Buying Baroque: Italian Seventeenth-Century Paintings Come to America 9780271079462

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Buying Baroque

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Buying Baroque Italian Seventeenth-Century Paintings Come to America

Edited by Edgar Peters Bowron

The Frick Collection The Pennsylvania State University Press University Park, Pennsylvania

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This book evolved from a symposium, “Going for Baroque: Americans Collect Italian Paintings of the 17th and 18th Centuries,” organized by the Center for the History of Collecting, that was held at The Frick Collection on September 20 and 21, 2013. Both the book and the symposium were made possible through the generous support of the Robert H. Smith Family Foundation. Library of Congress Cataloging-inPublication Data Names: Bowron, Edgar Peters, editor. Title: Buying Baroque : Italian seventeenthcentury paintings come to America / edited by Edgar Peters Bowron. Other titles: Studies in the history of art collecting in America ; 3. Description: University Park, Pennsylvania : The Pennsylvania State University Press, [2017] | Series: The Frick Collection studies in the history of art collecting in America ; 3 | “This book evolved from a symposium, ‘Going for Baroque: Americans Collect Italian Paintings of the 17th and 18th Centuries,’ organized by the Center for the History Collecting, that was held at The Frick Collection on September 20 and 21, 2013.” | Includes bibliographical references and index. Summary: “A collection of essays on the American collecting of Italian Baroque paintings in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Looks at the influence of art exhibitions and exhibition catalogues on the understanding and popularity of Italian Baroque art”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2016037536 | ISBN 9780271077277 (cloth : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Painting—Collectors and collecting—United States—History—19th century. | Painting—Collectors and collecting—United States—History—20th century. | Painting, Baroque—Italy. | Painting, Italian—17th century. Classification: LCC N5201 .B89 2017 | DDC 759.04/60945--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc. gov/2016037536

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Copyright © The Frick Collection, 2017 All rights reserved Printed in China by Oceanic Graphic International Published by The Pennsylvania State University Press, University Park, PA 16802–1003 The Pennsylvania State University Press is a member of the Association of American University Presses. It is the policy of The Pennsylvania State University Press to use acid-free paper. Publications on uncoated stock satisfy the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Material, ansi z39.48–1992.

Frontispiece: Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Il Guercino; 1591–1666), Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife, 1649. Oil on canvas, 123.2 × 158 cm. Washington, National Gallery of Art. Patrons’ Permanent Fund, 1986.17.2. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Additional credits: Page v, detail of Lodovico Carracci, The Dream of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, ca. 1593, Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art, Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1952.5.59 (fig. 4); pages vi and ix, details of Mattia Preti, Christ Seats the Child in the Midst of the Disciples, ca. 1680–85, Greenville, Bob Jones University Collection, P.53.41 (fig. 45); page 1, detail of Domenichino, Saint John the Evangelist, ca. 1625–28, Greenville, Bob Jones University Collection, P.69.467.14 (fig. 42).

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The Frick Collection Studies in the History of Art Collecting in America Series Editor: Inge Reist

This is the third volume of Studies in the History of Art Collecting in America, a series conceived by the Center for the History of Collecting at The Frick Collection. The Center, established at the Frick Art Reference Library in 2007, is a research institute that focuses on an expanding area of study within the fields of art and cultural history. It encourages and supports the study of the formation of collections of fine and decorative arts, both public and private, in Europe and the United States from the Renaissance to the present day. An important element of the Center’s mission is to add to the scholarly literature on art collecting both through its own publications for this series and through its support of authors who benefit from the Center’s fellowship program. Other Volumes in the Series Quodbach, Esmée, ed. Holland’s Golden Age in America: Collecting the Art of Rembrandt, Vermeer, and Hals Reist, Inge, ed. A Market for Merchant Princes: Collecting Italian Renaissance Paintings in America

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Contents

List of Illustrations xi Foreword xiii Acknowledgments xvi Introduction: The Critical Fortunes of Italian Baroque Painting in America 2 Edgar Peters Bowron

1. Italian Baroque Paintings at the Ringling Museum: The Legacy of John Ringling and Chick Austin 16 Virginia Brilliant

2. The Atheneum to the Fore: Hartford and the Italian Baroque 28 Eric m. Zafran

3. The American View of the “Forgotten Century” of Italian Painting: Reminiscences of a Conservator and Art Dealer 40 Marco Grassi

4. An Invisible Web: Art Historians Behind the Collecting of Italian Baroque Art 54 Richard e. Spear

5. Baroque in the Caribbean: Luis A. Ferré and the Museo de Arte de Ponce 66 Pablo Pérez d’Ors

6. Dealing and Scholarship: The Heim Gallery, London, 1966–1995 78 J. Patrice Marandel

7. The Detroit Institute of Arts and Italian Baroque Painting 92 Andria Derstine

8. The Bob Jones University Collection of Italian Baroque Paintings 104 Ian Kennedy

9. Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., and His Collection of Italian Baroque Paintings 116 Eric m. Zafran

10. Better Late than Never: Collecting Baroque Painting at The Metropolitan Museum of Art 128 Andrea Bayer

Notes 141 References 155 List of Contributors 163 List of Artists 167 Index 173

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Illustrations

Frontispiece: Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Il Guercino; 1591–1666), Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife, 1649 1 Benjamin West (1738 –1820), Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist, ca. 1761, after a painting by Guido Reni (1575–1642) 2 Luca Giordano (1634 –1705), The Calling of Saint Matthew, 1685 3 Antonio d’Enrico Tanzio (called Il Tanzio da Varallo; ca. 1575–1633), Saint Sebastian, ca. 1620/30 4 Lodovico Carracci (1555–1619), The Dream of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, ca. 1593 5 Francesco Cairo (1607–1665), Herodias, before 1635 6 Unknown photographer, John Ringling in front of the Ca’ d’Zan, ca. 1930 7 Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Il Guercino; 1591–1666), The Annunciation, ca. 1628 –29 8 Unknown photographer, A. Everett “Chick” Austin, Jr., 1947 9 Joseph Janney Steinmetz (1905–1985), Baroque paintings on display in the Ringling galleries, November 30, 1950 10 Unknown photographer, Museum of the American Circus, Sarasota, Florida, ca. 1950 11 Deford Dechert, Chick Austin in Hartford, 1938 12 Bernardo Strozzi (1581–1644), Saint Catherine of Alexandria, ca. 1615 13 Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, called Il Caravaggio; 1571–1610), Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy, ca. 1595–96 14 Salvator Rosa (1615–1673), Lucrezia as Poetry, ca. 1641 15 Valerio Castello (1624 –1659), The Legend of Saint Geneviève of Brabant, ca. 1652 16 Unknown photographer, Galleria Luigi Grassi & Sons, Florence, ca. 1920 17 Unknown photographer, Professor Luigi Grassi (1858 –1937) 18 Catalogue of Palazzo Pitti exhibition, 1922 19 Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, called Il Caravaggio; 1571–1610), Saint Catherine of Alexandria, ca. 1598

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3 4 9 10 12 17 20 24 25 26 29 33

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20 Orazio Gentileschi (1563–1639), Danaë and the Shower of Gold, 1621–23 52 21 Valentin de Boulogne (1591–1632), Samson, ca. 1630 55 22 Unknown photographer, Walter Friedländer (1873–1966), 1951 57 23 Unknown photographer, Donald Posner (1931–2005), mid-1970s 58 24 Unknown photographer, Rudolf Wittkower (1901–1971) 59 25 Unknown photographer, Howard Hibbard (1928 –1984) 60 26 Anonymous (Venetian?), Lot and His Daughters, eighteenth century 67 27 Pompeo Batoni (1708 –1787), Antiochus and Stratonice, 1746 71 28 Francesco Furini (1603–1646), Cephalus and Aurora, 1625 72 29 Giovanni Battista Langetti (1625–1676), The Torture of Ixion, ca. 1660 75 30 Giacinto Gimignani (1606–1681), The Stoning of Saint Stephen, ca. 1650 76 31 Heim Gallery, Andrew Ciechanowiecki (1924 –2015) 79 32 Carlo Saraceni (1579?–1620), Dormition of the Virgin, ca. 1612 85 33 Paolo de Matteis (1662–1728), The Annunciation, 1712 86 34 Francesco Solimena (1657–1747), The Risen Christ Appearing to His Mother, ca. 1708 88 35 Francesco de Mura (1696–1782/84), Charity, 1743/44 89 36 Robert J. Wickenden (1861–1931), James Edmund Scripps, 1907 93 37 Guido Reni (1575–1642), Head of Christ Crowned with Thorns, early 1630s 95 38 Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (1727–1804), Women of Darius Invoking the Clemency of Alexander, 1750/53 96 39 Unknown photographer, entrance to the exhibition Art in Italy, 1600 –1700, Detroit Institute of Arts, spring 1965 100 40 Unknown photographer, Frederick Cummings and Denis Mahon at the opening of the exhibition Art in Italy, 1600 –1700, April 1965 101 41 Unknown photographer, Dr. Bob Jones, Jr. (1911–1997), in the Bob Jones University Museum & Gallery, Greenville, 1960s 105 42 Domenichino (Domenico Zampieri, called Il Domenichino; 1581–1641), Saint John the Evangelist, ca. 1625–28 109 43 Giovanni Battista Carlone (1603–1684), Joseph Sold into Bondage by His Brethren 110 44 Pietro della Vecchia (1603/5–1678), Dead Christ Mourned by Angels 112 45 Mattia Preti (called Il Cavaliere Calabrese; 1613–1699), Christ Seats the Child in the Midst of the Disciples, ca. 1680 – 85 113 46 Unknown photographer, Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. (1909–1988) 117 47 Guido Reni (1575–1642), The Meeting of David and Abigail, ca. 1615–20 121

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48 Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Il Guercino; 1591–1666), Samson Bringing Honey to His Parents, ca. 1625–26 49 Giuseppe Maria Crespi (1665–1747), The Continence of Scipio, ca. 1700 50 Salvator Rosa (1615–1673), The Baptism of the Eunuch, ca. 1660 51 Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, called Il Caravaggio; 1571–1610), The Musicians, ca. 1595 52 Salvator Rosa (1615–1673), Self-Portrait, ca. 1647

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122 123 125 129 133

53 Salvator Rosa (1615–1673), Bandits on a Rocky Coast, 1655– 60 54 Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1651/53), Esther Before Ahasuerus 55 Annibale Carracci (1560 –1609), The Coronation of the Virgin, after 1595 56 Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Il Guercino; 1591–1666), Samson Captured by the Philistines, 1619

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illustrations

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Foreword

Throughout the centuries of collecting Italian art in the United States, men and women eager to adorn their homes and later their museums faced obstacles of supply, problematic attributions, even their own prejudices, as well as a frequent lack of knowledge of all but a handful of famous of artists such as Raphael or Titian. Many of these obstacles account for the dearth of Italian Baroque art in American collections during the years of the early Republic and the nineteenth century. Supply was meagre, attributions often suspect or aspirational. To be sure, as Edgar Peters Bowron points out in his elegant introductory essay for this volume, there were some worldly and enlightened collectors of Baroque paintings in America during the post-Revolutionary years—the well-traveled Robert Gilmor, Jr., of Baltimore, who owned works by, or after, such artists as Carlo Dolci and Domenichino, for example. For the most part, however, Italian Baroque art was viewed with suspicion as emblematic of an age of absolutism and popery and entirely contrary to the values of the young nation. Once John Ruskin’s damning opinions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian art took hold among American writers and educators, collectors followed suit, avoiding the Madonnas and Martyrdoms that had been accepted by earlier generations of collectors, especially in England. How, then, did Italian paintings by Caravaggio, the Carracci, Domenichino, Guido Reni, Salvator Rosa, and Luca Giordano come to proliferate in America? This is the subject of this volume, which addresses the issue from the points of view of both

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public and private art collecting, as well as the influences of academia and the art market. A constant thread throughout the volume, regardless of the specific subject of each chapter, is the fact that the resurgence of interest in Italian painting of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is due in large measure to the passion of individuals, people such as A. Everett “Chick” Austin (museum director), John Ringling and Julius Böhler (collector and dealer), Julius Weitzner (dealer), Andrew Ciechanowiecki (founding dealer of the Heim Gallery in London), and Rudolf Wittkower (academic), to name only a few. The tenacity of these men, who together cultivated public interest in paintings wholly unknown to most people at the time, produced by artists whose authorship in some cases could not even be identified, eventually turned the tide of the harsh opinions of Ruskin and his American acolytes to bring about a profound appreciation of Seicento and Settecento pictures. An increasing supply of high-quality Italian Baroque paintings emerging from the collections of cash-poor British aristocrats no doubt helped, but without the actions of these determined individuals, staging exhibition after exhibition, publishing catalogue after catalogue, no deep-rooted appreciation of this art would likely have been felt by collectors or the public. For readers of the series The Frick Collection Studies in the History of Art Collecting in America, this volume offers a unique opportunity because it focuses on a category of art collecting that rose in popularity during the lifetimes of most of the authors of the following essays, that is, during the middle decades of the twentieth century. Many of our authors are thus in the rare position to describe the motives and modus operandi of collectors, curators, dealers, and advisers whom they either knew personally or whose memories live vividly on among their colleagues and friends. Moreover, another consequence of the comparatively recent ascendance in popularity of Italian Baroque among

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American collectors is that numerous primary documents have survived to bear witness to the deliberations and decisions made by the players in this arena, enabling the authors to step away from speculation about possible collecting motives and let those players tell their own stories. Rarely is a book of essays so heavily salted with quotations from letters, stock books, and diaries, in many cases published here for the first time. After Edgar Peters Bowron’s introduction sets the stage for the entire volume, the chapters that follow explore the actions, motives, and remarkable contributions of individuals, those mentioned above as well as others, beginning with Virginia Brilliant’s account of the collecting activity of circus king John Ringling and his wife, Mable, who embraced the grandeur of Italian Baroque art with characteristic bravado. While Bowron’s introduction offers his own view of the collecting landscape in the United States, gleaned from years of experience with individual collectors, dealers, and academics at some of the country’s most influential museums, it also draws on Eric Zafran’s exceptional 1994 summary of the paths American collectors of Italian Baroque paintings followed. The two essays in this volume by Zafran himself, one on the pioneering role played by the Wadsworth Atheneum and the uniquely energetic and theatrical personality of its director, Chick Austin, and the other on the collection formed by Walter Chrysler, Jr., offer us chronological bookends, as they mark the starting point of the rise in interest in this art and evidence of what a wealthy man could acquire with sound advice during years when Baroque art was already on a firm path to receiving the recognition it deserves. Much of that advice came from Robert Manning and his wife, Bertina Suida Manning, whose exceptional roles in promoting Baroque art are everywhere apparent in the chapter on Chrysler and, indeed, throughout the volume. Marco Grassi’s and Richard Spear’s essays are the most personal accounts in this volume, invalu-

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able for their eyewitness immediacy. Grassi chronicles his own experiences in the various roles he has played following in the footsteps of his conservator grandfather and his art dealer father, while charting his own course as the curator of the extraordinarily rich collection of Heinrich Baron Thyssen-­ Bornemisza. Spear tells the story of the essential role university professors, most of whom he knew, played in cultivating a taste for Baroque art. These academics, many of them émigrés from war-ravaged Germany, Austria, and Britain, brought an intellectual rigor to the appreciation of Baroque art, so that the shifting sands of attributions became a source of intrigue rather than nagging doubt, and the puzzles of iconographic interpretation became welcome exercises rather than unsolvable riddles. Examining the formation of the Bob Jones University collection, Ian Kennedy brings out many of the common threads of this book. The collection is first and foremost the product of one man’s passion, the fundamentalist Christian leader and educator Dr. Bob Jones, Jr. Yet there was an academic component at work in his effort to promote the art he cherished in a university setting. Finally, the availability of high-quality works at affordable prices, offered by knowledgeable dealers who had become partners more than purveyors for the collectors (for Jones it was Julius Weitzner primarily), made it possible to create fine collections from scratch with little money. Whereas Bob Jones had to be circumspect about cost, money was not an issue for Luis Ferré, as we learn from Pablo Pérez d’Ors’s chapter on the philanthropist’s determination to establish an art museum as a cultural focal point in the Puerto Rican city of Ponce. Here, too, an adviser hailing from the world of academia was of critical importance, as Ferré turned to Barnard professor Julius Held for wise counsel. The role of dealers is addressed by Patrice Marandel in his essay on the crucial contribution made by Andrew Ciechanowiecki and London’s

foreword

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Heim Gallery during its thirty-year run from 1966 to 1996 as the leading venue for dealer exhibitions of Baroque art. The semiannual exhibitions Heim created, and their accompanying catalogues, pioneered a new approach to selling art, one that elevated the standard of research and documentation and would become a model for Heim’s competitors, such as P. & D. Colnaghi. Through these catalogues, Ciechanowiecki and his partner, François Heim, instilled in their clients confidence in the documentation of the works of art. Not surprisingly, then, Heim became a leading supplier to America’s museums, as Ciechanowiecki proactively developed lasting relationships and a sense of trust in the curators with whom he worked. Collecting for America’s public museums is another thread that weaves through this volume, from Zafran’s essay on the Wadsworth Atheneum to Andria Derstine’s elegant chronicle of the vital role the Detroit Institute of Arts played in bolstering Americans’ taste for the Baroque, thanks to the vision of James E. Scripps and, later, to the synergy created by the associations of leading members of the Scripps and Ford families with forward-thinking curators such as Frederick Cummings. Andrea Bayer’s final essay in the book rounds out the explorations of the formation of major museum collections, with candid acknowledgment that The Metropolitan Museum of Art, America’s premier museum, came to collecting Seicento and Settecento art “better late than never.” In this case again, the passion of individuals and their willingness to buck the tide made growth possible, through the efforts of curators Theodore Rousseau and his successors

John Pope-Hennessy and Everett Fahy, and through the generosity of great patrons such as Charles and Jayne Wrightsman. The shifting sands of attributions for Italian Baroque paintings have caused this volume to be heavy laden with artists’ names that may be unfamiliar to readers who are not specialists in the field. For that reason, we have included a list of the names of all of the artists mentioned in the essays. This list, diligently compiled by Esmée Quodbach, assistant director of the Center for the History of Collecting, will doubtless serve as a helpful touchstone. Although Richard Spear justly expresses concern over the diminished offerings of courses on Italian Baroque art at our colleges and universities today, twenty-first-century American collectors of Italian Baroque paintings such as Mark Fisch, Carlo Croce, and Clifford Schorer continue to carry the torch, benefitting as they do from the evolution and elevation of Italian Seicento and Settecento art in the United States that is explored by the authors of this book. They bring knowledge and sophistication to their collecting practices, consulting with curators regularly, reading voraciously the now-robust body of art-historical literature on the subject, and carefully following market trends for specific artists. They thus embody the subtle combination of forces that created a taste for Baroque art in America, while they continue to be guided by their passion for this expressive and emotive art. Inge Reist Series Editor and Director of the Center for the History of Collecting

foreword

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Acknowledgments

In addition to acknowledging with enormous gratitude each of the contributors to this volume, I would like to single out Edgar Peters Bowron, the volume editor, without whose guiding hand the book could not have gained the cohesion it has, with each chapter presenting the constant theme of the ascendance of Americans’ taste for Baroque art from a subtly different point of view. Many others were essential to the planning and production of this book, both as it relates to the symposium held at The Frick Collection in September of 2013 that gave rise to this publication and to the management of image permissions and copy editing. Principal among these invaluable behind-the-scenes contributors are Samantha Deutch and Esmée Quodbach, assistant directors of the Center for the History of Collecting, and John Morris, whose meticulous copy editing skills ensure a readable and enjoyable outcome. Finally, thanks is due to the Robert H. Smith Family Foundation, whose sponsorship of the initial symposium and of this publication has been of vital importance. Inge Reist Series Editor and Director of the Center for the History of Collecting

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Buying Baroque

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Introduction The Critical Fortunes of Italian Baroque Painting in America

Edgar Peters Bowron

1. Benjamin West (1738 –1820), Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist, ca. 1761, after a painting by Guido Reni (1575–1642). Oil on canvas, 125.3 × 94.1 cm. Ferens Art Gallery, Hull Museums. Bridgeman Images.

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We are all familiar with the passionate interest in Italian Baroque painting on the part of a handful of American collectors, museum curators and directors, and scholars beginning in the 1920s, and with how it gained more and more adherents over the decades, particularly in the 1950s and 1960s. But it is easy to forget that the Baroque played at least a supporting role from the first tentative appearances of European art in this country; even our Founding Fathers showed an interest in the art of the period. Before his departure for Europe in 1784, Thomas Jefferson compiled lists of works, based in part upon Horace Walpole’s (1717–1797) description of the pictures gathered by Sir Robert Walpole (1676– 1745), England’s de facto first prime minister, at Houghton Hall in Norfolk, of which he wanted copies for his art gallery at Monticello, including Salvator Rosa’s Prodigal Son (early 1650s; now at the State Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg). In Paris, Jefferson bought copies after Domenichino, Guido Reni, Jusepe de Ribera, Francesco Solimena, and Carlo Maratti, and from Italy he wrote that Carlo Dolci had become a “violent favorite.”1 The leading American painters of the late eighteenth century were also drawn to the Italian Baroque to further their artistic educations. Benjamin West, John Singleton Copley, and John Trumbull all admired the seventeenth-century Bolognese school, and West made several fine copies after Guido, including a Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist in the Palazzo Corsini, Rome (fig. 1).2 By the early nineteenth century, as Americans traveled to Europe in greater numbers, emulating the British on the Grand Tour, they increasingly acquired examples, both originals and copies, of the Italian paintings they had admired. Richard Meade (1788 – 1828), a Philadelphia merchant and businessman, for example, amassed an important collection of Old Master paintings between 1810 and 1820 while serving as United States Consul in Cádiz, Spain, where he assembled a “gallery” of pictures that was

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2. Luca Giordano (1634 –1705), The Calling of Saint Matthew, 1685. Oil on canvas, 199.4 × 254 cm. Washington, D.C., Georgetown University Library. Purchased from Martha Meade, 1860. Courtesy Georgetown University Art Collection, Special Collections Research Center, Washington, D.C.

later placed on display in Philadelphia. They included Luca Giordano’s large Calling of Saint Matthew (fig. 2), acquired by Georgetown University from Meade’s daughter Martha in 1860.3 Eric Zafran, in his authoritative essay “A History of Italian Baroque Painting in America,” produced an indispensable guide to the subject of this volume of essays. With meticulous attention to

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seemingly every detail that pertains to the collecting of the Italian Baroque in America, he documented the continuous interest in paintings of the period by Americans from the founding of the nation to the 1990s, noting, for example, the purchases of two visitors to Florence in 1836, Richard Henry Wilde (1789–1847) of Georgia and Colonel James Thomson (1808 –1883) of New York, who acquired from

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the Ricciardi Serguido family Salvator Rosa’s Landscape with the Baptism of Christ (ca. 1657–58; Museum & Art Gallery, Bob Jones University, Greenville, South Carolina) and Self-Portrait (ca. 1647; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York [fig. 52 in this volume]),4 respectively. The roster of private collectors, dealers, and art institutions in nineteenth-century America and the works they acquired, by the likes of the Carracci, Domenichino, Guido Reni, Guercino, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, Pier Francesco Mola, and Carlo Maratti (even if the paintings were inevitably not always authentic or by the masters claimed), are truly eye-opening. In the 1800s, from Boston and New York to the Midwest to the West Coast, Italian Baroque paintings were acquired by a host of collectors; for example, James Scripps (1835–1906), the newspaper publisher and philanthropist, acquired a Head of Christ Crowned with Thorns by Guido Reni (fig. 37 in this volume) and gave it to the Detroit Museum of Art, now the Detroit Institute of Arts, in 1889. The contributors to this book explore the collecting of Italian Baroque painting from at least five points of view: first and foremost, the personalities—the collectors, curators, and museum directors—who acquired the paintings; the art market—the dealers, auction houses, and commercial galleries—that provided access to them; the vicissitudes of taste and the influence of writers, teachers, art historians, and art-historical scholarship in shaping perceptions about seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian painting; the role of art exhibitions and exhibition catalogues; and the shifting market values of the works themselves. Inextricably entwined, none of these avenues of investigation can be regarded in isolation one from another. Consideration of the vagaries of the fashion for Italian Baroque painting in America offers a good point of departure. Eric Zafran has pointed to the 1840s and 1850s as the zenith of American taste for

the grandiose and sentimental Baroque, especially the work of Guido Reni and Carlo Dolci, an enthusiasm that lingered on in conservative upperclass circles for quite some time. Henry James (1843–1916) has one of his most fatuous female characters say, “ We have a Sassoferrato, you know, from which we’re inseparable—we travel with our picture and our poodle.”5 But just at the moment that these painters were enthroned as exemplars of taste and quality, and prints and photographs of Guido Reni’s frescoed ceiling of the large central hall of the garden palace, the Casino dell’Aurora in Rome, adorned Victorian parlors and libraries across the country, the tide of taste began to reverse. Differing opinions on the importance of these artists and even the period of the Baroque in general were increasingly being expressed, notably by John Ruskin (1819–1900), who wrote to his father from Italy in 1845, “I have pretty well now arranged my scale of painters”; in the bottommost group—“the School of Errors and Vices”—he put the Carracci, Guido, Carlo Dolci, and Caravaggio, whose paintings he reviled as “morbid brutality” and “feeding upon horror and ugliness, and filthiness of sin.”6 The enthusiasm with which Guido Reni had been regarded in the eighteenth century—Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768) compared him to the classical Greek sculptor Praxiteles—and the early nineteenth—when he captivated the poetic imagination of Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)— plummeted in the second half of the century under the scornful attacks of Ruskin, who condemned him and the entire seventeenth-century school for being overly sentimental and lacking in sincerity and religious conviction. George Hersey (1927–2007), who wrote perceptively on the critical fortunes of Neapolitan Baroque painting in America, noted a variety of influences that doomed the prestige of Italian seventeenth-century painting, above all the figure of Ruskin, the first art historian who was at the same time a major literary influence and a

Introduction

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best-selling author, an immensely popular lecturer, and even something of a seer. In Hersey’s words, his “disciples . . . ranged from Proust to Pater to Berenson to Mahatma Gandhi.”7 The tentacles of Ruskin’s high regard for Giotto, Fra Angelico, and the early Italian school, to the detriment of the Baroque, soon reached America. In 1864, we find the collector and writer James Jackson Jarves (1818 –1888) describing Domenichino’s Last Communion of Saint Jerome (1614; Pinacoteca Vaticana, Rome), for many a visitor to Rome the supreme achievement in paint after Raphael’s Transfiguration, as “a violation of artistic rule, instigated by the ascetic side of religion” and lacking a “proper understanding of Christianity.”8 Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1908), the leading American disciple of Ruskin and Lecturer on the History of Fine Arts at Harvard University, influenced several generations of scholars and collectors, such as Bernard Berenson (1865–1959) and Isabella Stewart Gardner (1840 –1924), with his pronouncement that the same artist’s Martyrdom of Saint Agnes (ca. 1619– 22/25; Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna) was “one of the worst of the Bolognese School,” marked by “coarse materialism, disgusting exaggeration, and the utter want of elevation or truth of expression.”9 By the 1860s, Italian Seicento painting was probably despised far more in England and America than on the Continent. Happily, however, Ruskin’s scathing view that Reni and his ilk epitomized a “feeble and fallen school” did not survive the reappraisal of twentieth-century scholarship. Instead, the sculptor Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s view—that Reni painted “pictures of Paradise”— has gradually been restored, beginning in the 1950s and 1960s through an older generation of scholars and then through American art historians such as Stephen Pepper and Richard Spear. I am confident that by now many advocates of the Baroque have come to view Guido Reni as “perhaps the purest painter who ever wielded a brush, an artist of

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unearthly talent and labyrinthine complexity,” as Charles Dempsey once pronounced.10 But throughout the twentieth century there was a kind of yin and yang, an oscillation between fame and disrepute, praise and blame, for those works that had once been so widely hailed for their beauty and grace and religious fervor and then disparaged as academic, monotonous, tearful, and saccharine. And even looking back to the heyday of the popularity of Italian Baroque paintings in America in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, I often question just how deep and widespread this popularity in fact was, and is. It is not that we have never lacked admirers for Italian Baroque paintings in America. We just need to remind ourselves of the indifference to or outright prejudice against the art of the Catholic Counter-Reformation, deeply rooted in aesthetic, social, and religious traditions, on the part of many American museum trustees, patrons, and the general public. At the beginning of the twentieth century, when it came to collecting Italian art, under the influence of Charles Eliot Norton, Bernard Berenson, Robert Langton Douglas, and the dealers Joseph Duveen, P. & D. Colnaghi, and Roland Knoedler, Renaissance masters such as Giovanni Bellini and Raphael, along with gold-ground painters of the fifteenth century, were ascendant. None of the great American collectors of the Gilded Age—J. Pierpont Morgan, Collis and Henry Huntington, Peter and Joseph Widener, Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Mellon, and Jules Bache— considered Italian seventeenth- and eighteenth-century pictures to be of any significance, and what few they did purchase were restricted to the occasional sketch by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, genre scene by Pietro Longhi, or view by Canaletto or Francesco Guardi. Whether these collectors actually subscribed to Berenson’s dictum that “our grandfathers were thrilled by Guido Reni’s ecstatic visages, whose silly emptiness now rouses our laughter,”11 their interests for the

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most part lay in the “Great Masters” of the Dutch, Flemish, and English schools. In the 1920s, the anti-Baroque sentiment began to reverse, and remarkably swiftly. The resurgence of interest in the Baroque began in Europe around World War I with the work of a handful of scholars, including the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölfflin (1864 –1945). Between the two world wars it continued to acquire increasing academic status. A new generation of scholars, mostly born in the 1880s and 1890s, such as the Italian art historians Giuseppe Fiocco, Roberto Longhi, Matteo Marangoni, and Antonio Muñoz; the German A. E. Brinckmann, Dagobert Frey, Nikolaus Pevsner, Hans Posse, and Werner Weisbach; and the English Tancred Borenius, Anthony Blunt, Denis Mahon, and Ellis Waterhouse, made the art of the Baroque increasingly familiar and accessible to specialists and students alike. A seminal event was the great exhibition in Florence in 1922, Mostra della pittura italiana del Seicento e del Settecento in Palazzo Pitti, with more than a thousand paintings representing artists of the period, from Francesco Albani to Antonio Zanchi, which opened the eyes of dealers, scholars, collectors, and the general public to the breadth and variety of Italian Baroque painting.12 The exhibition was followed by others in London and elsewhere devoted to the period and inspired a growing number of specialist studies. Notable is Hermann Voss’s (1894 –1987) influential Die Malerei des Barock in Rom (1924), which nearly a century later continues to provide a useful guide to painting in Rome, from the Carracci and Caravaggio to Anton Raphael Mengs and Domenico Corvi. In the same year, Sacheverell Sitwell (1897–1988) published Southern Baroque Art: A Study of Painting, Architecture and Music in Italy and Spain of the 17th & 18th Centuries, in which he boldly, if perhaps prematurely, declared, “Baroque art needs no defense now; the victory has been won a long time.”13 The changing attitude of the 1920s toward Italian Baroque painting in America is reflected not

only in the remarkable collection assembled by the circus master and entrepreneur John W. Ringling (1866–1936), but also in a host of American museum acquisitions. Harry B. Wehle (1887–1969), curator of European painting at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, whose own institution did not make a serious effort to collect Baroque paintings until relatively recently, noted in an article in the Museum’s Bulletin in 1929 that “during the past generation or two the entire body of baroque art, except the paintings of Rubens and Van Dyck, may be said to have been generally out of favor, but the last few years have shown signs of their gradual reinstatement in the public’s good estimation.”14 The culmination of this remarkable decade of activity was the first American exhibition of Italian Baroque paintings, Exhibition of Italian XVII and XVIII Century Paintings and Drawings, held at the Fogg Art Museum in January and February 1929.15 Thanks to Eric Zafran, we have a detailed, decade-by-decade account of the rehabilitation of the Italian Baroque in America, which is well beyond the scope of this introduction. The developments in the 1930s and 1940s are to a large extent dominated by the activities of John Ringling (Pietro da Cortona, Hagar and the Angel, acquired 1930); A. Everett “Chick” Austin, Jr. (1900 –1957), director of the Wadsworth Atheneum, who in 1943 acquired Caravaggio’s Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy, for years the only authentic work by the artist in the United States, which he bought for $17,000 from Arnold Seligmann, Rey & Co., New York; and Samuel H. Kress (1863–1955), the businessman and philanthropist and founder of the S. H. Kress & Co. fiveand ten-cent stores. From 1927 to 1936 Kress bought exclusively from the Italian art dealer Alessandro Contini-Bonacossi (1878 –1955), who conceived the ambitious, improbable project of acquiring a fine work by every known Italian master. By 1935 Kress had already invested the rough equivalent of $60 million in today’s money in his

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collection; in the next two years he more than doubled that outlay. In accordance with the taste of the day, Kress’s earliest purchases were almost all Italian Renaissance works from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries,16 with the notable exception of a group of eighteenth-century Venetian paintings and a fine Interior of the Pantheon, Rome, by Giovanni Paolo Panini, acquired in 1927 (ca. 1734; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.). It may be that Contini shrewdly kept from Kress the excesses of Italian Seicento painting—the martyrdoms, adorations, and penitent saints that to the Victorians epitomized the sick sensuality, melodrama, superstition, and popery of the period—but when Kress acquired Tanzio da Varallo’s Saint Sebastian (fig. 3) in 1935, he was certainly swimming against established taste.17 The work of Tanzio remains as shockingly original today as it did in 1922, when the Saint Sebastian startled visitors to the exhibition at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence (where the painting’s authorship was correctly identified by Roberto Longhi)18 and brought the vivid and eccentric character of his art to a wide audience for the first time. To some degree, however, Samuel Kress is an outlier within the context of this book because he set out a priori to create a collection ranging from Cimabue to the end of the eighteenth century, and thus acquired the very Italian paintings that collectors like Andrew Mellon and Henry Clay Frick had shunned. After Kress became ill in the early 1940s, the responsibility for the future growth and development of the collection fell upon the shoulders of his younger brother, Rush H. Kress (1877–1963), who, with the advice of the restorers Stephen Pichetto (1887–1949) and later Mario Modestini (1907– 2006; see the essay by Marco Grassi in this volume), and the art historians Wilhelm Suida (1877–1959) and Robert Manning (1924 –1996), set out to form “not only the most complete but also the most beautiful collection of Italian Baroque painting,” in the words of a memorandum of 1949.19 The

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moment was propitious because the 1950s were a golden age for acquiring Baroque paintings; never before (or since) were they so cheap and plentiful. The social, political, and economic upheavals of World War II resulted in the dispersal of many great aristocratic collections, particularly in England, and suddenly large numbers of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian paintings were available on the London art market. What really fired enthusiasm for the Baroque in America was the availability of fine works by these neglected masters that could be acquired for a few hundred or a few thousand dollars. In the mid1940s, one British pound equaled four American dollars; in 1948, the exchange rate was £1 = $2.80. At the Ellesmere sale at Christie’s, London, in October 1946, paintings by the Carracci, Domenichino, and Guido Reni, artists who a century earlier had been revered in England as the flowers of the Seicento, sold for prices that are scarcely believable today. A Vision of Saint Francis by Annibale Carracci painted on copper (formerly Sir John Pope-Hennessy Collection, now National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa) fetched £23 ($92). Domenichino’s The Way to Calvary, a small masterpiece also on copper of around 1610 (also owned by Pope-Hennessy, now in the J. Paul Getty Museum), brought £42 ($168). And one of the finest Baroque pictures in the Kress Collection, Lodovico Carracci’s The Dream of Saint Catherine of Alexandria (National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; fig. 4), acquired from Contini in 1950, brought only £52 ($210) at the Ellesmere sale.20 In the early 1950s, the prices of Italian seventeenth-century pictures remained exceptionally low in relation to their artistic quality and historical importance. Buying in London, dealers such as Julius Weitzner, David Koetser, Elkan and Abris Silberman, Frederick Kleinberger, Nicholas Acquavella, Frederick Mont, and Oscar Klein shrewdly seized the opportunity and brought these paintings

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3. Antonio d’Enrico Tanzio (called Il Tanzio da Varallo; ca. 1575–1633), Saint Sebastian, ca. 1620/30. Oil on canvas, 117.3 × 93.7 cm. Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art. Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1939.1.191. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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4. Lodovico Carracci (1555–1619), The Dream of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, ca. 1593. Oil on canvas, 138.8 × 110.5 cm. Washington, D.C., National Gallery of Art. Samuel H. Kress Collection, 1952.5.59. Courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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to New York for sale. At the same time, a small number of inspired collectors realized the extraordinary opportunity before them, and around 1950, as various authors in this volume note, Walter Chrysler, Jr., Luis Ferré, Paul Ganz, Robert and Bertina Suida Manning, and Dr. Bob Jones, Jr., all began to form their important eponymous collections. Among these, the collection of Paul H. Ganz (1910 –1986) is perhaps the least familiar today, owing to the dispersal of more than a thousand paintings. Onetime president of the Prince Matchabelli Perfume Company, which his father Saul, a perfume manufacturer, had purchased in 1936, Ganz was a notable eccentric, remembered fondly by many, both for his enthusiasm for the Italian Baroque and for the late-night soirées he and his wife, Eula, held in their apartment at 1185 Park Avenue, inevitably centered around their collection, which ranged from works by Scarsellino, Giovanni Baglione, Cerano, Morazzone, Ludovico Cigoli, Carlo Francesco Nuvolone, Francesco Francanzano, Pietro Testa, and Mattia Preti to Giovanni Battista Gaulli, Pietro Bianchi, and Giuseppe Chiari. An insatiable collector, Ganz continuously bought, sold, and traded Italian Baroque paintings. His pictures contributed significantly to the collections formed by Luis Ferré in Ponce (see the essay by Pablo Pérez d’Ors in this volume); his friends Mary Jane and Morton B. Harris (some of which were subsequently given by them to The Metropolitan Museum of Art and to the Palmer Museum at Penn State University, respectively); and Channing Blake, a young New York enthusiast for the Italian Baroque whose collection is now largely at the Springfield Museum of Art, Massachusetts.21 Representative of Ganz’s interests is a beautiful Herodias by Francesco Cairo (fig. 5), a fragment of a larger composition, which he gave to The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1973 in memory of Rudolf Wittkower, whose classes he attended and to whom he was devoted.

