Enfilade

From The Holburne Museum:

Joseph Wright of Derby: Bath and Beyond
The Holburne Museum, Bath, 25 January — 5 May 2014
Derby Museum and Art Gallery, dates TBA

Joseph Wright, Vesuvius in Eruption, with a View over the
Islands in the Bay of Naples, ca. 1776–80 (London: Tate)

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I have taken the Liberty to give this Letter of Introduction to my Friend Mr. Wright of Derby, Who since his Return from Italy is come to Bath, & Designs to settle there.
Erasmus Darwin, 22 November 1775

Joseph Wright ‘of Derby’ (1734–1797) lived and worked in Bath between November 1775 and June 1777. This brief and little-known episode in Wright’s life marked a crossroads in his career; yet it has never been explored in detail. Joseph Wright of Derby: Bath and Beyond will place Wright in the context of the many artists, musicians, writers, business people and scientists living and working in the Georgian spa and present for the first time a comprehensive view of his life and work during those eighteen months. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue will also go ‘beyond’ to examine the effect of his time in Bath and his travels in Italy on Wright’s later work.

Joseph Wright, The Rev. Dr. Thomas Wilson and his adopted Daughter Miss Catherine Sophia Macaulay, 1776 (Chawton House Library)

Wright came to Bath to paint portraits, hoping to build on the success of Thomas Gainsborough who had recently left for London. The exhibition will include the three remaining portraits that the artist certainly made in Bath, including his painting of the elderly Rev. Thomas Wilson with the young daughter of Catharine Macaulay, the radical historian.

Whilst in Bath Wright worked up landscape studies he had made in Italy, producing spectacular views of Vesuvius in Eruption and the dazzling firework displays of Rome, the highlight of a visit to the artist’s studio in Brock Street. It was whilst in Bath that he first began to explore subjects from sentimental contemporary literature, which in turn have a strong impact on his portrait composition, and the exhibition will include some of his most beautiful depictions of figures alone in the landscape.

We are grateful to Derby Museum, which holds the world’s largest and finest collection of Wright’s work, for its generous loans to this exhibition which will include The Indian Widow, The Alchymist and some beautiful drawings. Other lenders include the National Gallery, Musée du Louvre, Tate, the British Museum, the Walker Art Gallery and the Fitzwilliam Museum. This exhibition will travel to Derby Museum and Art Gallery.

A study day is scheduled for 24 February 2014.

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From I. B. Tauris:

Amina Wright, Joseph Wright of Derby: Bath and Beyond (London: Philip Wilson Publishers, 2014), 112 pages, ISBN: 978-1781300213, £16 / $30.

Joseph Wright (1734–1797) arrived in Bath from his native Derby in November 1775. Recently returned from a tour of Italy, he came to the fashionable spa town to re-establish his business as a portrait painter, hoping to fill the vacancy left by Thomas Gainsborough the previous year. This book, the first to examine Wright’s little-known Bath period, places the artist in the context of a city then at the height of its unique cultural significance. Using rarely-seen illustrations of his work, it considers his attempts to conquer a saturated portrait market with images of local celebrities, and his use of domestic spaces for public exhibition. His celebrated views of fireworks in Rome and the terrors of Vesuvius were first shown in Bath. Beautifully illustrated and highly readable, Joseph Wright of Derby: Bath and Beyond sheds new light on a key moment in this important English artist’s career, deepening our understanding of his life and work as a whole.

Amina Wright is Senior Curator at the Holburne Museum in Bath, UK, and has been Curator of Fine Art there since 2001. She was closely involved in the Holburne’s major redevelopment project, completed in 2011, as well as a number of exhibitions relating to British eighteenth-century painting, drawings and Georgian Bath. Previous publications include the exhibition catalogues Pictures of Innocence: Children in Portraits from Hogarth to Lawrence (2005) and Pickpocketing the Rich: Portrait Painting in Bath 1720–1800 (2002).

