthalle

Graphite

July 30th, 2010 § 0

Borrowdale’s Seathwaite Mine is a graphite mine in England’s Lake District. Its commercial run ended in the mid 19th century, after some 300 years, but it continues to be of interest to geologists because of the extraordinary purity of its graphite. From the 13th century to the 16th, the mine belonged to Furness Abbey and an account book lists graphite as sheep oodde, a substance to mark sheep. A peculiarity of the Borrowdale mine graphite is that it sometimes takes the form of egg shaped lumps–perfect for drawing bold marks on the coats of sheep. Graphite is a bit oily and impervious to rain or water.

By the 16th century the mine had passed to the crown and was leased out. Since the graphite was so pure, sticks could be sawn and used as is or used in a holder and this excellent drawing material found favor throughout Europe. It wasn’t known as graphite, but as plumbago, referring to lead. Of all drawing media, graphite’s line most closely resembles that produced with leadpoints. It was not until the 18th century that it was proved that graphite was not a type of lead, but carbon (diamonds are also a carbon form and both have the hottest melting points). The Bankes family, builders and owners of Kingston Lacy, now a National Trust property, owe some of their wealth to the Seathwaite Mine. It is amusing to think that their Sebastiano del Piombo was financed by graphite money. Graphite was also used as a lubricant in molds for armaments, producing greater financial rewards than art supplies.

Early on, artists used graphite principally for underdrawing, to faintly mark out forms and space before putting down marks in the central medium. Ferrante Imperato, a Neapolitan scholar of natural history wrote of graphite in his 28 book work Dell’Historia Naturale:

Il grafio piombino si preferisce a tutte le materie que preparino il disegno, alla penna e l’inchiostro, percioche facilmente, usandovi industria, si cancella; e non volendo cancellarlo si conserva. Non da impedimento al maneggio della penna, il che fa il piombo per un modo, et il carbone per un’altro; si tirano con questo sottolissimi lineamenti, ne si puo stimar materia per inventioni da far in carta, que se la possa aggualiare; è untuoso al tutto, et al fuoco sommamente indurisce.

Graphite is to be preferred above all other materials for the underdrawing in pen and ink drawings because it can, with a little industry, be erased and, if you don’t want to erase it, it lasts. It doesn’t interfere with the handling of the pen, the way lead does on the one hand or the way charcoal does on the other. With graphite one can draw the finest of lines and one can’t imagine a finer material for creations on paper. It is also oily and when placed in the fire, it becomes extremely hard.

– Ferrante Imperato, Dell’Historia Naturale, Naples, 1599. Book IV, chapter 43, p. 122.

Drawings referred to as plumbagos are portraits, usually small in scale, and done in graphite on a vellum support. The type originated with printmakers in late 16th century Holland, who made drawings in graphite in preparation of engraved portraits. Plumbagos became popular in England after 1660, when the monarchy was restored and exiled artists returned from Holland. After a time, plumbagos were thought of as finished works of art in themselves, and no prints were made from the drawings. The Victoria & Albert have a nice group of these portraits, visible at this link.

Graphite, albeit of a poorer quality than the Borrowdale graphite, was present throughout Europe. Refinements were necessary to make the continental graphite usable. In 1662 pencils were produced in Nuremberg, the pencils combined graphite, sulphur, and antimony. The sulphur would have created an unpleasant smell. The big breakthrough in pencil making occurred in 1795 when Frenchman Nicolas-Jacques Conté (1755 – 1805) received a patent for his pencil. The pencil was made by baking ground graphite with clay and this continues to be the way pencils are produced today. The more clay in the mixture, the softer the pencil. He was also the inventor of the conté crayon, a waxy pencil. Conté’s pencil improvement was prompted by the war between France and England, when the French were no longer able to import the Borrowdale graphite. Because of Conté’s invention, the early 19th century saw a huge increase in pencil production. As an example, the naturalist Henry David Thoreau’s father was one of 8 pencil makers in Concord, Mass. By the time the Borrowdale mine ceased producing, the new manner of making pencils meant that Borrowdale’s closing wasn’t felt.

Ingres’ portraits of the early 19th century are considered some of the most brilliant drawings in graphite. Graphite lends itself to works of great detail and precision. This drawing of Corot’s, shown above, is not at all precise. It shows, however, the possibilities of the shimmery silver of graphite.