With respect to the economics of collecting Italian Baroque painting, the 1950s were the halcyon years, for thereafter their prices began to rise, gradually in the 1960s and then sharply in the following decades. This can be illustrated by the history of a lovely small panel (12 × 151⁄2 inches) depicting The Rest on the Flight into Egypt by Bartolomeo Schedoni, one of several extant versions, which was bought around 1950 –53 on the London art market by Julius Weitzner and sold to Victor Spark, who sold it to Frederick Mont, who offered it for $2–3,000 and then sold it in 1956 to Ganz. In 1968, he sold it to a private collector in New York City for $6,500, who lent it to The Metropolitan Museum of Art from 1987 until 1997, insured for $200,000 (later possibly $300,000). The painting was offered with an estimate of $400 – 600,000 at Sotheby’s in New York on January 28, 1999, and sold for $772,500.22 Public institutions also bought advantageously in the 1950s and 1960s. Seicento Italian painting was not at all popular at the time of the opening of the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1916, and the institution was slow to add examples in this area. In 1929, a painting by Bernardo Strozzi was purchased, followed in 1950 by a powerful Vision of Saint Jerome by Giovanni Battista Langetti, but it was not until the 1960s that the Museum, under Sherman Lee (1918 –2008) and Ann Lurie (1921– 2010), began to concentrate on the Italian Baroque. In the space of a few years, paintings by Bernardo Cavallino, Giovanni Battista Gaulli, Luca Giordano, Orazio Gentileschi, Guercino, Johann Liss, Guido Reni, Sassoferrato, and Francesco Solimena were acquired, culminating in the purchase of Caravaggio’s Crucifixion of Saint Andrew in 1976. The acquisition of Italian Baroque paintings in Toledo and Minneapolis, under the aegis of Otto Wittmann (1911–2001) and Anthony M. Clark (1923 – 1976), respectively, followed a similar pattern. For example, beginning in 1960 and buying largely from Colnaghi and Agnew’s in London, the Toledo

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5. Francesco Cairo (1607–1665), Herodias, before 1635. Oil on canvas, 75.2 × 62.5 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of Paul Ganz, in memory of Rudolf Wittkower, 1973, 1973.165. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Museum of Art acquired within a dozen years important paintings by Pompeo Batoni, Pietro da Cortona, Luca Giordano, Carlo Maratti, Sebastiano Ricci, and Francesco Solimena, as well as a magnificent large Feast of Herod by Mattia Preti, dated 1656 – 61, acquired for $25,000 from Colnaghi in 1961. Minneapolis acquired some two dozen Italian Baroque paintings in the 1960s by Batoni, Castiglione, Cortona, Gaulli, Corrado Giaquinto, Guercino, Salvator Rosa, and Bartolomeo Schedoni. Significantly, during these very same years, Burton Fredericksen was acquiring for the Getty Museum such pictures as Carlo Dolci’s polished and precise Saint Matthew Writing His Gospel (1670s), painted for his confessor as part of a series depicting the four evangelists. The result was that by the mid-1960s the Italian Baroque could be amply detailed with loans drawn from American collections in the important exhibition Art in Italy, 1600 –1700 (Detroit, 1965), with works such as Tanzio da Varallo’s Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness (Philbrook Art Museum, Tulsa; acquired by Samuel H. Kress in 1939) and Guercino’s Semiramis Receiving Word of the Revolt of Babylon (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; acquired in 1948 for $1,130). Even more narrowly focused exhibitions such as Genoese Masters: Cambiaso to Magnasco, organized by Robert and Bertina Suida Manning and shown in Dayton, Sarasota, and Hartford in 1962, and Florentine Baroque Art, organized by Joan Nissman for The Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1969, which included paintings by such recherché artists as Giovanni Balducci and Giovanni Battista Lupicini as well as the more familiar painters Carlo Dolci, Francesco Furini, Lorenzo Lippi, and Simone Pignoni, could be assembled almost exclusively from American collections. The Samuel H. Kress Collection remains central to the theme of this book, however, because one of its distinguishing features is the variety, number, and quality of its Italian Baroque paintings. The Kress

Foundation took shrewd advantage of the relative neglect of later Italian painting in the 1940s and 1950s to acquire such important examples of the Baroque and its aftermath as Antonio de Bellis’s Sacrifice of Noah (ca. 1645–50; The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; acquired from Julius Weitzner in 1945); Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione’s Allegory of Vanity (ca. 1647– 49; Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City; acquired from Weitzner in 1952); and Giovanni Battista Gaulli’s Thanksgiving of Noah and Abraham’s Sacrifice of Isaac (ca. 1685–90; High Museum of Art, Atlanta; acquired from Alessandro Contini-Bonacossi in 1950). That these paintings are now in Houston, Kansas City, and Atlanta and not in the National Gallery of Art, as intended, underscores the recurrent prejudice against Italian Baroque painting in America. From the moment of Samuel Kress’s initial gift to the National Gallery in 1939, he endorsed the principle of exchanges to improve the quality of the collections on view in Washington. For twenty years — from the opening of the Kress Collection Galleries in 1941 until the presentation of the final Kress gifts in 1961— paintings had been delivered to Washington, exhibited at the Gallery, and either retained for its collections or, in the case of most of the Italian Baroque pictures, returned to New York for dispersal to one of the Kress regional galleries. The result is a superlative collection of Italian Renaissance paintings in Washington but a collection in which the absence of the major figures of the Italian Baroque — Domenichino, Caravaggio, Guido Reni, Cortona, Castiglione, Mola, Rosa, Gaulli — is conspicuous. The decision to relinquish the majority of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paintings to the regional galleries was made by John Walker (1906 –1995), the Gallery’s chief curator from 1938 –56 and its director from 1956 – 69. Walker was a disciple of Bernard Berenson, who in 1948 had written, “In Europe itself art history must

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avoid what has not contributed to the main stream, no matter how interesting, how magnificent in itself. It should exclude, for instance, most German and even Spanish and Dutch Art. It should dwell less and less on Italian art after Caravaggio, and end altogether by the middle of the eighteenth century with Solimena and Tiepolo.”23 Thus, Walker encouraged the Kress Foundation to create a great collection of Renaissance paintings and sculpture for the National Gallery, but his disinclination to bolster the museum’s Baroque holdings is especially frustrating today, when the prices and rarity of great pictures of the period have made them almost unobtainable. Notable Baroque paintings that would be in the Kress Collection in the National Gallery if not for Walker’s opposition include Valentin de Boulogne’s Musical Party, acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1998, a superb work painted in Rome about 1626 by the greatest French Caravaggesque master, and by virtue of its quality, provenance, and subject without parallel in the National Gallery collections. Another is Caravaggio’s brooding, melancholic Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness (1604 –5), now in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, which Mario Modestini and the Kress staff desperately wanted to acquire in 1952.24 Ultimately, the Italian Baroque pictures Washington lost, Raleigh, Houston, Memphis, Kansas City, El Paso, San Francisco, Tulsa, and other cities gained. The collecting of Italian Baroque paintings in America is a rich and fascinating subject, many aspects of which invite further inquiry: for example, the circumstances that led to some of the remarkable, if anomalous, acquisitions of Italian Baroque paintings in America before 1900, such as the moving Head of Christ Crowned with Thorns by Guido Reni, acquired by James Scripps and given by him in 1880 to the then Detroit Museum of Art (now the Detroit Institue of Arts), as well as the activities of nineteenth-century collectors like

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Thomas Jefferson Bryan (1800 –1870). Although the purchase in Rome in 1902 by Henry Walters (1848 –1931) of the large collection assembled by Don Marcello Massarenti, a priest and member of the papal court, was dominated by pictures by or in the manner of Italian Renaissance artists, it did contain a number of important Baroque pictures, including Domenico Fetti’s Flying and Adoring Angels (ca. 1614), a fragment of an altarpiece devoted to the Madonna and Child, once in the church of San Lorenzo in Damaso and the most important extant work of the artist’s early period in Rome. His copy of Titian’s Christ and the Tribute Money in Dresden, painted for Duke Alfonso d’Este; Bernardo Strozzi’s Adoration of the Shepherds (1650s); and Luca Giordano’s Ecce Homo (1650s) also merit further attention.25 The role of the art dealer in creating a new taste for the neglected Italian seventeenth century in America is another important subject, and in this volume the importance of Count Alessandro Contini-Bonacossi in encouraging Samuel Kress’s collecting, and of Andrew Ciechanowiecki (1924 – 2015), who as the director of Heim Gallery in London spurred interest in the Baroque as a field of collecting in America, established the precedent of scholarly dealer catalogues, and sold many paintings of the period to American art museums, has been discussed. But scholars in the field of the history of collecting could also profit by delving into the role and activities of the art dealers in New York in the 1950s, notably Julius H. Weitzner (1896 –1986) and David M. Koetser, a Dutch-English dealer who settled in New York after the war and in 1953 sold the Kress Collection an important group of Italian Baroque pictures, as well as the more prominent English dealers in the area of Italian Baroque pictures, such as Sir Jack Baer (1924 –2016), or the group of young men who gathered around Roddy Thesiger (1915 –2005) at Colnaghi in the 1970s, including Patrick Matthiesen

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and Michael Simpson, who have also played a significant part in our story. And in the present day the 2013 reinstallation of the Metropolitan Museum’s European paintings galleries has given pride of place to the Italian Baroque and to the many important pictures acquired in recent years. Many great paintings of the period have enriched other American museums over the past three decades, such as Mattia Preti’s magnificent Saint John the Baptist Preaching (ca. 1665), acquired by the Legion of Honor, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, in 1981, Orazio

Gentileschi’s Lot and His Daughters (ca. 1622), acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1998, and Guercino’s Christ and the Woman of Samaria (1619– 20), acquired by the Kimbell Art Museum from Adam Williams Fine Art in 2010 in memory of Ted Pillsbury (1943 –2010), the Museum’s distinguished longtime director; private collectors in the field, such as Mark Fisch, Jon Landau, Cliff Schorer, and Nelson Shanks, have also been active in recent years. All these serve as vivid reminders of a shift in attitude toward a more positive view of this “feeble and fallen school.”

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chapter 1

Italian Baroque Paintings at the Ringling Museum The Legacy of John Ringling and Chick Austin

Virginia Brilliant

6. Unknown photographer, John Ringling in front of the Ca’ d’Zan, ca. 1930. Silver gelatin print. Sarasota, Collection of The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, the State Art Museum of Florida, Florida State University.

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The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, is often praised as housing one of America’s most important, and earliest, collections of Italian Baroque paintings. This assemblage of paintings came into being between the 1920s and 1950s thanks to two pioneering figures, the Museum’s founder, John Ringling (1866 –1936), and its first director, A. Everett “Chick” Austin, Jr. (1900 –1957). John Ringling (fig. 6) was born in McGregor, Iowa, on May 31, 1866, the sixth of seven surviving sons and a daughter born to August and Marie Salomé Juliar Ringling.1 Inspired by the traveling shows that passed through their small town, Ringling and four of his brothers founded the Ringling Brothers Circus in 1884. Ringling started his career as a clown, but was soon overseeing the circus route. Transport of the show shifted from wagons to rail in 1890, and the Ringling Brothers Circus was transformed into a national phenomenon, with a convoy of more than a hundred rail cars crossing America every season. In 1907, when the Ringling brothers acquired the Barnum & Bailey show, their dominance over the American circus scene was complete, and the circus claimed the title of “The Greatest Show on Earth.” Profits from the circus gave Ringling the initial wealth he then invested in some thirty business enterprises, including railroads, ranch land, oil wells, banking, and real estate. By 1925, when his portrait appeared on the cover of Time magazine, Ringling’s net worth was estimated at $200 million, making him one of the richest men in the world. Ringling and his wife, Mable Burton (1875– 1929), who had married in 1905, first came to Florida in 1909. Two years later, John and his brother Charles purchased more than sixty acres on Sarasota Bay. Now the site of the Ringling estate, the property then included Palms Elysian, the modest twelve-room clapboard house that was the Ringlings’ first Florida home. In 1924, the Ringlings

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began construction on a new Sarasota home, a Venetian-style mansion designed by the New York architect Dwight James Baum (1886–1939). The two-hundred-foot-long residence comprised twenty-two thousand square feet of living space, including some thirty-two rooms and fifteen bathrooms. The construction was completed in December 1925 at the staggering cost of $1.5 million and soon became the epicenter of cultural and social life in Sarasota. Ca’ d’Zan, meaning “House of John” in Venetian dialect, was the culmination of the Ringlings’ love affair with all things Venetian. They adorned the Ca’ d’Zan with Venetian-style paintings, furniture, and decorative arts, and completed the Venetian atmosphere with a gondola Mable purchased for trips in the bay.2 From the beginning of their marriage, John and Mable avidly acquired furnishings for their homes in New York City; Alpine, New Jersey; and later, Sarasota, making regular appearances at New York’s auction houses. They were also travelers par excellence. As the general manager and routing director of the circus, Ringling constantly rode the rails throughout the United States, visiting every major city and hundreds of other towns. Making the most of their ever-growing fortune, John and Mable also traveled increasingly to Europe. But while they bought souvenirs and other pieces to outfit their homes, their early marriage was not marked by acquisitions of fine art of any significance, and certainly not of museum quality. All of this changed in the fall of 1925, when Ringling and the German art dealer Julius Böhler (1883–1966) traveled to Italy to buy decorative stonework and sculptures to embellish a Ritz-Carlton Hotel Ringling was building on Longboat Key off the coast of Sarasota.3 On this journey, Ringling announced to Böhler that he had decided to build an art museum in Sarasota, and asked the dealer to help him. Thus began a six-year period of frenzied collecting as Ringling, like a circus man filling the

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big top, worked tirelessly with Böhler to fill the galleries of his museum, built in tandem with the collection. Ringling engaged the architect John H. Phillips to build the Museum on property adjacent to the Ca’ d’Zan. Construction of the pink, Italianate, Renaissance-style palace began in 1928, and articles began to appear in the press heralding the venture.4 On March 31, 1930, the Museum opened to the public for a single day, and over ten thousand visitors, a number exceeding Sarasota’s entire population, were herded through the galleries by local Boy Scouts. A year later the Museum opened again, this time for a week. The Museum finally opened permanently on January 17, 1932.5 Ringling was reticent in commenting on his motives for founding the art museum. The only interview he ever gave on the subject of the Museum is titled “John Ringling Sparing of Words Finds Time to Discuss the Arts. He Will Talk of His Museum at Sarasota, Fla., but Little; of Goliath, His Sea Elephant, Some; of the Beauty He Has Found, More.”6 He did, though, express a wish to do something for Sarasota. The foremost investor and developer in the area, Ringling almost singlehandedly transformed his adopted Florida home into a populous and prestigious resort town. By founding a museum, he further enriched Sarasota, making it a cultural capital of the South. At the time, there was no major art museum in the southeastern United States. The museum was also a memorial. By 1925, Ringling was at the pinnacle of his career, but he was nearly sixty years old. Virtually all his immediate family had died. His marriage was childless. He believed an art museum would be a legacy, one that would outlast his business interests, assert his status as a gentleman despite his humble beginnings, and transcend his associations with the American circus. Ringling’s taste for the Baroque can be traced to some of his earliest purchases.7 In May 1926, Ringling made an enormous acquisition that set a

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tone for his collecting and for the Museum: from Hugh Grosvenor, 2nd Duke of Westminster (1879–1953), he bought four immense paintings by Peter Paul Rubens.8 At the time, these paintings were thought to be cartoons for tapestries designed by the Flemish master in the 1620s for the Infanta Isabella Clara Eugenia, daughter of King Philip II of Spain and regent of the Spanish Netherlands. Three of the paintings had hung in the picture gallery at Grosvenor House, the duke’s London residence. Rubens’s paintings made for a splendid display in the new museum. They filled a great deal of wall space, and, because Rubens was largely out of fashion with American collectors, were relatively inexpensive. For Ringling, moreover, not himself a highly trained connoisseur, good provenance, particularly British aristocratic provenance, seems to have been magnetic, a hallmark of quality. Although the paintings by Rubens are, of course, Flemish rather than Italian Baroque works, their distinctive qualities — their grand scale, vivid colors, dynamic, robust, larger-than-life figures, and overtly Catholic themes — perfectly foreshadow Ringling’s penchant for the Italian Baroque. At the time, salerooms and dealers’ galleries were brimming with Baroque paintings from aristocratic English collections whose owners increasingly felt the crushing burden of higher and higher taxes. The availability and relative affordability of Baroque pictures, particularly in proportion to their grand, wall-filling scale, presented Ringling with an opportunity to build a collection with a distinctive emphasis quickly. Ringling’s first Italian Baroque purchases came in 1926, the second year of his collecting activity, during which he acquired the paintings by Rubens. In that year he purchased Sassoferrato’s Portrait of a Cardinal, then attributed to Carlo Maratti; Luca Giordano’s Flight into Egypt; and Tobias Taking Leave of His Parents, attributed to Bartolomeo Manfredi but now given to the French Caravaggist Nicolas Tournier. All three

paintings were from aristocratic British collections, those of Viscount Ridley and the Duke of Rutland, and were sold at Christie’s, London.9 It was, however, in the years 1927 and 1929 that Ringling amassed the bulk of his Italian Baroque collection. At two auctions at Christie’s, London, he purchased a staggering number of works. On July 25, 1927, at the sale of the Italian pictures once belonging to the nineteenth-century British collector Robert Holford (1808 –1892), Ringling employed six different agents to bid on more than fifty lots.10 He secured twenty-one paintings, and then bought another half dozen that had eluded him in the saleroom from dealers. The works included a landscape by Salvator Rosa, a full-length standing figure of Saint Lawrence, attributed to Domenichino but now given to Francesco Curradi, and two small paintings then attributed to Carlo Dolci, the so-called Blue Madonna and Saint John the Evangelist, the latter of which is on copper and still given to Dolci. Another painting on copper—Saint John the Baptist— came from the Holford sale; then attributed to the school of Annibale Carracci, it is now assigned to Francesco Albani. Also attributed to the Carracci were a pair of immense canvases showing scenes from the life of Christ—Christ Raising the Son of the Widow of Nain and Christ Healing the Blind—which are now attributed to Domenico Fiasella, as well as a Susannah and the Elders now given to Sisto Badalocchio. Two years later, on July 12, 1929, Ringling bought 23 of the 136 lots offered at the sale of the collection of the Earl of Yarborough. At that sale, Ringling secured, among other works, another Rosa landscape, two landscapes by Pier Francesco Mola, two paintings that were thought to be by Guido Reni but were in fact copies, and, most impressively, Guercino’s colossal Annunciation (fig. 7). Both then and now, the Annunciation was a unique example in North America of an Italian Baroque painting designed for a monumental setting. Painted in 1628 –29 to be placed above the

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7. Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Il Guercino; 1591–1666), The Annunciation, ca. 1628 –29. Oil on canvas, 237.5 × 595.6 cm. Sarasota, Collection of The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, the State Art Museum of Florida, Florida State University, SN122.

arched entrance to the sanctuary of the Oratorio dell’Invenzione della Santa Croce in Reggio Emilia, the painting was removed from its original location during the suppression of the Oratorio in 1783 and from the Roman art market made its way to England, first to the collection of Sir Richard Worsley and then by inheritance into the collections of the Earls of Yarborough. Buying great numbers of works in a single burst of enthusiasm, almost en bloc, rather than accumulating a collection slowly over a lifetime of careful purchases, was much in keeping with Ringling’s activities as a business tycoon, whereby numerous companies were often bought up all at once and consolidated in a larger operation, or to gain a monopoly in a particular industry. Perhaps unsurprisingly, businessman-collectors such as J. Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913), Henry Walters (1848 –1931), and William Randolph Hearst (1863–1951) also collected in this way. Ringling also acquired Italian Baroque paintings one by one, however. The allure of the collection of the Duke of Westminster, from

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whom he purchased his large canvases by Rubens, proved tenacious. From 1925 until 1931, Ringling bought from dealers and at auction several other former Westminster works that had been sold at Christie’s in London in 1924, among them a number of Italian Baroque paintings. These included Salvator Rosa’s Allegory of Study, Sassoferrato’s Madonna and Child, and Pietro da Cortona’s sublime Hagar and the Angel. The Cortona, which had been in France in the eighteenth century and later in the collection of the Dukes of Westminster, can be said to rank among the finest Baroque paintings in America, as well as being a rare example of a painting by the artist outside of Europe. Ringling also acquired other single works at auction, including Christ Disputing with Doctors, sold as by Giovanni Battista Piazzetta at Christie’s, London, in 1928; Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife, sold as by Guercino at Christie’s, London, also in 1928; Luca Giordano’s Bacchanal, sold at the American Art Association in New York in 1929; and a supposed Cavaliere d’Arpino deaccessioned from The

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Metropolitan Museum of Art through the American Art Association, also in 1929. According to Julius Böhler, Ringling also “bought a number of Baroque canvases from small dealers—all at prices ranging between 20 pounds and 150 pounds.”11 Such works, many of whose exact sources remain unclear, include Francesco Furini’s Saint Christina; a grand Annunciation commissioned by King James II of England for his private chapel at Whitehall Palace, at the time attributed to Carlo Dolci but now known to be the work of Benedetto Gennari; Massimo Stanzione’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt; and Saint Matthew and the Angel, then attributed to Artemisia Gentileschi but now thought to be the work of Nicolas Régnier. Ringling also attempted to buy a painting by Caravaggio. At an auction at Anderson Galleries in New York in 1927, Ringling acquired a Supper at Emmaus attributed to Caravaggio, now (rather amusingly) ascribed to the Master of the Sarasota Supper at Emmaus. It was not until 1943 that the Wadsworth Atheneum became the first American museum to buy an authentic Caravaggio, the Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy (see fig. 13). Although he failed in securing a genuine painting by Caravaggio, Ringling must be credited with what was, for an American collector, a quite precocious attempt to buy a work by that artist. Altogether, the works amassed by Ringling made for a diverse collection of the Italian Baroque. There are paintings of all sizes, and their genres range from religious works to portraits to landscapes (and Austin would later introduce still-life paintings into the collection). Altarpieces and works made for use in private devotion intermingle with gallery paintings. All the major schools—Bolognese, Roman, and Neapolitan, as well as Venetian and Lombard—are represented. Furthermore, while Ringling never managed to secure a painting by Caravaggio or Annibale Carracci, these two competing trends in the art of the Italian seven-

teenth century are ably represented by works of their followers, which sometimes combine the idioms of the two masters. Ringling’s collecting of the Baroque was not limited to the seventeenth-century Italian schools. His seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish collections included the standard works found throughout American museums of the day—history subjects, portraiture, genre, still life, landscape, and interiors, by artists such as David Teniers, Jan Steen, and Nicolaes Maes—but Ringling also purchased superb works by Frans Hals and Jan Davidsz. de Heem. Other works of the Northern Baroque he acquired, an altarpiece of Hagar and Ishmael by Karel Dujardin and a Brazilian landscape by Frans Post, for example, diverged from the typical tastes of his contemporaries. Ringling’s collection of works by Peter Paul Rubens—he purchased three additional paintings by the artist to complement the large canvases discussed above—is remarkable. He never managed to buy a painting by Rembrandt, however, though several attempts were made, and the Ringling Museum owns a number of works by the Dutch master’s associates and followers. Ringling also joined collectors like Archer Huntington (1870 –1955), who founded the Hispanic Society in New York, in buying Spanish works of the seventeenth century. Some were attributed to well-known artists, including Bartolomé Murillo, Jusepe de Ribera, and Francisco de Zurbarán, while others still retain attributions to then more obscure painters like Alonso Cano, Juan de Valdés Leal, and Juan de Pareja. The Portrait of Philip IV by Velázquez, purchased in 1927 from the Holford collection, remains the Museum’s greatest Spanish painting. In French art of the seventeenth century, Ringling purchased standard classics, including a large work by Nicolas Poussin, two landscapes by Gaspard Dughet, and a supposed Claude Lorrain landscape. More unusually, he also bought a fine Simon Vouet for mere pennies, though the painting was attrib-

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uted simply to an Italian artist when it was purchased, and first published as by Vouet in William Suida’s 1949 catalogue of the collection.12 Ringling’s collecting was groundbreaking for its time.13 At the moment he was building his collection, Italian Baroque art was not well understood, and very few first-rate examples were found in America. There were some small holdings of Italian Baroque paintings in collections formed in the mid- and late nineteenth century, such as those at Georgetown University, the Thomas Jefferson Bryan (1800?–1870) Collection, given to the New-York Historical Society, the Isaac Lea (1792– 1875) collection in Philadelphia, Thomas Walker’s (1840 –1928) collection in Minneapolis, and E. B. Crocker’s (1818 –1875) in Sacramento. Before the 1920s, the major civic museums of New York, Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, and Saint Louis had only limited representations of the Italian Baroque. The Detroit Institute of Arts, through a gift from the Scripps family, had the greatest number, but many of the works were not authentic. A major change in taste occurred, however, after the first great exhibition of Italian Baroque painting was held in Florence in 1922. This show demonstrated the quality and power of these muchneglected masters. By 1930, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Cleveland Museum of Art had both acquired works by Bernardo Strozzi; the Minneapolis Institute of Arts owned pictures by Guido Reni and Guercino; and the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester owned a painting by Domenico Fetti. The Fogg Art Museum at Harvard, where Arthur McComb (1895–1968) in the Fine Arts Department promoted the Baroque period and organized the first American exhibition of Italian Baroque art in early 1929, received one supposed Caravaggio as a gift in 1922 and purchased another in 1929. Under the direction of Chick Austin from 1927 to 1945, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, became the leading American museum

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for the acquisition and exhibition of Baroque art, holding America’s second exhibition of the Italian Baroque in 1930 and buying many major works. Nonetheless, there were few private collectors of Italian Baroque art. William Randolph Hearst, in the course of decorating his various palatial residences, did obtain several Italian Baroque paintings. Some of these are still on view at his California estate at San Simeon, and others were later given to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Ringling knew Hearst; he might also have looked for inspiration to Henry Walters, whom he appointed to the board of his fledgling museum in 1928, though it seems that this group never met.14 Walters, who had inherited the basis of his great collection from his father, sought to create an essentially encyclopedic museum, to be housed as a public resource in an Italian-style palazzo in Baltimore. Seeking to expand his holdings of Old Master paintings, in 1902 Walters purchased the Massarenti collection, an enormously varied group of hundreds of Italian paintings, especially rich in the Baroque. Ringling’s enterprise and taste in many ways repeat the propensities of Henry Walters. John Ringling seems to have been surprisingly dedicated to developing his knowledge of the art he was collecting. In a 1929 letter to Böhler regarding one of the large paintings he had acquired at the Holford sale, he wrote, “I think I found out why they attribute the Carracci ‘Christ Healing the Blind’ to Ludovico. I presume you have Storia della Pittura Italiana, Second Edition, Volume Six. On page seven you will find Christ Healing the Blind illustrated, attributed to Ludovico.”15 It is difficult to think of another American collector in the 1920s who could identify, let alone research, a supposed Ludovico Carracci. Yet when Ringling’s museum opened, the Baroque collections were not the focus of attention. Instead, the Museum was widely touted as a collection of masterpieces to rival the great galleries of

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Europe. In a typical example, the New York World told its readers, “The galleries in Paris, Florence, London, Dresden, New York, Leningrad, and others long famous may have more works of art, but they have none which are finer. . . . Here is the greatest collection on earth of the work of Peter Paul Rubens. . . . Here are half a dozen Titians and as many Veroneses!”16 The resemblance of this hyperbolic language to that used to describe Ringling’s circus—the Greatest Show on Earth!—is striking. It is intriguing to ask if it was Ringling’s press agent or the article’s writer who saw the Museum in such terms. Ringling himself never accounted for his collection’s distinctive emphasis on the Baroque. Writing two decades later, Julius Böhler attempted to clarify how Ringling’s Baroque collection had come into being: When Mr. Ringling and myself started forming the Museum, we bought whatever pictures we thought were right and good in price. We certainly made mistakes, especially in trying to collect all schools and all periods. But we learned and in time we conceived the idea of concentrating our energies on buying baroque pictures. We thought that a collection of this kind would be most appropriate for a southern country and then it was also possible to buy these pictures fairly cheaply as they were not at all in fashion and consequently low in price. A great help was the dispersal of several great English collections during these years, collections which were rich in fine baroque paintings. We bought a great number of these with the result that today already the Sarasota museum is the richest in baroque paintings in the States.17

Early on, the quality of Ringling’s Italian Baroque collection was recognized by the man who would later become the Museum’s first director, Chick Austin (fig. 8), then director of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut.18 In a letter of 1929, in the midst of planning America’s second-ever

exhibition of Italian Baroque painting at his own museum, he wrote to John Ringling: “My dear Mr. Ringling, Mr. Forbes, of the Fogg Art Museum, whose assistant I was at Harvard for some years, has told me that you have many very fine paintings of the Baroque period, and I am wondering if you would possibly be willing to lend me some of these for our exhibition.”19 Edward Forbes (1873–1969), the director of the Fogg, had visited Sarasota earlier that year and must have told Austin about the collection. Ringling seems never to have responded to Austin’s request, and no works were lent, perhaps because Ringling needed them for the first public opening of the Museum, which was imminent. In his will, John Ringling left the Museum, the Ca’ d’Zan, and all of his collections to the State of Florida. He died in 1936, but ten years of litigation followed. Only in 1946 did the state formally take possession of the Museum. It was then that Austin left the Wadsworth for the Ringling, where he served as director until his death in 1957. An inspired maverick, Austin looked beyond the art museum to Ringling’s entire sixty-six-acre estate, transforming it into an attraction where fine, decorative, and performing arts could be experienced and studied in tandem. In order to do so, he opened the Ca’ d’Zan to the public, purchased an eighteenth-century theater from the town of Asolo in Italy and installed it beside the art museum,20 and founded, in buildings that had been the Ringlings’ garages, an entirely new museum dedicated to the history of the American circus. Austin also presented exhibitions of modern art, featuring works by major artists like Picasso and Dalí for the very first time in Florida, and inaugurated public education programs to bridge the gap between these seemingly abstruse, even mystifying creations and their new audiences. A brilliant connoisseur, Austin brought important Italian and other Baroque paintings by Bernardo Strozzi,21 Nicolas Poussin,22 and Peter Paul Rubens, among others, into the collection, significantly improving its overall quality.

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8. Unknown photographer, A. Everett “Chick” Austin, Jr., 1947. Photograph. Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Courtesy of the Archives of the Wadsworth Atheneum.

A lifelong devotee of still-life painting, he added two seventeenth-century Italian examples of the genre to the collection, and two more came to the Museum shortly after his tenure as director. Having bought a painting by Caravaggio for the Wadsworth Atheneum, Austin attempted more than once to buy one for the Ringling. One was the Saint Catherine now in the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum in Madrid, which Baron Thyssen briefly considered selling around 1949, and another was a version of the Kimbell Art Museum’s Cardsharps that appeared at Knoedler’s in 1954.23 Nonetheless, a genuine painting by the artist for the Ringling proved elusive for Austin.

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Austin’s love of Baroque art also influenced the way that the institution was presented to the wider world. Because of Austin, the Museum’s Baroque collections were finally given their proper due (fig. 9) and touted as its foremost strength. The 1951 Ringling Museums Annual was dedicated to the Ringling Museum’s collection, to the theme of the Baroque, and to the circus (fig. 10). A lengthy article on Baroque art written by Austin was illustrated exclusively with images of Ringling paintings, many of them the earliest color reproductions of those works. Austin also used the idea of the Baroque to define an identity for the institution as a whole, as a

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means of knitting together the personality of John Ringling, his business enterprises, and his taste in art. In the Museum’s first (and only) Annual, published in 1951, Austin drew a parallel between the Museum’s collection of Baroque art and the circus, writing that “John Ringling was no stranger to Baroque spectacle, for its essential style still lives on in the modern circus. It was natural for him to seek to create in Sarasota not only the winter quarters for his giant ventures in the world of entertainment but to recreate nearby some of the visual aspects of that original Baroque vista which for three centuries and more had been the chief source of inspiration as

well as the direct tradition of The Greatest Show On Earth, not an inaccurate reference to the seventeenth century itself!”24 Ironically, Ringling had likely believed that by building an art museum he might distance himself and his legacy from the circus. Yet Austin’s rhetoric, his idea of the Baroque, which expanded across the

9. Joseph Janney Steinmetz (1905–1985), Baroque paintings on display in the Ringling galleries, November 30, 1950. Photograph. Florida Memory Project, State Archives of Florida, JJS0935. Courtesy of the State Archives of Florida.

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10. Unknown photographer, Museum of the American Circus, Sarasota, Florida, ca. 1950. Postcard. Sarasota, Collection of The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, the State Art Museum of Florida, Florida State University. Tibbals Digital Collection.

Ringling estate, joining high art of the past with popular entertainment of the present, rendered Ringling’s attempt to reach beyond his circus roots forever impossible. In the same Annual, Austin wrote that if the Museum’s collecting efforts continued, “[t]he Ringling Museum should be in a position to rival, if not surpass, other collections of Baroque paintings in this country, and become the truly great Museum of Baroque art.”25 However, since Austin’s death in 1957, only a handful of Italian Baroque works have been added to the collection. Paintings of Judith with the Head of Holofernes by Francesco Cairo and Fede Galizia were given to the Museum in 1966 and 1969, respectively,

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a Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist by Mattia Preti was purchased in 1985, and a Micco Spadaro, with figures possibly by Cavallino, came as a gift in 1976. Nonetheless, when in 1986 a selection of Baroque paintings from the Ringling toured America and was shown at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, Sydney J. Freedberg (1914 –1997), the Gallery’s chief curator, noted, “Our own collection in the Italian field is not at this level, so this is a model for us. I hope it will educate our staff to the possibilities that exist.”26 Austin concluded his essay in the 1951 Ringling Museums Annual thus: “The second half of the twentieth century will see the further realization of

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[Ringling’s] dream through the acquisition of the Asolo theater, the paintings and objects of art, as well as through the lively development of the Museum of the American Circus—all fragments of that larger picture of the Baroque-world of enchantment and discovery, of fantasy and fact.”27 In the seventy-five years since the Ringling Museum first opened, the attributions of many of the paintings have been changed, and new, perhaps even greater collections of Italian Baroque paintings,

discussed throughout the essays in this volume, have been built elsewhere. But the spirit of the Baroque— dramatic, expressive, and larger than life—is still very much alive for anyone who visits the Ringling today, thanks not only to the collection built by John Ringling, but also to Chick Austin, whose belief that beauty is not “solely imprisoned in the gold frames on gallery walls”28 led him to tranform the entirety of John Ringling’s Florida legacy into that Baroque world of enchantment.

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chapter 2

The Atheneum to the Fore Hartford and the Italian Baroque

Eric M. Zafran

11. Deford Dechert, Chick Austin in Hartford, 1938. Photograph. Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Image courtesy of the Archives of the Wadsworth Atheneum.