From Artbooks.com:

Dipinti tra rococò e neoclassicismo da Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia e da altre raccolte
Palazzo Ducale Castromediano di Cavallino, Lecce, 21 September — 15 December 2013

La mostra è dedicata alla memoria di Fiammetta Luly Lemme (Ancona, 20 marzo 1937 – Roma, 29 marzo 2005), avvocato, collezionista e studiosa d’arte, moglie dell’avvocato Fabrizio Lemme, che con lei ha condiviso i medesimi interessi per l’arte e il collezionismo, che ancora coltiva. La collezione Lemme, formata con la consulenza di insigni studiosi quali Federico Zeri, Italo Faldi e Giuliano Briganti, fornisce un rilevante materiale di studio per la conoscenza della pittura barocca, rococò e proto-neoclassica, con particolare attenzione al Settecento romano. Nel 1998 i coniugi Lemme donarono al Museo del Louvre venti quadri e una scultura, collocati nella “Sala Lemme,” mentre altri ventuno furono donati contestualmente alla Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Antica di Palazzo Barberini, oggi organicamente inseriti nel nuovo allestimento.

Il 28 maggio 2007 Fabrizio, Giuliano e Ilaria Lemme hanno formalizzato la donazione al Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia del nucleo più importante della collezione, costituito da 128 dipinti, in gran parte già oggetto di notifica del Ministero dei Beni Culturali e Ambientali come insieme di elevato interesse storico artistico (Decreto del 1 dicembre 1998). La raccolta è confluita nel Museo del Barocco Romano, ubicato nella dimora chigiana, formato a partire dal nucleo di dipinti del ‘600 lasciati nel 2002 dallo storico dell’arte Maurizio Fagiolo dell’Arco. Ulteriori donazioni provenienti da altre raccolte (Ferdinando Peretti, Oreste Ferrari, Renato Laschena, etc.) hanno potenziato il museo di Palazzo Chigi, arricchendo le già rilevanti raccolte di provenienza chigiana, acquisite con la dimora nel 1989.

Il presente evento si pone in continuità ideale ed è una prosecuzione in termini didattici e storicoartistici della mostra Dipinti del Barocco Romano da Palazzo Chigi in Ariccia, tenuta a Cavallino di Lecce tra settembre e dicembre 2012, circoscritta alla pittura romana del ‘600. L’esposizione si volge al ‘700, il secolo dei lumi, l’età d’oro del Grand Tour d’Italie, che ebbe in Roma il proprio centro pulsante, propagandosi in tutta Italia. Tuttavia, oltre agli artisti attivi nella capitale pontificia, sono presenti in mostra anche pittori della scuola napoletana, provenienti o attivi nel regno borbonico. Spicca in ambito meridionale la figura di Corrado Giaquinto, il massimo artista pugliese del secolo ed uno dei più grandi del ‘700. Sono presenti anche tele di Paolo de Matteis, pittore della scuola napoletana attivo anche nel Salento. Le opere esposte provengono in gran parte da Palazzo Chigi, sia dalla collezioni storiche chigiane che dal Museo del Barocco. Sono presenti anche alcune opere in collezione privata, compresi ulteriori dipinti raccolti da Fabrizio Lemme negli ultimi anni o provenienti da una prestigiosa collezione privata inglese.

Francesco Petrucci, Dipinti tra rococò e neoclassicismo da palazzo Chigi in Ariccia e da altre raccolte (Rome: Gangemi, 2013), 128 pages, ISBN: 978-8849227086, $48.50.

Now on view in Nancy, as noted at Arachné, a research group blog dedicated to tapestries:

Chefs-d’œuvre de la tapisserie: La collection du Petit Palais, Paris
Nancy, Musée des Beaux-Arts, 25 October 2013 — 27 January 2014

Curated by Charles Villeneuve de Janti and Patrick Lemasson

Le Petit Palais, Musée des Beaux-Arts de la Ville de Paris, possède l’une des plus belles collections de tapisseries des XVII^e et XVIII^e siècles. Issues de grandes manufactures européennes, elles furent élaborées et tissées en matériaux précieux d’après les cartons de peintres majeurs tels que Le Brun, Champaigne, Boucher, à l’instar du carton pour La Destruction du Palais d’Armide par Charles Coypel, l’un des chefs-d’œuvre du Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nancy.