A Conversation with Alessandro Kokocinski about Eric Hebborn

June 22nd, 2010 § 0

Alessandro Kokocinski is a painter, sculptor and draftsman. I visit with him in his studio in Tuscania, in the medieval church of San Biagio. The space is divided into two immense rooms and works that are part polychrome sculpture and part painting fill the studio. For some years he worked in theatre, designing sets, costumes and lighting for the performances of Lina Sastri, an actress and singer with whom he had a long relationship. As a young man he worked in the circus as an acrobat. It is pretty clear that his work in the performing arts has informed his paintings, sculptures, and drawings. Kokocinski’s website contains galleries for each of his art forms. In the fall he’ll go to Argentina for an exhibition of his work and for commissions for public spaces, a monument to the “Desaparecidos” (he himself was briefly imprisoned in the 1970s in Italy at the behest of Argentina’s military dictatorship, who wanted him extradited), and to start work on a monument for the Israeli embassy in Buenos Aires, commissioned to honor those who died in the 1992 bombing of that embassy. Next year he’ll have exhibitions in Salzburg and Perugia. Kokocinski is a fascinating person and artist, maybe more fascinating than the reason I go over to Tuscania to speak to him: Eric Hebborn.

Alessandro Kokocinski in his Studio | Tuscania | 15 June 2010

For those who don’t know about Eric Hebborn, the following is a brief biography. He was born in the suburbs of London in 1934. After a difficult childhood and youth, he went to the Royal Academy Art Schools, where he was a student between 1954 and 1959. Here is a portrait of Eric Hebborn in the Royal Academy’s collection, painted by his teacher Peter Greenham in about 1960. Hebborn was awarded a scholarship to the British School at Rome. He spent most of his life in Italy and made a living faking old and modern master drawings, and to a lesser extent paintings and sculptures. He sold his falsifications through Pannini Galleries, a gallery he owned briefly in Rome; to dealers; and through the London auction houses. Hebborn also produced Hebborns in various media. He published two books, Drawn to Trouble : The Forging of An Artist (Edinburgh:Mainstream, 1991 and New York: Random House, 1993) and Il Manuale del Falsario (Vicenza: N. Pozza, 1995). The English version, The Faker’s Handbook (London: Cassell) came out posthumously in 1997. He died, perhaps mysteriously, on 10 January 1996, at the age of 61.

Kokocinski met Hebborn in about 1974 at Anticoli Corrado (province of Rome), where they both lived, and they remained friends until Hebborn’s death in 1996. Anticoli Corrado is east of Tivoli, and less than an hour from Rome. While Alessandro was born in Italy, his parents soon afterward moved to South America, and that is where he grew up. Almost immediately after coming back to Italy in 1974, he went to Anticoli Corrado because of the Spanish poet and artist Rafael Alberti, who was a summer resident of the town. It is a hill town that has attracted artists for years, even centuries. The town was known for its particularly beautiful people, mostly women, who would work as models. (Not just women though. My Italian grandmother would tell the story of Lord Leighton, who hired a model from Anticoli Corrado and brought him to London, for his looks and stamina, to pose as the martyred St. Peter, upside down on a cross.)

Hebborn, starting in the 60s, rented a villa outside of Anticoli Corrado, a villa where Luigi Pirandello had spent the summer of 1936, visiting with his painter son Fausto, who, like Hebborn, was a long term tenant. Kokocinski says of the Villa San Filippo, “The designer of the garden, in either the early ottocento or late settecento, had also worked on the Vatican gardens and brought many exotic plants there. The garden was very attractive, attractive because the plants were old, at least 150 years old. The garden was more beautiful than the big villa itself.” Later in the conversation I ask Alessandro if Hebborn had a good library and he says that he did and that he was very cultured, adding that he had a beautiful collection of Roman sculptures. Of Hebborn, he says, “He enjoyed living. “Gozzovigliava.” He spent money freely, everyday was a party, excesses in everything.” The way Kokocinski describes the era, it was a party for everybody, not just Hebborn.

Alessandro tells me that he and Hebborn had a joint show mostly of prints, but also drawings, and a few of Hebborn’s sculptures at the villa and that he has a pamphlet somewhere. “Eric taught me how to make engravings. He had a great knowledge of many techniques: sculpture, painting, drawing, and also engraving and etching. He had a small laboratory for printmaking and I learned how to make engravings. I still have some of the material from the show, not mine, but his.” I’m surprised by the fact that they would have the show in a private venue, wondering about the small number of people who could see it. Alessandro says that they did the show for friends, and that they both had a large circle of friends–an international group of artists, writers, theatre people, and dancers who visited. Alessandro remembers these years as being lived intensely, almost communally, with a lively exchange of ideas. “Much that I have now is in large part because of my great friendship with Eric Hebborn, to my maestro Riccardo Tommasi Ferroni, to Rafael Alberti, to Alberto Sughi and many, may others. Giving and taking. The richness in life comes from the exchange of ideas.”

