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Picture framing I: The shadows of a lost frame
428
Professional Notes
Documentation: Art and Architecture Thesaurus The editorial staff of the Art and Architecture Thesaurus has completed work on the second edition, which contains the full set of hierarchies originally projected a decade ago, and it is scheduled for publication by the Oxford University Press in February 1994. Replacing the first edition (1990) and the supplement set (ISBN: the five-volume (1992), 0-19-508884-O) includes the 33 hierarchies alphabetical index, and accompanying together with the Guide to Indexing and Cataloguing with the Art and Architecture Thesaurus, edited by Toni Petersen and
Patricia J. Barnett (ISBN: O-19-508880-0), one free AAT workshop registration, and a
Picture Framing I: The Shadows of a Lost Frame First in a series of Masterpiece Loan exhibitions organized in the United Kingdom by the National Art Collections Fund, A Bellini from Birmingham brought to the National Gallery in London (September-November 1993) the relatively little known miniature altarpiece formerly in the Watney Collection at Cornbury Park. Depicting the Madonna and Child enthroned between two Saints, and a kneeling Donor, it is signed and dated 1505, the same year as Giovanni Bellini finished his great sacra conversazione for San Zaccaria in Venice. Nothing is known about the early history of the painting before Carlo Ridolfi wrote his volume Le Mcraviglie in Venice in 1648. His dell’Arte, published description of it is imprecise in one key but. fortunately the altarpiece is respect, described with greater precision in an inventory drawn up in 1662 of the Muselli Collection in Verona where it had been seen by Ridolfi. In that inventory the altarpiece is described (in translation) as depicting: ‘a Madonna who sits on a most beautiful throne
to User Friendly: A Newsletter Users, all for US$375. An electronic Art and Architecture Thesaurus, Edition with Authority Reference Version 2.0 will be published at the
subscription for AAT
edition, Second TooF”,
same time (ISBN: O-19-508885-9, single user, US$195; and ISBN: o-19-508998-7, network, US$475), followed by versions 2.0 of the USMARC Authority Format and Authority Record Format. Toni Petersen notes: ‘The fourteen new and expanded hierarchies and the several thousand terms newly incorporated from the conservation terminology project significantly altered the hierarchies published in the first edition’, and further information is to be found in the Art and Architecture Thesaurus Bulletin, no.21 (1993). PETER CANNON-BKOOKES
of stone with the Child, St. Peter standing to the right and St. Paul to the left with a kneeling donor; on the doors, which close, is St. Vincent Ferrer on one and St. Francis on the other, the figures all full length, two braccia high and one-and-half braccia wide excluding the doors, a superbly executed work by Giovanni Bellini in the finest state of preservation.’ Subsequently in the Sereghi Collection in Verona, and others, the central panel was in the collection of the 4th Earl of Ashburnham by 1878, and the present frame was almost certainly provided for its display in Ashburnham House, London. By 1505 a miniature altarpiece with folding wings was a distinctly conservative, if not old-fashioned design, and taken with other evidence, the probability is that the painting was commissioned by a patron outside Venice for a private chapel or oratory. However, the 1662 description alone provides limited guidance to assist in any reconstruction of the original appearance of the altarpiece, and the scholar must turn as well to the internal cvidcnce provided by the painting itself, not least the significance of the prominent shadows cast across the pavement in front of the Madonna’s throne. The lighting of the paint-
Professional
Notes
429
1. The Madonna and Child enthroned with Saint Peter and Saint Paul and a Donor, by Giovanni Bellini (c1435-1516), oil on
BELLINVYMCCCCCV’, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery. The
before 1718. Photo Credit: National Art Collections Fund, Lon-
ing is fully coherent, from the left, and, for example, the head of the donor casts a clearly identifiable shadow on the arm of the right hand saint. What then casts the shadows is verv across the pavement. J The direction precise and the source of the shadow lies in the plane in front of the painted surface. The very existence of such prominent shadows cast by a body outside the painted space demonstrates that the painting itself once formed part of a larger composition, the interrelationship of whose component parts was rational and dependent upon the light sources. Thus if it were to be the figure of St. Vincent Ferrer or St. Francis on the left hand of the lost doors that figure would have had to have been gigantic m relationship to the central group, assuming that there was to be a rational relationship between them.