Ces œuvres, pouvant mesurer jusqu’à 5 mètres de hauteur, permettront aux visiteurs de découvrir un art de cour spectaculaire faisant écho à celui dévoilé dans l’exposition L’Automne de la Renaissance : d’Arcimboldo à Caravage. Pour des raisons de conservation, ces pièces sont très rarement présentées au public. Ce prêt du Petit Palais constitue donc une faveur exceptionnelle.

Didier Rykner provides a review at La Tribune de l’Art (4 November 2013).

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The catalogue is available from Artbooks.com:

Patrick Lemasson, Chefs d’oeuvres de la Tapisserie: La collection du Petit Palais, Paris (Milan: Silvana, 2013), 72 pages, ISBN: 978-8836627257, $29.

As noted at ArtDaily (2 December 2013) . . .

Master Drawings New York | Gainsborough and the Landscape of Refinement
Lowell Libson at Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York, 24 January — 1 February 2014

Thomas Gainsborough, Figures Resting in Woodland Landscape, signed 1784, 232 x 291 (Lowell Libson)

The exhibition is centered round a group of landscape drawings made by Gainsborough in the last two decades of his life but includes twelve drawings by Gainsborough spanning the full length of his career, from Gainsborough’s earliest recorded landscape study—completed when the artist was only 18—to a preparatory drawing for one of his last ‘Fancy pictures’ A Boy with a Cat, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which was completed the year before his death. Three of the drawings are previously unpublished and exhibited to the public for the first time here.

Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) was one of the Britain’s greatest artists, famed for his engaging portraits and evocative landscape paintings, he is also universally acknowledged as one of the finest European draughtsman of the eighteenth century. Despite this reputation, there have been very few exhibitions dedicated to Gainsborough’s drawings. These are not topographical works but imagined landscapes which Gainsborough created by drawing models he created using rocks and wood found in his garden and, as one writer noted, ‘distant woods of broccoli.’

Gainsborough was fascinated by a limited number of landscape features—herds of cattle, serpentine roads, clumps of trees and hilly horizons—often obsessively playing with these features time and time again, each time creating completely new works. This creative repetition—or refinement—was given expression in Gainsborough’s fascination with different techniques.

No two drawings in the exhibition are handled in the same way as Gainsborough explored different combinations of chalks, pencil, ink washes and watercolour in each work. Many of the drawings in the exhibition have provenances stretching back to the eighteenth century, one is inscribed as a present from ‘the ingenious artist’ to the daughter of a friend, another was in the collection of the celebrated surgeon, Dr John Hunter, who treated Gainsborough in his final illness. This group is the largest concentration of Gainsborough drawings to be offered by an art gallery since the celebrated exhibition mounted by Knoedler in 1914. It is accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue with scholarly entries written by the leading Gainsborough authority, Hugh Belsey.

The exhibition is free and open daily from Friday 24 January to Saturday 1 February, 2014 Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 1018 Madison Avenue, New York. Monday to Saturday, 11–6; Sunday, January 26, 2–6; Tuesday, 28 and Thursday, 30 January, 11–8.

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Press release (15 August 2013) from Master Drawings New York:

Master Drawings New York
New York, 25 January — 1 February 2014

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In a fifteen block stretch of the Upper East Side’s ‘Gold Coast’ in New York, close to 30 of the most acclaimed international dealers in master drawings will show the latest artworks entering the market during the eighth edition of Master Drawings New York, January 25th through February 1, 2014 with a Preview Friday January 24th from 4 to 8pm. Timed to coincide with New York’s major January art-buying events, including the Old Master auctions and The Winter Antiques Show, Master Drawings New York includes top dealers from the US as well as the UK, France, Germany, Spain, and Italy. Originally conceived as an annual walkthrough, Master Drawings New York has grown into a ‘must see’ event with a number of New York dealers making their galleries available to their overseas colleagues for the week. (more…)

