Enfilade

Thomas Hamilton (1784–1858) RSA, Design for National Gallery and Royal Scottish Academy.

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Press release from the National Galleries of Scotland:

Ages of Wonder: Scotland’s Art 1540 to Now
Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh, 4 November 2017 — 7 January 2018

The National Galleries of Scotland (NGS) and the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) have collaborated to organise a major new exhibition, which opens in Edinburgh this autumn. Ages of Wonder: Scotland’s Art 1540 to Now will be the largest exhibition of the RSA’s hugely significant collection ever mounted and the first to occupy the entire RSA building.

The RSA is an independently funded institution founded in 1826, and is led by artists and architects to promote and support the creation, understanding and enjoyment of contemporary art. It was instrumental in the establishment of a Scottish national art collection in 1859, with the opening of the Scottish National Gallery (SNG). In 1910, the RSA transferred significant works to the SNG’s collection in exchange for exhibiting rights within what is now known as the RSA Building, which is part of the SNG complex in the heart of Edinburgh.

Ages of Wonder will, for the first time in over 100 years, reunite these paintings and sculptures with the RSA collection, bringing together a selection of over 450 works by more than 270 artists and architects that will highlight the significant part played by RSA in Scottish cultural over the past two centuries. Around 60 outstanding works from NGS will feature in the exhibition.

The artworks on show will cover a period of nearly five centuries, from 1540 until the present day—from the The Adoration of the Kings by Jacopo Bassano (c.1510–1592) right through to Callum Innes’s Exposed Painting Lamp Black, submitted as the artist’s Diploma Work in 2015 after his election as an Academician, and a number of new commissions. Among the exhibition’s highlights will be a spectacular recreation of a Victorian gallery hang, which in RSA Gallery 3 will see over 90 works hung as they would have in the 19th century, from dado rail to ceiling.

Ages of Wonder will also feature a range of special events, including a series of life drawing classes led by prominent contemporary artists such as John Byrne (b.1940), and live etching classes which will utilise a beautifully preserved 19th-century printing press which belonged to the distinguished etcher E. S. Lumsden (1883–1948).

One room will focus on Sir James Guthrie (1859–1930) and the 1910 transfer, featuring major works from both the RSA and NGS, by Guthrie and other artists such as William Dyce (1806–1864) and Joseph Noel Paton (1821–1901), and a specially commissioned sculpture of Guthrie by Kenny Hunter (b.1962). There will also be a room of outstanding portraits of RSA Presidents and artists, showcasing key works by David Allan (1744–1796), Elizabeth Blackadder (b.1934) and Alberto Morrocco (1917–1998).

John Leighton, Director-General of the National Galleries of Scotland, said: “The NGS and the RSA have a shared history and together we occupy a central place in the past, present and future of the arts in Scotland. We now work very closely together and we are delighted to have partnered with the Royal Scottish Academy (RSA) to help deliver what is set to be a historic show. Visitors to the exhibition can soon enjoy some exceptional works by artists both past and present, with items from the national collection complementing the rich and important holdings of the RSA.”

The exhibition will be accompanied by a fully illustrated publication edited by Tom Normand and a catalogue. The publication includes essays around the Academy from Duncan Macmillan HRSA, Joanna Soden HRSA, James Holloway, Helen Smailes, Arthur Watson PRSA, Alexander Moffat RSA, William Brotherston RSA, Iain Gale, Lyon and Turnbull, John Morrison, University of Aberdeen, John Lowrey, University of Edinburgh and Sandy Wood, RSA Collections Curator.

Salon hang with William Etty’s Venus of Urbino.

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Press relese (5 July 2017) from LACMA:

Painted in Mexico / Pintado en México, 1700–1790: Pinxit Mexici
Fomento Cultural Banamex, Mexico City, 29 June — 15 October 2017
Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 19 November 2017 — 18 March 2018
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 24 April — 22 July 2018

Curated by Ilona Katzew with Jaime Cuadriello, Paula Mues Orts, and Luisa Elena Alcalá

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents Painted in Mexico, 1700–1790: Pinxit Mexici, the first major exhibition to reposition the history of 18th-century Mexican painting, a vibrant period marked by major stylistic changes and the invention of compelling new iconographies. Co-organized by LACMA and Fomento Cultural Banamex, A.C. in Mexico City, this exhibition foregrounds the connections between Mexican painting and transatlantic artistic trends while emphasizing Mexican painting’s internal developments and remarkable pictorial output. More than 100 paintings are presented in the exhibition, many on view for the first time and restored for this exhibition.