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The Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art was founded in 1842 by Daniel Wadsworth (1771–1848), one of the first major American art patrons. Wads­ worth originally planned to establish a “Gallery of Fine Arts,” but instead created an atheneum, a term popular in the nineteenth century used to describe a cultural institution like his, which combined an art gallery, library, historical society, and natural history collection. The son of a successful local businessman, Wadsworth donated his family’s land in the center of Hartford for the project, and bequeathed his collection, which was primarily devoted to American painting—he was a patron, first, of Thomas Cole, and then of Frederic Church.1 Early museum catalogues list paintings attributed to Murillo, Rubens, and Poussin, but these have all disappeared.2 The sole Italian seventeenth-century painting recorded in Wadsworth’s collection is a Ruth and Boaz that at one time was attributed to Andrea Schiavone.3 The Atheneum, well into the early twentieth century, was thus primarily a collection of American paintings with a few older European works. An exception was provided by a 1914 bequest from America’s leading nineteenth-century soprano, Clara Louise Kellogg, who had retired to New Hartford, Connecticut. Included among the diva’s donation to the museum was a Virgin in Glory with Saints by the Venetian painter Gregorio Lazzarini.4 A seismic change in the direction of the institution occurred in 1927 with the appointment of twenty-six-year-old A. Everett Austin, Jr. (1900 – 1957; fig. 11), known to all as “Chick,” as director. Austin had never run an organization or even been a curator, but educated at Phillips Academy, Andover, and Harvard University, where he spent several years working in various capacities at the Fogg Art Museum, this charming and energetic young man brought about a true revolution in the museum’s development.5 At the Fogg he had assisted its director, Edward Forbes (1873–1969), and taken the famed museum training course of the assistant

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director, Paul Sachs (1878 –1965).6 It was Forbes who recommended Austin to the Hartford museum authorities. He had observed Forbes and Sachs directing the operations and, more importantly, purchasing artworks for the Fogg. These included a supposed Caravaggio Saint Sebastian, acquired in 1924, which is now identified as by Giovanni Battista Caracciolo.7 (Harvard’s faculty would also soon have America’s principal advocate of the Baroque, Arthur McComb [1895–1968], who began lecturing there in 1928, organized a small Baroque exhibition drawn from local collections the following year, and published his groundbreaking book on the subject in 1934.)8 Already ensconced in the university’s art department was the distinguished expert on Spanish art Chandler Post (1881–1959), who was responsible for the Fogg’s acquiring its first true Baroque masterpiece, Jusepe de Ribera’s Saint Jerome in 1922.9 Following his graduation in 1922, Austin joined the Harvard and Boston Museum of Fine Arts archaeological expedition to Egypt. This proved to be fortuitous for his appreciation of Italian Baroque art because on the way to Egypt, his ship docked in Italy, and he took advantage of a week’s stay to visit the groundbreaking exhibition Pittura Italiana del Seicento e del Settecento, on view at the Pitti Palace in Florence. This revisionist show of more than a thousand pictures included works from Caravaggio to Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and, notably, a number of paintings by the then most popular Baroque painters, Alessandro Magnasco and Bernardo Strozzi. Included among the works of the latter was a great Saint Catherine of Alexandria (lent from a private collection in Venice), which made a lasting impression on Austin.10 Another formative source for Austin’s developing taste for the Baroque was the publication in 1924 of Southern Baroque Art by Sacheverell Sitwell (1897–1988). This modest but trailblazing volume was unusual in its focus on the Neapolitan painters Francesco Solimena and Luca Giordano. As

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Kenneth Clark later noted, when the book was first published, “Baroque and rococo were still terms of abuse. Southern Italian was considered vulgar beyond words. Yet such was the sureness of Sitwell’s eye and the persuasive eloquence of his prose that in a single volume the whole was changed. Southern Baroque Art created a revolution in the history of English taste.” And, as Austin told Sitwell’s brother, Osbert, it greatly influenced him.11 Austin in many ways was the model of the modern museum director and patron of the arts— in fact, he was an impresario in the manner of Sergei Diaghilev, whom he greatly admired and whose Ballets Russes company he saw in Europe every season from 1923 to 1929. He later wrote, “Diaghilev’s Russian Ballet was the most intense emotional experience of my life.” Thus, it is not surprising that at the Atheneum he created an extensive collection of Ballets Russes material.12 He also organized many innovative exhibitions, including the first major Picasso retrospective in America, as well as the first Surrealist show in this country, called Newer SuperRealism.13 In addition, he introduced educational classes in art and presented film, music, and dance programs, including in 1934 both the premiere of the Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson opera Four Saints in Three Acts and the first public performances of what was then called the School of American Ballet, under the direction of George Balanchine, whom he and Lincoln Kirstein had brought to this country in October 1933.14 Chick Austin himself liked to perform; he appeared on stage in serious plays like Hamlet and in his annual fundraising magic shows as the Great Osram.15 Also a designer, he planned both his own fantastic home modeled after a Palladian villa and, in 1933, the new Bauhaus-style Avery wing of the museum, which included a theater.16 But Austin not only built buildings, he also formed the Atheneum’s collection in remarkable ways. He bought, on the one hand, great Old Master paintings and nine-

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teenth-century gems by, among others, Nicolas Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Michael Sweerts, JeanBaptiste Greuze, Edgar Degas, and Paul Gauguin. On the other, he revealed a great sympathy for contemporary art and stood in the forefront of his time with acquisitions of works by Picasso; Surrealists such as Salvador Dalí, Joan Miró, and Max Ernst; and modernists such as Piet Mondrian and Alexander Calder.17 Austin was fortunate that in the very year he arrived in Hartford, a local benefactor, Frank C. Sumner, established the Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund in memory of his wife and sister-in-law. This generous bequest of more than a million dollars allowed Austin to carry out his “ambition,” as noted in the local newspaper, “to acquire for Hartford over a period of years, a series of acknowledged and unquestionable art masterpieces . . . not pictures that may simply be popular today but pictures that will stand the test of time.”18 In carrying out his pursuits, Austin created a brain trust of several key friends he had made at Harvard. These included the young architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Jr. (1903–1987), who was then teaching at nearby Wesleyan College in Middletown, and, perhaps even more importantly, R. Kirk Askew, Jr. (1903–1974), whom Chick had known from his days at Andover and who, after leaving Harvard, went to work for the recently opened New York branch of the long-established London firm of Durlacher Brothers, which specialized in Baroque paintings. Askew eventually took over the firm, and he and his beautiful wife, Constance (the former wife of Arthur McComb), made their brownstone on East 61st Street, which Austin frequented when he was in the city, into a lively gathering place for the intelligentsia and avant garde of the art world. Here cocktails were always available at teatime, and business could be readily combined with pleasure.19

Once Austin had taken the reins of the directorship of the Atheneum in 1927, he lost no time in searching for paintings to acquire. An invoice of 1928 documents that a Stoning of Saint Stephen by Domenico Fetti had been sent by Durlacher to the Atheneum for consideration. It was not acquired and was purchased instead by the Memorial Art Gallery in Rochester.20 But in 1930 Askew had more success, and the Atheneum’s first Baroque acquisition under Austin, Salvator Rosa’s Night Scene with Figures, was made. This small work, which cost $900, had been in the collection of Robert Holford (1808 –1892) at Dorchester House in London. It appeared at the time to be a quintessential work by Rosa. In an article in the museum’s Bulletin, HenryRussell Hitchcock, Jr., praised it as “an excellent example of Salvator Rosa’s work,” and observed, “It carries to us, who have the whole Romantic tradition in literature behind us, perhaps more effectively than it did to his contemporaries.”21 Unfortunately, more recently the painting has been considered a pastiche in the manner of the master.22 One of the advantages Austin enjoyed in forming a collection from scratch (and perhaps he was already looking ahead to the construction of a new building) was that he was not fettered either by the size of his acquisitions or by the spatial constraints of the Atheneum’s existing facilities. In the case of Italian Baroque paintings, this was all to the good, for the next paintings in the field, purchased from Durlacher Brothers in 1930 for $12,000, were a pair of enormous canvases by Luca Giordano, The Abduction of Helen and The Abduction of Europa.23 Hitchcock and Austin noted in a joint Bulletin article that although “Giordano has as a painter little to say . . . he says it with a wealth of eloquence, a vivacity and a versatility which is disarming. . . . For Giordano no subject was too grandiose. . . . [These works] illustrate decoration on a large scale as practiced in Italy in the seventeenth century.”24

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To present these first exciting acquisitions, and to promote the appreciation of the Baroque and draw the attention of a wider audience to the Atheneum, in January 1930 Austin organized America’s first significant exhibition of Italian Baroque paintings and drawings. The two-week exhibition was entitled Italian Painting of the Sei- and Settecento. As Austin explained in a letter to Gertrude Hurdle at the Memorial Art Gallery, Rochester, requesting the loan of the Fetti, “As you know, in America, it is exceedingly difficult to procure material of this epoch . . . and I want the exhibition to be large enough and important enough to attract as many out of town people as possible.”25 To assist his pursuit of appropriate paintings, Austin relied again on his knowledgeable circle of friends. Kirk Askew, who had just completed a tour around America, sent Austin information on potential loans of Italian Baroque paintings in the museums of Chicago, Minneapolis, and Detroit, as well as photos of Baroque pictures in the collection of John Ringling, whose museum was under construction in Sarasota, Florida.26 Austin immediately wrote to Ringling, noting, “I am a great admirer of seventeenth and eighteenth century painting and want to do all I can to change the underestimation in which it has been held for so many years.” Sadly, his letter remained unanswered.27 William Valentiner, director of the Detroit Institute of Arts, however, agreed to lend an Antonio Balestra Nativity (now attributed to the French painter Pierre-Louis Cretey). He wrote to Austin that “an exhibition of Italian Baroque paintings surely would be of the greatest value to the student and to the development of interest in this direction in this country.”28 In the end, the exhibition presented over sixty paintings and seventy drawings. Among other museum loans was Guercino’s large Toilet of Venus from the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, which the museum later deaccessioned.29 The Vassar College Art Gallery lent a painting of Erminia and the Shepherds, thought at the time to be by Mattia Preti but now

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believed to be by Andrea Vaccaro.30 The Boston collector Frank Gair Macomber sent a large painting by Luca Giordano, Saint Sebastian Tended by Saint Irene, which had been on loan to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts since 1913, but which he gave to the Atheneum after the exhibition.31 The Fogg Art Museum was generous, sending three paintings, Jusepe de Ribera’s Saint Jerome, the Caravaggio school Saint Sebastian, and another supposed Caravaggio, Card Players, acquired in 1928.32 From among the paintings lent to the exhibition from the art trade, Austin decided to acquire a so-called Caravaggio, Portrait of a Young Boy, lent by Wildenstein, and he was able to persuade Felix Wildenstein to lower the price from $7,500 to $6,500.33 However, fairly soon he came to realize that the picture was not by Caravaggio but rather the work of a contemporary French painter,34 now usually identified as “The Master of the OpenMouthed Boys.”35 Thereafter, Austin remained continually on the lookout for a genuine Caravaggio, and in a later correspondence Wildenstein suggested first that it might be possible to purchase the Lute Player from the Hermitage.36 When that did not come to pass, he offered instead as a Caravaggio The Chastisement of Love, a painting that eventually went to the Art Institute of Chicago, where it is now considered the work of Bartolomeo Manfredi.37 For the time being, Austin turned his attention to other acquisitions. One of the most spectacular was certainly Bernardo Strozzi’s Saint Catherine of Alexandria (fig. 12), the very painting he had seen in the Florence exhibition of 1922 and which he managed to purchase for $16,000 from the Venetian dealer Italico Brass in 1931.38 Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Jr., writing in the Atheneum’s Bulletin, waxed ecstatic about the new acquisition: “The Saint Catherine from the Brass Collection, lately acquired by the Wadsworth Atheneum, has for some time been known as a masterpiece by Strozzi. . . . But the most astonishing element in the picture is the

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12. Bernardo Strozzi (1581–1644), Saint Catherine of Alexandria, ca. 1615. Oil on canvas, 175.6 × 123.2 cm. Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund. Endowed in memory of A. Everett Austin, Jr., by Mrs. A. Everett Austin, Jr., 1931.1J9.

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bravura of the painting of the drapery in great broad and crisp folds in which the light glints and is reflected in all directions as from a Baroque glory.”39 The following year, Kirk Askew proposed a monogrammed Caracciolo Annunciation with an authentication by one of the world’s leading Baroque experts, Dr. Herman Voss of the Kaiser-FriedrichMuseum in Berlin, which was purchased for $3,000.40 In 1933, Askew offered another Domenico Fetti, David with the Head of Goliath, and a large Salvator Rosa, Landscape with Tobias and the Angel from the collection of George Francis Child-Villiers, 9th Earl of Jersey, at Osterley Park, near London. The two pictures were priced together at $6,000, but after hanging them both in the museum’s galleries to study, Austin wrote to Askew, “I have decided not to get the Fetti at the moment as it seems to look not so well in the Baroque room. The Rosa, on the other hand, is magnificent against the red wall and I like it very much.” The purchase price was $3,100.41 In May 1934, Askew sent to Hartford for consideration of purchase paintings by Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, Carlo Maratti, and Alessandro Magnasco, but none of these was acquired. No more Italian Baroque purchases were made until 1936, now from the other principal dealer Austin had come to rely upon, the German-born Paul Byk of Arnold Seligmann, Rey & Co., New York, who established a warm, avuncular relationship with the director and his family.42 First from this source came the Atheneum’s great Nicolas Poussin Crucifixion, which was followed by a series of smaller works, including Giuseppe Maria Crespi’s charming little Self-Portrait of the Artist in His Studio, which just the previous year had been exhibited in Bologna.43 The following year, Byk supplied for only $500 a work by Francesco Solimena, which he described as a “superb picture . . . representing the foundation of the Dominican Monastery of Monte Cassino.”44 Austin, perhaps recalling Sacheverell Sitwell’s book, made a point of noting that “Solimena was a

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talented poet as well as a musician.”45 This study of a scene from the life of Saint Benedict has become significant as a record of the artist’s finished composition, which was destroyed with the abbey during the Allied bombardment in 1944. In 1937, when it was still safe to go to Europe, Austin, accompanied by his friend Agnes Rindge, the director of the Vassar College Art Gallery, spent the summer traveling there, seeking Italian Baroque pictures, as she described it, “at the source.”46 He had his greatest success in Vienna, where for very modest sums he made several acquisitions from Fritz Mondschein at Galerie Sanct Lucas. Austin purchased a bust-length Saint Sebastian for $150 as a work by Guido Reni. This was later attributed by Hermann Voss to Giovanni Bilvert but has more reasonably been identified as by an Emilian painter close to Carlo Dolci.47 Coincidentally, Austin acquired at the same time another Dolci school piece, a Christ Child with a Garland of Flowers, for only $170.48 On this same buying spree he also purchased for $1,100 a Presentation in the Temple that was then thought to be by Sebastiano Ricci but was later attributed to Alessandro Magnasco and eventually deaccessioned.49 Also ascribed to Magnasco was a painting entitled The Cloister School, which Austin purchased that same year from Arnold Seligman, Rey & Co. It had belonged to the Magnasco expert Benno Geiger (1882–1965), but was eventually downgraded to a copy and sold.50 Fortunately, in 1937 Austin visited M. Knoedler & Company in New York, and its director, Charles Henschel, made a “special price” of $3,500 for an authentic painting by the artist, The Medici Hunting Party. An important work by Magnasco from his time in Florence, it documents an actual outing by his Medici patrons.51 In January and February 1938, Austin presented The Painters of Still Life, one of his characteristic exhibitions combining Old Master and modern paintings around a specific theme. In preparation for this, in 1937 he had acquired, from two quite

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disparate sources, still lifes of musical instruments, one attributed to Battista Bettera, the other to Evaristo Baschenis. The former came from Pieter de Boer in Amsterdam for $400; the latter, surprisingly, was supplied for $700 by Julien Levy, Austin’s ally in promoting the Surrealists.52 Even more obviously reflecting his taste for Surrealism was Austin’s purchase from a Parisian dealer in 1939 of a pair of Arcimboldo school compositions of the seasons, representing Spring and Summer, respectively, at a cost of only $1,400.53 Another unusual still life, acquired from Durlacher Brothers in the same year, was a large Fruit Stall which Hermann Voss had attributed to Vincenzo Campi.54 In 1941, a much more significant still life appeared at the New York gallery of David Koetser. This was, as the dealer wrote to Austin, attributed by the Viennese art historian William Suida (1877–1959) to the Milanese painter Fede Galizia.55 Austin was fascinated by this complex work, which he was able to purchase for $2,500. It was widely exhibited, and many attributions were subsequently proposed. In 1960, Roberto Longhi (1890 –1970) suggested that it was “a Flemish free copy from a lost early Caravaggio,” and in more recent times the artist has been identified as Prospero Orsi, but the Atheneum for the time being prefers to keep the traditional name “Master of the Hartford Still-Life.”56 Another Italian Baroque painting, which Austin also acquired in 1941, was a good, if somewhat damaged, Flight into Egypt by the Neapolitan painter Bernardo Cavallino. Purchased from Durlacher Brothers for $2,800, it came from the collection of Kenneth Clark.57 The final flowering of Austin’s tenure at the Wadsworth Atheneum occurred in 1943 and 1944. With regard to the Italian Baroque, this period saw the acquisition in April 1943 of a supposed Guercino, Saint Sebastian with Armor, from the Earl of Caledon’s collection. Paul Byk had first promoted the painting to Austin in April 1941, noting that

“Mr. [Stephen] Picchetto has virtually put the picture aside for Mr. Kress . . . but I don’t want you to miss it, as it is the only well identified Guercino, and as such, a worthy addition to your permanent collections. I had asked you originally $7,500, but would now take $6,500.”58 Austin accepted, and even bargained the price down to $5,500. He then made the painting the centerpiece of his patriotic exhibition at the Atheneum, Men in Arms, in February and March of 1943. However, the work was later studied by Denis Mahon (1910 –2011), who judged it “either an old copy of a lost original by Guercino or an independent work of a close follower.”59 Although the Guercino failed to pass muster, Paul Byk was able to atone by producing one last great Baroque treasure for Austin. The first tantalizing hint came in a letter of November 1939, in which he invited “Mr. Austin . . . to come to the gallery when next in New York, as I have a great surprise in store. I know in advance that you will share my enthusiasm.”60 The source of Byk’s excitement was, of course, the remarkable Caravaggio Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy (fig. 13). Austin’s desire to add this picture to the Atheneum’s collection became the raison d’être for the organization of one of his most original exhibitions, for, as he wrote to Valentiner at Detroit in January 1940, “I am very much involved in getting together (rather hurriedly, I am afraid) an exhibition of Paintings of Night Scenes.”61 Presented in February and March 1940, this was another of Austin’s typically wide-ranging shows, containing works from François de Nomé (Monsù Desiderio) to Albert Pinkham Ryder. The exhibition catalogue gave a full-page illustration to the Caravaggio painting, and Austin’s text praised “the miraculous chiaroscuro of the plastic forms,” noting rather grandly that this picture “is related to the Rest on the Flight of the Doria Gallery and the Story of Saint Matthew in San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome.”62 But Austin was not to have an easy time convincing the Atheneum’s trustees to pay the (specially reduced)

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13. Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, called Il Caravaggio; 1571–1610), Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy, ca. 1595–96. Oil on canvas, 94 × 130 cm. Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1943.222.

price of $17,000. Byk patiently waited over the course of two years, providing the information that the Italian experts Roberto Longhi, Antonio Morassi, and Giuseppe Fiocco all vigorously supported the attribution and underscored the importance of the painting, and hinting that the Cleveland Museum of Art was also interested in acquiring it.63 With a six-month directorial sabbatical scheduled to begin in July 1943, Austin knew he had to make his last stand over the Caravaggio. On June 9 he wrote a passionate, yet reasoned, letter to Robert Huntington, the chairman of the Atheneum’s trustee acquisition committee, arguing that the Saint Francis would represent the only authentic Caravaggio painting in America, that the price was a true bargain, and that the work would greatly strengthen the paintings collection assembled in Hartford.64 Fortunately, Huntington gave his

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consent, the painting was purchased, and in June 1943 it became the centerpiece of an exhibition of forty paintings entitled Caravaggio and the Seventeenth Century, which included all of Austin’s acquisitions for the Atheneum as well as seven paintings lent from New York galleries.65 Byk then invited Austin to begin his sabbatical as his guest at the famed Garden of Allah Hotel in Los Angeles.66 His leave was extended until January 1945, at which time he resigned the directorship. After a brief interval, he continued his innovative museum career at one of the most appropriate of all American institutions for an enthusiast of the Italian Baroque, The John and Mable Ringling Museum in Sarasota, Florida (as discussed in the essay by Virginia Brilliant in this volume).67 But Austin’s departure from Hartford did not completely end his influence on acquisitions at the

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Wadsworth Atheneum. When he was in Los Angeles, it was discovered, much to the consternation of the trustees, that some thirty paintings, which over the years Austin had requested to be sent to the museum for consideration of purchase, had never been shown to them and were languishing in storage. In November 1943, they therefore requested that Austin select the ones he favored for purchase, so that the remainder could be returned.68 Fortunately, he chose not only the remarkable Gauguin Nirvana from Wildenstein for $2,200,69 but also one of the most notable paintings lent to the 1943 Caravaggio exhibition, a Daedalus and Icarus, from Arnold Seligmann, Rey & Co., attributed by Hermann Voss to Bernardo Cavallino. This was purchased by the Atheneum in 1944.70 A very striking, large Caravaggesque work, which Roberto Longhi correctly attributed in 1966 to the littleknown Pisan painter Orazio Riminaldi, the painting was a star of the Caravaggesque exhibition held in 2012 in Los Angeles and Hartford.71 To replace Austin, the Atheneum trustees again turned to Edward Forbes at the Fogg. Forbes recommended another Harvard alumnus, Charles C. Cunningham (1910 –1979), who began his tenure in January 1946. Cunningham had, for a number of years, served as the assistant to the renowned W. G. Constable, curator in the Department of European Paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.72 He may not have possessed Chick Austin’s theatrical flair or passionate interest in contemporary art, but he cleverly hired curators who greatly strengthened the museum’s professional staff. Among those who worked for him in Hartford were Evan Turner, Peter Marlowe, and Sam Wagstaff. Most importantly, Cunningham had an excellent eye and sought out what he described as “stars,”73 both standout and offbeat pictures to build upon Austin’s accomplishments. Some of the Atheneum’s most famous paintings are in fact Cunningham purchases and not, as many assume, Austin’s. These include Francisco

de Zurbarán’s iconic Saint Serapion, Giovanni Paolo Panini’s Gallery of Cardinal Gonzaga, Joseph Wright of Derby’s memorable The Old Man and Death, and William Holman Hunt’s great Pre-Raphaelite painting The Lady of Shalott. Cunningham began auspiciously right where Austin had left off, acquiring in 1948 a bravura work by Gaspare Giuseppe Traversi, The Quarrel, from Durlacher Brothers.74 But a much more frequent source of paintings for him was the transplanted English dealer David Koetser, who opened premises in New York. In 1949, Koetser offered a splendid large Orazio Gentileschi, Judith and Her Maidservant. The asking price was $14,000, and after W. G. Constable at the Museum of Fine Arts graciously withdrew from the hunt, the Atheneum acquired it for the remarkably reduced price of $12,500.75 Cunningham made annual visits to the dealers in London, and there in 1955 he saw at Thomas Agnew & Sons a painting by Salvator Rosa, Lucrezia as Poetry (fig. 14), described at the time as La Ricciardi, Mistress of the Artist as a Sybil. Formerly in the Lansdowne collection, it was apparently the pendant to the painter’s Self-Portrait in the National Gallery, London. Geoffrey Agnew promised Cunningham “first refusal” of the painting, and he was able to acquire it for the Atheneum the following year.76 At the same time, Cunningham also acquired for the museum a Holy Family on panel from the Farnese collection in Parma that was attributed to Ludovico Carracci. Roberto Longhi in a letter to the museum, however, identified it as by the Carracci follower Sisto Badalocchio, an attribution later confirmed by Denis Mahon.77 In 1966, Charles Cunningham left the Atheneum to assume the directorship of the Art Institute of Chicago, but before his departure he made two more significant Italian Baroque acquisitions, which the museum’s Bulletin identified as “of the Caravaggio school.”78 From the delightful Fritz Mondschein, who in America had changed his name to Frederick Mont,

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14. Salvator Rosa (1615–1673), Lucrezia as Poetry, ca. 1641. Oil on canvas, 116.2 × 94.6 cm. Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1956.159.

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15. Valerio Castello (1624 –1659), The Legend of Saint Geneviève of Brabant, ca. 1652. Oil on canvas, 165.8 × 256.9 cm. Hartford, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, 1999.12.1.

came Carlo Saraceni’s Holy Family in Saint Joseph’s Workshop. This immensely appealing painting had been in a private collection in France, and, as the dealer, who sold it for $57,000, reported to Cunningham, “Longhi, Bloch, Sterling, and Zeri had all greatly admired it.”79 The other purchase was perhaps a greater coup for much less money. Cunningham acquired Pietro Antonio Novelli’s Sense of Taste, formerly in the collection of Prince Youssoupoff, from Duveen Brothers in 1963 for $10,500. Once again it was Roberto Longhi who in 1966 correctly identified the painting as an important early Roman work by Jusepe de Ribera from a series of the Five Senses painted about 1614.80 It, too, has become one of the iconic works of the European paintings collection at the Wadsworth Atheneum. As will have been evident, Austin and Cunningham, in their combined thirty-nine years of leadership, established the Wadsworth Atheneum as one of America’s most important centers for Italian Baroque painting. They also set the bar quite high for those who came later, and only a few subsequent

additions can match their achievements. In 1970, a mysterious Allegory of Magic (or Medea) by a previously unrepresented Genoese master, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, was added to the collection.81 Harvard-trained Jean Cadogan, who became curator of European paintings in 1978, acquired several remarkable works, including the Atheneum’s first Baroque altarpiece, Domenico Corvi’s Miracle of Saint Joseph Calasanz (1767), purchased from Heim Gallery in 1981,82 and Scarsellino’s beautiful Fame Conquering Time, purchased from Patrick Matthiesen in London in 1985.83 Peter C. Sutton, appointed director in 1996, is a distinguished connoisseur of Dutch art, but his first acquisition was Morazzone’s glowing Agony in the Garden, which, he rightly observed, “complements the museum’s baroque paintings.”84 This was soon followed by a stunning grand Genoese masterpiece acquired from the New York dealer Adam Williams, Valerio Castello’s Legend of Saint Geneviève of Brabant (fig. 15), a painting that had formerly belonged to Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. (see the essay on Chrysler in this volume).85

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chapter 3

The American View of the “Forgotten Century” of Italian Painting Reminiscences of a Conservator and Art Dealer

Marco Grassi

16. Unknown photographer, Galleria Luigi Grassi & Sons, Florence, ca. 1920. Photograph. Courtesy of the author.

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Italian painters and sculptors of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries may well have been among the last artists enthusiastically embraced by their contemporary “establishment” patrons — at least, perhaps, until the Pop artists of the 1960s became media superstars. In fact, with the possible exception of Caravaggio, most of the great seventeenth-century Italian artists were eagerly pursued by the princes and prelates who constituted the “art market” of the period, and even Caravaggio — the born outsider — initially enjoyed significant recognition and patronage in Rome. These artists continued to be highly regarded, and many of their works later migrated to collections formed at great expense by English grandees in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. By contrast, the innovators of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century artistic movements were, at first, vehemently rejected by the prevailing “official” tastemakers. Interestingly, this was the period (ca. 1830 –1930) during which the Italian Baroque was being rejected with equal distaste. The same period witnessed the birth of what has loosely been termed the “international art market.” This network of dealers, auctioneers, middlemen, restorers, and experts catered to an emerging class of wealthy patrons who were no longer members of the curia or the court but financiers, industrialists, and real-estate entrepreneurs. Unlike the earlier princely and ecclesiastical patrons, these new élites seldom commissioned art from contemporary artists, but preferred instead to collect works from the past. Not surprisingly, their taste, and that of their dealers and advisers, coincided with the late Romantic rediscovery of the world of the Middle Ages and early Renaissance and its art, history, and heroes. They were also predominantly Northern European or American and culturally liberal and Protestant, and they abhorred Counter-Reformation Catholicism and were consequently repelled by the Italian Baroque.

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The present essay is based on the writer’s reflections on the Grassi family’s involvement in the art market for well over a century, a span that coincides with the resurgence in collecting Italian Baroque painting at the end of the nineteenth century and its full return to favor by the end of the twentieth. This long evolution has brought fundamental changes in the way the art business is structured and, even more importantly, in the tastes and aesthetic preferences of those who conduct it. In my own activity as a paintings conservator for over five decades, I have been a privileged witness to, and occasional minor participant in, this rich and varied story. It begins with Luigi Grassi (1858 – 1937), my grandfather, who was born in modest circumstances in Genzano (a small town in the province of Lazio). Possessed of keen artistic perception, he enrolled in and later graduated from the Accademia di San Luca in Rome. Grassi’s uncle was the successful Florentine restorer and art dealer Emilio Costantini, and he invited the talented young man to Florence and found employment for him as a restorer at the Uffizi’s Gabinetto del Restauro—at the time, an academically trained painter was thought to be the ideal candidate to restore antique paintings. Shortly thereafter, however, Grassi left that respectable, but quite unprofitable, profession to start on his own as a dealer. By the early 1890s he was off and running, having financed his start in commerce with a whirlwind carousel of IOUs payable to a local moneylender called Ciampolini (the young dealer had a brilliant eye, but no collateral). Business was so brisk that “Professore” Grassi could, over and over again, borrow very significant sums and repay them with interest within three to a maximum of six months (at that time, the usurious—and illegal—rate in Italy was about 6%!).1 A slightly older contemporary of Grassi was the antiquarian and art dealer Stefano Bardini (1836– 1922), who had amassed a fortune by buying tons of antique architectural elements discarded when the

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center of Florence was demolished in the 1860s and “reinvented” for its brief stint as Italy’s capital. This was the raw material that served to embellish countless brand-new “Gothic” and “Renaissance” mansions all over Europe and the New World.2 For an idea of how lively the market was for earlier Italian art—and how abundant the pickings— one has only to visit the former church and convent of San Gregorio della Pace, which Bardini transformed into a charming neo-Renaissance palazzo suitable for housing not only an exhibition gallery but also a series of laboratories where works of art were restored and made ready to be sold. The building, today the Museo Bardini, is a composite of myriad antique architectural remnants, including four huge sixteenth-century pietra serena tabernacles that were originally in the nave of a church and now serve as window surrounds on the façade. After a first venue in Via della Scala, the home of Luigi Grassi & Sons moved in 1909 to the Montagliari Palace in Via Cavour in Florence (fig. 16).3 As the photograph suggests, probably none of the works of art on display was of the seventeenth century. Luigi Grassi’s tastes and expertise were very much in keeping with those of his time, and he dealt almost exclusively in the field of Italian art from the thirteenth through the early sixteenth centuries. His personal collecting interests were also typical of the time— early Renaissance bronzes, ceramics and furniture (the earlier the better), fifteenth- and sixteenth-century textiles, and medieval seals. The list of clients, specialists, and academics who visited the gallery in Via Cavour constitutes a “ Who’s Who” of the art world at the turn of the last century. First and foremost were the collectors, who included Adolphe Stoclet (1871–1949), Otto Lanz (1865– 1935), Adolf von Beckerath (1834 –1915), and Arthur Lee, 1st Viscount Lee of Fareham (1868 – 1947). Among the museum officials, the most revered—and acquisitive—was Wilhelm Bode (1845–1929), the Berlin museum director; and then,

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17. Unknown photographer, Professor Luigi Grassi (1858 –1937). Photograph. Courtesy of the author.

of course, there were the practitioners of that new academic discipline—art history. Although Bernard Berenson (1865–1959) would have described himself simply as a “connoisseur,” he was foremost among this early crop of art historians.4 A portrait, later in life, of Professor Luigi Grassi (fig. 17) depicts a virtual stand-in for Bernard Berenson. In fact, both my grandfather’s and father

Arturo Grassi’s (1899–1971) admiration for Berenson was unbounded. They always maintained a cordial professional and social relationship with “BB” and the intimates of his “court” at Villa I Tatti in Florence, and I will always be grateful to Nicky Mariano (1887–1968), the household’s “gatekeeper,” for arranging a visit for me—fresh out of university—with the ailing ninety-four-year-old sage.

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Arturo Grassi continued the family business, but, as sons are wont to do, he looked beyond his father’s devotion to the alta epoca and was much more drawn to the Italian Settecento, particularly Venetian and Roman view-painting. Among his successes as a dealer was the pair of monumental Roman vedute by Giovanni Paolo Panini, The Roman Forum and View of the Colosseum (1735), which he acquired in England in 1947 and sold to the Detroit Institute of Arts.5 The postwar Clement Attlee government had made life virtually impossible for an entire class of English landed gentry, and country houses were relinquishing, for pennies, endless “souvenirs” of the Grand Tour such as the splendid Panini views. While Arturo Grassi was indulging his taste for the eighteenth century (he paid almost no attention to the Baroque), others were much more attentive to the Italian Seicento. At the same sales where he was buying vedute by Gaspar van Wittel and Luca Carlevaris, the young Denis Mahon (1910 –2011) was picking up, for even fewer pennies, masterworks by Guercino and the Carracci. In Florence, Roberto Longhi (1890 –1970) was coming to grips with Caravaggio and the problems posed by his countless imitators.6 As he began to unlock the enigma of Caravaggio (a task that continues to this day), he illuminated with equal acumen the lives and activities of such lesserknown figures as Orazio Borgianni, Giovanni Serodine, Carlo Saraceni, and many others. Longhi has occasionally been described as the supreme “anti-Berenson,” not only for his love of the Baroque, but for his praise of any artist whom he judged “anticlassical.” Nicky Mariano used to say that when Longhi telephoned from Il Tasso, his villa across the Arno, he often annoyed the staff at I Tatti by asking for “Dr.” Berenson. Of course, if there was one thing that BB, ever the Edwardian gentleman, abhorred, it was being called dottore. Longhi’s wellknown penchant for teasing his colleagues and, in general, acting l’enfant terrible may well have been another aspect of his genius.

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Another Italian critic who wrote perceptively about the seventeenth century was Matteo Marangoni (1876 –1958).7 Interestingly, at the beginning of the last century, there were other adventuresome Florentines who began collecting Baroque painting, such as Ugo Ojetti (1871–1946), a writer, art critic, and journalist who was very influential in the Italian intellectual community, and Angelo Cecconi (1865 –1937), a doctor of Southern Italian descent, who delved into the nether reaches of Neapolitan and Sicilian Seicento painting. And then there were pioneering collectors such as the Uzielli –De Mari family, who, in two generations, assembled major works by Domenico Fetti, Bartolomeo Manfredi, and Jusepe de Ribera. Both Ojetti and Cecconi lent to what is now regarded as a watershed event in the history of taste and collecting, the 1922 Palazzo Pitti exhibition Mostra della Pittura Italiana del Sei e Settecento in Palazzo Pitti (fig. 18).8 Taking a U-turn away from the family tradition of buying and selling art, I retraced my grandfather Luigi’s footsteps and became an apprentice at the same Gabinetto del Restauro of the Uffizi where he had begun in 1880 or thereabouts. Although I stayed with the profession, I veered again from family custom and began admiring Italian Baroque paintings. In Florence in the early 1960s, the 1922 Pitti exhibition still exerted its spell on the “younger generation,” as we styled ourselves. When the opportunity arose, I couldn’t resist buying a Pier Francesco Mola, Saint John the Baptist Preaching in the Desert (ca. 1650 –55), that had belonged to Ojetti, and a Mattia Preti, Martyrdom of Saint Januarius (ca. 1685), that had belonged to Cecconi. Featured in the 1922 show, both paintings kept my wife Cristina and me exceedingly good company for many years in New York, and are now in the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid.9 (I purchased the Preti rather rashly, ignoring the fact that Longhi had expressed doubts about it in a review of the Palazzo Pitti exhibition.)10 I vividly remember visiting Ugo Bardini, the

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great dealer’s son, in Florence in 1960 or 1961. He was a tall, distinguished older gentleman living a lonely, isolated retirement in a splendid palace high above the Ponte Vecchio in Oltrarno. Of what remained of his father’s immense and once-thriving gallery,11 he showed me several stacks of canvases, arranged by size, piled on the floor— dozens of paintings, carpet-like, one on top of another . . . without stretchers! He remarked, “You see, here are some of those dark Baroque paintings for which my father had no use.” Probably my own father and grandfather would have regarded these works with even less attention. As it turned out, among those canvases, forlorn and forgotten, was a splendid work by Cecco Bravo, The Prophet Balaam and the Ass (ca. 1660), which I was commissioned to remount and restore. It was eventually purchased by the Staatsgalerie, Stuttgart.12 I have often wondered what other interesting works lurked in those stacks. A slight detour into the history of jurisprudence will be helpful in order to describe a key provision in Italian law, the fidecommisso, that played a major role in the twentieth-century dispersal of a great Roman princely collection. The fidecommisso represents an evolution of the ancient feudal principle of primogeniture, whereby the eldest heir is entitled to an undivided estate. It was formalized as a legal statute by Pope Urban VIII Barberini (1568 –1644) to ensure the intact survival of great family patrimonies, particularly the works of art that were such an important part of those holdings. Many Roman family collections, including the Spada, Rospigliosi, and Doria, were placed under fidecommisso jurisdiction during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — each carefully catalogued and described. (Equally important, the fidecommisso was intended to protect such collections from sticky-fingered family members.) The fidecommisso is regarded as one of the first attempts to safeguard the integrity of artistic ensembles. It was abolished during the Napoleonic

18. Catalogue of Palazzo Pitti exhibition, 1922. Photograph. Courtesy of the author.

regime but reestablished in 1815. However, with the Unification of Italy in 1871, the principle was definitively abrogated, with one very important exception—works of fine art. Historic collections governed by fidecommisso were to remain undivided, as indeed they have, by and large, to this day. At the beginning of the last century, the Borghese family, thanks to a profligate member obsessed with early motorcars, faced the dire prospect of bankruptcy. Although the Borghese still controlled enormous real estate holdings, notably the Villa Borghese and its surrounding park, the priceless fidecommisso collection faced a real threat. The Italian state saw an opportunity and, with rare foresight, purchased everything (except the palace near the Pantheon) by

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matching the estimates proposed by a stateappointed commission of experts. Thus, the story has a happy ending considering the fact that, not long before, Titian’s Sacred and Profane Love, widely considered the crown jewel of the collection, had been offered to Isabella Stewart Gardner by Berenson. The painting had been valued at more than 3 million lire—a price beyond even Mrs. Jack’s ample purse. Were it not for the fidecommisso, two of Titian’s greatest masterpieces would now be under the same roof in Boston (the other being Europa). The comparison between the “three-million-lire Titian” and the paltry 1,200-lire valuation placed upon Caravaggio’s David with the Head of Goliath in the Borghese collection and the mere 100 lire for the artist’s Boy with the Basket of Fruit is stunning and speaks volumes about the dramatic change in attitude toward seventeenth-century art that would occur only a few decades later. The fidecommisso Barberini had a quite different, but no less epochal, resolution, particularly as regards the migration of works beyond Italy’s borders. In 1934, the Corsini family of Florence became principal heir to the Barberini estate. As with the Borghese, there were immense real estate and agricultural holdings on which, by then, there were also considerable inheritance taxes due. This time the state negotiated a kind of barter. It received the Barberini palace and other valuable Roman properties in exchange for allowing the breakup of the Barberini fidecommisso— essentially the historic family collection. This remarkable body of art passed, virtually in its entirety, to the Corsini family—without export restrictions. The unprecedented deal was negotiated on behalf of the Corsini by Ettore Sestieri, a distinguished and obviously very well-connected Roman art dealer. It did not take long for the sales to begin. In fact, the very year of the deal’s conclusion, 1934, Baron Heinrich Thyssen (1875–1947) purchased the famous Christ Among the Doctors by Albrecht Dürer (Museo Thyssen-­ Bornemisza, Madrid).13

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Noticeable in the bottom right corner of the painting is the fidecommisso number that appears on all the Barberini paintings. This is the one picture that the Baron desperately wanted and for which he was willing to pay an extravagant premium. Sestieri, on behalf of the Corsini, and the dealer Dr. Rudolf Heinemann (1902–1975), who was advising Thyssen at the time, realized that they could include as part of the deal two other works that they felt would be difficult to sell, making it a three-for-the-[very]high-price-of-one sale. It is difficult today to imagine that those other two items in this exceptional job lot were the Saint Catherine of Alexandria by Caravaggio (fig. 19) and the Saint Sebastian by Gian Lorenzo Bernini, masterpieces that Thyssen purchased only with the greatest reluctance!14 As the Dürer, Caravaggio, and Bernini crossed the Alps to Switzerland, the first two ex-Barberini paintings traveled to America. The famous fifteenth-century “Barberini panels,” representing The Birth of the Virgin and The Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple, lateral panels of an altarpiece painted in 1467 for a lay confraternity of flagellants in the hospital church of Santa Maria della Bella in Urbino by Fra Carnevale, were sold by Knoedler in 1935 to The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, respectively. The first significant Baroque painting from the Barberini-Corsini collections to cross the Atlantic was the great Death of Germanicus by Nicolas Poussin. As late as 1958 — after being rejected by the Metropolitan and the National Gallery of Art—it was purchased by the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Indeed, in hindsight, not until the early 1960s did a major American institution pay much attention to the Baroque. Smaller museums got there first: for example, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford and the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City with the acquisitions of Caravaggio’s Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy and Saint John the Baptist, respectively. A smattering of visionary collectors

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19. Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, called Il Caravaggio; 1571–1610), Saint Catherine of Alexandria, ca. 1598. Oil on canvas, 173 × 133 cm. Madrid, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza. Photo: Kharbine-Tapabor / The Art Archive at Art Resource, New York.