From the Vatican Museums:

Precious Antiquities: The Profane Museum at the Time of Pius VI
Room of the Aldobrandini Wedding, Vatican Museums, Rome, 2 October 2013 — 4 January 2014

Curated by Guido Cornini and Claudia Lega

For the first time in over two hundred years, an exhibition will bring back to life in the Vatican the charm of the eighteenth-century collections of the Profane Museums at the time of Pius VI, before the Napoleonic requisitions. It offers a unique opportunity to see reunited, in their original museum context, works previously exhibited in the Museum and now conserved in prestigious international cultural institutions. The exhibition will open simultaneously with the new display of the historical collections of the Profane Museum.

The Profane Museum, the original nucleus of the collections of profane antiquities in the future complex of the Vatican Museums, was created by Clement XIII (Rezzonico, 1758–1769) and enriched with further collections and furnishings under Pius VI (Braschi, 1775–1799). The conclusion of this demanding restoration project, which involved the entire collection and its context, is an opportunity to imagine a momentary “homecoming” of a nucleus of antique gems and cameos, mounted in elaborate Neoclassical settings at the end of the eighteenth century, and a valuable numismatic collection of Greek, Etruscan and Roman exemplars. Involved in the dramatic wartime events of the Napoleonic period, these works were transported to France as a war indemnity following the assassination of General Mathurin-Léonard Duphot in Rome in 1798.

Curated by Guido Cornini and Claudia Lega, curator and assistant in the Department of Decorative Arts of the Vatican Museums, the exhibition Precious Antiquities: The Profane Museum at the Time of Pius VI – presented in the evocative surroundings of the Room of the Aldobrandini Wedding – displays for the first time in over two hundred years works such as the Augustus Group, with its splendid portrait of the emperor in chalcedony, the famous Carpegna Cameo of magnificently engraved onyx depicting the Triumph of Bacchus, the “Delle Paste” Group, with a glass cameo pinax depicting the loves of Bacchus and Ariadne, and other Groups and cameos masterfully reinterpreted and infused with new life by Luigi Valadier, celebrated silversmith in Rome at the time of Pius VI. (more…)

From The Met:

Antonio Canova: The Seven Last Works
Gallerie d’Italia, Milan, 4 October 2013 — 6 January 2014
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 22 January — 27 April 2014

Curated by Fernando Mazzocca and Matteo Ceriana

Antonio Canova (1757–1822), the greatest of all neoclassical sculptors, remains famous above all for the elegant nude mythological subjects that he carved exquisitely in marble. But he also worked in a deeply serious, deceptively simple style. This less familiar Canova is revealed in an extraordinary series of full-scale plaster models illustrating episodes from the Old and New Testaments. Such models, used to review his compositions before they were transferred into stone, were a distinctive feature of his sculptural practice. These Biblical scenes were made in connection with a project for 32 low reliefs that were to adorn the Tempio Canoviano, the church in his home town Possagno, which later became the artist’s mausoleum. He completed only seven models before his death. Six come from the Gallerie dell’Accademia in Venice, and one from the Gipsoteca in Possagno. Newly restored, they will all be lent for the first time to the United States. Drawing inspiration from ancient sculpture and early Renaissance masters, the models are striking for the marked linearity of the figures, arranged in brilliantly syncopated compositions. They constitute Canova’s last, profoundly moving masterworks.

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From the Gallerie d’Italia:

Canova. L’ultimo capolavoro. Le metope del Tempio
Gallerie d’Italia, Milan, 4 October 2013 — 6 January 2014
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 22 January — 27 April 2014

a cura di Fernando Mazzocca e Matteo Ceriana

L’esposizione è organizzata da Intesa Sanpaolo in partnership con la Soprintendenza Speciale PSAE e per il Polo Museale della città di Venezia e dei Comuni della Gronda lagunare e in collaborazione con la Fondazione Cariplo. Aperta al pubblico nella sede milanese fino al 6 gennaio 2014, la mostra sarà ospitata al Metropolitan Museum of Art di New York dal 20 gennaio al 27 aprile 2014.