Painted in Mexico, 1700–1790: Pinxit Mexici is curated by Ilona Katzew, curator and department head of Latin American art at LACMA, with guest co-curators Jaime Cuadriello, Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, and Paula Mues Orts, Escuela Nacional de Conservación, Restauración y Museografía, both of Mexico City, and Luisa Elena Alcalá, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid of Spain. The exhibition is presented as part of the Getty’s Pacific Standard Time: LA/LA initiative and is one of a handful of historical exhibitions focusing on the legacy of Latin American art before the 20th century.

“This is truly a once-in-a-lifetime undertaking of an engrossing chapter in art history,” said Michael Govan, LACMA CEO and Wallis Annenberg Director. “Over the last six years, the co-curators have traveled all over Mexico to uncover new materials; many restored specially for the exhibition and photographed for the first time. This is a groundbreaking reassessment of the field, and we are proud to be at the forefront of this important undertaking and advancing new scholarship.”

Ilona Katzew, project director and a noted expert in the field, stated, “The 18th century is a particularly rich period in the history of Mexican art, which has not yet received its due attention. In organizing this exhibition, we hope to open up a vista on a sophisticated and innovative body of work, one that is contextually rich and highly rewarding to look at and study, and share our collective enthusiasm for this fascinating chapter of global art history.”

In the 16th century, European artists immigrated to Mexico to decorate newly established churches and complete artistic commissions. Some of these artists and their families formed workshops in Mexico that endured for several generations. By the 17th century, a new generation of artists born in the Americas began to develop their own pictorial styles that reflected the changing cultural climate as well as the desires of their patrons, both religious and secular. The 18th century ushered in a period of artistic splendor as local schools of painting were consolidated, new iconographies were invented, and artists began to group themselves into academies.

During the 18th century, painters were increasingly asked to create mural-size paintings to cover the walls of sacristies, choirs, and university halls, among other spaces. The same artists produced portraits, casta paintings (depictions of racially mixed families), painted folding screens, and finely rendered devotional imagery, attesting to their extraordinary versatility. The volume of work produced by the four generations of Mexican artists that spanned the 18th century is virtually unmatched elsewhere in the vast Hispanic world.

Painters also became more aware of their own contributions, largely owing to the sizable number of pictures that were exported to Europe, throughout Spanish America, and within the viceroyalty itself. This awareness led many educated painters not only to sign their works and emphasize their authorship but also to make explicit references to Mexico as their place of origin through the Latin phrase Pinxit Mexici (Painted in Mexico). This expression eloquently encapsulates the painters’ pride in their own tradition and their connection to larger, transatlantic trends.

The exhibition combines a chronological and thematic approach, and includes seven major sections:

Great Masters introduces the works of some of the leading painters of the day around which others congregated; the notion of a local tradition and intergenerational ties is emphasized. Since the 16th century, educated painters in Mexico City had organized themselves in guilds. By the 18th century, their most distinguished members (some of whom descended from long lines of illustrious painters) also established informal academies. The academy organized by the brothers Juan and Nicolás Rodríguez Juárez around 1722, for example, evidences the artists’ growing interest in revitalizing their art.

Master Story Tellers and the Art of Expression illustrates how works were designed to convey complex stories. Conceived as series, these works decorated the interiors of churches, convents, colleges, and other public spaces, where they became activated through their particular arrangement, including as part of altarpiece-ensembles. During the 18th century narrative painting underwent a resurgence, which is evident in its more organic and idealized (and at times idyllic) sensibility. The artist’s increasing interest in emphasizing domestic interiors and details of everyday life helped to establish a more intimate connection with the viewer.