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were also at the forefront of the collecting of Italian Baroque painting; for example, John Ringling’s acquisition of Pietro da Cortona’s Hagar and the Angel remains to this day the great Baroque painter’s masterwork in America (see Virginia Brilliant’s essay in this volume); and Walter Chrysler, always intrigued by the innovative and unusual, appreciated a remarkable variety of genres for his purchases, among the most perceptive of which was Guido Reni’s superb Meeting of David and Abigail, now with other gems in the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk (see Eric Zafran’s essay on Chrysler in this volume). While I was studying painting conservation in Rome at the Istituto Centrale per il Restauro, my father told me of a visit he had received in Florence from Adolph Loewi, the Venetian textile dealer, who, by then, was living in Los Angeles. Loewi spun a wonderful story— of course entirely of his own making—for which my father fell hook, line, and sinker. It went something like this: because of the population explosion in California, Loewi said, many neo-Baroque Catholic churches were being built. Would my father by any chance happen to know of any large, cheap religious pictures to decorate these tacky new churches? Any old seventeenth-century altarpiece was bound to be less expensive than a newly commissioned painting, he argued. Dad contacted Prince Tommaso Corsini (whose father sold the first round of Barberini pictures); they were near contemporaries and very good friends. As it turned out, a Mattia Preti altarpiece (now in the Art Museum, Dayton, Ohio) just happened to be languishing in one of the prince’s attics. Loewi, of course, bought it for a song and probably already had an adventuresome American museum curator ready to purchase it for a multiple of its original cost. I remember how my father, ever the Berensonian, marveled at the sale. These grandees, he used to say, have all the luck . . . imagine actually finding a buyer for such a huge, dark Baroque macchinone (big machine)!

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Rudolf Heinemann, mentioned above in connection with the first series of great ex-Barberini sales, moved to New York before the Second World War but continued his close relationship with the Thyssen family, now with the younger baron, Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza (1921–2002), whose father had died in 1947.15 Heinemann and his wife, Lore, summered in Switzerland at Casa Tanello, high above Castagnola, overlooking Lake Lugano and— not coincidentally—the Thyssen Villa Favorita. Although not particularly photogenic or socially polished, Rudolf Heinemann had a very keen sense of quality in paintings and an equally shrewd grasp of what made them valuable and saleable. Not surprisingly, he kept close tabs on Thyssen’s collecting activities because, by the early 1960s, the younger baron was surpassing his father as a collector. I had only heard of Rudolf Heinemann as a legendary dealer, but one day in the spring of 1964 his star client, Baron Thyssen, walked into the conservation studio I had started only three years previously in Florence. He was accompanied not by Dr. Heinemann but by an attractive young lady who had been a friend of mine since her family moved to Florence from Germany. After several further visits to the studio, Baron Thyssen asked me to become visiting conservator of the spectacular collection that had become his consuming passion. I was offered the position independently of Rudolf’s, let’s say, “patronage,” and, not surprisingly, our relationship was at first rather tense. Eventually, however, we developed a high degree of mutual respect and even friendship. In all the years we knew each other, one of the very few negotiations on which Rudolf and I actually collaborated—probably around 1968 —was when Prince Corsini again called my father regarding the possible sale of another Baroque macchinone. Of course he had not forgotten the Mattia Preti success, and this time it happened to concern another altarpiece, the great ex-Barberini Guido

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Reni Adoration of the Magi (1642; Cleveland Museum of Art).16 One of the artist’s last works, the towering painting (more than twelve feet in height) remained unfinished in the artist’s studio following his death and is distinctive both for its silvery coloring and its loose and sketchy handling. I spoke to Rudolf about it, and immediately he and the London dealer Geoffrey Agnew arrived in Florence to confirm the purchase.17 To tell the truth, this time my father was a bit less surprised. The Reni was promptly sold to Sherman Lee in Cleveland (like the other fidecommisso items, it had export permission), and it remains one of my proudest contributions to the migration of Italian Baroque paintings to America. Another memorable sale involved the splendid Domenico Fetti Portrait of a Man with a Sheet of Music (ca. 1620), now at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.18 It was brought to my attention by a descendant of the Florentine Uzielli De Mari family who was then living near Lugano. Curiously, and in a kind of backwards fashion, I was responsible for a similarly important seventeenth-century work finding its way back to Europe. It had belonged to Joseph-Napoléon Bonaparte (1768 –1844), who is remembered as among the first collectors in America to own Italian Baroque paintings. The emperor Napoleon’s older brother came to these shores in 1816, where he lived until 1832 in suitably grand style at Point Breeze, his estate near Bordentown, New Jersey, twenty-five miles northeast of Philadelphia. He brought with him some stolen Spanish crown jewels and lots of furnishings and works of art. Among these were two large paintings by Luca Giordano, The Judgment of Solomon (ca. 1665; Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection, on deposit at Museo Thyssen-­ Bornemisza, Madrid) and The Rape of the Sabine Women (ca. 1672–74; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra), which Bonaparte may have acquired in Naples when he reigned there from 1806 to 1808. When he returned to Europe, the furnishings of

Point Breeze remained, and so did the two Giordano paintings. Alas, destiny decreed that these very early Italian Baroque visitors to America would not remain here.19 One of the most important chapters in the history of collecting Italian Baroque paintings in America centers upon the activities of Samuel H. Kress (1863–1955), to whom a number of American museums owe a significant part of their collections, particularly of Italian seventeenth- and eighteenthcentury paintings.20 When Kress, a self-made dime store millionaire, died in 1955, he (along with his brothers, Claude and Rush) had assembled the nation’s premier collection of European art from the thirteenth century to the nineteenth century— in round numbers, some 3,000 objects, including more than 1,400 Old Master paintings, 150 works of Italian and French sculpture, 1,300 Italian bronzes, and a wealth of frames, furniture, tapestries, and decorative arts. Analyzing the Kress Collection in the field of Italian seventeenth-century painting provides an interesting perspective on the taste for the Baroque in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. For example, the collection includes only a single, although very important, painting by Domenichino and a sole “Caravaggio” (or at least so the beautiful Roman Still Life, now in the National Gallery of Art, was thought to be when purchased in 1935).21 To be sure, there is one Guercino, one Luca Giordano, two paintings by Guido Reni, and two by Annibale Carracci, but, oddly, the collection ends there with respect to the “classics” of Italian Baroque painting; on the other hand, there are two masterworks by Tanzio da Varallo as well as a monumental Still Life by Anton Maria Vassallo—all remarkable for quality and rarity but hardly the work of artists with household names. Moreover, there are five paintings by Giuseppe Ghislandi (also known as Fra Vittore), six by Bernardo Strozzi, eight by Giuseppe Maria Crespi, five by Giuseppe Bazzani, and eleven by

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Alessandro Magnasco. The incredible vision and enthusiasm of the Kress brothers thus provides the single most effective introduction to an American audience of Italy’s “minor” seventeenth- and eighteenth-century masters. The individual most critical to the formation of the Kress Collection in its earliest years is Count Alessandro Contini-Bonacossi (1878 –1955), who deserves the credit for turning Sam Kress into both an Italophile and a collector of Italian art. Contini, a philatelic dealer who reinvested his profits in Old Master paintings, was one of the most successful private art dealers in the world at the time.22 Widely traveled, well connected, and well established in Fascist circles, he was rewarded with the titles of count (Bonacossi was his mother’s name) and senator by Mussolini; by 1930, Contini had acquired a magnificent villa (Villa Vittoria) in a large park in Florence (across from the railway station) and an impressive personal collection of art. Contini began his astonishing career as an adventuresome and hugely enterprising stamp dealer. Very early on he traveled through South America unearthing quantities of Spanish and Spanish-colonial rarities that he could sell with sizable markups in North America and in Europe. On a visit to Milan in 1899, in a public park he met a diminutive and minimally educated woman of humble background from the provincial hinterlands of Lombardy, Vittoria Galli. She had little to offer in the way of social cachet (and she had a young, out-of-wedlock child), but she possessed exceptional intelligence, insight, and ambition. The couple soon married and continued their philatelic travels to exotic parts until the First World War. Shortly after the war, the Continis were in Bergamo to collect a long-standing debt from another stamp dealer, who offered to pay the couple with paintings, which he assured them had far greater upside potential. Within a year or two the Continis were in the picture business with lavish

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private quarters in a villa on the Via Nomentana in Rome. In the early twenties, their business took them to New York, clearly the new frontier for European paintings. The Continis always operated as a team, without public exposure, a gallery, or advertising (and presumably no taxes). In New York they settled into a large suite at the Plaza Hotel with the very important adjunct of a kitchen, where Vittoria would practice her Italian culinary arts to the delight of their visitors. (This was decades before the city’s Italian restaurant invasion.) “Donna” Vittoria also kept a diary that survives and is an absolutely unique record of America and American art collecting as seen by this unschooled but incredibly perceptive woman.23 Contini seems to have conceived the grand, improbable project of acquiring a fine work by every known Italian master, and Kress bought almost exclusively from the Italian dealer from 1927 to 1934 in accordance with this plan. He paid extraordinary sums of money for his pictures, from tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of dollars, and by 1935 he is said to have invested the rough equivalent of $60 million in today’s money in his collection; in the next two years he more than doubled that outlay. In the 1940s, Contini’s activities as an art dealer were understandably constrained by the war, but by 1948 he had resumed his relationship with the Kress Foundation under the aegis of Rush Kress (1887–1956), and over the next couple of years he sold some sixty pictures, including a number of Italian Baroque works from English collections that had recently come onto the market. Although Alessandro Contini no longer traveled, he was never far from the action. The count was now served by an energetic and gifted Florentine pianist, Gualtiero Volterra (1901–1967), who possessed a keen eye for paintings and an even shrewder business sense. Gualtiero proved to be indispensable as a buyer, particularly in England as

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death taxes and socialism took their toll on the patrimony of the great country houses. Restoration and conservation were paramount concerns of the Kress brothers’ endeavors from the earliest days, and they realized the importance of the role of the restorer in the formation and maintenance of their collection. For years Stephen Pichetto (1887–1949), consultant restorer to The Metropolitan Museum of Art and to dealers such as Contini and Duveen, played a decisive role in the formation of Samuel Kress’s collection and aided Kress as a confidant and connoisseur.24 He was, moreover, the person through whom all decision making was directed, including art-historical advice, information on provenance, iconography, attribution, and even the final approval for the titles of paintings. Pichetto’s sudden death in 1949 was keenly felt by the Kress Foundation, which was just then entering a tumultuous period of acquisitions, including a number of Italian Baroque paintings. Contini wasted no time in suggesting a replacement—a talented Roman restorer and connoisseur of Old Master paintings, Mario Modestini (1907– 2006), whom he described as “without exaggeration the finest restorer in the world”25—and Rush Kress eagerly took Contini’s advice. Mario, despite not knowing a word of English when he arrived in New York for his first interview, was obviously so convincing that he was soon at work on a number of Kress projects. Eventually he left Rome altogether and settled permanently in New York, becoming an essential member of the team that brought to completion the grand design of the Kress Foundation to divide its entire collection between the National Gallery of Art in Washington and scores of institutions around the country. Mario loved and knew a great deal about Italian Baroque paintings. For years he proudly displayed in his workroom the beautiful copy he had lovingly executed of an Orazio Gentileschi.26 I remember well how he used to lament the fact that John Walker, director of the

National Gallery of Art—a card-carrying Berensonian— declined to choose for its collections some of the very best Italian Baroque paintings in the Kress Collection, although in fact he had been granted first refusal on everything.27 By the time Contini died in 1955, he had become one of Italy’s wealthiest men.28 His estate was enormous but was entailed with formidable complications, including his remarriage following Vittoria’s death in 1949. Negotiations between the Italian state and his various heirs dragged on for years until the early 1960s. A group of paintings was bequeathed to the Galleria degli Uffizi in lieu of taxes, while many others that had been purchased abroad, and therefore had export rights, were released and distributed to the various children and grandchildren. The dispersal of the Contini collection, including a number of Italian Baroque paintings, continued throughout the 1960s and 1970s, and many of the sales were expertly handled by the premier private dealer of the period, Eugene V. Thaw. In 1973, about three years after I returned to New York in a professional capacity, Thaw asked me to clean and restore a magnificent Tiepolo ceiling, The Triumph of Virtue and Nobility over Ignorance, painted about 1740 –50 for the Palazzo Manin, Venice (Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena), that he had purchased with a partner from the Contini estate. What a thrill it was for me to work on a painting that I had admired from forty feet below in the hall of Villa Vittoria in Florence fifteen years before! The Tiepolo was just one of the many acquisitions of masterpieces from the Contini collection made by Norton Simon (1907– 1993), the irrepressible California collector. The purchase of the ceiling had been preceded by many others with the same provenance and now in the collections of the Norton Simon Museum: Giovanni Bellini’s Portrait of Joerg Fugger (1474) and Francisco de Zurbarán’s The Birth of the Virgin (ca.

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20. Orazio Gentileschi (1563–1639), Danaë and the Shower of Gold, 1621–23. Oil on canvas, 161.3 × 226.7 cm. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum, 2016.6.

1627) and Still Life with Lemons, Oranges, and a Rose (1633), to name but a few. But for the great Italian Baroque paintings he acquired, Norton Simon turned to Wildenstein & Co. in New York, where he purchased in 1973 the superb (and superbly preserved) early Saint Cecilia by Guido Reni.29 Interestingly, the Reni had previously passed through the hands of David Koetser, Walter Chrysler, and Robert Manning.30 Another memorable addition to Simon’s collection was Guido Cagnacci’s masterpiece Martha Rebuking Mary for Her

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Vanity, painted after 1660. The painting turned up at a Sotheby’s sale in London and was bought by Simon, with the London dealers P. & D. Colnaghi bidding on his behalf. The purchase was finalized after a rather complicated auction buyback arrangement, in which the crafty financier excelled. These kinds of imbroglios became notorious and were the bane of all dealers who did business with the California collector. One wonderful Italian Baroque painting, however, slipped from Simon’s grasp: a magnificent Danaë and the Shower of Gold by Orazio

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Gentileschi (fig. 20) that belonged to the widow of the late London dealer Thomas P. Grange and was in storage in Switzerland.31 Simon was quickly seduced by the work’s erotic subject and grasped its importance, but so did a friend and colleague of Grange, the New York dealer and collector Richard L. Feigen. Because of the work I had performed on the Tiepolo (in a New York warehouse, for lack, at that time, of a proper studio!), other interesting conservation commissions from Simon followed. He occasionally asked me to inspect works that he was considering for purchase, and, because the Gentileschi was on offer at the time, and I was nearby in Lugano, I was able to convey to him my enthusiasm for the picture. In fact, Simon never fully trusted the advice he elicited from a single source; his decisions were invariably reached after

consulting various experts, whose opinions he weighed and considered. The Gentileschi Danaë clearly met with unanimous approbation, and Simon obtained an option from Mrs. Grange, pending the resolution of an earlier offer from Feigen. Finally, after much haggling, and shortly before his option expired, Simon chose to exercise his right to buy the picture. However, the time stipulated in the agreement was Greenwich Mean Time, not Pacific Standard Time, and Feigen got there first! It was one of the rare instances when Norton Simon, in his need to play a winning hand to the fullest extent possible, outsmarted himself. Fortunately, the picture remained in New York for many years, on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, until it was offered for sale at Sotheby’s in January 2016 and purchased by the J. Paul Getty Museum.

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chapter 4

An Invisible Web Art Historians Behind the Collecting of Italian Baroque Art

Richard E. Spear

21. Valentin de Boulogne (1591–1632), Samson, ca. 1630. Oil on canvas, 135.6 × 102.8 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund, 1972.50.

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The role of art historians in the collecting of Italian Baroque art in America merits a book of its own, given the magnitude and complexity of the subject. In an effort to make it manageable in this short essay, my focus is limited to the period after World War II and mainly to art historians whose careers were in teaching rather than curating or dealing.1 Even so, this overview inevitably is incomplete.2 The primary evidence for the subject rests with collectors and museum personnel who were inspired to appreciate the Italian Baroque by their teachers. Secondly, there is the legacy of those teachers among their students who became teachers and, in turn, stimulated taste for Italian Baroque art. The third category of evidence is art-historical scholarship. The invisible role of the art historian behind collecting is exemplified by Valentin’s Samson in the Cleveland Museum of Art (fig. 21). It will seem odd to trace its acquisition to the late Francis Dowley (1915–2003), a professor at the University of Chicago who had no affiliation whatsoever with the Museum. As a result of his teaching, Dowley’s students went on to make important contributions to Baroque studies. Among them are Dwight Miller, whose collecting will be cited below; Fred Cummings of the Detroit Institute of Arts, who as curator organized the major exhibition Art in Italy, 1600 –1700 (1965; see Andria Derstine’s essay in this volume); and eighteenth-century specialists Hal Opperman and Barbara Stafford. I am a student of Dowley, too. As an undergraduate at Chicago, I was inspired by him to study Domenichino, which I did for my doctorate at Princeton under the direction of John Rupert Martin.3 This detour leads back to Valentin, for were it not for Dowley, I never would have become an Italian Baroquist, nor would I have been invited by the director of the Cleveland Museum of Art, Sherman Lee, to organize Caravaggio and His Followers.4 While tracking down a painting by Orazio

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Borgianni that I wanted to consider for inclusion in the exhibition, I stumbled on the Almagià collection in Rome, from which Cleveland acquired Samson shortly after it was exhibited in Caravaggio and His Followers.5 Sherman Lee and Ann Tzeuschler Lurie, then the Museum’s curator of paintings, who had a special interest in the Italian Baroque, admired the painting, not only for its quality and condition, but also for its distinguished Barberini provenance.6 Its early history was established through the research of another art historian, Marilyn Aronberg Lavin.7 Such provenance data, like the data constituting the Getty’s Provenance Index, Burton Fredericksen’s brainchild, often affect a collector’s decision whether or not to buy a painting. The Getty’s Provenance Index has a new database devoted to Italian Baroque painting, specifically to some thousand prices I assembled on payments to painters in Seicento Rome, including the 25 scudi paid to Valentin in 1630 for his Samson.8 This intricate background exemplifies what I am calling the art-historical web behind acquisitions of Italian Baroque art. As for the second category of evidence that is an essential part of the web—the legacy of teachers—I note that, as Dowley’s student, I have taught Philip Sohm, Linda Bauer, George Bauer, the younger Steven Ostrow, Nicola Courtright, and Gail Feigenbaum, who in turn have been spreading the Baroque word at Toronto, Irvine, Minneapolis, Amherst, and the Getty. To follow the genealogy a step further by citing their students would run the risk of turning this essay into a litany of begats, albeit the lineage is considerable and an essential component of the larger story.9 Before leaving Samson, more attention should be paid to the third category of evidence, scholarship. Samson was part of the first international loan show on Caravaggio and the Caravaggisti in the United States (1971), an exhibition at the beginning of what has evolved into an absurd Caravaggiomania.10 Prior to 1971, only the Wadsworth Atheneum (see Eric

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Zafran’s essay on the Wadsworth in this volume), The Metropolitan Museum of Art (whose lackadaisical collecting in the field is addressed by Andrea Bayer in this volume), and the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City owned paintings by Caravaggio.11 Then, in 1973, the Detroit Institute of Arts bought Martha and Mary Magdalene (ca. 1598), Cleveland acquired the Martyrdom of Saint Andrew 1976, the Kimbell Art Museum purchased The Cardsharps in 1987, and the Metropolitan Museum acquired its second Caravaggio, The Denial of Saint Peter, in 1997. Meanwhile, American museums were buying numerous paintings by the Caravaggisti. A good indication of the trend is that of the twenty-six loans from American museums to the 2013 exhibition in Los Angeles and Hartford, Caravaggio and His Legacy, half were acquired in 1971 or later.12 Caravaggio and His Followers certainly was not the market influence on the collecting of Caravaggesque paintings in America, but it was an important catalyst, along with the widely read publications on Caravaggio and Caravaggism by Roberto Longhi, Denis Mahon, Alfred Moir, Benedict Nicolson, and others. As with publications on individual artists such as Caravaggio, art-historical research on Italian regions and cities has refined the understanding of schools of painting and accordingly expanded collectors’ taste. A good example is Florence, whose Seicento painting long was spurned as decadent but, thanks to the publications of scholars such as Mina Gregori and her students in Italy, and of Miles Chappell (College of William and Mary) in the United States, has had a strong revival. In fact, the only geographically focused Italian Baroque collection in this country, the Haukohl Family Collection in Houston, concentrates on Seicento Florence.13 Though private collectors, like museums, carefully assess the quality and condition of paintings under consideration, authorship obviously matters. By and large, authorship is the initial, catalyzing factor, which is why catalogues raisonnés, whether on

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Seicento Florentine painters (of which now there are many) or other painters of the period, have played an essential role in the history of collecting. Discussion of Caravaggio and catalogues raisonnés points to Walter Friedländer (fig. 22), whose groundbreaking monograph Caravaggio Studies, published in 1955, fueled scholarship on the Lombard painter. As a professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, Friedländer produced an extraordinary cast of Baroquists: as early as 1940, Margo Cutter wrote her master’s thesis on Caravaggio under Friedländer; two years later, Kenneth Donahue, curator of the Ringling Museum of Art under Chick Austin (see Virginia Brilliant’s essay on Austin and the Ringling in this volume), subsequently its director, and later director of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, wrote on Giovanni Bellori. Another of Friedländer’s students was the Caravaggio and Claude Lorrain scholar Pamela Askew (1951). Under Friedländer’s supervision, Richard Judson wrote on Gerrit van Honthorst in Italy (1954), William Crelly on Simon Vouet and Italy (1958), and the elder Steven Ostrow on Agostino Carracci (1959). In 1968, as curator at the Rhode Island School of Design, Ostrow organized the major traveling exhibition Baroque Paintings: Italy and Her Influence.14 At Rhode Island, Ostrow followed in the path of two other notable Baroque devotees, John Maxon and Anthony (Tony) Clark, who, respectively, later became director of fine arts at the Art Institute of Chicago and director of the Minneapolis Institute of Art. Both Robert and Bertina Suida Manning, notable collectors of Italian Baroque paintings and drawings, studied under Friedländer, too.15 Another Friedländer student vital to the story of collecting Italian Baroque art in America is Donald Posner (fig. 23),16 author of the standard catalogue raisonné of Annibale Carracci’s paintings, whose survey 17th and 18th Century Art: Baroque

22. Unknown photographer, Walter Friedländer (1873–1966), 1951. Photograph. Courtesy of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, written with Julius Held (see Pablo Pérez d’Ors’s essay in this volume on Held’s role in the formation of the collection of the Ponce Museum of Art), has been read by countless students and collectors since its publication in 1971. As a professor at the Institute of Fine Arts, Posner continued Friedländer’s legacy by teaching the late Francesco Trevisani specialist Frank Di Federico, and William Barcham, Catherine Puglisi, and Andaleeb Banta, who wrote dissertations on Canaletto, Francesco Albani, and Bernardo Strozzi, respectively. Three of the contributors to this volume, Edgar Peters Bowron, Eric Zafran, and Andria Derstine, studied with Posner. For Zafran it was just one course, but a course, he told me, that

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23. Unknown photographer, Donald Posner (1931–2005), mid-1970s. Photograph. Courtesy of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

was “truly eye and mind opening . . . it was quite important for the formation of my own taste.” The web behind the Metropolitan Museum’s acquisition of Francesco Cairo’s Herodias involves two other figures of major significance for this story.17 Herodias was given to the Museum in 1973 in memory of Rudolf Wittkower by Paul Ganz, that most passionate and insatiable of collectors of Italian Baroque painting, who, with his wife, Eula, acquired more than a thousand works, now entirely dispersed.18 Ganz credited his conversion to Italian Baroque painting to his attending Wittkower’s classes at Columbia.

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Well before settling in America, Wittkower (fig. 24) had a profound influence on scholars in the field; for instance, on Luigi Salerno, who spent time with Wittkower at the Warburg Institute in London in 1948 and later wrote important books that collectors know well on Salvator Rosa, Guercino, Italian still-life painting, and Seicento Roman landscape painting. Wittkower moved to the United States permanently in 1956 and the next year became chairman of Columbia’s Department of Art History and Archaeology. Through his leadership, teaching, and publications, the department was brought to international preeminence in the Italian Baroque.

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24. Unknown photographer, Rudolf Wittkower (1901–1971). Photograph. New York, Columbia University. Courtesy of the University Archives.

Wittkower’s most significant publication appeared in 1958, Art and Architecture in Italy, 1600 – 1750, one of the outstanding volumes in the Pelican History of Art. Thanks to two other leading Baroquists, Joseph Connors and Jennifer Montagu, a richly illustrated revised edition appeared in 1999. It is impossible to gauge the influence of Wittkower’s magisterial work on the history of taste for the Italian Baroque,19 for, while a large part of taste might be unaccountably innate, a fundamental premise of this essay is that taste is shaped by knowledge and understanding. The formation of Paul Ganz’s collection is a good example. Another is

the inclination of the distinguished architectural historian Henry Millon, who recalls that Wittkower’s “captivating seminars . . . determined much of the path I followed. . . . He transmitted an appreciation for mastery of the literature, the archives, and the monuments, as well as a love of the history of art and architecture of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Italy (and England).”20 During Wittkower’s chairmanship, Columbia students organized Masters of the Loaded Brush, an exhibition of Baroque oil sketches from Rubens to Tiepolo shown at the Knoedler Gallery in 1967. And two years later, Florentine Baroque Art was held

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25. Unknown photographer, Howard Hibbard (1928 –1984). Photograph. New York, Columbia University. Courtesy of the University Archives.

at the Metropolitan Museum.21 The first of those exhibitions was directed by another Columbia teacher of Baroque art, Milton Lewine (1928 –1979), while the second was overseen by Howard Hibbard (fig. 25), himself a student of Wittkower’s, who wrote important books on Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Carlo Maderno, and Caravaggio. I doubt that ever in America was there a period as fertile for the subject of this essay as those years before Wittkower’s death in 1971 when Wittkower, Lewine, and Hibbard were all teaching at Columbia. The student responsible for the catalogue of the Florentine show at the Metropolitan Museum was Joan Nissman, who, with Mort Abramson, now

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deals in Old Master drawings, as does Kate Ganz, Paul Ganz’s niece. All three were Hibbard’s students. Others include Mark Weil, whose teaching and collecting will be referred to below; the late Stephen Pepper; and Babette Bohn (Texas Christian University).22 Yet another distinguished scholar of the Italian Baroque taught at Columbia, Joseph Connors. Like that of Wittkower and Hibbard, Connors’s training is in architecture, but his intellectual curiosity has shaped his students’ interests much more broadly. In addition to those who under his guidance wrote dissertations on Baroque architecture, Louise Rice (New York University) has published a major book on the altarpieces of new Saint Peter’s, Alice Jarrard (The New School) studies theater history, and independent scholar Patrizia Cavazzini is a specialist on Agostino Tassi and the Seicento Roman art market. Moreover, Connors served as director of both the American Academy in Rome and Harvard’s Villa I Tatti. Indeed, Seicentisti have had an unusually prominent place in directing research institutions.23 In addition to Connors’s role, Henry Millon was the founding dean of the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), and his successor, Elizabeth Cropper, is a scholar of the Italian Baroque. Harvard’s early importance for our subject has radically declined from the years when it produced John Maxon, Alfred Moir, Irving Lavin, Henry Millon, Howard Hibbard (who studied under Wittkower when Wittkower was a visiting professor at Harvard in the mid-fifties), and Joseph Connors; the Metropolitan Museum’s Chair of European Paintings, Keith Christiansen; David Stone (University of Delaware); Laura Giles (Princeton University Art Museum); John Spike (Muscarelle Museum of Art); and two well-known figures in the Old Master trade, Alan Salz and Matthew Ruttenberg. While on the faculty at Harvard, the Renaissance scholar Sydney Freedberg taught courses on the Italian

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Baroque and published Circa 1600: A Revolution of Style in Italian Painting (1983). Freedberg’s teaching was responsible for converting David Stone to the field. Like Harvard’s, Princeton’s Department of Art and Archaeology cannot compare with the Institute’s or Columbia’s for its impact on the appreciation of Italian Baroque art, yet it has had some prominent graduates, such as Malcolm Campbell, long-time professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a leading authority on Pietro da Cortona; curator and Carracci scholar Diane De Grazia; James Clifton, director of the Sarah Campbell Blaffer Foundation; and Andrea Bayer, a contributor to this volume.24 A larger group of Seicentisti wrote dissertations supervised or cosupervised by Irving Lavin at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and earned their degrees from Princeton, the Institute of Fine Arts, and Rutgers.25 Yale, the fifth of what I consider to be the Big Five in art history on the East Coast, has influenced our field the least, to judge from the near absence of active Italian Baroque scholars among its alumni. Exceptions are Sheila McTighe (Courtauld Institute), who works on both French and Italian topics; Jeffrey Collins (Bard Graduate Center), who has published on late Settecento material; and David Nolta (Massachusetts College of Art and Design), who wrote his thesis on Francesco de Mura but has not continued in the field. Some noted Renaissance specialists who studied at Yale occasionally have crossed over into the Italian Baroque, such as Carmen Bambach and John Marciari. Another Yale graduate, Mirka Beneš, publishes on Italian Baroque landscape architecture and gardens. Two more Yale alumni deserve mention. The first is Edmund (Ted) Pillsbury, who, after graduating from Yale, completed his doctoral work at the Courtauld Institute. Under Pillsbury’s directorship, the Kimbell Art Museum acquired not only Caravaggio’s Cardsharps, but paintings by Annibale Carracci, Elsheimer, Domenichino, Poussin,

Bernardo Cavallino, and Pietro da Cortona, and sculptures by Bernini. Moreover, during Pillsbury’s years at the Kimbell and the enduring tradition he established, the Museum has featured exhibitions on Ludovico Carracci, Caravaggio and his Roman followers, early Poussin, Guido Reni, Ribera, Salvator Rosa, Bernini, Tiepolo, and Crespi. The Kimbell’s role in promoting knowledge of Italian Baroque art is remarkable and unsurpassed by any American museum. Fittingly, its current director, Eric Lee, who enrolled in many Baroque art courses while earning his doctorate at Yale, purchased a beautiful early Guercino, Christ and the Woman of Samaria, in memory of Pillsbury, at once paying homage to him and building on his legacy.26 Like Pillsbury, dealer-collector Richard Feigen earned his B.A. at Yale, jointly in art history and English. In addition to the many notable early Italian paintings in his collection, Feigen has bought outstanding pictures by Annibale Carracci, Ludovico Carracci, Schedoni, Saraceni, Turchi, Guercino, Lanfranco, and Orazio Gentileschi.27 For a Genoese collector, Giovanni Antonio Sauli, Orazio painted the Danaë later owned by Feigen and sold to the Getty in 2016. By chance, a second of Orazio’s three Sauli paintings is in another private New York collection, that of Mark Fisch, who is one of the increasingly rare American collectors interested in the Italian Baroque.28 No longer is anyone buying on the scale of Paul Ganz, Walter Chrysler (whose collecting is discussed by Eric Zafran in this volume), or the Mannings. In today’s market it simply is impossible to acquire hundreds upon hundreds of good yet inexpensive Italian Baroque paintings as Ganz did, though Carlo Croce, as noted below, is trying. Feigen’s and Fisch’s holdings are entirely different from Ganz’s or Croce’s: small and select. In addition to the Orazio, Fisch has bought an early, little-known large Guido Reni, along with paintings by Ludovico Carracci, Guercino (two), Preti,

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Procaccini, Gandolfi, and an unusually big Cavallino. He also donated a beautiful Penitent Magdalen by Corrado Giaquinto to the Metropolitan Museum in honor of Keith Christiansen.29 Mark Fisch told me that Sotheby’s expert George Wachter was instrumental in his decision in 1995 to collect Italian Baroque art. Wachter was a student of art history at Brandeis University and took Sotheby’s Works of Art course in London. Now, through his senior position at Sotheby’s (chairman of Sotheby’s North America and South America and co-chairman of Old Master Paintings Worldwide), he, like other auction-house experts, has strongly affected contemporary taste and collecting. Auction catalogues frequently report the opinions of art historians, especially on pictures attributed to important artists. To cite just one example, Christie’s lengthy entry on an Annunciation auctioned in 2013 as by Annibale Carracci is dependent on Posner’s monograph on Annibale and Gail Feigenbaum’s research on Ludovico Carracci. Feigenbaum is cited as believing that the Annunciation is by Ludovico. The catalogue further notes the opinions of Alessandro Brogi, who also favors Ludovico, and of Keith Christiansen, Xavier Salomon, Andrea Bayer, and David Steel, who prefer Annibale. In short, a large roster of art historians cited by Christie’s determined how the painting was presented to bidders.30 The route of another collector’s entrapment in the web of art history is unusually precise. In 1961, a trio of museum directors noted for their interest in the Italian Baroque—Thomas Colt at Dayton, Charles Cunningham at Hartford, and Kenneth Donahue at the Ringling— enlisted Robert and Bertina Manning to help organize a large exhibition, Genoese Masters: Cambiaso to Magnasco. While it was on view in Sarasota one rainy day in 1963, Mary Jane Harris dropped by and was hooked. Her taste for the Baroque strengthened when she took courses at the Institute of Fine Arts. As a graduate of Pennsylvania