Il recente restauro di sei bassorilievi in gesso conservati presso le Gallerie dell’Accademia di Venezia, ispirati a episodi dell’Antico e del Nuovo Testamento, e lo studio dei documenti ad essi relativi hanno portato alla luce opere di grande valore storico. Sono infatti state identificate nelle opere restaurate i modelli originali per le prime delle trentadue metope – i pannelli decorativi destinati a ritmare il fregio dorico – che Antonio Canova, moderno Fidia, intendeva realizzare per il pronao del Tempio della natia Possagno, l’edificio maestoso da lui stesso progettato ispirandosi all’architettura del Partenone e del Pantheon.

Lo scultore iniziò a lavorare ai modelli delle metope nel dicembre del 1821; ai primi di aprile del 1822 ne erano stati eseguiti sette, subito inviati dallo studio di Roma all’Accademia di Venezia, perché altrettanti scultori, scelti tra i migliori allievi dell’Accademia stessa, iniziassero a realizzarne la versione in marmo. La morte, sopraggiunta il 13 ottobre 1822, impedì allo scultore di portare a compimento il progetto. Insieme ai sei bassorilievi del Tempio, sono in mostra sette disegni preparatori, provenienti dal Museo Civico di Bassano del Grappa, in stretta relazione alle metope stesse, che testimoniano il costante interesse di Canova per i temi biblici e cristiani, così come il suo studio dei Primitivi.

Completano l’esposizione due esemplari, provenienti dalla Biblioteca Braidense, dell’Atlante illustrato della Storia della scultura (1813–1818 e 1822–1824) di Leopoldo Cicognara, storico dell’arte e amico di Canova: una fonte importante che permette di contestualizzare meglio il confronto con il Medioevo e il primo Rinascimento. Uno dei sette modelli delle metope, andato purtroppo perduto, viene rappresentato in mostra dal bassorilievo proveniente dalla Gipsoteca Antonio Canova di Possagno, appartenente ad una serie eseguita dai seguaci dell’opera del Maestro.

La mostra trova una sede ideale nelle sale della sezione Da Canova a Boccioni delle Gallerie di Piazza Scala, nelle quali sono esposti i bassorilievi Rezzonico di Collezione Fondazione Cariplo. Tale collocazione consente un confronto diretto – nell’ambito delle opere di Canova con la tecnica del bassorilievo in gesso – tra la produzione giovanile dell’ultimo decennio del Settecento, ispirata all’antichità classica, e opere realizzate prima della morte.

Press release from Robilant-Voena:

Giacomo Ceruti (1698–1767): Popolo e nobiltà alla vigilia dell’età dei lumi
Robilant-Voena, Milan, 30 October — 13 December 2013

Curated by Francesco Frangi and Alessandro Morandotti

Robilant-Voena presenta nella sua sede milanese una mostra che indaga uno dei più grandi artisti del Settecento italiano: Giacomo Ceruti. Nell’occasione sarà possibile apprezzare un cospicuo nucleo di opere di questo protagonista della “pittura della realtà” lombarda, riscoperto a partire dagli anni venti del Novecento per merito degli studi di Roberto Longhi, Giuseppe Delogu, Giovanni Testori e Mina Gregori. Grazie ai prestiti di importanti collezioni private di formazione antica o recente, la mostra affiancherà a dipinti già noti da tempo, alcune tele finora sconosciute, che contribuiranno a mettere a fuoco i diversi aspetti del linguaggio di questo formidabile pittore.