Alessandro says that Hebborn taught him “techniche neoclassiche” in painting and drawing. Now, when he says Neoclassic, I’m sure he does not mean the Neoclassicism of Canova, David, and Flaxman, but more old master or classic art. He still has the two studies after Caravaggio that he made with Hebborn’s help. They’re on old canvas and they’re really very good. A dealer friend of Hebborn’s had asked Kokocinski to make Rembrandts. The dealer would have supplied the “croste” or old paintings which could have been recycled, but Kokocinski had no interest, he was doing them to learn technique.

Hebborn showed Alessandro how he made the inks, how he cut quill pens, he taught him about old paper. Hebborn was a good fourteen years older than Kokocinski and beyond friendship, there must have been something of a teacher/pupil relationship. Kokocinski on Hebborn’s own work “Strangely, when he did his own work as an artist, artist between quotes, the work was not great. It was, let’s say limited. However, when his copies were successful, they were extraordinary.” He goes on to clarify, as Hebborn did, that they weren’t really copies, but works in “the manner of” or inspired by old masters. Hebborn was open about what he was doing and he must of had a certain scorn for dealers and curators. He would say “How expert can these experts be if they can’t tell one of my drawings.” I ask Alessandro whether he remembers ever meeting Anthony Blunt and the name sounds familiar, but he can’t remember for sure. Kokocinski thinks that Hebborn as Hebborn did his best work in sculpture. He remembers that Hebborn had exhibitions of his sculptural work in England.
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Alessandro uses old paper for his drawings. I ask him if he got this from Hebborn, and he says, “Yes, it must have been, even if not consciously.” He says he never makes drawings in preparation for paintings or other art forms. He makes them as finished works. Just below is a watercolor on antique paper of a circus rider. It is from a book of drawings which was published in 2003. Alessandro says that the circus is the only art form that hasn’t been ruined by money. He worked in the circus in South America and his brother has had a life-long career in the circus. Alessandro explains “The circus is still extraordinary, and it has evolved and gotten better over the years. It’s still a virgin art form: the people are doing what they love, as long as their bodies let them, and they’re not in it to cash in as the rest of the art world is.”

Alessandro Kokocinski | At the Hungarian Circus | Watercolor on Antique Paper | 250 x 175 mm.

Alessandro tells of going to a museum in Buenos Aires a couple of years ago. A museum in a converted cigarette factory, where he pays an entrance of 2 or 3 Argentina dollars, which he explains is quite a bit there. “I enter these very beautiful spaces thinking that I would find things that I could admire and which I myself can’t do, to find doors to a universe that is more beautiful than what I see every day. Instead I find myself in this big gallery with old chairs and stuff heaped up on the floor. Also, a video, let’s say pornographic, but sad. If it were beautiful, it might even have excited, but instead it just turned one’s stomach. I say no. I go down to the ticket office and I say ‘Please, I’d like my money back, I paid to see things that I can’t make myself. I have to learn and museums have to open doors to my soul/spirit through which I can see marvelous and beautiful things. Instead I see stuff, dirty clothes. I’m not interested in this and I consider this a swindle. It offends my intelligence.’” They give Alessandro his money back and the story, I think at least, tells a lot about his work. It is most certainly beautiful and it leads to a universe that one doesn’t see everyday.

Alessandro left Italy from 1986 to 1995 and lost touch with Hebborn, but when he returned they started seeing one another in Rome, where they were both living. Hebborn would go to Alessandro’s house once or twice a week for supper. Hebborn by this point had moved from Villa San Filippo to a house he built called Santa Maria, again outside of Anticoli Corrado and he had an apartment in Trastevere, where he was spending most of his time. Hebborn and Edgar had left each other and Alessandro sees this as the point where things started to go downhill for Hebborn. Edgar, a dancer from the Philippines who had performed in the musical Jesus Christ Superstar, and Hebborn had been together for some 25 years. Hebborn was drinking more and more. There weren’t the outlets that there used to be for his drawings and he complained that the dealers had made much more money on his fabrications than he had. On the plus side, he remembers Hebborn telling him that he had a good contracts for the books, and Alessandro remembers that Japanese television did a documentary on Hebborn. I ask him about Hebborn’s death and he says what a lot of people in Italy say, that you can’t exclude murder.