An important clue is provided by Ridolfi when he described the painting, by then in the Muselli Collection, as ‘in forma d’altare’ and so indicates that it was part of an architectonic structure. Indeed, the most rational explanation of the shadows is that thev are ‘cast’ by a freestanding column which formed part of the original altar. In his triptych of 1488 in the Frari, Venice, Giovanm Bellini adopted a scheme in which the architectural structure of the frame is a rational extension of the painted space, or the painted space is developed as a rational cstension of the frame since in Renaissance times a frame of this elaboration was usually commissioned before the painter was brought in. In the Frari Triptych the three compartments are almost completely isolated from one another, and the entablature pain-
430
Professional Notes
ted in the central painted panel is slightly wayward, but the thrust of Bellini’s ideas are an extension of Mantegna’s San Zeno Altarpiece, in Verona, and ultimately Donatello’s Santo Altar in Padua, in its original configuration. nowever, in 1505 Giovanni Bellini achieved a new sophistication in his sacrd convevsazione painted for San Zaccaria, Venice, in which the marble frame and the painted space are fully integrated into a single coherent illusionistic ensemble. In San Zaccaria the painted space occupied by the Madonna and Child and four Saints is a fictive side chapel to the church; a space into which the worshipper can gaze but not enter. It is clear that, on a much smaller scale, also completed in 1505, Giovanni Bellini was exploring similar ideas in the Birmingham miniature altarpiece and the close, strictly rational, relationship between the painted space, the frame and its setting is enshrined in the shadows across the pavement. If the column of the lost frame is to throw the double shadow depicted, two well-defined and separate light sources must be postulated on the left hand side of the room for which the altarpiece was intended. Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely that the room for which the Birmingham altarpiece was painted will ever be identified, but the internal evidence provided by the painting, interpreted in the light of Giovanni Bellini’s deep interest in illusionistic structures, allows a great deal more to be deduced about the original appearance of the altarpiece. The logical explanation of the above evidence is that the Birmingham Bellini was originally built into a strongly architectonic tabernacle frame with freestanding columns located in front of the surface of the panel and slightly to the side of the present edges (i.e. in front of the inner frame of the existing 19th century tabernacle frame, rather than m the position of the present pilasters). Only then would the illusionistic ensemble be fully coherent, and presumably these columns would have been backed b?; matching pilasters which would have provided the left and right hand sides of the framing of the main panel, The 1662 inventory is precise in detailing that the doors closed, that they are painted with St. Vincent Ferrer and St.
Francis, and that all the figures in the altarpiece are full-length. This raises the question as to whether the missing saints were painted on the inside or the outside of the doors which close. If we postulate that the saints were painted on the outside of the doors, and were thus only visible when the altarpiece was closed, we are left with the difficult task of putting forward some kind of non-figurative decoration for the inside of the doors, visible when open, which would be part of a coherent illusionistic ensemble. On the other hand, if these saints were painted on the inside surfaces of the doors, the painted illusionistic world of the main panel probably extended into the folded-back doors, creating an effect not unlike Bellini’s Frari altarpiece of 1488, or, for that matter, Mantegna’s San Zeno altarpiece in Verona, The combination of the freestanding columns indicated by the shadows and the closing doors described in the 1662 inventory points to an unusual, though not unique, pivoted arrangement whereby the columns
2. The Birmingham miniature altarpiece by Giovanni Bellini displayed in the gilt tabernacle frame in Ashhurnham House, made for its display during the 3rd quarter of the 19th London, century. P/~‘l,oroCredir: National Art Collections Fund, London.
are fixed to the doors, instead of the main structure, and turn with them. This arrangement would enabfe the doors to fold outwards into the same plane as the main panel, thereby facilitating the creation af a single unified illusionistic space behind the frame, while the position of the doors when closed in front of the main panel would, for both constructional and aesthetic reasons, have to be set forward at least double the diameter of those columns. Thus the structure of the lost tabernacle begins to emerge, with an unusuafly deep entablature ‘carried’ by the columns and, atmost certainty% some kind of decorative superstructure above. The close relationship between Bellini’s paintings and their carved/sculpted architectonic frames, in the Frari and San Zaccaria altarpieces, is such that they are both developed as fully integrated illusionistic ensembles in which the three-dimensional carved components pass almost imperceptibly into the painted world beyond. The lost frame of the Birmingham altarpiece was clearly an
integral component of such an ensemble so that when the deep box-Iike interior of the tabernacfe was opened a magical world was reveaIed, extending into the folded-back doors,.and with the carved tabernacle itself providmg a richly architectonic shrine for the Madonna and Child enthroned within and with the painted lighting coinciding precisely with the real lighting of the room. A remarkable treasure indeed.