Noble Pursuits and the Academy explores the efforts of artists throughout the 18th century to form art academies. The introduction of academic principles in Mexico is generally connected with the arrival of Jerónimo Antonio Gil from Spain and the establishment of Mexico’s Royal Academy of San Carlos in 1783. This perspective has overlooked the earlier trajectory of local artists, who long sought to have painting recognized as a noble, as opposed to a mechanical art. In the 18th century painters organized several independent academies (c. 1722, 1754, and 1768), where they actively engaged in discussions about the theory and practice of their art. They also attempted to elevate the status of painting by writing and referencing art treatises, by equating their task with that of the supreme creator, and refashioning their image through their self-portraits.

Paintings of the Land brings together a compelling group of works representing local subjects. The expression “paintings of the land” (pinturas de la tierra) recurs often in contemporary panegyric literature and artistic inventories to describe works unique to Mexico—either made there or representing aspects of life in Mexico. Many of the works included in this section, such as vedute (large-scale paintings of a cityscape or vista), casta paintings (depictions of racially mixed families), folding screens with fête gallant scenes (amorous figures in pastoral settings), and depictions of Indian weddings, are peppered with colorful local elements. The works brilliantly exemplify how Mexican painting could simultaneously fulfill artistic, political, and documentary purposes.

The Power of Portraiture illustrates the various modalities of the portrait genre. In the 18th century, Mexico saw an upsurge in portraiture associated with the economic growth of the viceroyalty, and different social groups, particularly within urban contexts, commissioned artists to paint their likenesses. In a hierarchical society such as New Spain, which placed a premium on nobility of birth, piety, wealth, titles, and merits, portraiture had the power to convey both corporate and personal messages. Through portraiture people could fashion and refashion their identities and project them onto society. Portraiture also fulfilled a genealogical role, designed to preserve the memory of families and institutions—religious and secular. Dress and other attributes became an essential part of the genre.

The Allegorical World looks at a highly inventive group of works that became prevalent in the 18th century. Often commissioned by ecclesiastical orders to instruct in issues of faith, allegorical images are fascinating manifestations of a culture that relied increasingly on its own visual metaphors. These images became particularly popular, in part, because of the versatility of allegorical language that could express many things simultaneously. Allegorical paintings can be broadly divided into four categories: guides to inner spirituality for nuns and monks within cloistered life, teaching or mnemonic tools to aid in the practice of piety, symbols that promoted local devotions, and commentaries to extol (or even criticize) figures of power. Some allegories were conceived as large- scale paintings that covered the walls of different institutions and religious spaces, while many smaller ones were designed to awaken piety within the context of cells and oratories.

Imagining the Sacred features a stunning selection of paintings that copied holy effigies, many considered miraculous. Copying holy images became part of a long tradition that engaged the best painters of the day. Although most subjects were universal, sacred painting saw significant developments in 18th-century Mexico. Painters updated age-old formulas: the resulting richness of themes, pictorial approaches, and devotional complexity is noteworthy. The most visible public images were large paintings representing specific sculptures that were known for performing miracles. Intimate devotional experience was more commonly channeled through smaller paintings, many on copper, in which painters demonstrated great precision and skill. These works reflect the extent to which art, belief, and society were inextricably connected.

Painters in the Exhibition

Juan Francisco de Aguilera (Spain [?], active Mexico, first quarter of the 18th century) Manuel de Arellano (Mexico, 1662–1722)
Ignacio María Barreda (Mexico, c. 1754–1800)
Ignacio Berben (Guadalajara, 1733–c. 1814)
Miguel Cabrera (Mexico, c. 1715–1768)
Francisco Clapera (Spain, 1746–1810, active Peru and Mexico)
Nicolás Correa (Mexico, 1657–c. 1708)
Nicolás Enríquez (Mexico, 1704–c.1790)
Rafael Joaquín Gutiérrez (Mexico, c. 1750–1792)
Fray Miguel de Herrera (San Cristóbal de la Laguna, Canary Islands, 1696–c. 1789, active Mexico)
José de Ibarra (Mexico, 1685–1756)
Andrés López (Mexico, 1727–1807)
Francisco Martínez (Mexico, 1687–1758)
Manuel Montes y Balcázar (Guadalajara, active, c. 1727–1760)
Juan Patricio Morlete Ruiz (Mexico, 1713–1772)
José de Páez (Mexico, 1721–c. 1790)
Rafael Ximeno y Planes (Spain, 1759–1825, active Mexico)
Pascual Pérez (Puebla, d. 1721)
Juan Rodríguez Juárez (Mexico, 1675–1728)
Nicolás Rodríguez Juárez (Mexico, 1677–1734)
Antonio de Torres (Mexico, 1667–1731)
Francisco Antonio Vallejo (Mexico, 1722–1785)
Miguel Jerónimo Zendejas (Puebla, 1720–1815)
José Joaquín de la Vega (Mexico, active second half of the 18th century)

