Exhibition Review

Miziolek Jerzy Year: 2018 Edizione: L'ERMA di BRETSCHNEIDER ISBN: 978-88-913-1278-5 Binding: Hardcover with dustjacket Pages: 440, 298 ill. B/N, 1 ill. Col. Size: 24 x 28 cm Jerzy Miziolek, Renaissance Weddings and the Antique. Italian secular Paintings from the Lanckoroñski Collection March 2015 The book discusses some thirty Italian Renaissance domestic paintings from the Viennese collection of Count Karol Lanckoroñski (1848-1933), which since 1994 have belonged to the Wawel Royal Castle in Kraków. The majority of them depict mythological subjects and scenes from Greek and Roman history; they once served as decorations on the walls of nuptial chambers (spalliere) or the fronts of painted wedding chests, usually referred to as cassoni. The domestic paintings amassed by Lanckoroñski in the last quarter of the 19th century in an exemplary way reflect the Renaissance fascination with classical literature, archaeology, and the classical tradition in the visual arts. Above all the book provides an explorative study of the subject matter of the paintings in the context of weddings, although stylistic analysis is also discussed. JERZY MIZIOLEK is professor of the visual arts and the classical tradition at the University of Warsaw (Institute of Archaeology). He studied art history and classical archaeology at the Jagiellonian University, Kraków and Christian archaeology at the Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia, Rome. He received his Ph.D. in 1987 and habilitation in 1996. He has been awarded a Saxl Fund fellowship at the Warburg Institute (1990), a Getty Grant Program postdoctoral fellowship (1991), a Mellon fellowship at Villa I Tatti (Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, 1994), a fellowship at the Kunsthistorisches Institut, Florence (1995), a Paul Mellon fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts at the National Gallery of Art, Washington (1996, 1997, 1998, 2001) and a Getty Research Institute fellowship (2006). Since 1992 he has been teaching courses in Italian Renaissance art and the classical tradition in the visual arts of the 18th and 19th centuries. He is the author of more than 150 papers and reviews published, among others, in the Journal of the Warburg Institute, Mitteilungen des Kunsthistorischen Intitutes in Florenz, Arte Cristiana, Prospettiva, Fontes, Renaissance Studies, I Tatti Studies, Fontes, Iconographica, Pegassus and Arte Lombarda. Several of them deal with Italian Renaissance domestic paintings. He has published seven books, including: Sol verus: Studies in the Iconography of Christ in the Art of the First Christian Millennium (1991), Soggetti classici sui cassoni fiorentini alla vigilia del Rinascimento (1996), Falsifications in Polish Collections and Abroad (2001), The Artistic Culture of Warsaw' s University (2003) and Muse, bacchanti e centauri. La pittura pompeiana e la loro fortuna in Polonia (2010). Since 1991 he has delivered more than forty papers and lectures at foreign universities and international symposia concerning Early Christian, Renaissance and neoclassical art.

In 1474–1475, the humanist Felice Feliciano of Verona wrote a letter to Giovanni Bellini in which he praised the artist’s ‘resplendent brushes’ (micanti pennelli). This overlooked passage from the early critical literature on Bellini, which is mainly characterized by rhetorical tropes and comparisons with the antique, suggests that the luminous qualities of his art were appreciated by his contemporaries. This paper examines Bellini’s painterly resplendence as it might have been understood by a fifteenth-century audience, through a reconsideration of the visual sources, composition, and symbolism of the artist’s Resurrection altarpiece for San Michele di Murano, Venice (now Gemäldegalerie, Berlin). A painting of the Resurrection by the Louvain artist Dieric Bouts for an altarpiece in an unknown Venetian church (now Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena) is recognized as the primary inspiration for Bellini’s composition. The identification of Bellini’s figure of Christ in a naturalistically rendered dawn sky with the celestial phenomenon of the morning star (stella del mattino) presents an opportunity to reconcile symbolic and naturalistic interpretations of the artist’s sacred landscapes.

LA TECHNIQUE PICTURALE D'ANDREA MANTEGNA, 2009

Mantegna was a supremely confident draughtsman and there is no evidence in his underdrawings of the use of any aids for the reproductions of cartoons or the enlargements of studies on paper. Instead, he seems to have drawn directly on the gesso making his first marks with a brush and very diluted carbon black ink, perhaps guided by a smaller scale sketch on paper. Once the placement of the main features was settled, Mantegna developed the underdrawing using a darker more pigmented liquid material still applied with a brush and contours were defined with broad, thick and fluent lines which have been also painted at sight. The modelling of forms has been achieved at the level of painted surfaces which seems to be a further indication of Mantegna\u2019s late painting production. All these features seem to be present in both paintings and particularly on the central part of the Family of Christ and Saint John Baptist. The underdrawings of the figures of Saint Joseph and Zacharias appear to be less fine and accurate then those observed on the central part of the painting. The very bad state of conservation of these pictorial layers do not allow a clear assignment to Mantegna and the contribution from another artist (his son Francesco?) can only be hypothesized. Given the fact that the Baptism of Christ undertook severe restoration interventions and suffered in the past from the exposure to unsuitable environmental conditions, it is hard to draw conclusive results from both the historical documentation and multi spectral imaging examinations. Analogies with the underdrawings documented in the central part of the Holy Family of Christ and St John Baptist exist, but their poorer definition do not allow a certain attribution to the typical late painting technique of Andrea Mantegna and, it is well understandable why such a controversial attribution went through many centuries. The analytical results seem to confirm that both canvas paintings have been prepared in the usual way with a gypsum preparatory ground; the contemporary presence of elements such as Fe, Si, Mn and Al can be associated with the use of umber mixed with red ochre pigments added to the ground to achieve a warmer tonality of the upper paint layers. As far as the pigments\u2019 composition is concerned the analyses confirmed for both paintings the use of almost the same paint palette and highlighted the constant presence of smalt which has been identified for the first time on Mantegna paintings. This result, that in principle would suggest a common authorship for the two paintings, would also need to be further confirmed through other analyses capable to characterize the polychrome structure, as the profound understanding of the way in which paint layers and pigments have been applied in terms of thickness and morphology can be sometime conclusive in conducting technical study of paintings