Probably the most interesting piece I have read about Eric Hebborn’s death was written by Matteo Collura in a highly recommended 4 May 2008 article published in the newspaper Corriere della Sera. In the article he tries to reconstruct what happened to Hebborn before his death in a Rome hospital on 10 January 1996. It is based on his interviews with people in the Trastevere neighborhood where Hebborn lived, from newspaper accounts, and from hospital and police reports. Hebborn had been seen the evening of 8 January by the proprietor of a wine shop, where he was a regular and where he had stopped for a couple of glasses of wine. The proprietor couldn’t remember whether he was alone, but he did remember that he wasn’t drunk and that he was going to dinner. Vague reports of Hebborn being in the company of another person exist, but nobody comes forth to identify or describe the person. Hours elapse and Hebborn is lying in the rain in Piazza Trilussa. Someone covers him with a raincoat that is not his own. Another unknown, calls for an ambulance and at 2 in the morning he arrives by ambulance at Nuova Regina Margherita Hosptial on Viale Trastevere. Collura writes that Hebborn was taken for a drunken “barbuto” literally “bearded man,” but meaning hobo or homeless. He was wet from rain and left in a corner to sober up, his head wound unnoticed and unattended. His first real care came at about 10 in the morning and Collura points out this was a good 8 hours after he entered the hospital. It’s not clear at which point they find his wallet with ID, money, credit cards. He hadn’t been mugged. It wasn’t until 4 that afternoon, by this time he’d been taken across the river to San Giacomo Hospital, that he had a CAT scan and was operated on. Around midnight his breathing becomes irregular and he dies at 7:40 on 10 January 1996. In general if you talk to people in Rome, they say he was murdered, that the head wound came from the murderer, who must have been a dealer, and not from falling to the pavement. They say the case was never properly investigated to shield powerful people. Another conspiracy theory for this conspiracy rich world.

Six months after Hebborn’s death, the official looking into the Hebborn case, and relying on the autopsy, dismissed it, saying that his death was only hastened by the head wound he suffered from falling, but he would have died from artereosclerosis (a quick check of the Mayo Clinic site shows that this is treatable) and the onset of cirrhosis of the liver. (There is something hypocritical here, since people who are in comas and can’t possibly recover are the objects of dramatic church vigils, their impossible lives prolonged, and their families and medical providers risk legal actions if treatments are discontinued.) What starts running through my mind is that even if you are a homeless drunk, you deserve prompt medical care; even if you are gay, you deserve a thorough investigation into your death. (Pasolini’s mysterious murder and the ensuing investigation are now being scrutinized, some 35 years later.) I also don’t think this is peculiar to Italy.

A month or two after Hebborn’s death, Kokocinski went to Anticoli Corrado to see what was happening with Santa Maria. He went to the house, found the door open, and the house had been ransacked. There was stuff all over the floor, things had been burnt. To gauge how bad it was, I ask him if it looks like the photos of Francis Bacon’s studio, and he says worse, it looked worse. The pity here is that the papers were not taken in as evidence, when there was thought that Hebborn might have been murdered. Perhaps there would have been clues about his death. There might have been, or almost surely would have been records, maybe one for each drawing, showing where they’d been sold and a lot of doubts could have been lifted from the world of old master drawings.

Kokocinski picked up some papers, really at random, to remember his friend Eric Hebborn. He shares the folder with me. In it there are notes for his book, a letter to Sotheby’s and Christie’s, a couple of Hebborn as Hebborn drawings and various other papers. I scan some pages, and because it takes too long, I start photographing some of the pages. His handwriting can be good to very good. (In 2004 his treatise on calligraphy Italico per Italiani is published by Colla Editore. Hebborn had translated Michaelangelo’s sonnets into English and written them out.) I’m struck by how organized he seems to be. Things are bulleted, and 1.2.3. Alessandro says that he was always very methodical and kept his papers well organized, everything in folders.

What surprises me so much about Hebborn is not so much Hebborn himself (I’ve gotten over that), but that so little work is done to try to isolate his fakes. If you look around at museum databases you’ll see that the British Museum is one of the few that list works of Hebborn. Unaccountably, they don’t provide images of their Hebborns. Others, in fact, most museums don’t want to admit they have any of his works in their collections. What would really be a service, would be if some university/ies would offer seminars, maybe even Sotheby’s, where they have a training program, and have students assemble and publish online the drawing of Hebborn. It would be excellent for them to develop connoisseurship skills and it would help collectors and others in easing their minds about acquisitions. The business of the Hebborn forgeries have cast such a shadow that one would think that Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Colnaghi’s etc. would share their records to clear this business up.

Below are scans and photographs from the file and brief remarks.

Hebborn Drawing of a Seated Woman and Photograph of Hebborn/John Drawing

Drawing by Hebborn’s of a seated woman on common three-hole punch paper and a photograph of his “Augustus John” drawing, published in Drawn to Trouble.

Hebborn | Inscription Back of John Photo

Back of the photograph of “Augustus John” drawing with interesting inscription. In the book Drawn to Trouble he says that the drawing was given to his English landlord in lieu of rent. Here, it seems that he sold the drawing to Howard McCrindle, although the name is misspelled. Eric Hebborn has at least two of his own drawings, Hebborn as Hebborn, published in McCrindle’s review, the Transatlantic Review, one in Dec. 1960 (No. 5) issue and another in Spring 1965 (No. 18) issue.