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State University, Harris has been a key donor to its Palmer Museum of Art, giving or promising that museum works by Guercino, Pietro Della Vecchia, and Giovanni Baglione. The latter she acquired from Paul Ganz, as well as a painting by Scarsellino, which she donated to the Metropolitan Museum.31 Like Harris, the late Channing Blake, who earned a doctorate in architectural history at Columbia, was especially devoted to one museum, “the first I ever went into,” the Springfield Museum of Fine Arts. His small but focused collection included Manfredi’s Mocking of Christ, a pair of allegories by Trevisani, and paintings by Valerio Castello, Alessandro Turchi, Crespi, and Filippo Lauri. And, like Harris, Blake bought pictures from Paul Ganz, both the Manfredi and Castello, as well as Andrea di Leone’s Tobit Burying the Dead, which he sold to the Metropolitan Museum.32 Another collection with roots in art history is that of the late Barbara Piasecka Johnson, which was put together after Johnson studied art history in her native Poland and moved to the United States. The collection is now mostly dispersed.33 Despite the vast number of paintings she acquired with the fortune she inherited from John Seward Johnson I, cofounder of Johnson & Johnson, one might doubt her claim that “I will be greater than Frick.”34 She did, however, make many notable Baroque acquisitions, although she stubbornly refused to acknowledge some overly ambitious attributions (two to Caravaggio) and insisted that loans to exhibitions be labeled in accordance with her opinion.35 A significant number of her pictures passed through the hands of Patrick Matthiesen, a London dealer whose role is fundamental for the history of collecting Italian Baroque painting in America. Among the works she bought from Matthiesen is Carlo Saraceni’s Martyrdom of Saint Cecilia, which Matthiesen later resold to the Los Angeles County Museum.36 Johnson’s uncommon taste proved John Pope-Hennessy wrong in 1985 when she boldly acquired a

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life-sized Christ at the Column by Domenichino. Pope-Hennessy had thought that because of its “insistently emotional character . . . no private collector will buy it.”37 (His opinion was eventually validated when it recently failed to sell.)38 The late artist-collector Nelson Shanks studied architecture before switching to art school in New York and Florence. His real education, he has told me, was the time he spent in Italy, where he was converted to Baroque painting not in the classroom but by looking around in museums and churches. Nonetheless, “I’ve always tried to arm myself with knowledge.” Among his more than three dozen Italian Baroque paintings—the second-largest private collection in the country—are a charming small copper by Annibale Carracci, paintings by Cavaliere d’Arpino, Lanfranco, Mola, Caroselli, Strozzi, and Cavallino; a signed Guido Cagnacci; and others by Preti, Tiarini, Cignani, Solimena, and Crespi.39 Certainly the largest private collection of Italian Baroque paintings in the United States is Dr. Carlo Croce’s in Columbus, Ohio, which contains nearly three hundred Sei- and Settecento paintings, inevitably of varying importance. Most of Croce’s initial collection, then housed in Philadelphia, was sold in 1993.40 A lifelong collector (he bought his first painting at the age of twelve), Croce has been acquiring again—at the dizzying pace of two or more paintings per month! His collection now contains works representing virtually all of the major centers in Italy, from Genoa to Naples and beyond. Croce’s interest in the field, like that of Shanks, cannot be attributed to individual art historians but rather was formed by his exposure to Baroque art as he grew up in Rome. Even though he is in touch with many art historians, he says that he seldom consults before buying. One of his most significant acquisitions is Giovanni Lanfranco’s Diana at the Bath, which belonged to the Barberini and was recently published by Erich Schleier, whose numerous articles and exhibition catalogues on

Lanfranco and other Seicento painters have provided collectors with invaluable information and, accordingly, guidance.41 A final group of more modest collectors should be recognized because they could not be more germane to this paper: art historians who personally collect, albeit there is no American equivalent of the late Sir Denis Mahon. For example, Howard and Shirley Hibbard lent paintings by Cecco Bravo and Simone Pignoni to Columbia’s Florentine exhibition.42 Alfred Moir donated works to several museums, notably the Santa Barbara Museum of Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Mark Weil, long-time professor at Washington University, with his former wife, conservator Phoebe Dent, put together a notable collection of more than a hundred paintings, drawings, and prints that is promised to the Saint Louis Art Museum. It also contains Weil’s specialty, Baroque sculpture. Weil’s collecting had modest roots dating to the time when he started to acquire works as teaching aids for his classes. There his students included Judith Mann, curator of European art to 1800 at the Saint Louis Art Museum, who co-organized major exhibitions on the Gentileschi and Federico Barocci. Weil also mentored C. D. Dickerson, at the time curator of European art at the Kimbell and co-organizer of the recent exhibition of Bernini’s terracottas. Dickerson, who earned his M.A. under Weil and subsequently studied with Donald Posner and Keith Christiansen at the Institute of Fine Arts, is now curator and head of the Sculpture Department at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. In 1995, an exhibition at the Stanford University Museum of Art (now the Cantor Arts Center) consisted of dozens of loans from the collection of Dwight Miller, the leading authority on the work of Marcantonio Franceschini. While teaching Baroque art for more than three decades at Stanford (where Chandler Kirwin wrote his thesis on Cristofano

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NYU/IFA Columbia Harvard Princeton Yale Ancient

6

3

1

2

2

Medieval

3

2

2

1

2

Renaissance

4

2

4

1

1

Renaissance/ Baroque



1+ (Renaissance and Northern weighted)

2 (architecture)

2 (1 Central Europe, 1 architecture)



Baroque

1 (Spanish)

0

0

0

0

Modern

7

14

6

5

5

Asian/Islamic

4

4

5

4

3

Architecture (other than Renaissance/ Baroque)

1

5

As above

As above

1

Other

1

4

3

2

5





Table 1. Faculty by field, regular appointments (from departmental websites, 2012–2013)

Roncalli under Miller’s supervision), Miller collected paintings, drawings, and prints in his field.43 Were there ever an exhibition devoted to Italian Baroque art historians who bought what they taught, other loans could come from Ann Sutherland Harris, whose scholarship has embraced not only Italian Baroque art but also women artists, and who has written a survey text, Seventeenth-Century Art and Architecture (2008). Harris collects in one of her areas of expertise, Seicento drawings, nine of which were exhibited a decade ago in Pittsburgh Collects.44 To the hypothetical exhibition my wife, Athena Tacha, and I could lend paintings by Albani, Carpioni, Cagnacci, and Giordano, drawings by Arpino, Domenichino, Canini, and Cesare Gennari, and a group of Seicento prints, all of which, with an endowment earmarked for the acquisition of Italian Baroque art, are promised to the Allen Art Museum of Oberlin College. It would take another essay to credit the many art historians, especially European, who have not been

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cited here yet affected the collecting Italian Baroque art in America.45 Nor has there been space for discussion of various private collections with strength in Italian Baroque paintings, other than Barbara Johnson’s, that have been dispersed in recent years.46 While their breakup might seem disheartening, as paintings change hands, collecting continues. Yet I cannot be as sanguine about a concluding observation: the sorry state of Italian Baroque art in American universities today. While the field is being taught by specialists in about ten American doctoral programs,47 a table of the faculties at the “Big Five” East Coast departments, which tallies Italian and Northern Baroquists together, presents a dismal picture (table1). There is not one full-time appointment at any of those universities whose primary field is Italian Baroque painting, sculpture, prints, or drawings.48 And the same situation prevails across the country, from Chicago and Michigan to Stanford, Berkeley, and UCLA.49

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One reason for this situation is uncomplicated. With a rise of interest in non-European art, material culture, modern and contemporary art, and photography, those areas have gained priority. Due to tight budgets, appointments in fields with large demand have been made at the expense of premodern Western art. The Italian Baroque, historically the last in, has been the first out. At the same time, there has been a broad shift toward critical theory in many graduate departments. The original object has lost standing, with unclear consequences for collecting, especially if students are less affected by museums such as the Fogg, which historically has had an important influence on the field. A second, more slippery explanation for the demise of the Italian Baroque concerns taste. I suggest that when many American students and their teachers are questioning the power structures of traditional mega-institutions; when assertive spirituality is not only shunned but perceived as a

threat to civil liberties; and when identity politics and separatist movements are challenging the status quo—at such a time, most Italian Baroque imagery is seen not simply as irrelevant, but as embodying those excesses of wealth, authority, and power that provoke suspicion. The exceptional popularity of Caravaggio among all Italian Baroque painters is due in part to his image as a contrarian, as a revolutionary underdog who got away with challenging authority with “straight talk.”50 He is perceived as the antithesis of Guido Reni and other Italian Baroque painters, as a narrator of “actual events” happening to ordinary people, albeit his compositions are carefully staged and his collectors belonged to the Establishment. As Italian Baroque art vanishes from American curricula, it is difficult to predict if it will continue to be collected. Whatever its future, it has a noteworthy past in the history of American collecting, thanks in no small measure to the pivotal role played by art historians.

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chapter 5

Baroque in the Caribbean Luis A. Ferré and the Museo de Arte de Ponce

Pablo Pérez d’Ors

26. Anonymous (Venetian?), Lot and His Daughters, eighteenth century. Oil on canvas, 127.8 × 154.9 cm. Puerto Rico, Museo de Arte de Ponce. The Luis A. Ferré Foundation, Inc., 57.0027.

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The founder of the Museo de Arte de Ponce, Luis Alberto Ferré (1904 –2003), died three months shy of his one hundredth birthday, still actively involved in acquisitions and plans for the institution that was his lifelong project. The date of his passing makes him the most recent collector discussed in this volume, which presents a paradoxical difficulty: although Ferré’s name is still remembered in the auction houses of New York and London, his activity as a collector has not attracted quite the attention it deserves. To get a proper sense of it, relevant information must be gleaned from a number of receipts, notes, and unpublished letters in the museum’s archives. Ferré’s vision, his connections, and his modus operandi provide a fascinating chapter in the history of collecting in America, which will be approached here by focusing on some of the museum’s most celebrated treasures: an ensemble of Italian paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The multifaceted personality of Luis A. Ferré and his many achievements are almost impossible to describe in brief. He grew up in Ponce, a small town on the southern coast of Puerto Rico, and his childhood and youth in the first decades of the twentieth century coincided with what might have been the golden age of his hometown.1 Although San Juan had always been the island’s capital and the center of political, military, and ecclesiastical power, the local coffee and sugar production in the late nineteenth century brought new wealth that turned Ponce into the indisputable focus of the island’s cultural life and economic prosperity.2 When he was sixteen years old, Ferré moved to Boston to study engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and piano at the New England Conservatory; in fact, he might have become a professional pianist if not for the pressure to follow in his father’s footsteps in the steel and cement industries.3 Ferré’s other great passion was politics, which he entered with a strong social and philanthropic awareness; in

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time, he would work to improve labor conditions and champion the cause of Puerto Rican statehood, founding a political party and serving as governor of the island from 1969 to 1973.4 However, culture had always been at the top of Ferré’s agenda, at least since 1935, when he formed a group called Asociación Pro Arte Ponce to organize concerts and lectures.5 In time, this preoccupation would culminate in the founding of the Museo de Arte de Ponce. Following in the footsteps of Henry Clay Frick and many other great American collectors, Ferré’s interest in art was awakened after an eye-opening trip to Europe with his wife, Lorenza, in 1950.6 However, rather than starting a collection for himself, he began to entertain the idea of opening Puerto Rico’s first art museum. His natural choice was to establish it in Ponce to contribute to the town’s existing cultural life. Owing to his earlier involvement in politics, Ferré was keenly aware of the profound and rapid changes affecting Puerto Rican society at the time. The American government’s “Operation Bootstrap” had been launched following the end of the Second World War to boost the island’s economy, and the bulk of the population would soon leave the countryside to work in factories. Ferré feared that this would result in an overly acquisitive, materialistic society, and he envisioned the museum as an antidote, believing that artistic beauty fosters what he described as “the human need to dream, to feel, and to be overcome by emotion.”7 Ferré took up the challenge of developing his project in a place that lacked all the typically encouraging conditions: there were no great past or present collectors for him to emulate and measure himself against, nor was there an established school of art historians or, most importantly, a tradition of museums or museum-going. (By 1950, the literacy rate in Puerto Rico was around 25 percent.)8 Ferré’s activity as a collector began in 1953, perhaps unwittingly, when he bought three paintings by the

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two famous Puerto Rican artists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, José Campeche (1751– 1809) and Francisco Oller (1833–1917), whom he evidently believed needed to be represented in the future museum. After this probably impulsive buy, Ferré’s first step was to establish the Luis A. Ferré Foundation in 1956 to create the legal framework for the museum. The first person to point Ferré in the direction of Old Master paintings was Salomon van Berg (1887–1964), a Dutch-born diamond merchant and collector of Dutch and Flemish art who had opened a workshop in Ponce. Van Berg, who occasionally also traded in artworks, sold Ferré a few paintings, including his first Italian Baroque piece. Unlike many later additions to this part of the collection, this small canvas, a bozzetto by Giovanni Battista Gaulli (1639–1709) for one of the pendentives in the frescoed vault of the Jesuit church of Il Gesù, Rome, was properly catalogued with the correct attribution. Painted around 1675, the composition includes the Four Great Doctors of the Western Church, Saints Gregory the Great, Ambrose, Augustine, and Jerome.9 A similar bozzetto with four prophets of Israel is in the Cleveland Museum of Art, and preliminary drawings for the composition are in the Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf.10 Although not particularly grand in scale, Ferré’s first Italian Baroque purchase is directly related to one of the most important decorative cycles in seventeenth-century Rome.11 Besides this early addition to the museum’s collection, Van Berg made a more lasting and significant contribution by putting Ferré in touch with Julius S. Held (1905–2002), a renowned specialist in Northern Baroque art who is perhaps best remembered for his two-volume catalogue Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens (1980). Held had been forced to leave his job at Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie when the Nazis came into power in 1933. Seeking refuge in the United States with his wife, Ingrid, he

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settled in New York, where he taught art history at New York University and later at Barnard College.12 The first contact between Ferré and Held took place in New York in May 1957. On May 10, Ferré had taken part in his first auction at the Savoy Art and Auction Galleries (founded by Samuel Spanierman in 1928, and then located at 5 East 59th Street) and had asked Held for his opinion on the twenty-five Old Master and nineteenth-century paintings that he had just bought for under $7,000. Ferré had bid without any guidance, simply choosing works that appealed to him, and Held was surprised to find that among the twenty-five paintings were a number of very high quality; he advised Ferré to keep eight and sell the rest. Among the paintings were several Italian seventeenth-century pictures that are still part of the museum’s collection, such as Saint Praxedes by Simone Pignoni.13 Another version of the painting is in the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Chambéry. In addition to his advice on individual acquisitions, Julius Held played a decisive guiding role during the earliest stages of Ferré’s collecting. After their first meeting, Held and Ferré started corresponding regularly, and their exchange of letters would continue over four decades. For our purposes, the most interesting letters are those written in the decisive decade of the 1960s, starting in 1958 and 1959, at the very beginning of Ferré and Held’s friendship and professional collaboration. Ferré would write to Held asking for advice and informing him of new developments regarding the museum, and Held would promptly write back offering advice. Some of Held’s eloquent and thought-provoking letters dating from this period recall previous conversations with Ferré, which must have taken place either by telephone or during Held’s visit to Ponce in January 1959 as part of his sabbatical leave.14 We cannot overstate the importance of these conversations and letters in helping Ferré refine his idea of what the museum’s future character should be. For example, in one letter written in 1959, two

years after they met, Held reminded Ferré that “[a]rt lovers and art historians, which is not always the same, want the excitement of discovery. If I had a choice of visiting a place that has 10 pictures, each one by a famous painter, and another with 200, each by one less well known, I would not hesitate a second where to go.”15 By emphasizing what he called “the excitement of discovery,” the professor revealed a healthy share of what museum professionals nowadays might call “visitor awareness,” while at the same time holding to his ideal that Ferré should acquire artworks that would attract scholarly attention. Ferré and Held realized early on that Italian Baroque painting was an excellent avenue to achieve both goals. In the contiguous United States, collectors who were active in the middle of the twentieth century often encountered an ideological as well as aesthetic prejudice against Italian seventeenth-century art.16 However, in a predominantly Catholic environment such as Puerto Rico, the religious nature and devout sentiment that are recurring features in these paintings would provide an instant point of access for the average visitor, who would have at least some degree of familiarity with the iconography, the lives of Christ, the Virgin, and the saints, and the ways in which these images were originally displayed and used. A large canvas of Saint Luke Painting the Virgin by Luca Giordano, bought from French & Company in New York in 1957, provides an excellent illustration of Held’s point of view and demonstrates how well Italian Baroque painting was suited to Ferré’s vision for the museum.17 Ferré and Held wanted high quality, the thrill of discovery, and paintings that visitors could relate to, and Italian Baroque paintings perfectly served those purposes. They were also affordable, as market prices continued to be reasonable through the 1950s and 1960s. As for the other intended audience mentioned by Held in his letter, the art-historical community, Ferré’s purchases were noted by specialists in the

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United States as well as in Europe even before the museum’s opening. Held was also uniquely positioned to put Ferré in touch with what Richard Spear has called “the invisible web,” the network of scholars who were then carving out a place for Italian Baroque art in the Western canon. Time and again, Held consulted with specialists on either side of the Atlantic about the correct attribution of Ferré’s new purchases, and the lengthy, sometimes inconclusive discussions that ensued reflect the evolving nature of this developing field of study. For instance, Ferré had bought the Saint Praxedes mentioned above as the work of the Florentine Carlo Dolci, an attribution which Held suspected was incorrect. Some years later, Held put Ferré in touch with Mina Gregori, one of the leading experts in seventeenth-century Florentine painting, who suggested the current attribution to Simone Pignoni.18 Another case in point is an eighteenthcentury canvas of Lot and His Daughters, which Ferré acquired at the Galleria Athena during his trip to Rome in the summer of 1957, shortly after meeting Held (fig. 26).19 This picture was bought as the work of Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, but a year later Ferdinando Bologna made an elaborate argument to include it in his catalogue raisonné of the paintings of Francesco Solimena, as an early work.20 Other specialists, including Richard Spear, have found this attribution problematic.21 The painting is still under research, but it seems that the original Venetian attribution was probably closer to the correct one. The changing attributions of Saint Praxedes and Lot and His Daughters represent a familiar phenomenon in the field of Italian seventeenth- and eighteenth-century painting which is particularly evident regarding the collection in Ponce, owing in part to the fact that Held was not a specialist in the field and relied on external opinions. This was also somehow intensified by an important characteristic of Ferré’s attitude toward collecting, which can be related to the same letter cited above. Held wrote, “You know

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that I want above all pictures of quality, irrespective of their ‘fashion’ in the market. . . . After all, what you are building up is not meant to appeal only to the taste of 1959, or not even of 1969. A museum is built for the centuries, and as long as we do not let down our standards of quality, we will come out all right, because tastes and fashions change.”22 Ferré heeded this advice, and sought quality and condition rather than “big names” in the paintings he acquired, with the result that the works in the Ponce collection often defy easy attributions. As Held charmingly put it in 1961, in an article publicizing the new museum, “today’s Cinderella, after all, may be tomorrow’s Princess.”23 The history of the Museo de Arte de Ponce is punctuated by the appearance of several publications about the institution and its collection written by specialists, which achieved the important effect of opening up discussion, proposing changes in attributions, and bringing international attention to this rather remote corner of the art world.24 Now that he had defined the guidelines for future acquisitions, the next task for Ferré was to find a building to house the collection. The museum’s first premises were on number 70, calle Cristina, in an 1870 colonial house designed by Juan Bertoli Calderoni, a Corsican architect who had been hired to design the city’s theater and oversee its construction.25 This first Museo de Arte de Ponce, which opened on January 3, 1959, consisted of seven interconnecting rooms, within which the paintings were arranged roughly according to regional schools. In the year before the museum opened, Ferré made the acquaintance of the most important dealers of Italian Baroque paintings and usually bought several works at a time from each of them. For example, Julius H. Weitzner (1896–1986) immediately caught Ferré’s attention in a letter of October 10, 1958, when he wrote that “it might interest you to know, that I believe I have the largest and most important stock of Italian Baroque

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27. Pompeo Batoni (1708 –1787), Antiochus and Stratonice, 1746. Oil on canvas, 189.8 × 233 cm. Puerto Rico, Museo de Arte de Ponce. The Luis A. Ferré Foundation, Inc., 58.0064.

paintings of any dealer anywhere in the world.” Weitzner’s braggadocio clearly achieved its intended purpose, for Ferré bought from him a group of five paintings, including The Angel Healing the Blindness of Tobit by Girolamo Troppa, Landscape with Monks and Sailors by Alessandro Magnasco, and a painting representing the five Jesuit martyrs of Cuncolim, which was bought as by Carlo Maratti and later attributed to Sebastiano Conca by Erich Schleier.26

Among the five paintings which Ferré bought from Weitzner, two must have competed immediately for the visitors’ attention in the Italian galleries on account of their quality as well as their size: Pompeo Batoni’s Antiochus and Stratonice (fig. 27) and Francesco Furini’s Cephalus and Aurora (fig. 28).27 Furini’s beautiful fable, one of the treasures of the collection, is another good example of an Italian Baroque painting that benefited from scholarly

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28. Francesco Furini (1603–1646), Cephalus and Aurora, 1625. Oil on canvas, 231.2 × 190.5 cm. Puerto Rico, Museo de Arte de Ponce. The Luis A. Ferré Foundation, Inc., 58.0060.

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attention after it was purchased for the museum. In this particular case, both the iconography and the attribution have been subject to several changes over the years since Ferré acquired the painting, reflecting the pace at which original documents were discovered and articles and catalogues raisonnés published. The painting was bought as the work of Jacopo Vignali, and was given the title Venus and Adonis; later this was tentatively changed to a “Scene from an Italian Romance” (as it appears in the museum’s first catalogue of 1965), and, subsequently, to Diana and Endymion.28 The rather obscure subject matter, the unrequited love of the goddess of dawn for a mortal hunter, continued to elude specialists for over a decade and was finally elucidated by Joan Nissman in 1969, when the painting was exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Florentine Baroque Art exhibition as the work of Vignali.29 The correct attribution to Francesco Furini (1603–1646) was first proposed by Mina Gregori in 1972, although some scholars maintained the earlier attribution to Vignali for some time.30 Definitive confirmation of Gregori’s hypothesis came in 1974, when Anna Barsanti published the Life of Furini written by his fellow painter Domenico Peruzzi.31 This biography of Furini informs us that the painting was first shown in public, shortly after the painter finished it, on the façade of Palazzo Spini Ferroni in Piazza Santa Trinità, Florence, on the morning of the eve of the feast of Saint John the Baptist in 1625. In a record time of only three years after his earliest purchases, Ferré’s dream came to fruition. When the museum opened on January 3, 1959, fifteen Italian paintings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were on display, which represented about 25 percent of the museum’s holdings. The other prominent collection in the original museum consisted of Dutch and Flemish paintings from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, reflecting Julius Held’s own professional

and academic interests. With the institution up and running, Ferré’s collecting slowed down somewhat, and in the following months his attention was divided between his business interests, political activities, and his father’s deteriorating health.32 Thus, between the beginning of 1959 and 1962 Ferré did not acquire paintings in bulk, as he had done in the frantic run-up to the opening of the museum, but he accepted a few offers made to him by dealers with whom he had already established relationships. Among the paintings that entered the collection at this time was a charming genre scene, The Seduction by Gaspare Traversi, which was bought from French & Company in 1959 together with a painting of Saint Andrew by Anthony van Dyck.33 (Another Italian Baroque painting mentioned above, Luca Giordano’s Saint Luke Painting the Virgin, was acquired from the same dealer.)34 In a similar fashion, Ferré returned to Julius Weitzner in 1961 to buy two paintings of Saint Sebastian, one by Guercino and the other attributed at the time to Guido Reni.35 The exhibition The Agony and the Ecstasy at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in 2008 made it possible to compare four versions of the painting from Auckland, Madrid, Dulwich, and Ponce, and it became clear that the Ponce canvas is a later copy, although it faithfully records some of the original’s details that are difficult to appreciate in the other paintings.36 Another important addition to the collection came in 1962, thanks to Julius Held. The Samuel H. Kress Foundation was then distributing the founder’s collection among museums based in cities with Kress stores, and they agreed to donate fourteen paintings to Ponce. Besides several Trecento and Quattrocento paintings, these works included one addition to the museum’s Italian Baroque collection, a delicate Bolognese Head of Christ painted on slate, attributed to Elisabetta Sirani.37 As the collection kept growing, Ferré realized that it was necessary to bring a full-time museum

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professional to Ponce, although he continued resorting to Held as a consultant. He approached René Taylor (1916–1997), a British specialist in Spanish art and architecture who at the time was a professor at the University of Granada in Spain. Taylor came to the United States on a lecture tour, and Ferré hired him as the museum’s first curator after inviting him to take a detour to give a talk in Ponce. A few months later, in 1962, Ferré offered Taylor the post of director, which he would occupy for the next twenty-five years. Taylor came to reinforce Ferré’s interest in Italian and Spanish seventeenth-century painting, a field in which he had already made a reputation for Ponce. Around the same time that the museum received the Kress donation, Ferré started seeking a more permanent repository for the collection, and approached the architect Edward Durell Stone (1902–1978) for what turned out to be a landmark design. It is worth pausing for a moment to look into the general layout of the building, as I believe it exerted a fundamental influence on Luis Ferré’s collecting in the years after its opening. Stone’s modern building attempted to reference local colonial architecture: it is a horizontal, two-story structure with gardens at both ends and a balcony wrapped around the first floor. Some of the museum’s largest paintings, such as Edward Burne-Jones’s monumental Sleep of King Arthur in Avalon, could only be accommodated in the bigger rooms of the ground floor. Besides British paintings and a smattering of American and Puerto Rican pieces, the ground floor also contained some offices and storerooms, but the main display space was upstairs. The upper floor is accessed through an imposing double staircase, which divides a row of six hexagonal rooms into two wings. Ferré and Taylor’s idea was to separate religious and secular art, installing religious paintings in the east wing and secular paintings in the west. (In fact, the racier west wing was off limits to unaccompanied minors

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until the mid-1980s.) Within each wing, religious and secular paintings were arranged by school, although this scheme was probably implemented with some leeway. Probably on account of the upper floor’s distribution, Ferré’s acquisitions of religious and secular paintings could now be presented in a more systematic way than had been the case before the opening of the new building; this, of course, also affected the development of the Italian Baroque collection. The new museum building was considerably larger than the previous one, and additional acquisitions were needed in preparation for the opening. Seizing upon this as an opportunity to expand his sources, Ferré returned to his earlier practice of buying many paintings at a time. Thus, in 1962 he bought his first picture from Oscar Klein’s Central Picture Galleries—a depiction of the bishop saint Maurilius, patron saint of Ferrara, which was then attributed to Marcantonio Basetti by Antonio Morassi and was subsequently given to Carlo Bononi by Federico Zeri.38 Klein supplied Ferré with other Italian Baroque paintings in the following years, chief among them The Death of Seneca by Luca Giordano, which had been in the collection of the Dukes of Marlborough at Blenheim Palace.39 This was bought alongside five other paintings of different schools. Also from Central Picture Galleries came Giovanni Battista Langetti’s The Torture of Ixion (fig. 29) and Carlo Dolci’s Lamentation, bought together in January of 1964.40 That same year, Held mentioned the Langetti as an example of how the museum had been acquiring “pictures of superior merit” for almost a decade, in an article that he wrote in order to showcase the museum’s collection in anticipation of the opening of the new building—this would occur in the following year, on December 28, 1965. Regarding the later Italian pictures in the collection, Held commented, “It is well known that the art market is still generously offering paintings by the Italian Baroque artists, especially those whose names are not

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29. Giovanni Battista Langetti (1625–1676), The Torture of Ixion, ca. 1660. Oil on canvas, 193.6 × 257.2 cm. Puerto Rico, Museo de Arte de Ponce. The Luis A. Ferré Foundation, Inc., 64.0455.

making the front pages of art-history books.” A similar sentiment was expressed by Rudolf Wittkower as late as 1967.41 As the essays in this volume make abundantly clear, Ferré was far from alone in buying Italian Baroque pictures from New York dealers such as Julius Weitzner and Oscar Klein during the 1950s and 1960s. Since the supply of paintings was always limited, he surely must have competed with the other important collectors who were active in the same years, especially Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. (see the essay

on Chrysler by Eric Zafran in this volume) and Dr. Bob Jones, Jr. (see the essay by Ian Kennedy in this volume). It would be interesting to explore whether the New York dealers followed any strategy in offering specific paintings to one collector or another; unfortunately, the scarce letters in the museum’s archives that record these dealings do not allow us to answer the question. Richard Aste, the former associate curator of European art at Ponce, pointed out a common interest between Ferré and Chrysler besides Italian Baroque, namely, that both men also

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30. Giacinto Gimignani (1606–1681), The Stoning of Saint Stephen, ca. 1650. Oil on canvas, 121.8 × 163.4 cm. Puerto Rico, Museo de Arte de Ponce. The Luis A. Ferré Foundation, Inc., 66.0589.

collected French Salon paintings—an area which at the time was, if anything, even more unfashionable.42 Another important supplier of paintings to Ferré in the middle of the decade of 1960 was Paul Henry Ganz (1910 –1986).43 Ganz’s fortune came from his father, who had bought the Prince Matchabelli perfume company, and he was an active collector of Italian Baroque paintings who frequently bought, sold, and exchanged the pictures in his collection. He was one of the lenders to the exhibition Italian Baroque Paintings from New York

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Private Collections at Princeton in 1980, and his relationship with Ferré was instrumental in the growth of the Italian Baroque collection at Ponce.44 On June 8, 1966, for example, Ferré bought twelve paintings from Ganz for $65,000. The most remarkable among these are the Magdalen at the Cross by Giovanni Battista Caracciolo, Saint Francis by Ludovico Cigoli, Mercury and Argus by Pietro Bianchi, a beautiful Death of Adonis by Giovanni Battista Gaulli, and two moving scenes of martyrdom, a Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew by Sisto

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Badalocchio and a dramatic Stoning of Saint Stephen by Giacinto Gimignani (fig. 30). This important group of Italian Baroque paintings makes Ganz one of the museum’s main suppliers after the opening of the Edward Durell Stone building, as Erich Schleier and Julius Held have observed.45 Besides buying from Klein, Weitzner, French & Company, and Ganz, with each of whom Ferré established a sustained relationship by returning to them over the years and sometimes purchasing several paintings at a time, the museum occasionally acquired individual paintings from other dealers or at auctions––usually particularly fine works that Ferré, Held, or Taylor considered of outstanding quality. Some important pictures that entered the collection this way were The Infancy of Jupiter by Carlo Cignani, bought at the Parke-Bernet gallery in 1962, and The Doubting of Saint Thomas by Bernardo Strozzi, bought from Knoedler Gallery in 1965.46 The years 1965 and 1966, just before and after the opening of the museum’s new building, were the busiest period for Ferré as a collector of Italian paintings of the seventeenth and eighteenth centu-

ries. He must have considered this part of the collection more or less complete around that time, because in the later part of that decade his purchases declined in number. The most important later additions to the collection are a dramatic Aeneas Rescuing Anchises by Sebastiano Ricci and a Virgin and Child with Saint Francis by Carlo Nuvolone, bought from Central Picture Galleries in 1971 and 1974, respectively. After 1974, Ferré and his associates ceased to buy Italian Baroque paintings in order to direct their efforts toward other areas of the collection, Spanish art in particular. All in all, Ferré’s groundbreaking activity resulted in a collection of Italian Baroque paintings that has been described as one of the richest in the United States, together with the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, and the Bob Jones University Museum & Gallery in Greenville.47 The Museo de Arte de Ponce currently holds seventy-four Italian paintings from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, which present a compelling overview of the diversity and richness of Italian art of that period.48

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chapter 6

Dealing and Scholarship The Heim Gallery, London, 1966–1995

J. Patrice Marandel

31. Heim Gallery, Andrew Ciechanowiecki (1924 – 2015). Photograph. Los Angeles, The Getty Research Institute, Heim Gallery records, 1965–1991. © J. Paul Getty Trust.

To write about the Heim Gallery in London from its opening in 1966 until its final closing in 1995 is to evoke a past recent enough for many readers to remember and at the same time a world as distant to us as New York’s Gilded Age or Paris’s fin de siècle, as described by Henry James and Marcel Proust, respectively. Indeed, the art market and the world of art museums have changed so profoundly in the interim that it would require the talent of these writers to convey the genteel atmosphere of the London art scene in the early years of the Heim Gallery’s activity. Old Master paintings galleries were fewer then than now in London, but their presence dominated Old Bond Street, where the façades of the highly respectable firms of P. & D. Colnaghi & Co. and Thomas Agnew & Sons, established in 1760 and 1817, respectively, almost faced one another. Agnew’s, run by the same socially well-established family for generations, was a source for a variety of European paintings, many of which came from venerable British family collections. It was the place to find not only grand portraits by the likes of Reynolds, Gainsborough, or Lawrence, but also a spectacular Rubens or a fine Dutch Golden Age still life or genre scene. Italian Baroque paintings of the kind collected by Grand Tourists were also often available there, exceptional Bolognese paintings in particular.1 By contrast, Colnaghi’s, owned by investors with ties to continental Europe, was run by some of the most brilliant art historians active in London. Thanks to an active partnership with Italian dealers, the firm presented paintings acquired both in England and through those Italian sources. Both galleries were often the first, obligatory stops for American and European museum directors and curators on their visits to London during the second half of the twentieth century. There were, however, other Old Master galleries of great significance south of Piccadilly in St. James’s that contributed to the appreciation and diffusion of

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Italian Baroque art. These included Hazlitt, Gooden & Fox in Bury Street, run by Sir Jack Baer; Trafalgar Galleries, also in Bury Street, operated by Alfred and Ronald Cohen, which held a large stock of Italian Baroque paintings, many of which came from English and Irish country houses; and Leggatt Brothers in Jermyn Street, overseen by Sir Hugh Leggatt, who dealt in both British paintings and watercolors and major Italian Baroque paintings. Not far away, on Farm Street just off Berkeley Square, the legendary American-born Julius H. Weitzner (1896–1986) sold Italian Baroque pictures from his townhouse, which became a meeting place for museum curators and directors as well as for other dealers. Paintings, sometimes piled ten deep against the walls, were presented pell-mell, many unattributed and thus the subject of passionate controversy and discussion. Perhaps the most active of all the dealers under discussion in this volume, Julius Weitzner sold, directly or in partnership with other dealers, pictures—mostly Italian Baroque— that can now be found in practically every museum in the United States. The Bob Jones University’s collection (discussed in this volume by Ian Kennedy) owes its formation almost exclusively to Julius Weitzner. Considering the limited demand for Italian Baroque paintings at the time, and the not inconsiderable presence of the dealers mentioned above, one may question the wisdom of opening yet another gallery—as late as 1966—in a market that was not only well-established, but apparently sufficient to respond to the demands of both private collectors and public institutions. The story of the Heim Gallery is tightly linked to the history of its manager, co-owner, and finally owner of many years, Andrew Ciechanowiecki (1924 –2015; fig. 31).2 Born Andrzej Stanisław Ciechanowieck in Warsaw, the scion of an aristocratic Polish family, Ciechanowiecki had considered a career in the diplomatic service, but the Second World War put an end to those ambitions. He

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nonetheless studied economics and art history in one of the clandestine schools set up by the Polish Resistance and served in the underground Home Army, playing a courageous role in the Warsaw Uprising of 1944. After a brief stint as chef du protocole at the Ministry for Foreign Trade in the interim Polish government, he took a degree in economics at Krakow, followed by a master of arts degree in the history of art at the Jagiellonian University in the same city. His academic career was interrupted in 1950 by his arrest in connection with the “British Embassy Trial,” and, after lengthy and stressful interrogations, he was sentenced to ten years in prison in February 1952 for allegedly helping Anglo-Saxon and Vatican spies. Upon his exoneration and release after six years of incarceration, Ciechanowiecki received grants in 1958 from both the British Council and the Ford Foundation that enabled him to study in Britain and the United States. Although he was aiming at an internship at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, he did not secure a position there, essentially because of the intense dislike of the director, James Rorimer, but the opportunity provided an introduction to the American museum world, which in the end turned out to be far more rewarding than a post at the Museum. He had offers of work and additional fellowships, but he decided to return to Europe, where in the autumn of 1959 he enrolled at Eberhard Karls University in Tübingen to prepare another thesis, this time for a doctoral degree on a forgotten Polish musical court of the eighteenth century, which was published as Michał Kazimierz Ogin´ski und sein Musenhof zu Słonim. Ciechanowiecki’s academic background and accomplishments account to a large extent for his acquaintance and familiarity with a large group of scholars from both sides of the Atlantic. His formidable academic expertise and connoisseurship, whether in Portuguese Baroque furniture (on which he must have been one of the very few non-Portu-

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guese specialists), Renaissance bronzes, or Baroque sculpture, at one time prompted Michel Laclotte, then director of the Louvre, to tell him, “Monsieur, vous êtes aussi un marchand” (You are also a dealer). In 1961, Ciechanowiecki decided to remain in the West and settled in London, where he arrived with two pounds in his pocket, a substantial address book, and, above all, a flair for finding works of art of high quality. This was a time when medals by the Florentine sculptor and goldsmith Massimiliano Soldani or French animalier bronzes could be found for nominal sums on Portobello Road in London or the Marché aux Puces in Paris. Within a year, Ciechanowiecki was offered a directorship in the newly founded firm Mallett at Bourdon House, where he organized several groundbreaking exhibitions devoted to sculpture, mainly of the forgotten French nineteenth century and sculptors like the brilliant virtuoso Jules Dalou, which were received with much critical acclaim. By the time he left Mallett to cofound the Heim Gallery in 1965, his expertise in sculpture, from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century, was well known in London. Indeed, the partnership between Ciechanowiecki and François Heim, the leading Parisian dealer in Old Master paintings,3 was received by the English art establishment as an extraordinary boon to the London art market. The idea was that Andrew would bring in the sculptures and François the paintings. In an interview with Connoisseur Magazine on the occasion of the gallery’s opening, François Heim reckoned that such a gallery could only exist in London at that particular time, the city being, in his words, the one place where “enlightened and aesthetically sophisticated patronage” could be found.4 Heim Gallery’s first exhibition, Italian Paintings & Sculptures of the 17th and 18th Centuries, opened in June 1966 at its premises, 59 Jermyn Street in St. James’s, featuring thirty-one paintings, thirty-five sculptures, and fourteen drawings by Giovanni