International Scholar’s Day
February 2018

An international scholar’s day will be co-organized with the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), enabling established and junior scholars to present new research. Given the extensive restoration undertaken for the exhibition, part of the event will be dedicated to presentations by leading conservators from Mexico, the United States, and Europe, who will discuss the techniques, materials, and pictorial processes employed by Mexican painters, and their wider art historical implications.

Ilona Katzew, ed., with contributions from Ilona Katzew, Luisa Elena Alcalá, Jaime Cuadriello, Ronda Kasl, and Paula Mues Orts, Painted in Mexico, 1700–1790: Pinxit Mexici (New York: Prestel, 2017), 512 pages, ISBN: 978 379135 6778, $85.

Painted in Mexico, 1700–1790: Pinxit Mexici is accompanied by a groundbreaking catalogue that offers the first in-depth assessment of 18th-century Mexican painting, making accessible an extraordinary body of images, alongside compelling new scholarship. The volume is edited by Ilona Katzew with contributions by the exhibition co-curators Luisa Elena Alcalá, Jaime Cuadriello, Ilona Katzew, and Paula Mues Orts. Exquisitely illustrated with newly commissioned photography of never-before-published artworks, the book includes fascinating essays on a number of themes, such as the tradition and innovation of Mexican painting, the mobility of pictures within and outside the viceroyalty, the political role of images, and the emphasis on ornamentation. Rounding out this volume are over 130 catalogue entries that offer new and authoritative interpretations. The book is published by LACMA and Fomento Cultural Banamex, A.C., and DelMonico Books, Prestel. A Spanish edition is also available.

Catalogue cover image: Juan Patricio Morlete Ruiz, Mexico, 1713–1772, Portrait of Doña Tomasa Durán López de Cárdenas (Retrato de Doña Tomasa Durán López de Cárdenas), ca. 1762, Galería Coloniart. Collection of Felipe Siegel, Anna and Andrés Siegel, Mexico City.

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From the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco:

Gods in Color: Polychromy in the Ancient World
Bunte Götter: Die Farbigkeit antiker Skulptur
Glyptothek, Munich, 2003
Liebieghaus Sculpture Collection, Frankfurt am Main, 2008
Legion of Honor Museum, San Francisco, 28 October 2017 — 7 January 2018

Reconstruction (A1) of the so-called Chios kore from the Akropolis in Athens, 2012. Copy of the original: Athens, ca.500 BCE. Crystalline acrylic glass, with applied pigments in tempera. Liebieghaus Skulpturensammlung, Polychromy Research Project, Frankfurt am Main, acquired in 2016 as gift from U. Koch-Brinkmann and V. Brinkmann (Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco).

Gods in Color: Polychromy in the Ancient World will offer an astonishing look at Classical sculpture swathed in their original vibrant colors questioning the perception of an all-white ‘classical’ ideal. Ancient sculpture and architecture from Greece and Rome will be revealed as intended—garishly colorful, richly ornamented, and full of life—along with original sculpture from the Near East, Egypt, Greece, and Rome against the backdrop of the Legion of Honor’s neoclassical building.