Picture Framing II: The Frames of Thomas
lege, and he went on to the Ecole des BeauxArts in Paris (1866) where he studied under Jean-Leon Gercime. After his return to Philadelphia in 1870, Eakins rarely left the city, teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts, of which he was appointed Director in 1882. His totaf concentration on the study of the human figure and neglect of other subject matter was the source of mounting criticism, and as the immediate result of removing the Ioincloth from the male model in a mixed life class, he was dismissed in 1886. Eakins’s approach to portraiture was equally uncompromising, if not brutally frank, and during the latter part of his career the frames he designed and made for at least four of his finest portraits, and the plain chestnut frames enclosing a high proportion of the paintings given by his widow and their friend Mary Adeline Williams to the ~h~IadeI~hia Museum of Art in 1829, are an important component of his artistic production.
Eakins
A master of American realism and arguably the greatest American painter before the Modern Movement, Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) was born in Philadelphia and spent atmost the whole of his working life there. He was educated at the Central High School where he gained his lifelong interest in all things scientific and technological, and this grounding in the basic discipline of careful analytical observation and precision of expression, manifested beautifully in the perspective drawing of his father’s treadle lathe which he executed at the age of sixteen (signed and dated 1860, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington), was to provide the central driving force of his artistic career. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 1862, taking anatomy courses at Jefferson Medical Col-
Note A Be&i from g~~~rn~~~~~rn was sponsored by Marks & Spencer and was accompanied by a leaflet published by the National Art-Coffections Fund which focusses on ocher aspects of BelIini’s work. An extended account of the painting and the importance of the illusionistic ensemble of which it once formed part is provided by l? Cannon-Brookes, l%e Cavnbury Park Bellini (City Museums and Arr Gallery, Birmingham, 1977), which includes a full bibliography. PErER
CANNON-BROOKES
Professional Notes
Documentation: Art and Architecture Thesaurus The editorial staff of the Art and Architecture Thesaurus has completed work on the second edition, which contains the full set of hierarchies originally projected a decade ago, and it is scheduled for publication by the Oxford University Press in February 1994. Replacing the first edition (1990) and the supplement set (ISBN: the five-volume (1992), 0-19-508884-O) includes the 33 hierarchies alphabetical index, and accompanying together with the Guide to Indexing and Cataloguing with the Art and Architecture Thesaurus, edited by Toni Petersen and
Patricia J. Barnett (ISBN: O-19-508880-0), one free AAT workshop registration, and a
Picture Framing I: The Shadows of a Lost Frame First in a series of Masterpiece Loan exhibitions organized in the United Kingdom by the National Art Collections Fund, A Bellini from Birmingham brought to the National Gallery in London (September-November 1993) the relatively little known miniature altarpiece formerly in the Watney Collection at Cornbury Park. Depicting the Madonna and Child enthroned between two Saints, and a kneeling Donor, it is signed and dated 1505, the same year as Giovanni Bellini finished his great sacra conversazione for San Zaccaria in Venice. Nothing is known about the early history of the painting before Carlo Ridolfi wrote his volume Le Mcraviglie in Venice in 1648. His dell’Arte, published description of it is imprecise in one key but. fortunately the altarpiece is respect, described with greater precision in an inventory drawn up in 1662 of the Muselli Collection in Verona where it had been seen by Ridolfi. In that inventory the altarpiece is described (in translation) as depicting: ‘a Madonna who sits on a most beautiful throne
to User Friendly: A Newsletter Users, all for US$375. An electronic Art and Architecture Thesaurus, Edition with Authority Reference Version 2.0 will be published at the
subscription for AAT
edition, Second TooF”,
same time (ISBN: O-19-508885-9, single user, US$195; and ISBN: o-19-508998-7, network, US$475), followed by versions 2.0 of the USMARC Authority Format and Authority Record Format. Toni Petersen notes: ‘The fourteen new and expanded hierarchies and the several thousand terms newly incorporated from the conservation terminology project significantly altered the hierarchies published in the first edition’, and further information is to be found in the Art and Architecture Thesaurus Bulletin, no.21 (1993). PETER CANNON-BKOOKES