Hebborn | Draft Letter to Sotheby's and Christie's

Draft of a letter to the chairmen of Sotheby’s and Christie’s. Nice calligraphic handwriting and the amusing detail of how he cancels out the word “purchased” and writes “sold on my behalf.”

Hebborn | Drawing Media and Supports

Hebborn | Sources for Paper and Parchment

Notes for book, outlining drawing media and drawing supports.

Hebborn | Notes for Talk

Notes for a talk.

Hebborn | From Whom Mr. Hebborn Has Made Acquisitions

“From Whom Mr. Hebborn Has Made Acquisitions” is the heading on this typewritten page. It is written in the third person and has a rather legal tone.

Hebborn | Clipped from Newspaper | Carracci – Boy Drinking

A undated clipping from an English newspaper, about a hopping mad Mrs. King. Alessandro says that Carracci was a favorite of Eric Hebborn’s, although this one doesn’t look like it could have been done by Hebborn. There are no notations on the clipping.

Lorenzo Lotto and Hanging Paper

May 30th, 2010 § 0

In Jesi, a small city in the Marche, there is an extraordinary group of Lorenzo Lotto (1480–1556) paintings in the Pinacoteca Civica. Lotto had many Marchigian patrons and spent a number of years living there, including his final years, from 1549 to 1556. (There are works by Lotto in the following Marche cities and towns: Ancona, Jesi, Loreto, Recanati, Cingoli, Mogliano, and Monte San Giusto. A single ticket, with no expiration date, is available for visits to the museums, and the churches are free.) One of the pictures at Jesi is the Saint Lucy Altarpiece, painted intermittently over a nine year period, and completed in 1532. This predella panel has an interesting detail relating to how works, in this case woodcuts, some of them colored woodcuts, were hung. There is the possibility that some might be engravings, and maybe even drawings (for what can be more personalized than a drawing), but not likely.

Lorenzo Lotto | Detail of Predella Panel from St. Lucy Altarpiece | Oil on Panel | Pinacoteca Civica | Jesi

The prints, hang laundry or Christmas card style, over the tomb of St. Agatha, and would have been appended there for the sick, who hoped the saint would miraculously cure them of their medical disorders. They could also have been testimonials or tokens of thanks once the ill were cured. Even seeing the panel in the gallery, one can’t make out much about the hanging works, but you can tell there is variation in size, shape, and color between the sheets. Metal votive offerings, strung like beads, are interspersed with the sheets. St. Agatha’s martyrdom involved the severing of her breasts and some of the sheets are breast-like in shape. However irrational it seems, these would have been put their by those suffering from breast ailments, hoping for a miracle.

There are three predella panels beneath the main panel. This is the first, and the story, as with so many saint’s lives, is complicated. It’s painted storyboard style, but without frames. Lucy and her ill mother (living in 4th century Sicily) go to mass where they hear of St. Agatha’s miracles, the mother touches St. Agatha’s tomb in order to stop hemorrhaging, while Lucy sleeps and in her dream receives the message from St. Agatha that her mother will be cured. She then tells her mother that it’s because of Agatha that she was cured, that she is breaking off her engagement and that she is herself becoming a Christian, and will give away her dowry. At the right the two women are giving away Lucy’s riches to the poor.

One can imagine that the woodcuts/works on paper would have been taken down and discarded to make space for the fresh sheets of miracle seekers (just as candles are removed before they burn out in churches, although at a far faster rate). This type of work is, therefore, extremely rare.

The Lottos in Jesi are nominally five. However, since most are multi-part pictures, I was childishly thrilled when in the museum’s two Lotto rooms, to get to a count of eleven: Entombment (1), Annunciation (2), St. Lucy Altarpiece (4), Madonna delle Rose (2), Visitation (2). Here is a link to Lotto pages on the Jesi city website.

Travel Note

The following is for those who would like a seaside vacation and also want to see great works of art. My most recent visit to the Marche, to Jesi, was for just one day. However, last summer I spent a week in Sirolo, a lovely Medieval town right on the Adriatic and just under an hour from Jesi. Sirolo sits on the Monte Conero–the Conero was once an island, before it smashed into the coast, in some distant geologic era. From the town you can walk down steep paths, cut through pine trees and corbezzolo shrubs, to its beautiful beaches. For us the best way of doing things was to visit Ancona (ancient art museum, Romanesque churches, picture gallery with Crivelli, Titian, Lotto), Recanati (Lotto pictures and Leopardi museum), Loreto (Melozzo da Forli, Signorelli, Lotto) until lunch time and then spend the rest of the day on the beach. In the afternoon, the sun moves behind the mountain, shading the beach and then the water. The town’s information bureau, reachable by emailing info@prolocosirolo.it or calling +39 071 9332153 or +39 071 9332065, is very helpful. The bureau is located in the town’s main piazza and offers free internet service. Their website, only in Italian, could maybe use some improvement.