Nato a Milano e precocemente trasferitosi a Brescia, Ceruti è infatti una personalità dal percorso articolato, che in una prima fase della sua carriera seppe imporsi come ritrattista dai vigorosi accenti realistici e soprattutto come attento indagatore della vita quotidiana delle classi sociali più disagiate. Molto spesso, infatti, le opere che l’artista realizza tra gli anni venti e i primi anni trenta del Settecento per la nobiltà bresciana hanno come protagonisti i cosiddetti pitocchi: mendicanti, vagabondi, filatrici, contadini e artigiani. Un mondo di emarginati e di umili lavoratori che, a differenza di quanto era avvenuto nella pittura dei decenni precedenti, Ceruti mette in scena senza ironia, conferendo anzi ai protagonisti una solenne dignità, cui contribuisce il formato monumentale dei dipinti. Questa propensione raggiunge i più alti risultati nel famoso ciclo di Padernello, la serie di tele pauperistiche che sancì la riscoperta dell’artista a partire dagli anni venti del Novecento.

Verso la metà degli anni trenta del Settecento Ceruti si sposta in terra veneta, lavorando tra Padova e Venezia dove ottenne importanti commissioni da uno dei più illustri collezionisti del tempo, il maresciallo Matthias von der Schulenburg. Il confronto con la cultura figurativa lagunare segna una cesura nel percorso di Ceruti, le cui conseguenze si faranno sentire per tutto il seguito della carriera dell’artista che, fatta eccezione per un soggiorno a Piacenza nel corso degli anni quaranta, si svolgerà in prevalenza a Milano, dove Ceruti morirà nel 1767.

In questa sua seconda stagione il pittore dimostra di privilegiare un linguaggio più elegante e raffinato, aggiornato sulle mode della coeva cultura figurativa europea. Così i suoi ritratti perdono la ruvida dimensione naturalistica degli anni giovanili per acquisire un tono mondano e internazionale, bene esemplificato in mostra dal Ritratto del Marchese Orsini a cavallo, proveniente dalla villa Orsini di Mombello di Imbersago. Lo stesso avviene per le scene di tema popolare, che sostituiscono ai toni drammatici degli esordi un registro più rasserenato, di cui è testimonianza l’idillio sentimentale rappresentato nell’Incontro al pozzo già parte della decorazione di palazzo Busseti a Tortona. Notevole è poi la serie di teste di carattere (Ritratto di fumatore in costume orientale; Vecchio con gatto; Vecchio con colbacco e cane) che fanno di Ceruti un grande interprete di quel genere pittorico mondano (e tipicamente settecentesco) molto amato a Venezia e in Francia. Questi trapassi stilistici lasciano comunque inalterato il dato saliente della poetica cerutiana, da riconoscere nella capacità di restituire le diverse realtà del proprio mondo con uno sguardo schietto e disincantato; una lucida razionalità di osservazione che rende Ceruti perfettamente in linea con la sensibilità dell’età dei lumi che si andava allora diffondendo in tutta Europa.

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Published by Skira, the catalogue is available from Artbooks.com:

Francesco Frangi and Alessandro Morandotti, Giacomo Ceruti (1698–1767): Popolo e nobiltà alla vigilia dell’età dei lumi (Milan: Skira, 2013), 96 pages, ISBN: 978-8857222547, $75. Italian text with English insert.

Artista di spicco del Settecento italiano, Giacomo Ceruti detto “il Pitocchetto” è un importante protagonista della “pittura della realtà” lombarda, riscoperto a partire dagli anni venti del Novecento per merito degli studi di Roberto Longhi, Giuseppe Delogu, Giovanni Testori e Mina Gregori. Questo catalogo, che accompagna l’esposizione milanese, ripercorre la carriera artistica di Ceruti, a partire dagli anni bresciani, spesi sul binario di una ricerca realista, fino agli anni veneti e milanesi, quando il suo linguaggio diventa internazionale, e i pitocchi lasciano spazio ai ritratti nobiliari e alle teste di fantasia. Attraverso ventiquattro opere provenienti da prestigiose collezioni private oltre che dal patrimonio della galleria (alcune delle quali completamente sconosciute al pubblico e riscoperte in occasione della mostra), si vuole indagare questa dicotomia dell’opera di Ceruti, dove la realtà declinata nei suoi aspetti più poveri, fatta di storpi e mendicanti, stracci e polvere, si contrappone a un’eleganza di gusto internazionale, nella quale trionfano velluti e marsine.