of stone with the Child, St. Peter standing to the right and St. Paul to the left with a kneeling donor; on the doors, which close, is St. Vincent Ferrer on one and St. Francis on the other, the figures all full length, two braccia high and one-and-half braccia wide excluding the doors, a superbly executed work by Giovanni Bellini in the finest state of preservation.’ Subsequently in the Sereghi Collection in Verona, and others, the central panel was in the collection of the 4th Earl of Ashburnham by 1878, and the present frame was almost certainly provided for its display in Ashburnham House, London. By 1505 a miniature altarpiece with folding wings was a distinctly conservative, if not old-fashioned design, and taken with other evidence, the probability is that the painting was commissioned by a patron outside Venice for a private chapel or oratory. However, the 1662 description alone provides limited guidance to assist in any reconstruction of the original appearance of the altarpiece, and the scholar must turn as well to the internal cvidcnce provided by the painting itself, not least the significance of the prominent shadows cast across the pavement in front of the Madonna’s throne. The lighting of the paint-
Professional
Notes
429
1. The Madonna and Child enthroned with Saint Peter and Saint Paul and a Donor, by Giovanni Bellini (c1435-1516), oil on
BELLINVYMCCCCCV’, Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery. The
before 1718. Photo Credit: National Art Collections Fund, Lon-
ing is fully coherent, from the left, and, for example, the head of the donor casts a clearly identifiable shadow on the arm of the right hand saint. What then casts the shadows is verv across the pavement. J The direction precise and the source of the shadow lies in the plane in front of the painted surface. The very existence of such prominent shadows cast by a body outside the painted space demonstrates that the painting itself once formed part of a larger composition, the interrelationship of whose component parts was rational and dependent upon the light sources. Thus if it were to be the figure of St. Vincent Ferrer or St. Francis on the left hand of the lost doors that figure would have had to have been gigantic m relationship to the central group, assuming that there was to be a rational relationship between them.
An important clue is provided by Ridolfi when he described the painting, by then in the Muselli Collection, as ‘in forma d’altare’ and so indicates that it was part of an architectonic structure. Indeed, the most rational explanation of the shadows is that thev are ‘cast’ by a freestanding column which formed part of the original altar. In his triptych of 1488 in the Frari, Venice, Giovanm Bellini adopted a scheme in which the architectural structure of the frame is a rational extension of the painted space, or the painted space is developed as a rational cstension of the frame since in Renaissance times a frame of this elaboration was usually commissioned before the painter was brought in. In the Frari Triptych the three compartments are almost completely isolated from one another, and the entablature pain-
430
Professional Notes
ted in the central painted panel is slightly wayward, but the thrust of Bellini’s ideas are an extension of Mantegna’s San Zeno Altarpiece, in Verona, and ultimately Donatello’s Santo Altar in Padua, in its original configuration. nowever, in 1505 Giovanni Bellini achieved a new sophistication in his sacrd convevsazione painted for San Zaccaria, Venice, in which the marble frame and the painted space are fully integrated into a single coherent illusionistic ensemble. In San Zaccaria the painted space occupied by the Madonna and Child and four Saints is a fictive side chapel to the church; a space into which the worshipper can gaze but not enter. It is clear that, on a much smaller scale, also completed in 1505, Giovanni Bellini was exploring similar ideas in the Birmingham miniature altarpiece and the close, strictly rational, relationship between the painted space, the frame and its setting is enshrined in the shadows across the pavement. If the column of the lost frame is to throw the double shadow depicted, two well-defined and separate light sources must be postulated on the left hand side of the room for which the altarpiece was intended. Unfortunately, it is highly unlikely that the room for which the Birmingham altarpiece was painted will ever be identified, but the internal evidence provided by the painting, interpreted in the light of Giovanni Bellini’s deep interest in illusionistic structures, allows a great deal more to be deduced about the original appearance of the altarpiece. The logical explanation of the above evidence is that the Birmingham Bellini was originally built into a strongly architectonic tabernacle frame with freestanding columns located in front of the surface of the panel and slightly to the side of the present edges (i.e. in front of the inner frame of the existing 19th century tabernacle frame, rather than m the position of the present pilasters). Only then would the illusionistic ensemble be fully coherent, and presumably these columns would have been backed b?; matching pilasters which would have provided the left and right hand sides of the framing of the main panel, The 1662 inventory is precise in detailing that the doors closed, that they are painted with St. Vincent Ferrer and St.