To find out more about the exhibition, explore this digital offering from the Liebieghaus in Frankfurt:

In the eighteenth century there was already considerable debate about the extent to which ancient architecture and sculptures were painted. Two centuries later technical investigations with ultraviolet light and glancing light are providing new evidence about ancient polychromy. Investigations carried out in Munich’s Glyptothek in the 1960s resulted in important findings. In the 1980s a group of researchers associated with the archaeologist Volkmar von Graeve studied the polychromy of ancient works of art with the help of modern technological aids. At the time, Vinzenz Brinkmann was a member of von Graeve’s team. Later, as head of the Liebieghaus’s Department of Antiquities, he brought the research subject to Frankfurt.

By now the original painting of hundreds of Greek and Roman artworks around the world has been studied. Thanks to the development of new investigative methods, scholars have meanwhile been able to provide an increasingly precise sense of the kind and extent of the painting. Over the course of centuries of damage owing to wars or weathering it was lost. Even though only scant traces of pigment and scoring have survived, they can provide valuable information. Our newly won understanding of the original polychromy leads in many cases to surprising discoveries!

From FAMSF Publications: 

Vinzenz Brinkmann, Renée Dreyfus, and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann, eds., Gods in Color: Polychromy in the Ancient World (New York: Prestel, 2017), 192 pages, ISBN: 978 379135 7072, $40.

Although not widely known, antiquities were colored to dazzling and powerful effect. Polychromy—the painting of objects in a variety of hues—was a regular feature of the sculpture and architecture of most ancient cultures, especially in Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Aegean, Greece, and Rome. When such works began to be rediscovered in the eighteenth century after prolonged exposure to the elements, their colored surfaces were often so faded that later sculptors evoked classicism by leaving white marble and bronze surfaces unadorned.

Published on the occasion of an exhibition at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco, Gods in Color: Polychromy in the Ancient World reintroduces the unexpected effect of these bright pigments. Through reconstructions of well-known sculptural works dating from Bronze Age Greece to Imperial Rome, readers can see firsthand how these objects would have appeared when they were first created. Complementing these reconstructions are many fine examples of original antiquities, many with surviving polychromy, from ancient Greece and Rome and beyond to Egypt and the Near East. Rounding out these offerings are breathtaking watercolors of Greece’s landscapes and monuments painted in 1805 and 1806 by English antiquarian Edward Dodwell and Italian artist Simone Pomardi.

This handsome volume features six essays alongside catalogue entries that describe the cultural contexts of the ancient works and the modern technological methods to uncover their original coloration. Vinzenz Brinkmann and Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann offer a history of the research and scholarship of polychromy since the eighteenth century; with Heinrich Piening, they also describe the pigments and techniques used. Renée Dreyfus discusses polychrome examples from Egypt and the Near East to demonstrate the strong influences these cultures left on the classical world. Oliver Primavesi recounts the dilemma of eighteenth-century German archaeologist Johann Joachim Winckelmann, who at once celebrated the “pure” form of classical Greek and Roman sculpture but became increasingly aware that such works were originally colored and ornamented. John Camp describes the Greek tour of Dodwell and Pomardi as they depicted classical monuments, some of which still retained their original color.

An enduring scholarly record, Gods in Color reveals how ancient sculpture is incomplete without color. White or monochrome sculpture, an inherited notion of the classical ideal, would have been as strange to the ancients as these color reconstructions might seem to us today.

• Vinzenz Brinkmann is head of the department of antiquities at the Liebieghaus Sculpture Collection, Frankfurt and professor of classical archaeology at Goethe University, Frankfurt.
• Renée Dreyfus is curator in charge of ancient art and interpretation at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
• Ulrike Koch-Brinkmann is an archaeologist of classical antiquity based in Frankfurt. She is also assistant lecturer of classical archaeology at Georg August University in Göttingen.
• John Camp is the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Professor of Classics at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia and the director of the Agora excavations in Athens.
• Martin Chapman is curator in charge of European decorative arts and sculpture at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
• Louise Chu is associate curator of ancient art and interpretation at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.
• Jens Daehner is associate curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
• Jonathan Elias is an Egyptologist and the director of the Akhmim Mummy Studies Consortium.
• Kenneth Lapatin is curator of antiquities at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.
• Rebecca Levitan is a PhD student in the history of art department at the University of California, Berkeley.
• Heinrich Piening heads the department of restoration and conservation, furniture and art objects of wood, at the Bavarian Department of State-Owned Palaces, Gardens, and Lakes in Germany.
• Oliver Primavesi is professor of Greek philology and philosophy at the Ludwig-Maximilian University in Munich. In 2007 he was a recipient of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize, an important research award given by the German Research Foundation.
• Andrew Stewart is Nicholas C. Petris Professor of Greek Studies and professor of ancient Mediterranean art and archaeology at the University of California at Berkeley and curator of Mediterranean archaeology at UCB’s Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology.