Press release from The Prado:

Historias Naturales: Un Proyecto de Miguel Ángel Blanco
Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid, 19 November 2013 — 27 April 2014

Curated by Miguel Ángel Blanco; coordinated by Javier Portús

Miguel Ángel Blanco, A Leviathan Swallows a Goddess (Room 74)
Roman workshop, Venus with a Dolphin, MN; Dolphin skeleton, MNCN- CSIC.
Photo: Pedro Albornoz / Museo Nacional del Prado

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The Museo del Prado is presenting the exhibition Historias Naturales: A Project by Miguel Ángel Blanco, organised with the collaboration of the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) and the support of the Region of Madrid. 150 objects from the natural world make up the twenty-two interventions installed in the Museum’s galleries by this Madrid-born artist. Most of the objects — animals, plants and minerals — have been loaned by the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales of the CSIC, displayed alongside 25 works from the Museum’s own collection. The result is a close dialogue with these 25 works of art and also with the building itself and the urban setting of the Paseo del Prado.

Through this exhibition the Prado is paying tribute to its own history and to the origins of its building, originally designed as a Natural History museum. On 19 November 1819 the Prado opened its doors to the public for the first time as the Museo Nacional de Pinturas y Esculturas (National Museum of Paintings and Sculptures). However, the Neo-classical building designed by Juan de Villanueva that now houses the Prado was originally designed as the Royal Natural History Cabinet on the orders of Charles III in 1785.

Miguel Ángel Blanco, The Anteater’s Cruel Winter (Room 90)
Antón Mengs worskshop (?), His Majesty’s Anteater, MNP; Anteater skeleton, MNCN-CSIC (Photo: Pedro Albornoz / Prado).

To celebrate the anniversary of the Museum’s first opening to the public on 19 November 1819, the Prado will be introducing visitors to a lesser known aspect of its history, namely that of its origins as a natural history museum prior to its inauguration as the Museo de Pintura y Escultura. The building that now houses the Museum was designed by the architect Juan de Villanueva in 1785 as the Natural History Cabinet on the orders of Charles III. Now, for a period of almost six months the galleries of the Permanent Collection will display objects including some of those that the monarch acquired from the collector and naturalist Pedro Franco Dávila for his new natural history museum, which was previously located in the Palacio de Goyaneche (now the headquarters of the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando).

The Exhibition

Natural Histories: A Project by Miguel Ángel Blanco consists of twenty-two interventions in the Prado’s galleries, made up of 150 objects from the natural world (minerals, stuffed or preserved animals, skeletons and insects), the majority from the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, shown alongside twenty-five works from the Museum’s collection. The result is to establish a close relationship between them and also with the building itself and the surrounding urban context of the Paseo del Prado. Visitors will thus be able to see the realisation of Charles III’s desire to house a Natural History museum in the Villanueva Building. Due to the circumstances of history, the arts and sciences coexisted under the same roof on two occasions: in 1827 and during the Civil War when objects from the collections of the Real Jardín Botánico and the Museo de Ciencias were moved to the Prado for greater safety.

In order to bring about this reencounter with the Museum’s history and origins, the artist Miguel Ángel Blanco has not set out to reconstruct the Natural History Cabinet three hundred years later. Rather, as he explains, “What I have done in the Museo del Prado is to evoke that collection, the ghost of which inhabits the Villanueva Building. The twenty-two artistic interventions create a collection for the future, incorporating a creative viewpoint, interacting with the Permanent Collection and encouraging a new way of looking at the works which helps to increase the significance of the images.”

