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Spring 2010 |
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I Preraffaelliti. Il sogno del ‘400 italiano da Beato
Angelico a Perugino, da Rossetti a Burne-Jones |
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[The
Pre-Raphaelites. the Dream of the Italian Quattrocento from Beato Angelico to
Perugino, from Rossetti to Burne-Jones] |
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MAR, Ravenna, 28th February–6th June 2010
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Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, 15th September–5th December 2010 |
Review by Luca Caddia |
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Mainly composed of the Pre-Raphaelite
water-colours which are part of the Ashmolean Museum collection, this is the
first exhibition devoted to the Pre-Raphaelites that Italy has ever hosted,
and its location in Ravenna is not accidental. In 2004 the MAR (Museum of Art
of Ravenna) organized a fine event dedicated to nineteenth-century British
water-colour drawing which focused on the autonomy of this artistic technique,
famously defined as “the truly English art” by the Palgrave brothers in A Century of Painters of the English
School (1862). The statement of intent of the 2004 exhibition was a
revaluation of nineteenth-century British Art, whose erratic critical fortune
in the twentieth century had less to do with its intrinsic artistic quality
than with the indisputable supremacy enjoyed by French painting. By all
accounts, it still looks like – after exactly one hundred years from the
first Post-Impressionist exhibition in Britain – one cannot enjoy both French
and British art without meeting with osmotic disapproval. |
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However, now that the ghost of Modernism
looms small off our horizon – despite some Mr Bennetts of our times who still
think in twentieth-century terms – Victorian painting is slowly reacquiring
its place in the sun, if not its aura. And technological reproduction is an
important point here, since many of the works displayed in Ravenna show the
Pre-Raphaelites’ concern for accurate observation, maintenance and
preservation of those Italian works of art which risk(ed) to be damaged by
irresponsible restorations and neglect. For instance, John Ruskin’s splendid
and rare water-colours – and those of his pupils like George Price Boyce,
Arthur Burgess and Henry Roderick Newman – show all his idiosyncratic
critical energy, firstly because they manage to convey his early idea that
drawings should be exact documents of the objects represented, made on behalf
of those who cannot visit those sites for real; and secondly because unlike
daguerreotypes, the inclusive realism of these drawings is able to
communicate the pulsating energy of those places, which were perceived as
sacred not only because the objects depicted are often places of worship, but
because the spiritual crisis gone through the nineteenth century – which
Ruskin felt deeply and dramatically during his mature years – led Victorian
artists to conceive art as sacred.
It is especially by virtue of these reasons that Ruskin’s artistic
sensitivity has been defined as “ecological”,[1]
and it is also in the Pre-Raphaelites’ ecological concern that one can find
their modernity. |
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[John Ruskin, Part of the Façade of the Church of San Michele in Lucca, 1845,
pencil and water-colour on paper, Oxford, Ashmolean Museum] |
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The leitmotiv of this exhibition is
Italy, indeed, and the show opens with a gallery devoted to the “real”
Pre-Raphaelites, i.e. those Italian primitives whose works influenced the
mid-Victorian brotherhood (among them Lorenzo Costa, Perugino and Beato Angelico).
Italy as visualized in a “dream” – as the title goes – especially for those
Pre-Raphaelite brothers like Dante Gabriel Rossetti who never visited it. The
water-colours shown here are among his prettiest and they all deal with
Dante: the superlative Dante Drawing an
Angel on the First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice (1853) is flanked
by Dante’s Vision of Rachel and Leah
(1855) and the Paolo and Francesca pictures (the fact that Dante’s tomb is in
Ravenna makes the location of this exhibition even more appropriate). |
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[Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Dante Drawing an Angel on the First
Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice, 1853, water-colour and gouache on
paper, Oxford, Ashmolean Museum] |
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Italy is here conceived as a primary
source, often filtered through the medium of art, though: it is certainly the
case of Carlo Lasinio’s etchings of the Camposanto in Pisa, which proved
highly influential to Ruskin, Hunt, Millais, and Rossetti. Apparently, it was
the study of Lasinio’s etchings of Benozzo Gozzoli’s frescoes that convinced
the Pre-Raphaelites to reject late-Renaissance art in favour of the
primitives. In those times when the early Italian masters were only conceived
as propaedeutic to the formal perfection later obtained by Renaissance
artists like Michelangelo and Raphael, the Pre-Raphaelites broke the orderly
chronological conception of art of their times and reevaluated the primitives
by virtue of their religious authenticity (aided in this by Alexis François
Rio’s De la poésie chrétienne,
first published in 1836). Heirs to the Romantic poets they so loved, the
Pre-Raphaelites may have mistaken the effects for the intentions, but they
certainly managed to give feeling and imagination a preeminent part within
the artistic debate. |
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The only artist among them who copied the
Camposanto frescoes on the spot was Edward Burne-Jones, who firstly visited
Italy in 1859 together with Ruskin. The exhibition shows Burne-Jones’s
preparatory cartoons of the mosaic of the apse of Saint Paul’s within the
Walls, the first non-Catholic church built in Rome after 1870 (the year when
Rome was annexed to Italy). |
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Also interesting are the Italian
landscape paintings made by artists like William Bell Scott, Walter Crane and
George Howard, whose water-colours of the Non-Catholic Cemetery in Rome form
a pretty collection; and those by the so-called “Etruscan” painters, the
English artists who travelled extensively to Italy and came in close contact
with the Italian painter Giovanni Costa. This part of the exhibition includes
fine oils by Frederick Leighton, whose work can also be found in another
section of the exhibition devoted to the influence of Renaissance on those
British artists of the middle and late Victorian period who are sometimes
defined as Pre-Raphaelites of the second and third generation but are
actually more akin to Aestheticism. Among them, Frederick Sandys, Edward
Burne-Jones and Rossetti himself, whose later pictures famously abandoned the
primitive style of his early career to embrace rich Venetian atmospheres.
Perhaps the most beautiful of the paintings exhibited in this section is
Marie Spartali Stillman’s The Enchanted
Garden of Messer Ansaldo (1889). |
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[Walter Crane, Keats’s Tomb, 1873, water-colour on paper, Oxford, Ashmolean
Museum] |
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As an Italian Victorianist – and
associate editor of a journal entitled Ravenna
– I am particularly enthusiastic about this exhibition. I am also struck by
the fact that, in these days of ours when museums often need to rely on smash
hits to advertise their shows, the MAR and the Ashmolean Museum have managed
to create a successful event – both in terms of audience response and
cultural capital employed – by means of water-colours and apparently minor
works which seem to be more suitable to the pleasure of the academic scholar
than that of the general public. I won’t go so far as to write that this is
promising, but certainly it is very good news indeed. |
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v Luca Caddia received his Doctorate in English Literature in 2008 from the University of Rome “La Sapienza”. His doctoral dissertation dealt with the relationship between character and career in Anthony Trollope’s Palliser Novels. In the Academic Year 2009-10 he has obtained a residential fellowship at the Yale Center for British Art and a Paul Mellon Grant for his research project on collecting in Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema’s paintings. |
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