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From the Châteaux de Versailles:

Napoleon: Images of the Legend
Arras Musée des Beaux-Arts, 7 October 2017 — 4 November 2018

Curated by Frédéric Lacaille and Marie-Lys Marguerite

The exhibition will present a large selection of the Napoleonic collection from the palaces of Versailles and Trianon, which is the world’s largest on the subject. Visitors will be able to discover the history of Napoleon in chronological order, from General Bonaparte to the fallen Emperor.

The exhibition will also throw the spotlight on the Emperor’s close circle (family, important officers, imperial Court) and the Parisian and international societies of the time (artists, scholars, foreign sovereigns etc.) It will show how, from very early on, Napoleon wanted to write his own legend for posterity by commissioning multiple paintings commemorating key moments of his life. Paintings, sculptures, and furniture will reveal the wealth and quality of artistic production at the time and will lead visitors in the footsteps of Napoleon Bonaparte, whose unique destiny forever.

The exhibition is part of a partnership project between three major institutions: the region Hauts-de-France, the town of Arras, and the Palace of Versailles. This large-scale partnership was established in 2011, allowing collections from Versailles to be displayed in Arras. Major event-exhibitions are held alongside educational and cultural work in order to allow as many people as possible to discover the history and heritage of the Palace of Versailles.

The exhibition is curated by Frédéric Lacaille, Curator in charge of 19th-century paintings at the Musée National des Châteaux de Versailles et de Trianon, and Marie-Lys Marguerite, Director of Arras Musée des Beaux-Arts.

Frédéric Lacaille, ed., Napoléon: Images de la Légende (Paris: éditions Somogy, 2017), 280 pages, ISBN: 978 27572 12929, 28€.

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From the Uffizi Galleries:

The King of Spain’s Grandchildren: Anton Raphael Mengs at the Pitti Palace
Pitti Palace, Florence, 19 September 2017 — 7 January 2018

Curated by Matteo Ceriana and Steffi Roettgen

Anton Raphael Mengs, Double Portrait of the Archdukes Ferdinando (1769–1824) and Maria Anna (1770–1809) di Asburgo Lorena, 1770–71 (Florence: Uffizi Galleries).

Barely twenty days after the opening of an exhibition at the Uffizi devoted to the purchase of two preparatory paintings by Luca Giordano and Taddeo Mazzi, the Uffizi Galleries are now launching a second exhibition to present the prestigious acquisition of yet another important painting in 2016, by Anton Raphael Mengs (1728–1779), portraying Ferdinando and Maria Anna, two of the children of Archduke of Tuscany Pietro Leopoldo of Lorraine and of his consort María Luisa de Borbón y Sajonia, dressed in contemporary costume and depicted inside the Pitti Palace.

Eike D. Schmid: “The task of a living museum is to safeguard works of art, to preserve memory and to transmit culture through exhibitions and research, but also to allow its collections to ‘breathe’ with targeted additions closely linked to the story of the city, of its hinterland and of the collection of which they are going to become a part. Acquisitions, especially if they are so subtly motivated, are a crucial part of a museum’s life, particularly if they are the product of research guaranteeing both their provenance and a fertile interaction with the museum’s existing heritage.”

When this unfinished painting appeared on the antique market, it was instantly clear that it had to enter the collections of the Gallerie degli Uffizi so that we could showcase it in the Pitti Palace, because even if Anton Raphael Mengs did not paint the picture entirely in the palace, he certainly conceived it there. The young princes lived in the Pitti Palace with their family, under the watchful eye of governesses and tutors, of course, but more especially under that of their own parents, while the Boboli Garden was their playground.