Domenico Tiepolo. Terence Mullaly wrote of the exhibition in the Daily Telegraph, “There is . . . a distinguished group of Bolognese paintings. It includes a preliminary study in oil on paper by Guercino for an early altarpiece of 1613 for Santo Spirito in Cento. . . . Even more impressive are the Roman works. Both Pietro da Cortona and Lanfranco, the key figures in the second quarter of the century[,] are represented. Other Romans seen to advantage are Romanelli and Pietro Testa. Complementing these pictures are some of the finest sculptures seen in a London dealer’s exhibition . . . works by Lorenzo Ottoni, Algardi, Montauti.” He continued, “Yet for sheer appeal it is the group of Venetian works that are the most winning, Alexander and Campaspe by G. B. Tiepolo, a particularly fine Sebastiano Ricci, and good examples of Piazzetta, Pittoni, Pellegrini and Pietro Longhi, and drawings by G. D. Tiepolo,” and concluded, “There are also four large pictures that should not be overlooked. They are a splendid Magnasco, a Luca Giordano, a Strozzi, and an unusually beautiful Sassoferrato.”5 Most of the paintings had indeed been provided by François Heim and shipped from Paris, and the sculptures found by Ciechanowiecki. The prices were reasonable even by 1966 standards: large bronze Soldani medals sold for £100, the Tiepolo drawings ranged from £600 – 800, and paintings were offered for under £2,000. Only a few works reached five figures.6 The enlightened connoisseurs François Heim had intended to target responded well, as did British public institutions such as the Victoria & Albert Museum, the Fitzwilliam, and the Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery. A journalist for the Scotsman reported that “the curators of sundry English museums and art galleries have been usefully at work, judging from the burgeoning reserved labels.”7 American museums also made purchases from the Heim exhibition, notably the Cleveland Museum of Art, which acquired the Sassoferrato Saint Catherine of Siena Receiving the Crown

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of Thorns and a Rosary from the Christ Child (ca. 1643), which had been admired by Mullaly.8 The inaugural Heim Gallery exhibition did not pretend to offer more than a group of relatively fine pictures and sculptures for sale alongside a few important works by Bolognese, Venetian, and Neapolitan artists hanging on the gallery’s walls. But it made an enormous impression on the London cognoscenti. Benedict Nicolson, editor of The Burlington Magazine, noted, “the exhibition makes an excellent visual impression, because the pictures are divided up among the sculpture. In fact the place has an old-fashioned air of cluttered-up sumptuousness that we have lost sight of, and that reminds us of faded photographs of Edwardian exhibition galleries, the only touch of modernity being a fine attempt in the catalogue to get at the truth.”9 The paintings and sculptures on show had indeed been well researched, and most of the attributions have been upheld, with the notable exception of a painting attributed to Antonio Zanchi that over the years has been promoted to a Venetian-period Luca Giordano.10 With hindsight, one can recognize some of the future directions of the gallery, notably its role in promoting Neapolitan painting. The exhibition set the tone for the way the Heim Gallery would operate for the next thirty years. Typically, two exhibitions were organized each year: one in the summer, consisting of more important works and intended to coincide with the European trips of American museum directors and curators, and a second in the autumn for works envisioned for a broader group of collectors (Baroque Paintings, Sketches, and Sculptures for the Collector [autumn 1968] and Baroque Art for the Collector [autumn 1969]). The autumn exhibitions, however, did not lack for major works: the 1967 autumn exhibition, for example, presented thirtyfive works, including Francesco Solimena’s modello for his altarpiece depicting The Holy Trinity with the Virgin and Saints in the Neapolitan church of San

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Girolamo delle Monache (ca. 1705; Barber Institute of Fine Arts, Birmingham) and Francesco Maffei’s Annunciation (Ferens Art Gallery, Hull). Again writing in the Daily Telegraph, Terence Mullaly marveled at the scope of the exhibition of “Baroque oil sketches, drawings and pieces of sculpture” and mentioned their affordability: the drawings started at £100 each, the oil sketches at £250.11 Among the paintings so advantageously priced were works by Carlo Bonone, Antonio Bellucci, Benedetto Luti, Andrea Sacchi, and Donato Creti (represented by twelve drawings), to name but a few. A catalogue accompanied each Heim Gallery exhibition, with entries ranging from a few lines to page-long discussions of the works, including provenance and exhibition history as well as references to the scholarly literature. Many of these entries incorporated not only the research conducted by the Heim Gallery staff—that is, by Andrew Ciechanowiecki himself and a host of assistants who included over the years such notable scholars as William P. (Bill) Rieder, Alastair Laing, and Alex Kader—but also information on the works that was provided by the numerous curators, museum directors, academics, and scholars who made up the very constituency of the gallery. Indeed, the roster of the distinguished scholars thanked in the prefaces of Heim Gallery catalogues serves as a “ Who’s Who” of the leading Italian Baroque experts of the day: Ferdinando Bologna, Giuliano Briganti, Anthony Clark, Robert Enggass, Oreste Ferrari, Klaus Lankheit, Roberto Longhi, Denis Mahon, Mira Pajes Merriman, Dwight Miller, Jennifer Montagu, Philip Pouncey, Erich Schleier, and Carlo Volpe, for instance. The openings of exhibitions at the Heim Gallery were also innovative and became social and academic events in London. They were often opened in the presence of senior members of the Royal Family (twice by Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother), members of the government, and ambassadors, and attended by the elite of society, scholars, and museum professionals.

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Because of the importance the Heim Gallery placed upon scholarship, its catalogues—which Ellis Waterhouse pronounced “ingenious”—invited the kind of dialogue usually reserved for a more academic environment.12 If attributions were advanced as tentative, challenging them was never considered out of place. The art establishment came to anticipate the Heim Gallery catalogues with considerable excitement, and the seriousness of their content was readily recognized, not least by those who reviewed them. Benedict Nicolson, for instance, reviewed the 1967 autumn exhibition, Baroque Sketches, Drawings, & Sculptures, in The Burlington Magazine, employing a format that would be later imitated by many reviewers of museum exhibitions. He cast his review in the form of marginal notes to the catalogue taken during the exhibition, approving of an attribution here (“15. Solimena. Magnificent modello, not in F. Bologna. The most important in the show”), questioning another there (“5a. Volterrano (?) Certainly Florentine, with rich dark blues and reds. The reproduction gives no impression of its beauty”), or rejecting another altogether (“9. Not Cavallino, but Neapolitan about mid-century and classicizing”). Nicolson also noted with approval Denis Mahon’s entry on the Guercino Saint Jerome, which he deemed “the longest entry, and the best.”13 This informal exchange of ideas and opinions, which often took place over lunches and dinners at Frank’s, an Italian restaurant next door to the gallery in Jermyn Street (now Franco’s; a plaque marks the table where these conversations took place), came to define the spirit of the Heim Gallery. The British scholars who frequented the gallery and dined with Andrew Ciechanowiecki included not only Jennifer Montagu, Anthony Radcliffe, and Charles Avery, all distinguished specialists in Renaissance and Baroque sculpture, but also Anthony Blunt, Francis Haskell, Francis Watson, Terence Hodgkinson, Denys Sutton, John Hayward, and Neil McGregor; in

short, much of the British art establishment of the day. (In his commercial activities, Ciechanowiecki always favored British museums, giving them preference in their choice of works of art and always better prices. In this way he wanted to pay his debt to, in his words, “the country of my happy adoption.” Moreover, the gallery’s catalogues were always sold in aid of the National Art-Collections Fund or, occasionally, charities such as the Hospital of St. John and St. Elizabeth in London.) With keen attention to the exhibitions being planned by museums and galleries in London and elsewhere, Ciechanowiecki adopted the shrewd strategy of organizing certain of the gallery’s exhibitions to coincide with these public exhibitions. This started as early as 1968, when the autumn/winter Heim exhibition of French paintings and sculpture of the eighteenth century offered paintings by François Boucher, Hubert Robert, Nicolas Lancret, and Jean-Baptiste Pater, as well as lesser-known painters such as Jean Barbault and Carle van Loo, in the shadow of the major exhibition France in the Eighteenth Century, organized by Denys Sutton for the Royal Academy of Arts. Similarly, in the early 1970s, several Heim Gallery exhibitions were devoted to various aspects of Neoclassicism at a time when that style was benefitting from increasing scholarly attention and enjoying a revival generated by the 1972 landmark exhibition The Age of Neoclassicism, held at the Royal Academy and the Victoria & Albert Museum. By the early 1970s, much had changed from the early days of the Heim Gallery. The relationship between François Heim and Andrew Ciechanowiecki, although cordial and courteous, had deteriorated professionally. Ciechanowiecki felt that the Paris branch was not holding up its end of the contract and that paintings—in particular, paintings of great quality—were not arriving with the expected regularity at the Jermyn Street gallery. Paintings, and more specifically paintings from the

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Italian Baroque, were then in high demand, and not only from such probable clients as the National Gallery, the Fitzwilliam Museum, the Musée du Louvre, and European museums in general, but increasingly from American museums. Ciechanowiecki was in a unique position to be aware of the evolving taste of American museums and of their directors’ growing interest in paintings by artists whose names were largely unfamiliar to the members of their boards of trustees but for which they were willing to vouch, even to put their reputations on the line. He made yearly visits to a number of American museums in which he often played a significant role in helping to shape acquisition policies, programs, and exhibitions. He was particularly close to Anthony M. Clark in Minneapolis, John Maxon in Chicago, Sherman Lee in Cleveland, Otto Wittmann in Toledo, and Frederick Cummings in Detroit, a list that is far from exhaustive. Whether Italian Baroque scholars in their own right, such as Clark or Cummings, or enlightened, open-minded museum directors, such as Maxon, Lee, and Wittmann, they all participated in the enthusiasm for the Baroque which came to be perceived as being as essential to a well-balanced and encyclopedic museum collection as Italian Renaissance or Dutch Golden Age paintings. Indeed, a comprehensive collection of European art would not have been conceivable in the 1970s and 1980s without a serious core of Italian Baroque paintings. Contemporary scholarship helped to shore up this taste with key publications on the subject by Donald Posner, Marilyn Aronberg Lavin, Benedict Nicolson, Anne Sutherland Harris, Denis Mahon, Stephen Pepper, and Richard Spear, to mention but a few names in the Anglo-Saxon world. Baroque art was definitely in the air. With the supply of paintings from Paris diminishing, Ciechanowiecki decided to look for paintings himself. In general, he shunned the most obvious providers of Italian paintings in England; that is, the

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auction houses and the British country house collections. (In any event, the Italian Baroque pictures in venerable British family collections were more often than not destined for Agnew’s.) As for the saleroom, Ciechanowiecki’s preference for discretion largely stopped him throughout his career from acquiring works publicly. He does remember with amusement, however, his purchase of a painting by Mattia Preti for £10,000, which prompted a phone call from Peter Wilson, chairman of Sotheby’s, the morning after the sale, apologizing for such an outrageous hammer price. Acquisitions of paintings for the gallery from the mid-1970s were made mostly by Ciechanowiecki, an indefatigable traveler who maintained from his days of finding inexpensive and unrecognized bronze sculptures in flea markets a knack for discovering great works of art almost by chance and in the most unexpected places—whether French paintings and bronzes in Florence, Italian paintings in France, a bust by Antico in the back rooms of a Brussels decorator for £100, or a major painting by Carlo Saraceni, Dormition of the Virgin (fig. 32), painted for Santa Maria della Scala in Rome, found languishing on the walls of an old Catholic school, Ampleforth College, in North Yorkshire. An efficient network of both established and younger dealers from France and Italy contributed to finding major paintings for the gallery. In France, the group included Guy Charfnadel, Jacques Fischer, Georges de Lastic, and Jean-Georges Rueff, among others. In Italy, paintings were acquired through the Marcello and Carlo Sestieri family (who were also instrumental in providing paintings to Colnaghi) as well as Enzo Costantini, Fabrizio Apolloni, and Paolo Rosa in Rome, Ettore Viancini in Venice, Alessandro Orsi in Milan, and Leonardo Lappicirella in Florence. As the gallery developed and reached international stature, the paintings too became larger, more ambitious, and more suitable for display in public galleries—now Heim’s main

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32. Carlo Saraceni (1579?–1620), Dormition of the Virgin, ca. 1612. Oil on canvas, 305.1 × 231.1 cm. New York, private collection, on loan to The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

clients. In 1973, the Saint Louis Art Museum bought from the Heim Gallery Paolo de Matteis’s large Annunciation (1712; fig. 33), and Detroit acquired Gaetano Gandolfi’s vibrant Venus Receiving the Arms from Vulcan for Aeneas (ca. 1770 –75), both featured in the 1973 summer exhibition Paintings and Sculptures of the Italian Baroque. In 1976, the Gallery celebrated its tenth anniversary with an important exhibition entitled Italian Paintings & Sculptures of the 17th and 18th Centuries,

which featured twenty-one paintings and as many sculptures. Most of the paintings are now in public collections. They included Saraceni’s Dormition of the Virgin, presently on loan to The Metropolitan Museum of Art; the same artist’s Bath of Venus and Mars, formerly in the collection of Anthony Clark; Guercino’s Mars with Cupid (1649; Cincinnati Museum of Art); and Sebastiano Ricci’s Miraculous Draught of Fishes (ca. 1695 – 97; Detroit Institute of Arts, under the title Christ at the Sea of Galilee). In all,

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33. Paolo de Matteis (1662–1728), The Annunciation, 1712. Oil on canvas, 206.1 × 178.1 cm. Saint Louis Art Museum. Museum purchase, 69:1973.

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the exhibition presented two paintings each by Saraceni, Guercino, and Mattia Preti; three by Sebastiano Ricci; two by Corrado Giaquinto; and major individual works by Giovanni Lanfranco, Pietro da Cortona, Carlo Maratti, Giovanni Franceso Romanelli, Daniele Crespi, Cesare Dandini, Simone Cantarini, Giulio Carpioni, Ciro Ferri, Francesco Solimena, and Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini. It was, however, a few years earlier that the Heim Galley scored its greatest success, in both commercial and scholarly terms. The summer exhibition in 1971, modestly called Fourteen Important Neapolitan Paintings, was, without question, one of the most important exhibitions of Old Master paintings mounted by a commercial gallery in the second half of the twentieth century.14 The timing was perfect, playing upon not only the neglect into which the Neapolitan school had fallen outside of Naples but the extraordinary scholarly resources provided by contemporary Neapolitan art historians. No Italian Baroque exhibition captured with such acumen the art-historical zeitgeist. The Neapolitan school, from Luca Giordano to Francesco Solimena (and beyond), was well known to specialists but lacked the prominence of the Bolognese or Venetian schools. As a result, its works were still both relatively plentiful and available, and Ciechanowiecki shrewdly realized that they could be offered at prices that fell well within the acquisition budgets of many museums. Indeed, museums in both Europe and North America reacted with extraordinary alacrity, acquiring almost every painting in the show and seizing the opportunity to acquire large works that became centerpieces of their galleries. A masterpiece by Francesco Solimena, The Risen Christ Appearing to His Mother (fig. 34), went to the Cleveland Museum of Art; a second, The Virgin and Child with Saints Dominic and Catherine of Siena (ca. 1680 – 82), to the Gemäldegalerie, Berlin; and a third, Dido Receiving Aeneas and

Cupid Disguised as Ascanius (1720s), to the National Gallery, London. The Barber Institute of Fine Arts acquired one of the two Mattia Pretis in the exhibition, The Martyrdom of Saint Peter (1650s); the other, The Return of the Prodigal Son (ca. 1656), went to the Pinacoteca of the Museo Nazionale in Reggio Calabria. A Toronto collector, Max Tanenbaum (1909–1983), acquired Luca Giordano’s The Toilet of Bathsheba (ca. 1663– 65) from the exhibition, and it was subsequently given by his family to the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto; the other, equally large painting by the artist in the exhibition, The Rest on the Flight into Egypt (ca. 1660), was acquired by the Toledo Museum of Art. Although not yet considered to be of the same artistic stature as the more illustrious of his Neapolitan predecessors, Francesco de Mura fared well in the exhibition, with two splendid works, Bacchus and Ceres (ca. 1735), acquired by the Snite Museum of Art, The University of Notre Dame, and Charity (1743/44; fig. 35) purchased by the Art Institute of Chicago. Only a painting representing Lot and His Daughters, cautiously exhibited as by Massimo Stanzione (an attribution that was not retained by the authors of the monograph on the artist), did not sell; another, attributed to Aniello Falcone, The Supper at Emmaus (ca. 1615–25), was bought by the J. Paul Getty Museum and has now been reattributed (and perhaps promoted) to Bartolomeo Cavarozzi. Just as the Heim Gallery paid tribute to scholarly exhibitions at the Royal Academy and elsewhere, it was now the museums’ turn to pay homage to the pioneering role of the gallery itself—a unique situation in which Andrew Ciechanowiecki himself played a decisive role. Owing to his pioneering research into Florentine late Baroque sculpture over a period of years, he formulated and conceived an exhibition that would demonstrate that Florence, which had been described as a backwater during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, was in fact a vibrant, creative center for the arts. Orga-

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34. Francesco Solimena (1657–1747), The Risen Christ Appearing to His Mother, ca. 1708. Oil on canvas, 222.5 × 169.5 cm. The Cleveland Museum of Art. Mr. and Mrs. William H. Marlatt Fund, 1971.63.

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35. Francesco de Mura (1696–1782/84), Charity, 1743/44. Oil on canvas, 139.5 × 134.6 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago. Preston O. Morton Memorial Fund for Older Paintings, 1971.429.

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nized by Frederick J. Cummings and Marco Chiarini for the Detroit Institute of Arts and the Palazzo Pitti in Florence in 1974, The Twilight of the Medici: Late Baroque Art in Florence, 1670 –1743 featured painting, sculpture, and the decorative arts and represented a milestone in the history of the appreciation of the Italian Baroque in America and Europe.15 Ciechanowiecki’s diplomatic skills and art-historical acumen were brought to bear not only on the organization of the exhibition (he was an influential member of the Consulting Committee) but also on the selection of the contents, a number of which had passed through his hands at the Heim Gallery; for example, sculptures by Agostino Cornacchini, Giovanni Battista Foggini, Antonio Montauti, and Massimiliano Soldani. (He also loaned a number of medals from his important private collection.) Having contributed to the rediscovery of the Neapolitan school, and having placed significant paintings in museums, Ciechanowiecki took on an ambassadorial role in introducing the distinguished Neapolitan art historians Raffaello Causa, Nicola Spinosa, and Oreste Ferrari to American museum curators. The result was the large exhibition devoted to the art of Naples in the Settecento held in Naples and then in Detroit and Chicago in 1981– 82, The Golden Age of Naples: Art and Civilization Under the Bourbons, 1734 –1805. The seeds of that exhibition were planted at the Heim Gallery well before they blossomed in the offices of the museum directors and curators who hosted the show. Unfortunately, the 1984 – 85 Civiltà del Seicento a Napoli exhibition did not fare as well internationally, and, in spite of Ciechanowiecki’s efforts to convince an American institution to host it, it was not shown on this side of the Atlantic. But by then, with most of the museum directors mentioned earlier retired or no longer alive, a shift had occurred in American museums. Baroque paintings, while still occasionally acquired, no longer exerted the same fascination among the

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next generation of museum directors, curators, and exhibition planners. In 1986, Andrew Ciechanowiecki sold the Heim Gallery and moved to, in the words of one writer, “a more discreet bolt-hole across the street,” founded by himself and named the Old Masters Gallery. He dealt from there until 1995, when, as a result of a serious stroke, he had to close the gallery and retire from business. Although Ciechanowiecki continued to find the occasional Baroque painting, the focus of the gallery shifted toward other schools: academic French nineteenthcentury painting and, of course, sculpture. More stringent Italian export laws, as well as a dwindling supply of high-quality pictures, certainly contributed to this shift in taste manifest in the changing patterns of collecting among museums. It is a curious phenomenon that some of us still active in the field have witnessed: the rise, the apex, and the decline of the taste for Italian Baroque paintings. Nonetheless, the Heim Gallery, whose archives can now be consulted at the Getty Research Institute, merits a significant place in the history of collecting. This essay is a modest attempt at sketching the gallery’s originality, achievements, and innovations. It is easily forgotten that many of the features we now expect from a commercial art gallery, such as a well-researched catalogue or a thematic display, had rarely been done until the Heim Gallery developed the formula systematically. The innovative catalogues of the Heim Gallery became well known throughout the world and are to this day considered important source material. They were copied by the main London auction houses and by private galleries; it is significant that as the Heim Gallery was celebrating its tenth anniversary in the summer of 1976, its London competitor, P. & D. Colnaghi & Co., organized—perhaps as a backhanded compliment to its St. James’s rival—the exhibition Italian Paintings, 1550 –1780. The accompanying catalogue’s format, entries, and design so closely mimicked the tradi-

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tional Heim Gallery catalogues as to be confused with a Heim publication. Over its thirty-year existence, the Heim Gallery handled over a thousand Italian Baroque paintings, many of which have found a place in museums around the world, a testimony both to the taste of the period and the acumen of a remarkable individual. Few other art dealers exerted such a tremendous influence on collectors and curators, or helped

to shape public and private collections, particularly in the United States. As Tim Knox has written recently, “Very often the world of art fails to appreciate the contribution of influential art dealers in the formation of taste and collections, both private and public, but Andrew Ciechanowiecki’s name deserves to be firmly inscribed on the roll-call of arbiters of taste during the second half of the twentieth century.”16

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chapter 7

The Detroit Institute of Arts and Italian Baroque Painting

Andria Derstine

36. Robert J. Wickenden (1861–1931), James Edmund Scripps, 1907. Oil on canvas, 147.3 × 91.4 cm. Detroit Institute of Arts. Gift of the Estate of James E. Scripps, inv. no. 07.2.

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Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian paintings were among the earliest acquisitions of the Detroit Museum of Art, which in 1919 took the name Detroit Institute of Arts.1 In large part the collection of later Italian paintings was built by a handful of donors, many from interrelated families, and by staff particularly devoted to the Baroque. This essay describes the growth of the collection from the 1880s to the present, with emphasis on the many curators, directors, and other individuals involved. In 1883, Detroit’s city fathers hosted an Art Loan Exhibition—following earlier public art exhibitions in 1852, 1853, and 1862—that was to transform the status of the visual arts in the city. It was prompted by the suggestion of William H. Brearly, advertising manager for newspaperman James Edmund Scripps (1835–1906) at Detroit’s Evening News, when he learned that Scripps had included in his will a gift of $25,000 for the founding of a municipal art museum; Brearly felt that this project should be accomplished during Scripps’s lifetime.2 Opening on September 1 and closing on November 12, the 1883 exhibition comprised almost five thousand works, including later Italian paintings described as after Annibale Carracci and Guido Reni, and one listed as an original by Pietro da Cortona—a Condemnation of a Vestal Virgin, dated 1641—said to have come from the gallery of Palazzo Capranica.3 Pope Leo XIII (1810 –1903), who learned of the exhibition, presented to the organizers as a gift—not a loan—a Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine from the Vatican Museums. This painting was thus the first donation to what would become a permanent art museum in Detroit. A work of the Italian Baroque once in the collection of Cardinal Joseph Fesch (1763–1839), it has most recently been ascribed to the circle of Claudio Ridolfi.4 The many city leaders who had underwritten the Art Loan Exhibition, buoyed by its great success, were determined to found a permanent public art museum in the city. Indeed, the businessmen of

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Detroit were from the start keenly interested in doing so, noting the great increase in local sales revenue that had been generated by the exhibition and appreciating the potential economic importance a museum would have for the city. One clothing merchant, C. R. Mabley (1836–1885), wrote to the organizers on November 1, 1883 (by which time the exhibition, initially scheduled to run from September 1 to October 31, had already been extended), saying that he and other businessmen would willingly contribute funds to a permanent institution, since the increase in their revenue during the previous two months had been so great.5 The organizers began to meet and plan the following year, and the museum was incorporated the year after that, in 1885, and opened to the public on September 1, 1888, five years to the day after the inauguration of the Art Loan Exhibition. The holdings of the nascent institution were vastly increased the following year, 1889, when James E. Scripps (fig. 36)—the primary provider of initial financing for the 1883 exhibition, and whose intended bequest had inspired that event— donated more than seventy paintings that he had purchased in Europe during the previous two years.6 Born in England, Scripps immigrated to Illinois at age nine and came to Detroit at age twenty-five. Two European trips in 1864 and 1881 subsequently whetted his appetite for European culture and art. Seeing among his contemporaries a “prevailing rage for modern pictures,” he set out to further local interest in Old Master paintings, and his gifts form the nucleus of the museum’s extensive holdings in that area.7 Scripps’s visionary qualities with regard to collecting Old Master paintings are evident in his preface to a catalogue of his collection, in which he noted that there were few collectors of Old Masters in America, that such paintings would become increasingly rare in the future, and that existing American museums had made little effort to acquire them; he emphasized, moreover, that cities with

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collections of eminent artists were attractive to younger artists and students.8 In July 1896, when Scripps was presented with a medal by the museum’s trustees, he stated that he had originally determined to work for the good of the museum in the area of its permanent collection (as opposed to its art school or exhibitions) because he considered this the weakest area of the burgeoning institution. He then decided to focus on a specific area, and, in his words, finally settled upon creating a nucleus for a collection of works by the old masters. I was led to this first because I thought it a field less likely to be taken up by others; second, because I knew that every year it was becoming more and more difficult to procure genuine and desirable examples of 15th, 16th and 17th century art; third, because I had already from some years’ experience as a collector of prints by the old masters acquired some knowledge of the subject, and lastly, because I believed that by beginning early the Detroit Museum might acquire such a collection as would render it superior to all other western institutions in a field where it would be difficult for them later to follow.9

The gift of the farsighted Scripps focused primarily on seventeenth-century Dutch works, but also included ten later Italian paintings, of which four remain in the collection. These are a Guido Reni copper Head of Christ Crowned with Thorns (fig. 37), a work of fluid handling and a consummate distillation of the Baroque’s emotional power; a Sassoferrato Madonna and Child; Giovanni Paolo Panini’s Ruins of a Triumphal Arch in the Roman Campagna; and a pastiche after Carlo Maratti, a Madonna and Child with the Young Saint John the Baptist.10 Another thirty-six years would pass before, in 1925, another later Italian painting was acquired. For many reasons this is not surprising. In the early years of the twentieth century, the new institution had few resources with which to acquire works of art, and no staff member was specifically assigned to the field of

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European art. Much of the administrative focus was on educational programming, as well as planning for the construction of a new building on Woodward Avenue, designed by renowned architect Paul Philippe Cret (1876–1945). Construction of this building, the museum’s major accomplishment of the early decades of the twentieth century, was begun in 1922, and it opened to the public in 1927. Moreover, it was not until the 1920s that the first stirrings of a renewal of interest in Baroque art were to occur on the part of scholars and collectors. Although Italian painting from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had been appreciated in America as early as the eighteenth century, and was to gain increasing popularity throughout the mid-nineteenth century, from about the 1850s onward an anti-Baroque feeling began to rise, largely spawned by the opinions of the English writer John Ruskin and carried on by his disciples, including Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1908), from 1874 to 1897 a professor at Harvard.11 The paintings of Guido Reni, Carlo Dolci, Sassoferrato, and others that had been held in such high esteem by mid-nineteenth-century connoisseurs now began to fall from favor, while Early and High Renaissance works were increasingly valued. During the 1920s, this antiBaroque sentiment began to dissipate, and great strides toward resuscitating the reputation of Baroque works were made. This renewal of interest was to find full flower in the 1950s and 1960s, continuing to the present day.12 The 1925 acquisition of a painting by Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, Women of Darius Invoking the Clemency of Alexander (fig. 38), at the time considered as by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, is evidence of this change in taste, as well as of the importance of the museum’s new director, William R. Valentiner (1880 –1958). Initially appointed as adviser in 1921 and serving as director from 1924 to 1945, Valentiner had a profound effect on the museum’s collections. His major interests were the fields of

37. Guido Reni (1575–1642), Head of Christ Crowned with Thorns, early 1630s. Oil on copper, 49.5 × 40.6 cm. Detroit Institute of Arts. Gift of James E. Scripps, inv. no. 89.23.

Dutch and Flemish painting, Italian sculpture, and German Expressionist art, but the wealth of acquisitions of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Italian paintings made during his tenure attests to the growing importance of the field in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s. These gifts and purchases were the result of his astute cultivation of donors, and in some cases—such as the Tiepolo—his relationships with German art dealers. The painting, a product of the artist’s Würzburg years, had remained in a Bavarian collection before passing through the German art market.

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38. Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (1727–1804), Women of Darius Invoking the Clemency of Alexander, 1750/53. Oil on canvas, 118.2 × 98.5 cm. Detroit Institute of Arts. Founders Society Purchase, General Membership Fund, inv. no. 25.207.

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Other purchases and gifts of Italian Baroque paintings followed in the 1920s, with Christ and the Woman of Samaria (now known as a studio work but at the time considered an original by Guercino) purchased in 1926, and two paintings—Sebastiano Ricci’s Camillus Rescuing Rome from Brennus and Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s Madonna and Child— presented as gifts. A Portrait of a Young Woman, purchased in 1926 and now believed to be a product of the workshop of Girolamo Forabosco or a copy after him, was considered at the time of acquisition a sixteenth-century work by Palma Vecchio. Several years would pass until the next Italian Baroque painting entered the collection, in 1935, but from that year until 1947 thirty-two paintings would be added, largely the result of Valentiner’s judicious acquisitions and his cultivation of local collectors and donors.13 Many of the museum’s most important acquisitions during these years were gifts of Anna Scripps Whitcomb (1866–1953), the daughter of James E. Scripps, and her husband, Edgar Bancroft Whitcomb (1866–1953), who was director of the Detroit News and active as a museum trustee and member of the city’s Arts Commission. Their gifts in this period numbered nine and included two paintings by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo—a small Immaculate Conception that had been in their private collection since 1930, and Saint Joseph and the Christ Child, a fragment of an altarpiece from Aranjuez created during Tiepolo’s last years in Spain, for whose purchase they contributed the funds. Their interest in forming an excellent collection of eighteenth-century Italian painting, and specifically view painting, was further shown by their gifts of funds for the purchase of Bernardo Bellotto’s View of the Tiber with Castel Sant’Angelo, and a magnificent pair of views by Panini, View of the Forum and View of the Colosseum. In 1947, the same year as the Panini donation, the Whitcombs also gave funds for the purchase of Salvator Rosa’s Finding of Moses, which had been commissioned by the Colonna family in

Rome and remained in that collection through the eighteenth century, as well as Alessandro Turchi’s Allegory of Hope, considered at the time to be a sixteenth-century work by Moretto da Brescia.14 These same years saw three important donations by Edsel (1893–1943) and Eleanor (1896– 1976) Ford, who became good friends and supporters of Valentiner and were very active at the museum until their deaths. In 1936, they purchased and donated the Fruit Vendor, then considered by Caravaggio and now known as a work by the Pensionante del Saraceni. They followed this with gifts of two signal paintings by eighteenth-century Venetian artists: a Madonna and Child with Adoring Figure, the surviving fragment from the Sagredo altarpiece, Giovanni Battista Piazzetta’s earliest major painting, which they purchased and donated as a work by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, and Canaletto’s Piazza San Marco, for which they donated a portion of the funds. Eleanor’s cousin, Robert Hudson Tannahill (1893–1969), also became an assiduous collector and left the museum substantial gifts of American and nineteenth- and twentiethcentury French paintings, among numerous other donations; in 1944 he donated two portraits of Federico, Prince of Urbino, by Alessandro Vitali, considered then as by Federico Barocci. Various other donations and purchases in the 1930s and 1940s led to the museum’s acquiring, among others, works by Alessandro Magnasco, Nicolas Régnier, Giuseppe Maria Crespi, Bernhard Keil, Domenico Fetti, Ottavio Leoni, Angeluccio and Michelangelo Cerquozzi, Pietro da Cortona, Luca Giordano, and Bernardo Cavallino, as well as a small painting likely from the studio of Annibale Carracci, attesting to the growing importance of the Italian Baroque field in those decades.15 Valentiner, working with Cret, was responsible for the museum’s innovative gallery layout. Taking up the ideas of Wilhelm von Bode (1845 –1929), general director of the Prussian state collections at

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the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum in Berlin, to whom he had been an assistant, Valentiner determined to mix media within galleries arranged chronologically, rather than keeping like media segregated. The plan for the galleries as laid out by Valentiner and Cret was so innovative that the 1929 Encyclopaedia Britannica printed an illustration of the floor plan as an example of ideal museum gallery arrangement.16 When the new museum building opened in 1927, the Southern Baroque gallery held art by the Spanish artists Bartolomé Esteban Murillo, Francisco de Zurbarán, and Jusepe de Ribera; a Last Supper ascribed to Nicolas Poussin but now known as a work of Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne; and, from Italy, a Christ and the Woman of Samaria (then considered as by Guercino and today known as a studio work), James Scripps’s Sassoferrato, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo’s Women of Darius Invoking the Clemency of Alexander, and Sebastiano Ricci’s Camillus Rescuing Rome from Brennus, which was a gift to the museum from the art dealers Harry Reinhardt & Son in 1927.17 Valentiner retired as director of the museum in 1945 and was replaced by Edgar Preston Richardson, who served in that capacity until 1962, after having joined the museum staff in 1930 in the education department. During his tenure, in 1946, in addition to the small studio work of Annibale Carracci mentioned earlier, a Holy Family with Saint Francis, a Rebecca at the Well now given to Ranieri del Pace was donated. The Whitcomb gifts of the Rosa, Panini, and Turchi paintings followed the next year. During the 1950s, under Richardson, the collection was augmented by five later Italian paintings. One of these acquisitions was Bernardo Strozzi’s Street Musicians, which had hung for years in the home of the Italian vice-consul in Detroit; the painting was a gift of the Italian Americans of Detroit on the occasion of the 250th anniversary of the founding of the city. Two others were Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith and Her Maidservant with the Head of

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Holofernes, a gift of Mr. Leslie H. Green, who served on Detroit’s Arts Commission, and Panini’s Interior of Saint Peter’s, a gift of Mrs. Edgar R. Thom that built on the strengths of the museum’s other three works by Panini and whose provenance as part of the installation of eighteenth-century view paintings at Farnborough Hall in Warwickshire has been established. The other two of the five works given in the 1950s were— once more— donations of the Whitcomb and Ford families, continuing the tradition of generous gifts by members of the extended families of the Scrippses and Fords. Mr. and Mrs. Whitcomb, who both died in 1953, left the museum the evocative View of Dolo on the Brenta Canal by Francesco Guardi (which can be dated 1774 –76 and thus is a rare secure dating for a view painting by the artist), while Henry Ford II (1917–1987), Edsel and Eleanor’s son, and his wife, Anne McDonnell Ford (1919/20 –1996), enabled the purchase of Giovanni Battista Tiepolo’s Woman with a Mandolin. While the Guardi had not been part of a 1952 exhibition at the museum, Venice, 1700 –1800: An Exhibition of Venice and the Eighteenth Century, organized in concert with the John Herron Art Museum—now the Indianapolis Museum of Art—it is likely that its subsequent donation was inspired by the many works by that artist on view there. Eight years would pass from the acquisition of the Tiepolo to the purchase of the next later Italian work to enter the collection, in 1965. A figure central to the ensuing activity of the museum in the area of the Italian Baroque was Frederick J. Cummings (1933–1990), who joined the staff in 1964 as curator of European art. Over the following twenty years, until his resignation as director of the museum in 1984, he presided over the next great period of acquisition of Italian Baroque works and was instrumental in the organization of three important exhibitions, one in each of the decades of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, that were greatly to popularize the field. Under him, as curator and then

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director, twenty-five Italian Baroque paintings entered the museum—almost the entire balance of the collection the museum holds today.18 One of Cummings’s early projects at the museum was the landmark exhibition Art in Italy, 1600 –1700 (fig. 39), the first major, comprehensive exhibition dedicated to Italian Baroque art in America.19 Despite its brief run of less than five weeks in the spring of 1965 (April 6 to May 9), and its being shown only in Detroit, the exhibition would be highly influential in presenting and stimulating new research. The catalogue was written by a number of the most eminent scholars in the burgeoning field, including Rudolf Wittkower, Donald Posner, Robert Enggass, Olga Raggio, Robert Manning and Bertina Suida Manning, Dwight Miller, and Alfred Moir; Stephen Pepper compiled a list of previous Baroque exhibitions. The Italian Baroque had finally come into its own. The exhibition included over two hundred works from thirty-five American and Canadian museums, two dealers, and eighteen private collections, including twelve works from Denis Mahon (1910 –2011), including his Coronation of the Virgin by Annibale Carracci, now at The Metropolitan Museum of Art (fig. 40 shows Cummings and Mahon at the exhibition’s opening). The events surrounding the exhibition comprised a lecture series, with John Rupert Martin of Princeton speaking on Annibale Carracci, Seymour Slive of Harvard on Caravaggio, Robert Enggass of Pennsylvania State University on ceiling painting in papal Rome, Jacob Bean of The Metropolitan Museum of Art on seventeenth-century Italian drawings, and Rudolf Wittkower of Columbia on Gian Lorenzo Bernini.20 In the year of the exhibition, the museum acquired Domenico Antonio Vaccaro’s Solomon Worshipping a Pagan God (purchased as the work of Francesco Solimena and with a different title) and Carlo Bononi’s Adoration of the Shepherds, the latter with Tannahill funds; both of these were shown in

the exhibition. Another work exhibited in the show and purchased by the museum the following year was Salvator Rosa’s Self-Portrait.21 The ensuing years saw a steady stream of Italian Baroque works enter the museum’s collection, many with Ford family funds or those of others in the close-knit donor circle. Gifts included Felice Torelli’s Martyrdom of Saint Peter Martyr and Orazio Gentileschi’s dramatic Young Woman with a Violin, the latter a gift of Eleanor Ford. Further strengthening its collection of large seventeenth-century religious works, the museum purchased major paintings by two of the century’s most important artists: Guido Reni’s Angel Appearing to Saint Jerome and Guercino’s Assumption of the Virgin. The Reni was purchased largely with funds from Ford family members— Henry Ford II and Benson (1919–1978) and Edith (1920 –1980) Ford—and from the Ralph Harman Booth (1873–1931) Fund; Booth, an active museum trustee, was a friend and protégé of James Scripps and the younger brother of Scripps’s son-in-law George Booth, as well as a close friend of Edsel Ford.22 The Guercino was purchased in part with funds from Robert H. Tannahill (Eleanor Ford’s cousin), and in part with funds from Ernest and Josephine Kanzler, Josephine being Eleanor Ford’s sister. Tannahill also gave money for the purchase of Luca Giordano’s Entombment of Christ. The second of the major Italian Baroque exhibitions during Cummings’s tenure was one that he co-organized in 1973, the year he became museum director, with Marco Chiarini at the Palazzo Pitti in Florence. The Twilight of the Medici: Late Baroque Art in Florence, 1670 –1743, shown in Detroit from March 27 to June 2, 1974, celebrated a subject that had only recently begun to be studied in earnest, and led to still more acquisitions, including the purchase in later years of works by Carlo Dolci (a Madonna and Child) and Sigismondo Coccapani (Moses and the Daughters of Jethro). A Rebecca at the Well, considered as by Corrado Giaquinto at the time of

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39. Unknown photographer, entrance to the exhibition Art in Italy, 1600 –1700, Detroit Institute of Arts, spring 1965. Photograph. Courtesy of the Detroit Institute of Arts.