Francis, and that all the figures in the altarpiece are full-length. This raises the question as to whether the missing saints were painted on the inside or the outside of the doors which close. If we postulate that the saints were painted on the outside of the doors, and were thus only visible when the altarpiece was closed, we are left with the difficult task of putting forward some kind of non-figurative decoration for the inside of the doors, visible when open, which would be part of a coherent illusionistic ensemble. On the other hand, if these saints were painted on the inside surfaces of the doors, the painted illusionistic world of the main panel probably extended into the folded-back doors, creating an effect not unlike Bellini’s Frari altarpiece of 1488, or, for that matter, Mantegna’s San Zeno altarpiece in Verona, The combination of the freestanding columns indicated by the shadows and the closing doors described in the 1662 inventory points to an unusual, though not unique, pivoted arrangement whereby the columns
2. The Birmingham miniature altarpiece by Giovanni Bellini displayed in the gilt tabernacle frame in Ashhurnham House, made for its display during the 3rd quarter of the 19th London, century. P/~‘l,oroCredir: National Art Collections Fund, London.
are fixed to the doors, instead of the main structure, and turn with them. This arrangement would enabfe the doors to fold outwards into the same plane as the main panel, thereby facilitating the creation af a single unified illusionistic space behind the frame, while the position of the doors when closed in front of the main panel would, for both constructional and aesthetic reasons, have to be set forward at least double the diameter of those columns. Thus the structure of the lost tabernacle begins to emerge, with an unusuafly deep entablature ‘carried’ by the columns and, atmost certainty% some kind of decorative superstructure above. The close relationship between Bellini’s paintings and their carved/sculpted architectonic frames, in the Frari and San Zaccaria altarpieces, is such that they are both developed as fully integrated illusionistic ensembles in which the three-dimensional carved components pass almost imperceptibly into the painted world beyond. The lost frame of the Birmingham altarpiece was clearly an
integral component of such an ensemble so that when the deep box-Iike interior of the tabernacfe was opened a magical world was reveaIed, extending into the folded-back doors,.and with the carved tabernacle itself providmg a richly architectonic shrine for the Madonna and Child enthroned within and with the painted lighting coinciding precisely with the real lighting of the room. A remarkable treasure indeed.
Picture Framing II: The Frames of Thomas
lege, and he went on to the Ecole des BeauxArts in Paris (1866) where he studied under Jean-Leon Gercime. After his return to Philadelphia in 1870, Eakins rarely left the city, teaching at the Academy of Fine Arts, of which he was appointed Director in 1882. His totaf concentration on the study of the human figure and neglect of other subject matter was the source of mounting criticism, and as the immediate result of removing the Ioincloth from the male model in a mixed life class, he was dismissed in 1886. Eakins’s approach to portraiture was equally uncompromising, if not brutally frank, and during the latter part of his career the frames he designed and made for at least four of his finest portraits, and the plain chestnut frames enclosing a high proportion of the paintings given by his widow and their friend Mary Adeline Williams to the ~h~IadeI~hia Museum of Art in 1829, are an important component of his artistic production.
Eakins
A master of American realism and arguably the greatest American painter before the Modern Movement, Thomas Eakins (1844-1916) was born in Philadelphia and spent atmost the whole of his working life there. He was educated at the Central High School where he gained his lifelong interest in all things scientific and technological, and this grounding in the basic discipline of careful analytical observation and precision of expression, manifested beautifully in the perspective drawing of his father’s treadle lathe which he executed at the age of sixteen (signed and dated 1860, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington), was to provide the central driving force of his artistic career. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 1862, taking anatomy courses at Jefferson Medical Col-
Note A Be&i from g~~~rn~~~~~rn was sponsored by Marks & Spencer and was accompanied by a leaflet published by the National Art-Coffections Fund which focusses on ocher aspects of BelIini’s work. An extended account of the painting and the importance of the illusionistic ensemble of which it once formed part is provided by l? Cannon-Brookes, l%e Cavnbury Park Bellini (City Museums and Arr Gallery, Birmingham, 1977), which includes a full bibliography. PErER
CANNON-BROOKES