Note on Drawings Collections in the Marche

I have not visited any drawings collections in the Marche. However, from an exhibition catalog of the Dutch drawings mounted by the Biblioteca Reale in Torino, I see that they have a table of organizations that include graphic collections, arranged geographically down the peninsula, noting whether or not these collections have Dutch drawings. This all seems circuitous and backwards (the way I all too often arrive at things), but here are the Marchigian collections they list:

Ascoli Piceno – Pinacoteca Civica
Museo Diocesano Giacomo Boccanegra – Camerino (MC)
Archivio della Santa Casa – Loreto (AN)
Biblioteca Oliveriana – Pesaro
Museo Civico – Pesaro
Biblioteca Comunale – Urbania (PU)
Soprintendenza per il Patrimonio Storico, Artistico ed Etnoantropologico delle Marche – Urbino

Another nugget–none of the above have Dutch drawings.

Vincent Price, continued

May 16th, 2010 § 0

In my last entry I mentioned posting images of drawings from the exhibition of Price’s collection in the late 80s. The scans are of black and white reproductions from the Bloomington exhibition catalog. They will have to do until I can find color images. The beautiful Battista Franco drawing of skulls seems like a fitting acquisition for Price, who had become known for his ghoulish parts in the cinema. It is a wonderful jumble of skulls, done at the same time that Vesalius was working on orderly anatomical studies. On the subject of skulls, I recently saw the church of Santa Maria delle Anime del Purgatorio ad Arco in Naples, a church that is richly decorated with sculpted and real skulls. In speaking to a couple of older Neapolitan men, I said that I thought the skulls were a bit frightening, to which they responded that I shouldn’t be afraid of the dead, but of the living. Perfectly sensible advice.

The scans are from:

Cole, Bruce and Gealt, Adelheid M. Master Drawings from the Vincent Price Collection. Bloomington: Indiana University Art Museum, 1987. [Catalogue of an exhibition held at the Indiana University Art Museum, Bloomington, Jan. 21 - May 3, 1987].

Vincent Price | Collector | 1911 – 1993

April 26th, 2010 § 0

I just saw His Kind of Woman with Robert Mitchum and Vincent Price. Price plays an actor with an ace shot for big game, and as the movie goes on, for mafia hoods. The character’s enthusiasm, in this case for shooting his rifle, reminded me of other characters that Price played–usually keen ghouls–and for his appearances on television relating to art, where he comes off as a boyishly enthusiastic connoisseur.

His Kind of Woman Still | Robert Mitchum and Vincent Price | 1951

Price was born in 1911 in St. Louis. His grandfather, a chemist, had made a fortune in baking powder before losing it in the panic of 1893. His father worked through the ranks to become president of the National Candy Company, makers of jawbreakers and other confections. Vincent Price had a comfortable upbringing and went first to Yale (grad. 1933) and then to the Courtauld in London. He collected in many areas, among them: contemporary art, tribal art, Asian art, old master drawings, and orientalist paintings. His daughter in an entertaining NYT (21 June 2001) piece talks of Price’s buying a motorhome, a Clark Cortez, and kitting it out with Mexican folk art, British oil studies, and renaissance drawings.

Sears Roebuck in 1962 hired Vincent Price to amass a group of art works to sell through their stores and catalogs. With a budget of three million dollars Price rounded up contemporary and earlier art works to sell. Fifty thousand oil paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints were sold through Sears until the program ended in 1971. The Man Ray drawing just below was one of the “Vincent Price Collection of Fine Art” works sold at Sears.

Man Ray | Study for Tableau de Chevalet | Pen and India Ink on Paper | 348 x 258 mm. | Christie's London 5 February 2009, lot 156

Judging from the works shown in the instructional film for Sears salespeople, link here, much of the work would not interest serious collectors. (Lessing J. Rosenwald, the great print collector, donor to the National Gallery, and son of Julius Rosenwald, an early owner of Sears, would not have been a target customer.) But that was not the point. Price wanted to introduce the American public to art collecting, thinking that owning art was the only way to truly value and understand it. Of course, he was being paid by Sears, but he seems sincere when he says “My satisfaction from running the Sears Art program is primarily the fact that I am able to bring art to literally hundreds of thousands of people the opportunity to become involved in the most enriching experience of my life–collecting or owning a work of art.”*

In the same piece, Price says of his collecting:

“As a collector of art, all the arts, during a long lifetime, I can only say that I have never stopped asking myself why I collect. The answers are many. First of all, I would think the greatest reason is that I feel by having a work of art around me continually I learn from it, not only about the artist but about myself. Collecting has helped me form my taste and I admit happily that my taste changes continually. Of all the areas of collecting in which I have been involved only two have remained constant, primitive art and drawings. In both of these areas I never seem to become bored with the individual work. Primitive art is a direct communication from the artist to the viewer and drawings have the same directness since they are the immediate response of the artist to the subject.”