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40. Unknown photographer, Frederick Cummings and Denis Mahon at the opening of the exhibition Art in Italy, 1600 –1700, April 1965. Photograph. Courtesy of the Detroit Institute of Arts.

the exhibition, was later reevaluated and attributed to Giovanni Camillo Sagrestani; it has since been given to Ranieri del Pace. The year 1973 was also significant for the museum’s purchase of Caravaggio’s Martha and Mary Magdalen (Conversion of the Magdalen) with funds given by Eleanor Ford and the Kresge Foundation. From 1974 to 1984, when Cummings resigned as director, another thirteen Italian Baroque paint-

ings entered the collection. During this period, Dewey Mosby, who was appointed curator of European art in 1974 and remained at the museum until 1982, was instrumental in securing works for the collection. One, a Paolo de Matteis Danaë, was a gift of Mr. and Mrs. Lester Gruber, the owners of a local restaurant where it had long hung; they donated it to the museum upon its identification by Mosby. All the rest, with the exception of a single

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gift, were museum purchases with funding from various sources, including Gaetano Gandolfi’s Venus Receiving the Arms from Vulcan for Aeneas, secured with funds provided by Mr. and Mrs. Allan Shelden III. Mr. Shelden was the descendant of one of the organizers of the 1883 Art Loan Exhibition, which led to the museum’s creation. Other purchases in these years included Sebastiano Ricci’s Miraculous Draught of Fishes (later listed by the museum under the title Christ at the Sea of Galilee), Corrado Giaquinto’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt (with Tannahill funds), Giovanni Battista Langetti’s Sisyphus, Bartolomeo Manfredi’s Fortune Teller, and— owing to the impact of the Twilight of the Medici exhibition—a Carlo Dolci Madonna and Child and Sigismondo Coccapani’s Moses and the Daughters of Jethro. Andrew S. Ciechanowiecki (1924 –2015) of the Heim Gallery in London, who helped to formulate both the concept of the Twilight of the Medici exhibition and that of the museum’s next major Baroque exhibition, of Neapolitan art, worked often with the museum during these years, selling it paintings by Luca Giordano, Gaetano Gandolfi, Sebastiano Ricci, and Bartolomeo Manfredi.23 The third major exhibition of Italian Baroque works held during Cummings’s tenure, from August to November 1981, was organized by J. Patrice Marandel. The Golden Age of Naples: Art and Civilization Under the Bourbons, 1734 –1805 was also shown in Chicago, and earlier, in a somewhat different form, in Naples in 1979– 80. Having heard about the exhibition in its planning stages, when Marandel was a curator in Chicago and then in Houston, Cummings quickly decided he wanted Detroit to be a venue. He not only secured the exhibition, which showcased eighteenth-century Neapolitan art in all media, but also lured Marandel to the staff, hiring him in 1980 as curator of early European painting. Just as the 1965 seventeenth-century exhibition and the 1974 Florentine exhibition encouraged gifts and purchases of relevant paintings, the Naples

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exhibition awakened a greater interest in eighteenthcentury Neapolitan art (already represented in the museum by the paintings of Corrado Giaquinto, Paolo de Matteis, and Andrea Vaccaro) and led to the purchase of a pair of scenes of Neapolitan diversions by Filippo Falciatore and, some years later, of a pair of Old Testament works by Lorenzo de Caro, the latter with monies from the Mr. and Mrs. Henry Ford II Fund and Mr. and Mrs. Edgar B. Whitcomb funds, among others. Since the departure of Cummings in 1984, two later Italian paintings have been purchased by the museum. In 1990, Marandel, working with director Samuel Sachs II, purchased a Gioacchino Assereto, with funds donated in part by A. Alfred Taubman (1924 –2015), who was then president of Detroit’s Arts Commission, as well as monies generated by the sale of earlier Scripps and Whitcomb gifts. The painting complements the two other seventeenthcentury Genoese works in the collection by Bernardo Strozzi and Giovanni Battista Langetti. The most recent purchase of a later Italian painting by the museum was a 2003 acquisition by curator George Keyes, working with director Graham Beal, Pompeo Batoni’s Samson and Delilah, again acquired with Robert H. Tannahill funds. In that same year a small Head of a Boy, formerly in the collection of the nineteenth-century American collector Thomas Jefferson Bryan, was donated, the last later Italian painting to enter the collection to this point. The magnificent collection of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century paintings in the Detroit Institute of Arts — particularly rich in Caravaggesque and tenebrist works, eighteenth-century view painting, and paintings by Neapolitan artists of both centuries — is evidence of the passion and cultivation of a primarily interrelated group of donors from the Scripps-Booth-Whitcomb and extended Ford families (including Tannahill and the Kanzlers), as well as astute decisions on the part of the museum’s curators and directors. While

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the museum lacks works by painters such as Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, Giuseppe Chiari, Mattia Preti, or Francesco Solimena that would add to its breadth, or, for example, a “true” painting by Annibale Carracci or Carlo Maratti, a Giovanni Battista Tiepolo ceiling sketch, or a Batoni portrait of an Englishman on the Grand Tour that would add to its depth, Scripps’s hope that a collection of Old Masters would cause Detroit to become “a center of art education” has been realized, as the museum today holds one of the most important Italian Baroque collections in the country, used extensively both in scholarship and public out-

reach. “Dedicated by the People of Detroit to the Knowledge and Enjoyment of Art”— as exemplified in the motto over the entrance to Cret’s impressive structure — the museum has had, from its very beginnings, a close involvement with the city’s growth. Fulfilling its role for almost 130 years as a center for learning and inspiration for the people of Detroit— as well as a national and international audience — the Detroit Institute of Arts remains vital today, and the number and quality of its later Italian paintings exemplify the care with which its holdings have been built, over time, by dedicated staff and patrons.

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chapter 8

The Bob Jones University Collection of Italian Baroque Paintings

Ian Kennedy

41. Unknown photographer, Dr. Bob Jones, Jr. (1911–1997), in the Bob Jones University Museum & Gallery, Greenville, 1960s. Photograph. Greenville, Bob Jones University Museum & Gallery.

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The collection of European religious paintings from the thirteenth to the nineteenth centuries at Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, is the work of one man, Robert Reynolds Jones, Jr. (1911–1997). Dr. Bob (fig. 41), as he was known, was the only child of Dr. Bob Jones, Sr., who founded the university as a Christian fundamentalist institution in Florida in 1927.1 After the college became permanently established in Greenville in 1947, Dr. Jones, Jr., served as university president from 1947 to 1971, after which he handed the presidency over to his son Dr. Bob Jones III, and assumed the role of chancellor. The art gallery was established in 1951, with 25 paintings displayed in two rooms. The collection expanded rapidly and by the opening of the present museum building in 1965 comprised more than 250 paintings. Today, the Bob Jones University Museum & Gallery houses over 400 works, along with furniture, sculpture, and a collection of icons. A large number of the Old Master paintings are non-Italian, but the Italian pictures, especially from the Baroque era, are the best known, and were first brought to the attention of a wider American audience with touring exhibitions in 1984 and 1994.2 In 1997, a selection of the Baroque paintings toured Japan,3 together with a group of works from The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida. For a religious institution to concentrate exclusively on religious subject matter in its art collection is hardly surprising, but the question arises why a fundamentalist preacher and educator should have been attracted by so many Catholic works of art. As Henry Hope, editor of The Art Journal, wrote in 1965, “How, one wonders, does this exotic collection of Saints, martyrs, and Madonnas fit into the ritual of a fundamentalist, protestant cult. The spirit of these paintings is more that of the Counter-Reformation than of Martin Luther. As for Calvin and our New England ancestors, they would have banished the lot as Papistry.”4 Dr. Jones, both

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privately and publicly, was not shy in his criticism of the Catholic Church.5 However, a basic tenet of Protestant fundamentalism is faithful interpretation of scripture, and on this basis it is easy enough to justify much religious painting, whether Catholic or Protestant in origin, as textual illustration and thus a didactic tool transcending denominational loyalties. In response to criticism by other fundamentalists of his failure to exclude specifically Catholic subject matter, Dr. Jones wrote that his gallery was not intended to teach theology. He was quite content to own works to whose theological content he did not subscribe, and he noted that the collection was meant to provide “aesthetic enjoyment, historical instruction and the chance for religious reflection.”6 No doubt Dr. Bob was also too much of a collector to worry about doctrinal differences if a specific work of art appealed to him. Indeed, as Donald

Posner and Kathleen Weil-Garris Posner pointed out shortly after the opening of the present building in 1965, “The paintings seem to have been assembled with a spirit of wide ranging curiosity and unrestricted adventuresomeness that are usually associated with private rather than with public or university collections.”7 This relatively latitudinarian approach to collecting by a Christian fundamentalist is the more understandable given the university’s long-term commitment to secular cultural activities, especially the performing arts, as an appropriate forum for the development of the preaching and proselytizing skills which form part of the university’s mission. This policy dates back to the earlier days of the university, in keeping with the senior Dr. Jones’s ambition to build “a college that would neutralize in the minds of the public the idea that culture does not go hand in

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hand with the old fashioned, conservative, Christian approach.”8 In the 1930s and 1940s, no other Christian college had established a concert series, and from 1942 the university joined the small group of colleges producing operas. A film department was set up in 1950. However, the university is perhaps best known for its theater program. Dr. Bob Jones, Jr., was an accomplished Shakespearian actor, famous in his roles as Richard III and Shylock. Clearly, his theatrical bent made it easier for him to be seduced by the rhetoric of the Baroque era, as well as complementing his role as a preacher. Dr. Bob was well aware that he had a good eye for paintings, but was never reluctant to take advice. His first important contact, made in 1948, was Carl Hamilton (1886–1967), then adviser to the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh, who shrewdly grasped the value of an art museum for an evangelical college.9 Hamilton introduced Dr. Bob to ranking experts of the day, including William R. Valentiner (1880 –1958), William Suida (1877–1959), and Hans Tietze (1880 –1954), and later advisers included Federico Zeri (1921–1998), Anthony M. Clark (1923–1976), and Chandler Post (1881–1959). There is nothing more disconcerting for a collector than to look over his shoulder and find nobody else doing the same thing, but in the 1950s and 1960s many American and European collectors were drawn to the seventeenth century because prices were low. As Eric Zafran has shown, American collecting of Italian Baroque pictures, from its Ruskin-influenced nadir in the late nineteenth century, steadily increased during the following century,10 but only really became fashionable in the 1960s, and then principally for only the best-known painters. Dr. Jones lacked the financial resources of other collectors of Baroque paintings discussed in this volume, such as Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. (1909– 1988), or Don Luis Ferré (1904 –2003) in Puerto Rico; his budget for acquisitions, allotted by the university, was only $30,000 a year, supplemented

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occasionally with monetary gifts from outside donors. This meant he could not concentrate on the great names of the Italian Baroque. Dr. Jones developed ongoing relationships with a number of New York dealers, notably Elkan and Abris Silberman, Mitchell Samuels at French & Company, and Oscar and Jan Klein at Central Picture Galleries,11 but his closest bond was with Julius Weitzner (1895–1986).12 Weitzner was born into a musical family in New York and at first made a living by playing the violin in restaurants. After obtaining a degree in chemical engineering, he went into the paint business, and from there into art dealing. He subsequently became one of the most successful Old Master dealers in America, moving to the more important art center of London in 1959. He had a brilliant eye and made a number of notable discoveries, including a Peter Paul Rubens Daniel in the Lions’ Den (ca. 1614/16), bought at Bonhams in London and sold to the National Gallery of Art in Washington.13 According to Dr. Bob, Weitzner’s wife Ruth “used to say Julius made a living by selling unsaleable pictures.”14 In that respect, at least, Dr. Jones was his best client, and eventually over half the paintings in the collection came from Weitzner. The collector described Weitzner as “a good friend, almost like a brother to me.”15 This is borne out by their voluminous correspondence, which reveals a mutual esteem and affection transcending their numerous commercial transactions. The layout of the Museum & Gallery at Bob Jones University is labyrinthine, and the visitor’s experience is one of total immersion, so extensive and varied is the paintings collection. The following brief survey of the paintings, in keeping with the theme of this publication, emphasizes the Italian Baroque but is also intended to suggest the flavor of the collection as a whole, as well as Dr. Jones’s taste and intentions in assembling it, and the breadth of his interest. The original décor of the museum galleries, as Henry Hope observed, was somewhat

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heady, with gold moiré walls and green and purple carpets.16 This has now been toned down, though a decided atmosphere of clutter remains. The collection is arranged by national schools in roughly chronological order, but in the case of the Italian paintings, not by region. Half of the paintings in the collection are Italian.17 Of the early Italian pictures, the best is a Crucifixion by Francesco di Vannuccio, active in Siena in the later fourteenth century.18 Vannuccio is best known for his small-scale devotional works, and this painting is much larger than usual, about six feet in height. Nevertheless, the expressive intensity of the artist’s style is maintained on this scale, reinforced by the streams of blood aggressively spurting from the wounds. As an introduction to the Italian paintings, it sets the tone for the confrontational engagement with subject matter characteristic of many of Dr. Jones’s Baroque paintings. Very different is a large Coronation of the Virgin by Guidaccio da Imola, dated 1469,19 the only signed work by this provincial artist from the Romagna, whose style owes much to Melozzo da Forlì. The tooling of the gold ground is sophisticated, but no one would call this a work of great refinement. The painting leaves a vivid impression of horror vacui, as if the artist were afraid to leave anything or anybody out, but there are few works in America which so effectively show the determination of an artist of limited talent to make as strong a statement as he can. In this respect it reinforces the feeling of “discovery” that is one of the most stimulating features of a visit to the Museum. The transition from the fifteenth to the sixteenth century within the collection is marked by a polygonal gallery filled with tondos, dominated by a Madonna of the Magnificat by Sandro Botticelli and his studio. The outstanding early sixteenth-century Italian painting is a Rest on the Flight into Egypt by Francesco Granacci, one of several versions. Within a collection formed on a limited budget in the twentieth century, the Granacci serves nicely in

place of a painting by Raphael. Henry Hope, as mentioned above, linked the spirit of the Bob Jones collection to the Counter-Reformation, when artists were enjoined, as a stimulus to piety, to make the worshipper feel actually present at the events depicted. In line with this central mission statement of the Baroque era, three Cinquecento-style paintings of altarpiece size play into that idea. The first, though from slightly before the Counter-Reformation, is Sodoma’s Procession to Calvary, where the example of Raphael’s Spasimo di Sicilia is spiced with Northern realism inspired by Dürer. The second painting is by Francesco Cavazzone, a follower of Pellegrino Tibaldi, representing the Legend of the Finding of the True Cross. Here the narrative furnishings—the crosses and the ladders—are placed conspicuously in the foreground to give the onlooker a feeling of teetering on the edge of the excavation. In the third painting, a Birth of the Virgin by Palma Giovane, the perspective is tilted up in the manner of Tintoretto, suggesting to the spectator that he has just entered the birth chamber. In the case of the Sodoma, some attempt has been made to establish an ecclesiastical context by giving the painting a massive tabernacle frame. Like many frames in the Bob Jones University collection, this was made in-house. It presents the picture quite effectively, though its aggressive craftsmanship could never be mistaken for sixteenth-century workmanship. The Palma Giovane is accompanied by a group of Venetian Renaissance paintings, the finest of which is The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon by Tintoretto. Rapidly painted in the artist’s cursive style of the 1540s, it has the sparkle of a mosaic, with lighthearted touches such as the snail-like jars and vessels in the foreground. A fine bridge to the century following is provided by a Saint Michael the Archangel Overcoming Satan by Ventura Salimbeni, a Sienese painter who is rarely represented in American collections except as a draftsman. Salimbeni was a pupil of Federico

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Barocci and remained faithful to his master’s ethereal palette, but while working in Rome he absorbed the streamlined elegance of works of the Cavaliere d’Arpino, an influence particularly evident here. The diagonal limb pattern of the saint and the devil was a popular device at the turn of the sixteenth century, for example in Ludovico Carracci’s Flagellation (ca. 1585; Musée de la Chartreuse, Douai), with the result that the Bob Jones painting forms an instructive link between late Mannerism and the early Baroque. Another transitional work is a 1607 altarpiece by Denys Calvaert, a Fleming domiciled in Bologna, of Saint Francis Adoring the Christ Child.20 Iconographically this relates to Ludovico Carracci’s luscious altarpiece of the same subject, today in the picture gallery at Cento. Compared to Ludovico’s masterpiece, however, the Calvaert is more old fashioned in its polished surfaces and repetitive facial types, typical of the artist’s Northern Mannerist origins. The Museum & Gallery’s Seicento Bolognese holdings were strengthened in 1969 with the purchase from Weitzner of one of Dr. Jones’s finest Italian paintings, Domenichino’s Saint John the Evangelist (fig. 42).21 With a prestigious eighteenthcentury provenance from the Orléans Collection, the painting was snapped up ten years after the French Revolution by Frederick Howard, 5th Earl of Carlisle (1748 –1825). Its Raphaelesque combination of poise and sentimental spirituality greatly appealed to Grand Tour taste. Equally important is the Four Evangelists by Guido Reni of 1630 –35, very freely painted and possibly meant to be hung high and impress from a distance.22 According to the artist’s biographer, Carlo Cesare Malvasia, Reni would generate such pictures quickly to pay his gambling debts.23 In the 1630s, possibly for similar reasons, Reni expanded his studio, but the autograph level of these paintings is clear by comparison with a studio version of his celebrated Saint Michael hanging opposite. After the Renis, a very late

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Guercino of Saint Francis is perhaps too far on in the artist’s career to show him at his best. Among the major Roman artists in the collection, a Lanfranco Saint Cecilia was acquired in 1981, but Dr. Jones could never have afforded a Caravaggio, so the artist is represented by proxy by The Body of Christ Prepared for Burial by his rival Giovanni Baglione. This painting acknowledges Caravaggio’s classic Entombment of Christ in the Vatican, but the even lighting and some of the facial types are much closer to the Cavaliere d’Arpino.24 The link with Arpino can be verified in the gallery by a small Annunciation by the artist hanging in the vicinity. If any Italian paintings in the collection could be singled out as examples of Protestant taste, the choice would fall on two works by the Genoese painter Giovanni Battista Carlone, Joseph Sold into Bondage by His Brethren (fig. 43) and Joseph’s Brothers Showing Jacob the Bloodstained Coat. They originally formed part of a set of four, two of which were regrettably sold.25 Carlone is one of the grittiest Genoese artists, and these two examples are suffused with the shaggy realism of Salvator Rosa. Apart perhaps from the upward glance of Jacob, there are no spiritual overtones. They are straightforward narrative depictions of deceit and callousness, from which any hint of disapproval by a higher power is excluded. A religious subject which permits such a lack of emphasis on transcendental presence is much more akin to the Protestant religious ethic than to the more paternalistic approach of Catholicism. In the Bob Jones collection, Salvator Rosa himself is represented not by a figure subject but by a rocky-river landscape with the Baptism of Christ. The painting came to America from the Ricciardi Serguido collection in Florence as early as 1836, acquired by Richard Henry Wilde of Georgia.26 At that time the eighteenth-century taste for the picturesque still remained in fashion in the New World and found ready acceptance in a young country engaged in conquering the wilderness.

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42. Domenichino (Domenico Zampieri, called Il Domenichino; 1581–1641), Saint John the Evangelist, ca. 1625–28. Oil on canvas, 98.4 × 74.6 cm. Greenville, Bob Jones University Collection, P.69.467.14.

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43. Giovanni Battista Carlone (1603–1684), Joseph Sold into Bondage by His Brethren. Oil on canvas, 193.7 × 246.1 cm. Greenville, Bob Jones University Collection, P.52.24.

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The Baroque school is also reinforced by a fairly conventional Bernardo Strozzi of Christ and the Woman of Samaria, a typically solid Domenico Fiasella of the Flight into Egypt, and a charmingly Correggiesque rendering of the same subject by Bartolomeo Guidobono. In another North Italian context, this time Milanese, a fascinating comparison can be made between two altarpieces of the Madonna and Child and Saints by Carlo Francesco Nuvolone and Filippo Abbiati. The Nuvolone, dateable to the 1640s, is typical of the artist’s soft Murillo-esque style, which came into vogue as a reaction against the austerity of the Borromean era. The Abbiati, which is signed, differs from his usual picturesque late Baroque manner and must be quite early since it still shows the influence of Nuvolone, under whom he trained. A point to make here is this: where else in America, amongst the more obscure byways of the Seicento, could the connoisseur or specialist find such a precise and illuminating juxtaposition? In a letter to Weitzner in 1952, Dr. Jones stated that he was trying to avoid too many Madonnas.27 Most of his pictures of the Virgin, like those in the tondo room, are Holy Families and thus more “familial” in spirit, but a notable exception is a splendid Virgin and Child by Carlo Dolci,28 which has a devotional intensity that Dr. Jones on the whole avoided. All the more surprising, therefore, is Pietro della Vecchia’s Dead Christ Mourned by Angels (fig. 44), where the blatant physical presence of the corpse seems almost idolatrous. Indeed, this painting could have resided quite happily in the company of the most theatrically spiritual works of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, the arch-propagandist of Catholic triumphalism. Alas, Dr. Bob was reticent about its acquisition in his correspondence. Perhaps it was so exaggeratedly theatrical that it appealed to his thespian side. The collection has nothing else so extreme in its overt religiosity, and its inclusion has occasionally been criticized by other fundamentalists.29

The Dolci is accompanied by a nice Triumph of David by his master, Jacopo Vignali, but to a man of the theater the flamboyant Baroque of Naples and Sicily was bound to appeal more, and one of the best examples is Mattia Preti’s Christ Seats the Child in the Midst of the Disciples (fig. 45). Preti became a name to conjure with in the 1970s and 1980s, but Dr. Jones bought this painting long before that, in 1953, when the artist’s works were largely unfamiliar except to specialists. It was the first painting by the artist to enter an American museum,30 and it shows Preti’s lasting allegiance to the luscious chiaroscuro of the early Guercino. The works of the even more prolific Luca Giordano were never hard to find on the art market, and the Bob Jones University collection has two, Christ Cleansing the Temple and a Triumph of Miriam. From the earlier Caravaggesque generation in Naples, there is a Jusepe de Ribera Ecce Homo of 1638 and a large and unusual Pietro Novelli altarpiece, The Trinity Instructs the Archangel Gabriel to Announce the Incarnation to Mary, painted in a Riberesque manner modified by the example of Van Dyck’s work in Novelli’s native Sicily. Roman and Bolognese influences in Naples are demonstrated by Pacecco de Rosa’s bright and sculptural Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, although the vicious grin of the scugnizzo on the left is thoroughly Neapolitan. Finally, the school of Lanfranco in Naples is represented by Giovanni Battista Beinaschi’s Saint Cecilia with Angel Musicians, acquired by gift in 1956. In 1965, it was exhibited in a landmark Seicento show in Detroit as by Giacinto Brandi, but correctly assigned to Beinaschi by Robert Manning and Bertina Suida Manning.31 In the early years of the twentieth century, it was in the Wilstach Collection in Philadelphia, reinforcing Eric Zafran’s point about the persistence of Baroque acquisitions in America even when the style was generally unfashionable.32 Today, secondary artists such as Beinaschi are perhaps of less interest than they were a few decades ago, when they basked in the first glow of rediscovery.

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44. Pietro della Vecchia (1603/5–1678), Dead Christ Mourned by Angels. Oil on canvas, 122.2 × 178.1 cm. Greenville, Bob Jones University Collection, P.62.281.

The later Baroque in Rome is represented by an early Carlo Maratti of the Martyrdom of Saint Andrew, still in the lithe Hellenistic manner of his master, Andrea Sacchi, and by Giovanni Battista Gaulli’s Lot and His Daughters. The influence of Anthony Clark encouraged Dr. Bob to add a number of works by the Maratti and Baciccio following, including paintings by Sebastiano Conca, Giuseppe Chiari, Lodovico Gimignani, Placido Costanzi, Giuseppe Bottani, Mariano Rossi, and Pompeo Batoni. Most of these artists except Batoni were virtually unknown in America until elucidated by Clark, after

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which they achieved a certain popularity with museums and collectors. Painted within a narrow stylistic range, for the present writer at least, they could present a humiliating lesson in connoisseurship since they all looked the same! Their prices were never high, and in recent years only Maratti has become relatively expensive. The Bob Jones Maratti, of which there are other versions, was in the Imperiali Collection (Genoa and Rome). Then, like the Domenichino, it acquired an English Grand Tour provenance from the Philipps family of Picton Castle. The painting is recorded there before 1752, a

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time when Maratti’s reputation was at its height.33 The non-Italian part of the Bob Jones University Collection—the Netherlandish, German, French, Spanish, and English schools—is less well known but of comparable quality and interest, and many of the best works are from the Baroque era.34 Northern Renaissance pictures had long been a fixture in American collections, notably in the John G. Johnson collection in Philadelphia. They may have appealed to American taste for their craftsmanship and realism, traditionally associated with the bürgerlich values of a commercial society. Indeed, Dr. Jones admitted that if he had a choice, he would have preferred to concentrate on small, highly finished Netherlandish works,35 but chose the Baroque because it was cheaper and more readily available. Considering the zest with which he collected Italian art, and his love of the theater, this

can never have been a choice he regretted. Much of the sixteenth-century Northern material is in the Mannerist style and so has a restless energy that seems more compatible with Baroque dynamism than quieter devotional works. In Northern seventeenth-century painting, Dr. Jones was attracted to both Dutch and Flemish artists. In the early days of his collecting, he recalled “Rubenses falling from the skies like manna from heaven.”36 The problem was, of course, that some of the manna was ersatz. His Rubens Crucifixion was published by Michael Jaffé as autograph, but it has more recently and justifiably

45. Mattia Preti (called Il Cavaliere Calabrese; 1613–1699), Christ Seats the Child in the Midst of the Disciples, ca. 1680 – 85. Oil on canvas, 119.4 × 195.6 cm. Greenville, Bob Jones University Collection, P.53.41.

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been downgraded to a studio work.37 A possible candidate is Jan Boeckhorst. The collection possesses a masterpiece by this artist, an Adoration of the Magi, notable for its Poussinesque sense of interval and the coruscating highlights on the gamboling putti, the robes of the Magi, and the gifts they bring. In this painting Boeckhorst makes a wholly individual contribution to the diaspora of Rubens and Van Dyck. In Dutch painting, a Rembrandt (at least a real one) was always too expensive, but the Rembrandt school, archetypical of Protestant history painting, is represented by a Joseph Interpreting Dreams by Gerbrand van den Eeckhout, an Esther and Ahasuerus by Jan Victors, and two Govert Flincks, a Saint Matthew and the Angel and a Solomon Praying for Wisdom, related to Flinck’s painting in the Amsterdam Town Hall. The most fascinating Rembrandt school picture is Christ Before Pilate, attributed to Constantijn van Renesse. Whoever painted it, it is certainly from the circle of Nicolaes Maes, with its rich, glowing colors. Notable details are the squat Bardolphian figure of the guard and the Goyesque vignette of jailers hustling the two thieves into the dungeons below. Dr. Jones was to some degree a pioneer in collecting the Utrecht school, perhaps attracted by Catholic artists working in a Protestant republic. Examples include Abraham Bloemaert’s Christ and the Samaritan Women; Jan van Bronckhorst’s Apostasy of Solomon; a late Jan van Bijlert Saint Mary Magdalene Turning from the World to Christ, and a Holy Family in the Carpenter’s Shop close to Gerrit van Honthorst. A lunette-shaped Mocking of Christ (a replica of a painting in San Pietro in Montorio, Rome) by David de Haen hangs in an adjacent gallery, where it exactly fills the available space under the ceiling. From Haarlem there is a Pieter de Grebber Adoration of the Shepherds, and nearby a rather Venetian-looking Flight from Sodom by Matthias Stomer.38 Pursuit of French seventeenth-century painting was a natural extension of Dr. Bob’s interest in the

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Baroque of Italy. A room of French pictures, many of them replicas, is populated by a Mocking of Christ by Philippe de Champaigne, a version of a painting at Port Royal; works by Jacques Stella and Claude Vignon; a Salome with the Head of John the Baptist called a Vouet but recently identified as a version of a painting by Charles Mellin at Capodimonte;39 and several works in the Poussinesque tradition. The best of these are a Pentecost by Charles Lebrun (a reduced version of an altarpiece in Saint Sulpice); a large Visitation by Louis Boullogne the Younger; and a Christ with the Roman Centurion by Jean Jouvenet, related to a painting at Versailles. Apart from the Italian pictures, Dr. Jones’s Spanish paintings, within an American museum context, are perhaps the most comprehensive group. A highlight is a Pentecost by Juan de Juanes. The figure style is generically Mannerist, but typically literal and Spanish are the tongues of fire, dancing about like enormous fireflies. Among the seventeenth-century Spanish paintings, the major work is Saint Catherine of Alexandria Appearing to the Family of Saint Bonaventure by Francisco Herrera the Elder.40 Painted for the monastery of San Buenaventura in Seville, it has a stellar provenance from Louis Philippe’s Spanish Gallery. In a letter to Julius Weitzner concerning an offer to buy it, Dr. Jones commented, “while it is a Catholic picture, it is not a veneration of the Virgin or something of that kind and has the quality of a group portrait.”41 As we have seen, Catholic-but-not-too-Catholic was a watchword for Dr. Bob. The rest of the Spanish Baroque pictures offer fertile ground for further research. A Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness attributed to Antonio del Castillo needs investigation in the context of the burgeoning field of Spanish Caravaggism. Two paintings attributed to Pedro Orrente, an Ecce Homo and a Laban Seeking His Idols in the Camp of Jacob, may be by different hands. The Ecce Homo, heavily influenced by Titian and Veronese, is a smaller

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version of an Orrente in the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, while the Laban is predictably Bassanesque but perhaps too obsessive in its detail for Orrente himself. The best English (strictly speaking AngloAmerican) paintings, displayed in the War Memorial Chapel, are a set of large canvases by Benjamin West representing the Progress of Revealed Religion. They originally formed part of a larger series commissioned by George III for the Royal Chapel at Windsor, but the project was curtailed because of the king’s madness. Most are Neoclassical in the less rigorous pre-Empire mode, but the Moses and the Brazen Serpent42 is in a rumbustious neo-Baroque manner, anticipating the Pompier machines of later nineteenth-century French painting. A coda to the Museum & Gallery’s Old Masters is provided by a small group of nineteenthcentury works, including a very Baroque, even cinematic, Gustave Doré of Christ Leaving the Praetorium, and an Edwin Long of Vashti Refuses the King’s Summons.43 Overlooked today, Long achieved a saleroom record for a living British artist in 1882 with his Babylonian Marriage Market. Dated 1879, the Vashti is the essence of nineteenth-century Orientalism, luscious and overripe, with all the domestic charm of an Alma-Tadema as well as some of its

absurdities. Instead of being shocked or outraged at her summons, Vashti merely looks slightly cross, as if a new dressmaker had presented her with an unattractive ball gown! It is certainly an anomaly in the collection, but a reminder that Dr. Jones’s acquisitions never followed a set pattern and could always surprise. The Bob Jones University Museum & Gallery always impresses with its possibilities of discovery, not only because it is off the beaten track, but because it is unusually personal. Indeed, from an American standpoint, the Museum and its collection seem more compatible with the great houses like William Randolph Hearst’s San Simeon or the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston than with the standard institutional displays. Complex to navigate, stuffed with works of art of varying quality, the Bob Jones collections evoke the omnivorous American collections of the early twentieth century, and by extension the palazzi of the Mediterranean world of centuries earlier or rich ecclesiastical interiors. In contrast to the reputation of the university in the world at large, the effect is persuasive, even seductive, rather than polemical or proselytizing. There are few places in America where Old Master paintings can be enjoyed in an ambience so sympathetic to their original use and purpose.

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chapter 9

Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., and His Collection of Italian Baroque Paintings

Eric M. Zafran

46. Unknown photographer, Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. (1909–1988). Photograph. Courtesy Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk.