We were eager to celebrate the new acquisition, which would not have been possible without the generous cooperation of the Galleria Virgilio in Rome, with an exhibition illustrating the historical and artistic environment in which the portrait was painted.

Mengs was born in Bohemia but soon moved to the west, becoming an adoptive Italian and Spaniard. He sought permission from King Charles III of Spain to travel to Rome so that he could both work and pursue his study of Classical antiquities and of the great Renaissance artists, chiefly that of Raphael after whom he had been named. The Spanish King, who loved Italy and had once almost governed Tuscany himself (eventually becoming the King of Naples), granted Mengs permission to make the trip but only on condition that he send him portraits from Florence of his young grandchildren, the children of his daughter María Luisa de Borbón y Sajonia and of Pietro Leopoldo of Lorraine. The pictures, loaned to the exhibition by the Museo del Prado where they normally hang, were painted while Mengs was in the Tuscan capital from April 1770 to January 1771. The portraits show us Pietro Leopoldo’s two extremely young children dressed in Spanish court attire with the marks of royalty (the Golden Fleece) in the traditional dress of the Infantes, as reported in the Gazzetta Toscana published on 29 September 1770. Once finished, but before they were packed up and shipped to the Spanish court, the portraits were shown to the Florentine public in the Pitti Palace, where they were much admired both for their sparkling technique and for their accurate rendering of the sitters’ features.

Anton Raphael Mengs, Double Portrait of the Archduke Ferdinand (1769–1824) and Maria Anna (1770–1809), 1770–71 (Madrid: Museo del Prado).

At the same time as Mengs was painting these portraits of the children for their grandfather, the Spanish King, however, he must also have produced the picture recently purchased by the Uffizi Galleries portraying Ferdinando and Anna Maria with a totally different approach and in a very different spirit. The two children portrayed here, looking happier than the children depicted in many of Mengs’s other works, are shown in contemporary clothing, and the choice of full, resonant hues such as the green and pink of their attire instantly reveals this new spirit. The prince is dressed in boy’s costume and the feather hat in his right hand is the kind of headgear one might have worn for strolling or hunting, thus introducing a touching note of daily intimacy into the picture—a far cry from the stiff, ceremonial approach evinced in the official portraits now in Madrid. The painting must have been very much to the liking of Pietro Leopoldo, a man of stern tastes, an enlightened sovereign, a reformer, in fact a thoroughly ‘modern’ (not to say bourgeois) monarch in both his public and his private life. We are drawn to the picture because we can not only see the lesson of Velázquez in it, but we actually get a foretaste of Goya, a great admirer of Mengs, and even of Manet.

Johan Zoffany, Francis I, Grand Duke of Tuscany of the House of Lorraine (1708–1765), 1775 (Vienna: Kunsthistorisches Museum).

The official court portrait painter to Pietro Leopoldo, however, was another German—albeit a naturalised Englishman—called Johann Zoffany. The exhibition showcases the portrait that he painted of Pietro Leopoldo’s first-born son Francis, the first Grand Duke of Tuscany of the House of Lorraine, which was painted for Francis’s paternal grandmother, the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, and which has been loaned by the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Having doffed the dazzling turquoise attire of a Spanish Infante, we discover him in the courtyard of the Pitti Palace leaning against the majestic rustication, a small man fairly split between his government duties, his arms and his studies. This very fine portrait, which has returned to Florence for the first time since it was despatched to Vienna, depicts a boy who, while he may appear a little melancholic, is already very much aware of his imperial destiny.

The exhibition opens with portraits of the sitters’ grandparents, parents, and little cousins from Naples and Parma and closes with the self-portraits of the two painters from the Uffizi’s celebrated collection: Mengs’s famous, heroic self-portrait, bursting with emotion even though it is not yet Romantic, and Zoffany’s subtly ironic self-portrait in which he portrays himself with his small dog a painting that will come as a pleasant surprise to visitors after being specially restored for the exhibition.

Matteo Ceriana and Steffi Roettgen, I Nipoti del Re di Spagna: Anton Raphael Mengs a Palazzo Pitti (Livorno: Sillabe, 2017), 184 pages, ISBN: 978 888347 9687, $35.

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