Price made television appearances as an art expert, on the “64,000 Challenge” and in a more entertaining 1952 segment of “What in the World?” The show involves three panelists who are shown artifacts and have to come up with where, when, and why the pieces were created. The program was developed by the University of Pennsylvania and lasted through the 50s and into the 60s. In the 1952 show, link here, Vincent Price is on stage with a museum professional and the sculptor Jacques Lipschitz. Price seems the most eager of the panelists and sparks fly (collector hallmark) when he picks up and examines the objects.

In 1987 Price’s collection of drawings was shown in Bloomington at the Indiana University Art Museum. I haven’t seen the catalog, but I’m having a friend look through it and send along images, which I’ll post. Through a search of auction and museum databases, I found a Stefano della Bella, visible here, and a drawing by Modigliani, visible here, that belonged to Price.

Beginning in 1951, Price began giving works of art to East Los Angeles College. The college now has 900 works from Price’s collection and the museum is named after Price, the Vincent Price Art Museum. In 2010-2011 the museum will have a new building and it will be interesting to see if they will create an online database of their collection, now numbering 9,000 works of art.

* Vincent Price. “Museum or Marketplace,” Art Education, Vol. 19, 2 Feb. 1966, pp. 29-32.

Goose Quill Pens

April 8th, 2010 § 0

Penna is the Latin word for feather. The ancient Romans used reed pens and brushes in applying ink to papyrus, but probably not feather pens. By the Middle Ages, bird quills, especially goose quills, were the favored writing implement and the word penna in Italian means both a bird’s feather and a pen. The longest feathers of any number of large flight birds work for feather pens, including swans and crow family birds, but the feathers of the goose were most commonly used–they seem the easiest to collect. The transition from reed to quill pens probably has to do with the movement from writing on papyrus to writing on parchment. Quill pens have more flexibility, more “give” than reed pens and allow for greater detail. By applying pressure, the draftsman can widen and vary a line. Cennino Cennini, the early 15th century artist, gives instructions in cutting a goose quill pen in his Libro dell’Arte (chapter xiv, available in Italian as pdf here and in English here) a kind of manual for young artists. He doesn’t make any mention of reed pens.

Jan van Bijlert | Detail – Saint Luke the Evangelist | Oil on Canvas | 93.6 x 77.4 cm. | Christie's Amsterdam 13 April 2010, lot 103

This detail from Jan van Bijlert (Utrecht 1597/8-1671) painting of St. Luke the Evangelist shows the saint using a large knife to make the first cut in making a pen. Penknives, and they are named for cutting quill pens, are now generally known as small folding knives that fit in the pocket, like pocketknives. What’s interesting to me is that the feathers have been cut off, the most decorative part has been removed, for a wholly utilitarian pen. Jacques de Gheyn’s drawing in Berlin, just below, shows both a quill and the knife, crossed on the table. The implication is that one needed the pen to trim the tip on a regular basis.

Thomas Jefferson, who was carried on a vast correspondence (est. of 20,000 letters) complained of the time involved in readying and repairing his quill pens and was happy when metal pens became available–until he wasn’t because of their rusting. Here is a drawing of Jefferson’s for a machine to make pasta. His handwriting is wonderfully legible, this coming from someone who types everything, even grocery lists since I cannot read my own writing.

Thomas Jefferson | Maccaroni Recipe and Press Design | No date | Library of Congress | Washington, DC

Lugt Online | Free Access

March 29th, 2010 § 0

Frits Lugt’s great work Les Marques de Collections de Dessins & d’Estampes is now online, courtesy of Lugt’s Fondation Custodia. HERE is the link and just below is a screenshot of the search fields.

Les Marques de Collections de Dessins & d'Estampes Screenshot

The first volume was published in 1921, a supplement printed in 1956, and the 2010 supplement is just now available online (from what I can tell, there won’t be a paper edition). All three are online and together they add up to being an invaluable database. I immediately bookmarked the site and set it as a start page on my phone. The search fields are easy to understand, navigate, and reset. For the name and place fields, you can start typing and without completing the word, a selection of names or places materializes. Many of the mark entries reproduce just the line drawings from the earlier Lugt volumes. Especially useful are the entries that have both the published reproduction and a photograph. In time, maybe all of the reproduced marks will be supplemented by photographs.