The first intervention is to be seen in the Ariadne Rotunda in the Museum, in which the preeminent work is the large-scale, recently restored sculpture of the Sleeping Ariadne (anonymous sculptor, 150–175AD). Next to it is the sculpture of Venus with a Dolphin (anonymous sculptor, 140–150AD), who now becomes the principal focus of this space. From the room’s ceiling Blanco has suspended a dolphin’s skeleton from the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales, explaining that “the marble-like bones of the skeleton resemble the ivory-like marble of the sculptures.” The skeleton projects its shadow over Venus, “leaping like a Leviathan to swallow up the goddess ….”

Another of the works that sums up Blanco’s work in the Museum is his intervention based on Joachim Patinir’s celebrated painting Charon Crossing the Styx. Patinir’s work, which is among those that has most fascinated Blanco, ceases to be a painting and becomes an extension of the lake. It is transformed into pigment by the placement immediately in front of it of a giant piece of azurite (Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales), the source of the copper carbonate that Patinir used as a pigment in his painting, “which we can imagine as the result of the lake drying up, assisted by the similarity between the shape of its outline and that of the stone.”

Room 55B in the Prado is another space transformed into a natural history collection by Blanco through his introduction of the skeleton of a snake wound round itself, located next to Dürer’s two panels of Adam and Eve. The skeleton is one of the most beautiful objects in the Museo de Ciencias Naturales’ reptile collection. Through this juxtaposition, Dürer’s two nude studies remind us even more forcefully of the subject of human proportions, which Blanco considers “a scientific endeavour.” Here he reveals an aesthetic intent in his placement of the skeleton, while “the snake’s flexibility resulting from its numerous vertebrae echoes the sinuosity of Dürer’s figures.”

Blanco’s twenty-two installations are completed with one of his own works, Book-box no. 1072, which is part of the work for which he is best known, the Forest Library. It consists of 1131 book-boxes housing natural elements, each one forming a micro-landscape. The book-box that he has chosen for this intervention acquires meaning in front of Lucas van Valckenborch’s Landscape with an Iron Works of 1595. According to Blanco, this is one of his boxes most oriented towards landscape and can be visually related to the landscape paintings in the Room 57 of the Museum: “Among these Flemish painters I feel close to Lucas van Valckenborch, who depicted himself in some of his works with a sketchbook on his lap, reflecting the practice of observing the landscape at first hand … Of all natural environments, the forest is my place and the tree my equal.” (www.bibliotecadelbosque.net)

Miguel Ángel Blanco (born Madrid, 1958)

Miguel Ángel Blanco is among the best known of Spanish artists associated directly with nature. For some years he lived in the Sierra de Guadarrama, which has been his preferred artistic terrain and was the subject of an exhibition he held at La Casa Encendida in Madrid in 2006 entitled Visions of Guadarrama: Miguel Ángel Blanco and the pioneering artists of the Sierra. In that event his book-boxes established a dialogue with works by the leading Spanish landscape painters who visited this mountainous area in the 19th century with the aim of depicting it in their works.

Miguel Ángel Blanco has exhibited different selections from the Forest Library, his most important project, at the Biblioteca Nacional de España, the Museo Nacional de la Estampa in Mexico City, the Fundación César Manrique in Lanzarote, the Calcografía Nacional, Madrid, and the Abbey of Santo Domingo de Silos (Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía), among other venues. In 2008 the Ministry of Culture commissioned a project from him in memory of the dead beech tree in the garden of the Fundación Lázaro Galdiano, which presented the temporary exhibition Fallen Tree, focusing on the relationship between the tree and time.

The Catalogue

The catalogue that accompanies the exhibition includes a text by Miguel Ángel Blanco, the creator of this project, entitled “The Call of the Bird of Paradise” and another, entitled “From Wunderkammern to Enlightenment Collections,” by Javier Ignacio Sánchez Almazán, curator of the collection of invertebrates at the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales. The catalogue also includes a portfolio with photographs and texts by the artist of each of the exhibition’s twenty-two interventions with technical details on all the works on display, in addition to the artist’s biography