After a quick look through, one can see that there are still many marks needing to be identified. If enough people use it, especially museum people with their vast holdings, and they share their findings, more and more marks will be identified. Since it is so easy and fun to use, the database will surely grow. It is also free, wonderfully free.

Detaching Frescoes and Splitting Drawings

March 20th, 2010 § 0

The decades of the 50s and 60s constitute the great age of fresco detachment–stacco and strappo are the techniques–and in 1968/69, the Met, together with the Florence Soprintendenza, organized the exhibition “The Great Age of Fresco” which traveled to London and Amsterdam after its NY debut.

War damage, frescoes exposed to the weather, threats of vandalism, and the Arno flooding were all good reasons for the detachment of frescoes. The finding of the sinopie and the ability to crate the works up, to make them portable, and show them around the world were other reasons. (The ancient Romans took murals from Greece as war booty and commonly moved frescoes around Italy.) Now, the practice is frowned upon and frescoes are only detached if they are in imminent danger. And, in truth, it is better to see them where they were created rather than some piece of masonite, looking forlorn, even if we can’t look at the sinopie.

The strappo method of fresco removal involves painting a layer of reversible glue onto the fresco surface and affixing a piece of cloth all over the fresco. Once the glue has dried, the cloth is carefully peeled from the wall, taking the painted surface with it. With the stacco method, the intonaco layer is taken with painted surface, again with glue and cloth. A knife is used to separate the intonaco plaster away from the coarser arriccio layer below. The arriccio is the layer where the sinopie were painted/drawn.

In 2007 I went to a fascinating lecture at the Frick and was very surprised to learn that the great drawings collector Pierre-Jean Mariette (1694 – 1774) used a similar method to split drawings in half. The lecture was given by Kristel Smentek, who wrote her dissertation on Mariette and is now a professor at MIT. Here is a link to a pdf with the slides from a lecture Smentek delivered. It shows drawings from Mariette’s collection, including an Albani drawing he split, and a conservator in the act of splitting a printed sheet in two. The recto and verso of the sheet are covered with glue and paper or cloth (looks like high tech conservation material) and then performing what looks like magic in making one piece of paper into two.

While I hadn’t heard of splitting drawings before Smentek’s lecture, it is not so uncommon. Josef Meder, the early 20th century curator and later director of the Albertina in Vienna, split drawings in that great collection.

Sinopia

February 28th, 2010 § 0

Red earth has been used in painting for millennia. Sinopia was the Italian word for this pigment and it was used for the underdrawing in fresco painting. The drawings themselves are now known as sinopia, much like the word oil can stand for painting. Sinopia color was also used in the fresco itself and in panel paintings, particularly for painting flesh. The example from Todi just below, shows a fresco, and at the left, where the intonaco or final layer has fallen, a section with the sinopia on the coarser layer of plaster called the arriccio. This fresco is from about 1380, when paper was still not very available.

As paper became more common, fresco design could be done on paper and then transferred by pricking and pouncing to the plaster. However, the much later Ligozzi example below shows that artists even in 1600 liked to use sinopia for fresco preparation.

Jacopo Ligozzi | Detail from St. Francis Distributing Bread Sinopia | 1599-1600 | Santa Croce Museum | Florence

Sinopia takes its name from Sinop, a cape and port town on Turkey’s Black Sea coast. A bustling trade in the pigment took place in Sinop, though the color was mined to the south in Cappodocia. Cennino Cennini writes about sinopia in his Libro dell’Arte (available in Italian as a pdf and in English posted online). Cennini talks of going with his father, also a painter, and finding sinopia and other colors in the Colle di Val d’Elsa area of Tuscany.

E pervegnendo in uno vallicello, in una grotta molta salvatica, e raschiando la grotta con una zappa, io vidi vene di più ragioni colori: cioè ocria, sinopia scura e chiara, azzurro e bianco, e ‘l tenni il maggior miracolo del mondo, che bianco possa essere di vena terrigna, ricordandoti che io ne feci la prova di questo bianco, e trava’lo grasso, che non è da incarnazione.

And coming into a little valley, in a very wild grotto, and after scraping the grotto with a hoe, I saw many veins of color, that is, ochre, dark and light sinopia, blue, and white, and I thought that finding white in the earth was the greatest miracle in the world. I’ll remind you that I tried using the white and found it too fat and it couldn’t be used for flesh tones.

Cennino Cennini | Il Libro Dell’Arte | Chapter 45

What Cennini writes made me think that Italy’s artistic output, enough to stock museums all over the world and still have so much left within the country, must, at least in part, have something to do with the Italy’s rich geology––so many minerals for making pigments and so much stone for sculpture.

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