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Walter P. Chrysler, Jr. (1909–1988; fig. 46), was a truly amazing art collector. He was one of the first Americans in the forefront of gathering Italian Baroque paintings in the 1950s, and his legacy lives on at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia.1 He was the eldest son of Walter P. Chrysler, Sr., the brilliant, hard-driven auto manufacturer, who produced his first car in 1924 and within ten years had formed the second-largest auto company in the world. He proved a difficult model to emulate, but from his father Walter Jr. inherited, if not his business acumen, at least both his desire to micromanage and his volatile temperament.2 Walter Chrysler, Jr., always credited his mother, Della, as the one who encouraged his interest in art by taking him to museums and galleries both in America and on their world travels together.3 The success of the Chrysler Corporation enabled the family to live in great luxury in Manhattan, and they also had a large estate on Long Island near that of Louis Comfort Tiffany, from whom Chrysler derived his lifelong interest in glass.4 Chrysler developed a passion for collecting as a teenager in preparatory school; first stamps and coins, and then art. He dropped out of Dartmouth College, where he was a friend of Nelson Rockefeller, and began to turn his attention to modern art, although when the Chrysler Building opened in 1930, his father insisted he work there. But in 1931 he went to Europe so that he could buy pictures and then sell them at his own gallery in the Chrysler Building.5 He knew Gertrude Stein (1874 –1946) and met Pablo Picasso (1881–1973), by whom at one point he had over three hundred works.6 He gave Picasso’s The Studio to the Museum of Modern Art in 1935, and the following year donated to the institution a collection of Surrealist books and printed materials.7 The first public showing of the Chrysler Collection—all modern and American works—was held at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1937, followed by a presentation at the Arts Club of Chicago

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in the same year.8 Walter P. Chrysler, Sr., died in 1940, and with his inheritance young Walter bought an estate in Virginia to raise racehorses.9 But he also continued to add to his art collection and the following year showed it at Richmond and Philadelphia, now with the addition of 250 European works, including a watercolor copy of a prehistoric rock painting, a few Old Masters (El Greco, Chardin, Goya), and nineteenth-century artists (Degas).10 The New York Times described it as “one of the largest modern collections in the country.”11 In 1942, Chrysler enlisted in the navy and was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia. He left the service in 1944 for unspecified reasons, but while there he met Jean Outland (1922–1982), who in 1945 became his second wife, and thus a link to the future home of his art collection was established.12 In the early 1950s, Chrysler continued his indulgent life with the purchase of a yacht from Tommy Dorsey and dabbled in producing Broadway shows.13 With respect to his art collecting, he had made an unusual purchase in 1949 from the New York dealer Julius Weitzner of Peter Paul Rubens’s grandiose Portrait of the Archduchess Isabella Clara Eugenia (ca. 1616; Chrysler Museum of Art). It marked a turn toward the Baroque that was to continue over the next few years, with particular zeal for the Italian school. Walter Chrysler never explained why his collecting took this turn, but he did later state, apropos of modern art, “I like the strong effort of a painter or sculptor, as opposed to the soft. I like it when an artist really gets into it, when I can see the enthusiasm.”14 Baroque painting offered the exuberance and rich colors he craved, and at the time one could acquire a lot of canvas for relatively little money. Walter Chrysler liked big, inexpensive pictures. His major effort in collecting Baroque paintings came after the sale of the Chrysler Building in 1953.15 The income from the sale was divided among family members, so Chrysler fortuitously had ready cash at a time when the New York dealers

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had a large stock of excellent paintings coming largely from English collections. Chrysler’s collection eventually embraced ancient, Asian, and American art, glass and decorative arts, and a variety of great European paintings and sculpture. The European Old Master masterpieces he owned at one time or another included a great Veronese, The Virgin and Child with Angels Appearing to Saints Anthony Abbot and Paul the Hermit (1562; Chrysler Museum of Art); a Bernini school Bust of Christ (ca. 1679; Chrysler Museum of Art);16 Francisco Herrera the Younger’s Dream of Saint Joseph (Placido Arango collection, Madrid); Bernardo Bellotto’s Architectural Capriccio with a Self-Portrait in the Costume of a Venetian Nobleman (ca. 1762– 65; Otto Naumann, Ltd., New York); and Giovanni Paolo Panini’s Carnival Scene (current whereabouts unknown). Among the nineteenth-century works were paintings by Théodore Géricault (Evening: Landscape with an Aqueduct, 1818; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); Gustave Caillebotte (Paris Street, Rainy Day, 1877; Art Institute of Chicago); and outstanding examples by Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Paul Gauguin still in Norfolk. The twentieth-century paintings included numerous works, not only by Picasso, Georges Braque, and Fernand Léger, but also by Henri Matisse, most notably The Dance (1909; Museum of Modern Art, New York). In assembling his Baroque collection, Walter Chrysler did not bid at auctions himself, but relied instead on a handful of New York dealers with English and European connections for his acquisitions. In addition to Julius Weitzner, these included David Koetser, Frederick Mont, Nicholas Acquavella, Clyde Newhouse, and the father-and-son team of Oscar and Jan Klein at Central Picture Galleries. Chrysler, like John Ringling, was definitely impressed by the snob appeal offered by the distinguished provenances of many of the paintings he acquired. The first concentrated showing of the newly accumulated Chrysler Old Master paintings was a

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widely circulated exhibition of 101 paintings that opened at the Portland Art Museum in March 1956 and continued until April of the following year with showings in Seattle, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Saint Louis, Kansas City, Detroit, and Boston.17 The choice of works had been made by the Portland Museum’s director, Thomas Colt (1905–1985); Theodore Rousseau (1912–1973) of The Metropolitan Museum of Art; and the distinguished émigré scholar Dr. William Suida (1877– 1959).18 For this endeavor, Chrysler needed a research curator who could prepare the catalogue entries. He offered the post first to a young art historian, Robert Manning (1924 –1996), who was working at the Samuel H. Kress Foundation for his father-in-law, Dr. Suida. According to Manning’s daughter, he declined, so the position was offered (at half salary) to his wife, Bertina Suida Manning (1922–1992), who accepted and was set up with the files in an office in the Chrysler Building.19 The death of Chrysler’s younger brother, Jack, in 1958, appears to have led Chrysler to do something more meaningful with his life. He and his wife gave up their horses, yacht, jewelry, and lavish entertaining, and in that year, using funds from the sale of some Impressionist paintings, he purchased an abandoned church in Provincetown, Massachusetts, for $40,000 and converted it into the Chrysler Art Museum. There he could show on a rotating basis diverse works from his own Old Master and modern collections as well as work by contemporary Abstract Expressionists and other local artists with whom he became friendly and from whom he often made bulk purchases.20 Bertina Suida Manning compiled the notes for the 1958 Inaugural Exhibition at the Chrysler Art Museum of Provincetown, which featured many of the Baroque works.21 Chrysler continued to acquire Italian Baroque works throughout the late 1950s, which enabled him to present a different selection of paintings in the exhibition 1550 –1650:

A Century of Masters from the Collection of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., which was shown in Fort Worth, Tulsa, and Austin in 1962.22 That year proved to be critical for Chrysler’s reputation as an art collector, because in the summer he opened in Provincetown The Controversial Century, 1850 –1950: Paintings from the Collection of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., an exhibition of nineteenth- and twentieth-century paintings that turned out to be “controversial” indeed: During the presentation of the exhibition at Ottawa, it was revealed by John Canaday in a front-page article in The New York Times that 70 of the 180 works on view were fakes.23 The scandal was widely reported in the popular media, including Life Magazine, Newsweek, and Time,24 and the negative publicity was to dog Walter Chrysler for the rest of his life, casting a shadow over his positive accomplishments as an art collector, and also making him extremely defensive, if not downright paranoid. All the fakes quickly disappeared, and in March–April 1963 he placed on view at the Bowdoin College Museum of Art another group of Old Master paintings, Baroque Paintings from the Collection of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr.25 In fact, all through the early 1960s many paintings from the Chrysler collection were lent to the remarkable series of exhibitions organized by Robert Manning at the Finch College Museum of Art, New York, founded in 1959. The accompanying brief catalogues have proven very helpful in reconstructing the extent of Chrysler’s Italian Baroque holdings.26 These paintings were also a rich source for the museum exhibitions in the 1960s that were to bolster the positive rediscovery of the Baroque, such as the 1962 Genoese show in Dayton27 and, notably, the great Art in Italy, 1600 – 1700 at Detroit in 1965.28 The most extensive presentation of Walter Chrysler’s Italian Baroque paintings came in 1968, when seventy-one works were lent to the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences to celebrate the opening of its new Willis Houston Memorial Wing.

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This time the catalogue was written by Robert Manning.29 A few years later, when Chrysler felt he had outgrown Provincetown, he sought a new location to house his collection. He is said to have had interest from over one hundred institutions.30 In the end, in 1971, he chose his wife’s hometown of Norfolk. Much to the consternation of the city’s old guard, the Norfolk Museum’s name was changed to the Chrysler Museum, and Chrysler himself was installed as director, with the power to acquire and exchange works of art for the collection. Although he had promised his entire collection, worth a purported $65– 85 million at the time, he in fact gave only a part of it.31 Fortunately, that included some of the finest Italian Baroque works, and for the rest of his life he used the promise of the remaining pictures as a stick or carrot to get his way in the management of the Museum. The collection which Chrysler shoehorned into the galleries of the Norfolk museum created a curious impression during the 1970s. The installation struck one as a combination of the creative efforts of Mrs. Gardner and Miss Havisham—lots of dark spaces filled with fabrics on mannequins, juxtaposed with furniture and sculpture, set among some very great paintings and objects. Eventually the Museum expanded, and it has had several subsequent renovations and reinstallations. The recent 2014 reinstallation presents the collection in a most handsome and impressive manner. Unfortunately, Walter Chrysler never signed his final will making over the works still in his possession to the Museum. As a result, when he died on September 17, 1988, his wife having predeceased him in 1982, everything passed to a distant cousin, who promptly sold the collection in a memorable estate auction at Sotheby’s, New York.32 A number of major paintings were thus lost to the Chrysler Museum’s collection, including many of the Baroque school, notably an impressive Valerio Castello, The Legend of Saint Geneviève of Brabant (ca.

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1652; Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford [fig. 15 in this volume]), which sold for over a million dollars. Walter Chrysler was given to exaggeration; he once claimed, for example, that he had owned eight hundred European pictures.33 This cannot be verified, since so much of his record-keeping was veiled in secrecy. But with regard to the Italian Baroque, it has been possible to document about sixty paintings that he owned at one time or another. Chrysler’s compulsive collecting meant that he could never stop; he was always making deals and trading paintings, not just for other pictures, but also often for cars, jewelry, furniture, or cash. Thus, many works, some major and others minor, continually came and went. The best approach to presenting Chrysler’s Italian Baroque holdings is to follow Robert Manning’s system of dividing the works into regional schools, beginning with the Bolognese. Signed, dated, and accepted by Suida was a muchexhibited Annibale Carracci, Venus, a Satyr, and Two Cupids. Formerly in the famous collection of Sir Herbert Cook (1868 –1939) in England, the picture was acquired by Chrysler from Frederick Mont in 1953. Donald Posner, however, described the work as “an excellent later copy” of a painting in the Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, and it is no longer in the collection.34 Chrysler fared much better with Guido Reni and had two masterful paintings by that artist. One, an early Saint Cecilia (1606; Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena) that he acquired from David Koetser in 1953, formerly in the collections of the Borghese family, Lucien Bonaparte, and the Marquess of Lansdowne, he unfortunately traded away, and Norton Simon purchased it from Wildenstein.35 The following year, Chrysler bought from Koetser the splendid Meeting of David and Abigail (ca. 1615–20; fig. 47), which had been in the collections of the Duc d’Orléans and of Lord Feversham at Duncombe Park, Helmsley, North Yorkshire.36

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47. Guido Reni (1575–1642), The Meeting of David and Abigail, ca. 1615–20. Oil on canvas, 156.2 × 163.8 cm. Norfolk, Chrysler Museum of Art. Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., 71.524.

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48. Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Il Guercino; 1591–1666), Samson Bringing Honey to His Parents, ca. 1625–26. Oil on canvas, 101 × 149.9 cm. Norfolk, Chrysler Museum of Art. Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., in honor of the Board of Trustees, 1977–1985, 71.521.

Koetser likewise supplied two paintings by Guercino to Chrysler. The more famous is the 1625–26 Samson Bringing Honey to His Parents (fig. 48), which was commissioned by Cardinal Maffeo Barberini, later Pope Urban VIII, and thus the Barberini family coat of arms with the heraldic three bees is incorporated into the composition. The painting remained in Italy until 1764, when it was brought to England by Francis Russell, Marquess of Tavistock; upon his death in 1767 it passed to the Dukes of Bedford at Woburn Abbey, and it was auctioned at Christie’s,

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London, in January 1951.37 This is thankfully still in the Museum, but the other Guercino, Lot and His Daughters, which came from the Duff-Gordon collection, is no longer part of the Museum’s collection and remains untraced.38 Other examples of the classic Bolognese Baroque, also now gone from the collection, were a Domenichino Saint Cecilia with Angels that according to Richard Spear was a copy after a vertical composition in the Palazzo Pallavicini-Rospigliosi, Rome.39 There was also an Apollo and Amor formerly called

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Guercino, but attributed by Bertina Suida Manning to Giovanni Andrea Sirani.40 One of the finest Chrysler Baroque paintings, typically large and colorful, is the Musical Concert, which was long attributed to Donato Creti. It too has a distinguished provenance, having belonged to Viscount Palmerston and Lady Mountbatten before it went to the London dealer Daan H. Cevat and then to Koetser in New York.41 More recently the work has correctly been identified as the mate to the Card Players by the less well-known painter Giovanni Battista Boncori, which the Chrysler Museum wisely purchased in 2010.42 Walter Chrysler also owned two paintings by the great later Bolognese master Giuseppe Maria Crespi. One was a charming, signed Madonna of the Goldfinch from the collections of the Earl of Pembroke, Wilton House, which has vanished without trace.43 The other, much more significant work was The Continence of Scipio (fig. 49), painted for Count Antonio Colato in Bologna (ca. 1700). Later in the Bertoloni collection, San Remo, acquired by Nicholas Acquavella, and purchased by Chrysler in 1953, the painting is unquestionably one of the major Baroque works remaining in the collection.44 Chrysler’s artistic tastes extended into the eighteenth century, and among the later Bolognese artists represented in his collection but now dispersed was Giovan Gioseffo dal Sole with a painting of the artist’s favorite theme, Saint Mary Magdalene in Meditation, formerly in the Duke of Newcastle’s collection.45 A Settecento Bolognese painter who worked in Rome, Aureliano Milani, was represented by an early work, a signed and dated Combat of Achilles and Hector, also now gone from the collection.46 Among the Venetian painters, Pietro della Vecchia was richly represented in the Chrysler collection. Two of his paintings have been sold— Soldiers Playing Dice, acquired from Julius Weitzner in 1954,47 and a Philosopher from a Genoese collection

49. Giuseppe Maria Crespi (1665–1747), The Continence of Scipio, ca. 1700. Oil on canvas, 220.7 × 167.6 cm. Norfolk, Chrysler Museum of Art. Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., 71.543.

and shown in the important Venetian Seicento exhibition at Ca’ Pesaro in 1959, La pittura del seicento a Venezia.48 But two other paintings by the artist are still in Norfolk. One, a Saul and David with the Head of Goliath, was bought from Oscar Klein and also lent by Chrysler to the exhibition in Venice in 1959.49 The other and better-known work by the artist is a signed and dated 1649 portrait of the German philosopher and mathematician Erhard Weigl at age twenty-five that had been exhibited in Darmstadt in 1914 and in London in 1925.50 Also no longer in the

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collection is Pietro Liberi’s Mercury and Venus, acquired from Central Picture Galleries in 1954, which underscored why the artist earned the nickname of “Il Libertino” for his racy, erotic subjects.51 A different sort of secular subject matter displaying robust realism is found in another dispersed work, Sleeping Hunter and Cook, attributed to the Venetian Pietro Bellotti.52 Venice, a leading artistic and commercial center in the seventeenth century, attracted a number of foreign artists, and of these itinerant painters who are generally associated with the city, several were represented in the Chrysler collection. By the German-born Johann Liss there was a Cain and Abel from the Earls of Stafford, Wentworth Castle, South Yorkshire, that Chrysler purchased from David Koetser in 1954. In 1975, the picture went to Knoedler’s in a trade, but then was reacquired by Chrysler and came to the Museum in 1989.53 Another painter who is often included within the Venetian school, although he also worked in Rome, is the Flemish-born Nicolas Régnier (or Niccolò Renieri), by whom Chrysler owned two paintings. The more impressive was a Death of Sophonisba from the artist’s Venetian period, which had been shown in the 1959 Venetian exhibition. The picture had been purchased from Weitzner, but later Chrysler traded it and it went to Colnaghi in 1970, appeared in several sales, and was bought in 2002 by the Matthiesen Gallery in London. Patrick Matthiesen reports that he sold it to an unknown collector in Russia.54 Remaining in the Chrysler Museum, however, is a Saint Sebastian of around 1620 that had been originally identified by Roberto Longhi and came from the dealer Delius Giese.55 Also in the Museum is a splendid work by Pieter Mulier the Younger (“Il Cavaliere Tempesta”). From Haarlem the artist traveled to Rome at the age of thirty, and subsequently worked in Genoa, Milan, and Venice. His Landscape with the Journey of Rebecca (sometimes identified as a Flight

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into Egypt) was a famous work painted for Consul Joseph Smith (1674 –1770), so it is most probably of his Venetian period. It was later in the collection of Oswald Mosley Leigh and then went to Colnaghi in 1953 and later to David Koetser.56 Of the later Venetian masters, whose styles verge onto the Rococo, there were two works each by Sebastiano Ricci and Giovanni Battista Pittoni in the Chrysler collection. The Ricci Contest Between Apollo and Pan, which remains in the Museum, came from Sir Richard Colthurst of Blarney Castle, Ireland; it was bought at auction at Sotheby’s, London, in 1952 for £500 by Koetser, who sold it to Chrysler in 1954.57 The other, now untraced Ricci, The Continence of Scipio, also came from Blarney Castle via Koetser.58 Pittoni was one of several Venetian artists involved with commissions from the Irish impresario Owen McSwiny (1684 –1754) to paint a series of allegorical tombs commemorating heroes from recent British history, and his splendid Memorial to James, First Earl of Stanhope, which had come from the Galerie Philippe Reichenbach, Paris, in 1955, also remains in the Museum.59 The other Pittoni, a Sacrifice of Polyxena from the collection of Count Schwarzburg of Thüringen, was traded by Chrysler and is now in the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.60 Among the exemplars of the Neapolitan Baroque, Luca Giordano was represented in the Chrysler collection by seven paintings in 1964.61 Of these, the greatest by far and the only one fortunately still in the Museum is a signed and very Titianesque Bacchus and Ariadne. It came from the Schindler collection in Germany and was sold to Chrysler by Nicholas Acquavella.62 Also extremely fine is The Dream of Saint Joseph, which Chrysler acquired from David Koetser but sold in 1971 to Agnew’s in London, from whom it was purchased by the Indianapolis Museum of Art.63 The other Giordanos included a Descent from the Cross acquired in 1955 from Central Picture Galleries,64 a very Riberesque Hercules Wrestling with Mars (from

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Koetser),65 as well as Hercules and the Nemean Lion, Christ Carrying the Cross, and Thetis Inspecting the Arms of Achilles.66 The other great Neapolitan Baroque master, Salvator Rosa, was represented in the collection with a notable pair of pendants, The Baptism of the Eunuch (fig. 50) and Saint John the Baptist Preaching in the Wilderness (ca. 1660). Filippo Baldinucci reported in 1681 that the pair was painted for a Monsignor Castaguti of Rome; from the mid-eighteenth century to 1953, the paintings were in the collection of the Earls of Ashburnham and were purchased at that family’s historic sale of paintings at Sotheby’s, London, June 24, 1953, by David Koetser, who sold them to Chrysler.67 The pictures remained together until 1967, when Chrysler traded away the Saint John the Baptist Preaching in the Wilderness, which ended up in the Saint Louis Art Museum.68 He always justified this by saying, “I kept the better one.”69 Another Rosa formerly in the collection which Chrysler purchased from Nicholas Acquavella is the monogrammed Hagar and Ishmael Visited by an Angel in the Wilderness, which came from the Earl of Dunmore and had been mentioned by Gustav Waagen in 1857.70 Perhaps the greatest Old Master painting that left the collection before Chrysler’s death was Mattia Preti’s Belisarius Receiving Alms (ca. 1660 – 65), described by Bertina Suida Manning as “one of the most stunning works from the late phase of the artist.” Chrysler purchased it from Julius Weitzner in 1954 but eventually gave it in trade to Knoedler’s. Sold at Sotheby’s, London, in 1991, the picture is now in the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, Rotterdam.71 A more modest and unusual work that was attributed to Preti, also no longer in the collection, was the Charity (or Begging Boys), which was bought from Koetser and had been exhibited at Colnaghi as by Bartolomeo Schedoni.72 The Chrysler Museum is fortunate to possess two works by perhaps the most elegant of Neapolitan Baroque painters, Bernardo Cavallino. The

50. Salvator Rosa (1615–1673), The Baptism of the Eunuch, ca. 1660. Oil on canvas, 200.7 × 121.9 cm. Norfolk, Chrysler Museum of Art. Gift of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., 71.525.

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Procession to Calvary (ca. 1645) had been in a private Amsterdam collection before arriving at Newhouse Gallery in 1957. Bertina Suida Manning called it “a great masterpiece of Neapolitan painting” and noted that it includes a youthful self-portrait of the artist.73 Probably by a follower of Cavallino is the Marriage of Tobias that was formerly in a Roman collection and with Nicholas Acquavella in New York by 1954.74 Works by a variety of other Neapolitan painters were also once in the Chrysler collection. By the Spanish-born Jusepe de Ribera (but also attributed to Juan Dò) was one of several versions of The Repentant Saint Peter.75 Attributed to Massimo Stanzione was a Lot and His Family Rescued from Sodom by Two Angels, which had come from Weitzner.76 By Andrea di Lione was a Tobit Burying the Dead, an oil on copper that was acquired from French & Company in New York in 1976 and was sold in the 1989 Sotheby’s sale.77 Remaining in the collection is a major work by Giovanni Battista Benaschi, a Piedmontese painter who worked in Rome, where he was deeply attracted to the art of Giovanni Lanfranco, before going to Naples. His large Neptune and Nereids had in fact been identified in early Chrysler collection publications as by Lanfranco, before it was correctly attributed to Benaschi by Jacob Bean.78 Among the eighteenth-century Neapolitan works in the collection was a Portrait of a Nobleman attributed to Francesco Solimena by Robert Manning, which Chrysler acquired from Frederick Mont in 1954 but which was sold in 1989 with the other contents of the intestate estate.79 Solimena’s study for a church ceiling, which appears to depict the reception of the Virgin into heaven, remains in the collection. A large and theatrical painting by Paolo de Matteis, Olindo and Sophronia Rescued by Clorinda, is precisely the sort of work that Walter Chrysler loved. Signed, and dating from the 1690s, it had come from Central Picture Galleries in 1969.80 Francesco de Mura’s modello for Robert of Anjou Witnessing the

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Construction of the Tempio di Santa Chiara (which passed from Agnew to David Koetser)81 is gone, along with a very beautiful Corrado Giaquinto Adoration of the Magi (from Central Picture Galleries) that was identified by Anthony Clark.82 Also dispersed in the Sotheby’s estate sale was a wonderful Musical Party, generally thought to have been the work of Gaspare Traversi until attributed to Giuseppe Bonito in 1989. It had come from a Viennese collection to Frederick Mont in New York, from whom Chrysler had purchased it in 1954.83 Among the Genoese Baroque paintings Chrysler once owned, the outstanding work was a large Legend of Saint Genevieve of Brabant by Valerio Castello (fig. 15 in this volume), which Julius Weitzner had acquired from an anonymous London collection. It is the companion to Diana and Actaeon with Nymphs, now in the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, and was sold in the Chrysler auction and eventually acquired by the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in Hartford.84 There remains in Norfolk a fine Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione Moses Striking the Rock, an unusual signed work, which came from a private English collection to Koetser.85 Also at one time believed to be by Castiglione, later attributed to Sinibaldo Scorza, and finally sold as by Domenico Brandi was a Pastoral Landscape with a Donkey, purchased from Weitzner in 1954.86 Chrysler owned three paintings by the leading Genoese painter of the period, Bernardo Strozzi, two of which, a Portrait of a Man87 and a portrait of Paolo Gregorio Raggi, Genoese governor of Corsica, which had been with Roland, Browse, and Delbanco in London in 1950 –51 and with Koetser in 1955,88 are no longer in the collection. The most impressive of Chrysler’s Strozzi paintings, a Martyrdom of Saint Justina (formerly identified as Saint Dorothea), happily remains in Norfolk. Probably from a Venetian church, it was in the collection of Italico Brass in Venice from 1920 to 1951 and then with Julius Weitzner from 1951 to 1953.89

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Chrysler also owned at least two works attributed to Alessandro Magnasco; one, in the Chrysler Museum, an Arcadian Landscape with Monks and Other Figures, although bearing the artist’s initials, is now thought to be a workshop production. It had been in Berlin as early as 1913 and emerged at Newhouse Gallery in 1958.90 No longer in the Museum’s collection is an oval Landscape with Monks from collections in Florence and Switzerland that was a companion to a painting in Dayton.91 Lastly, by Giovanni Battista Langetti, who was born in Genoa but later worked in Rome and Venice in a very Riberesque manner, is a large and violent Prometheus Bound that came from an unknown source.92 Sadly, all of Chrysler’s Florentine Baroque paintings were sold in 1989. These included a Tiberio Titi Portrait of a Nobleman (from Central Picture Galleries)93 and two sweetly religious paintings: Sassoferrato’s Virgin and Child (acquired from the same source in 1976)94 and Carlo Dolci’s Infant Christ with Saint John the Baptist, noted by Gustav Waagen in 1854 in Earl Cowper’s collection and acquired by Chrysler from Koetser.95 Similarly, the one Lombard school picture, a Still Life with a Lute and Violin from the studio of Evaristo Baschenis, a late addition in 1984 from Julius Weitzner, was also sold in 1989.96 Among the Roman Baroque paintings was a brilliant Giovanni Francesco Romanelli, The Discovery of Achilles Among the Daughters of Lycomedes (ca. 1650), that had been given by Walter Chrysler to the Museum in 1971 but was deaccessioned in 1989.97 Over the years, the collection also included two pictures attributed to Caravaggio. The first, which Chrysler had purchased in Paris in 1953 and which

bore an attribution by Hermann Voss to the artist, was described as a Portrait of a High Official. Jennifer Montagu later suggested that it possibly depicts the jurist Matteo Neroni, the author of one of the books depicted on the table in the composition. The portrait was sold at the 1989 Sotheby’s sale as “Roman School, c. 1635.”98 The other supposed Caravaggio, a Supper at Emmaus, is of greater interest and was never sent to Norfolk. Instead, Chrysler kept it hidden in his storerooms at the Sophia Warehouse in New York. Of considerable quality, the painting is a version of the painting in the National Gallery in London. It had surfaced in New York at Ehrich Gallery about 1900 and was sold to J. Waldron Gillespie of Santa Barbara, with whom it remained from 1903 to 1954; auctioned at Christie’s, London, in 1957, it was purchased by Oscar Klein of Central Picture Galleries, who sold it to Chrysler. He apparently traded it to Robert Manning in 1983, who in turn either sold or traded the painting to Chrysler’s friend the New York art dealer Jack Tanzer (1921– 2005). The painting today remains in his estate as a fascinating problem of attribution.99 Taken as a whole, the nearly sixty Italian Baroque paintings owned by Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., certainly constitute one of America’s greatest holdings in this area of collecting. Despite his continual trading and the sale of a number of paintings from his estate in 1989, the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk remains a not-to-bemissed destination for anyone studying the Italian Baroque. The collector was often heard to remark that in the future the name Chrysler would be remembered not for the automobile, but for the museum that bears his name,100 and indeed he may yet be proven right!

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chapter 10

Better Late than Never Collecting Baroque Painting at The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Andrea Bayer

51. Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, called Il Caravaggio; 1571–1610), The Musicians, ca. 1595. Oil on canvas, 92.1 × 118.4 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Rogers Fund, 1952, 52.81. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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The 2013 reinstallation of The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s galleries for European painting inspired renewed interest in the development of the Museum’s collections. In that installation, the number of galleries devoted to Italian Seicento painting doubled the number of rooms allocated previously from two to four, at last allowing this important and flourishing collection to be properly displayed; the Museum’s collection of eighteenthcentury Central Italian paintings has likewise evolved in a remarkable way in recent years and is also shown to its advantage. In fact, recognition of the newfound strength of the Italian Baroque collection was one of the primary justifications for the allotment of considerable additional gallery space for the permanent collection of European painting—a success story of which the Museum can be very proud. This generous allowance of space for Italian Baroque pictures does, however, raise a number of questions: What were the first steps taken in forming this part of the collection? When and to what purpose did the Museum consciously take a turn toward acquiring art of this period? These questions have, in part, been addressed previously, especially as a thread within Eric Zafran’s detailed 1994 essay on the collecting of Italian Baroque painting in the United States.1 What follows are a few thoughts about the progress—forwards, backwards, and sideways— of the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of European Paintings over its more than one hundred years of collecting the Italian Baroque. The story begins in the middle, with the purchase of Caravaggio’s The Musicians (fig. 51) in 1952.2 The late Sir Denis Mahon (1910 –2011), the great art historian and collector, was deeply involved in this acquisition, bringing the work to the attention of Theodore Rousseau (1912–1973), curator of European paintings, as a “quite out of the ordinary Christmas card” in 1951. (Mahon went on to publish the painting immediately thereafter in The Burlington

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Magazine.)3 As is well known, the young English dealer David Carritt (1927–1982) had recently discovered the picture in a remote private collection in England, and it was assumed that the National Gallery in London would become the likely purchaser. Mahon attempted to keep the Metropolitan Museum’s staff au courant about interest in the painting in London, and came to a rather damning conclusion: “I am informed that the present Director of the National Gallery [Philip Hendy] knows nothing at all about Caravaggio, and his staff are, with one partial exception, hardly aware of the existence of the Seicento.”4 Mahon was a great proponent of the picture’s coming to New York, because, as he noted to Rousseau, “the representation of the Seicento [at the Metropolitan Museum] is indeed pretty thin and I can of course well understand that you would like to fill it out a bit.” Following intense negotiation, the important, albeit gravely damaged, early Caravaggio did arrive in New York—hailed by Bernard Berenson (1865–1959) (who had disparaged so much Italian seventeenthcentury painting) as “by far the best that has turned up since the boom in that master,” and accompanied by a long article by Mahon in the Museum’s Bulletin, the first lines of which included the caveat that “it is necessary to insist from the start on the regrettably limited scope of our knowledge and understanding of 17th-century Italian painting.”5 Several noteworthy patterns of thought and action emerge from this back and forth. Most obviously, there is the apprehension on the part of the leading scholar that others really do not understand the art he is championing, although in the case of Caravaggio that unease is mitigated by the artist’s sudden new fame. The “boom” to which Berenson refers had been inspired in part by the groundbreaking exhibition devoted to Caravaggio in Milan in 1951, with its long introduction in the catalogue by Roberto Longhi (a salutary reminder of the importance of the great monographic and thematic

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exhibitions in Italy, such as that devoted to Emilian Seicento painting held in Bologna in 1959, to collecting the Italian Baroque in the United States).6 On the other hand, although the principals derived considerable satisfaction from this acquisition, the purchase was nonetheless cautious—The Musicians is a safely secular, pleasing work. It should be noted that at exactly this moment the Metropolitan Museum had also been offered Caravaggio’s powerful Saint John the Baptist, eventually purchased by the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City, but Rousseau decided against buying this masterpiece, recommending it instead to the conservator Mario Modestini (1907–2006) and the art historian William Suida (1877–1959), advisers to the Samuel H. Kress Foundation; they, in turn, urged director John Walker (1906–1995) to buy it for the National Gallery of Art, to no avail.7 Moreover, the Metropolitan Museum had also allowed Caravaggio’s Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy (fig. 13 in this volume) to leave New York in 1943, when it was sold by Arnold Seligmann, Rey & Co. to A. Everett Austin, Jr. (1900 –1957), for the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. (Rousseau, however, continued to believe that The Musicians was the finest of the artist’s early paintings in America, the importance of the Saint Francis notwithstanding.) Less well known, and quite extraordinarily, the Metropolitan Museum had made an effort to purchase Caravaggio’s Supper at Emmaus, painted in 1606 and still owned in 1938 by the Patrizi family in Rome,8 by whom it was commissioned. That year the Museum’s administration authorized payment of up to $35,000 for the painting through its beleaguered agent, Count Umberto Gnoli. Instead, this great canvas was purchased by the Amici di Brera for the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milan through the efforts of its former director, Ettore Modigliani, as a recent essay has shown.9 It is difficult to glean from the existing correspondence exactly who advocated for the painting at the Metropolitan, or how hard

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the administration pushed to see whether it could really leave Italy, but the episode highlights the quality of Italian Baroque paintings that were in the realm of possible Museum acquisitions. With regard to the acquisition of The Musicians, it is important to note the distinctly defensive tone in which much of the discussion of the acquisition was couched and the general distaste for many elements of Baroque painting that was expressed. Earlier, in 1934, when the Metropolitan Museum’s purchase of Jusepe de Ribera’s lyrical masterpiece the Holy Family with Saints Anne and Catherine of Alexandria was announced, it was conceded that although much of Ribera’s work illustrated martyrdoms and desiccated saints and hermits, this canvas “belongs to a different category far less numerous and, to the quieter taste of today, far more pleasing.”10 Similarly, when Guido Reni’s celebrated Immaculate Conception, which entered the collection in 1959, was the subject of an article by Howard Hibbard a decade later, the author began, “Guido Reni is hardly among the Italian painters most popular with today’s art lovers,” and he proceeded to quote Bernard Berenson’s acid observation: “Our grandfathers were thrilled by Guido Reni’s ecstatic visages, whose silly emptiness now rouses our laughter.” Hibbard concluded his introduction by noting that “[i]t would be hard to decide which aspect of Reni’s Immaculate Conception—style or content—is more remote from the modern viewer.”11 Thus, it is not at all surprising to learn that in 1954, when Ted Rousseau wrote a guide to the Museum’s new paintings galleries, he mentioned only five Italian Baroque paintings, four of them still in the Museum’s collection.12 It is against this backdrop of caution, skepticism even, and the curators’ belief that they were swimming upstream against the tide of the generally accepted canon of taste and fashion that the Metropolitan Museum’s earliest acquisitions of Baroque paintings must be considered. Seventeenth-century

paintings, few of them of lasting importance to the collection, came in through large bequests and purchases in the early years of the last century, and occasional purchases were made almost through serendipity. One notable example of the latter is Roger Fry’s (1866–1934) purchase in 1906 of The Birth of the Virgin, at the time attributed to Luca Giordano and today to the Neapolitan artist Francesco Solimena.13 (Fry’s acquisitions when he served briefly as a curator at the Museum have been described by John Pope-Hennessy as a mixed bag.)14 This painting appears to have entered the collection through the back door, as a letter written to Fry by the Museum’s assistant secretary indicates: “ We cannot find any trace of a bill for the Luca Giordano, and no record of its purchase having been authorized by the Committee on Purchases. . . . Mr. Burroughs [Bryson Burroughs (1869–1934), the Museum’s exceptional paintings curator, 1909–34, at the time Fry’s assistant] [was] apparently under the impression that the picture had been bought, since it has been hung in the gallery and a label placed upon it stating that it was purchased out of the income of the Rogers Fund.” Fry replied that he hoped the owner—a Miss Williams, now married, although he could not recall her current name—had been paid.15 The purchase was greeted with a grudging mention in the Bulletin that postulated that the Neapolitan school had a “more vigorous vitality than the academic schools of North Italy,” and that Luca Giordano’s paintings had great pictorial qualities, but that his works were “marred by the extreme rapidity with which he painted and the superficiality of his sentiment.” Following this oft-repeated cliché about the artist, the painting received the backhanded praise that the handling was “faintly comparable with that of Rubens.”16 Most of the Museum’s early acquisitions of Italian Baroque paintings were in keeping with broader American collecting practices. In the introduction to the catalogue of the groundbreaking

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exhibition Art in Italy, 1600 –1700 (see Derstine’s essay in this volume), organized by Frederick Cummings (1933–1990) at the Detroit Institute of Arts in 1965, Rudolf Wittkower (1901–1971), at the time a professor at Columbia University and one of the world’s greatest authorities on the Italian Baroque, noted that even during the driest periods of collecting in the field—when critical taste had cast doubt on the fundamental qualities of Baroque painting— there were certain masters who had always maintained their reputations, in particular Bernardo Strozzi, Jusepe de Ribera, and Salvator Rosa.17 The Metropolitan Museum collected all three from its earliest days, with important works by Rosa and Ribera entering the collection in 1921 and 1934, respectively, and a painting by Strozzi in 1927. Rosa’s Self-Portrait (fig. 52), painted about 1647 for the artist’s close friend Giovanni Battista Ricciardi, had been purchased from the Ricciardi Serguido family in Florence in 1836 by Colonel James Thomson (1808 –1883) of New York.18 Thomson was associated in Florence with the better-known Richard Henry Wilde (1789–1847), a poet, lawyer, and ex-congressman from Georgia, who arrived in Florence the same year, departing in 1840. Wilde came to Italy for his literary studies, writing the Life and Times of Dante and Conjectures and Researches Concerning the Love, Madness, and Imprisonment of Torquato Tasso.19 It seems likely that Wilde’s interests led to the decision to buy works by Rosa, and the two Americans may have been especially interested in this painting, with its allusions to the stoic philosopher Seneca and the Greek inscription “Behold, whither, when” on the skull. Thomson and Wilde bought three paintings attributed to the artist from the Ricciardi family, including a Landscape with the Baptism of Christ, now in the Bob Jones University Collection in Greenville, South Carolina (see Kennedy’s essay in this volume). They also bought numerous works by other Baroque painters, and Thomson purchased—and gave away as gifts—

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copies of paintings by Florentine Seicento artists such as Sassoferrato and Carlo Dolci.20 Wilde died before the paintings, shipped to the United States, could reach him in Louisiana, and then Thomson sold the entire group at auction in 1848 in New York; included were works attributed to Solimena, Guercino, and Francesco Albani. The Rosa painting remained in the family that purchased it at auction, the Livingstons, and arrived as a bequest at the Metropolitan Museum in 1921.21 The acquisition of the Rosa Self-Portrait was followed thirteen years later by the artist’s Bandits on a Rocky Coast (fig. 53), offered by the dealer R. Kirk Askew, Jr. (1903–1974), working for Durlacher Brothers.22 The landscape was one of three paintings by Rosa sold by George Francis Child-Villiers, 9th Earl of Jersey (1910 –1998), that had once hung at one his family seats, Osterley Park, near London; the work displayed as its companion was sold to the Vassar College Art Museum. When the acquisition was announced by Art Digest in 1935, the title of the article was “Appreciation for Salvator Rosa, Decadent.” Nonetheless, this notice liberally quoted an appreciative article by Louise Burroughs in the Museum’s Bulletin, which serves as a reminder of the appeal of Rosa’s paintings at the time. Burroughs touched upon the themes of the painter’s multivalent genius: his picturesqueness (“not quite the hero of romance that Lady Morgan so entertainingly depicts but nevertheless romantic enough”); the love of the English for his scenery; and the gentle mockery of Jane Austen, one of whose characters in Sense and Sensibility preferred a snug farmhouse as “better than the finest banditti in the world.” The article concluded with an accolade from Sir Joshua Reynolds on the earlier artist: “Everything is of a piece: his Rocks, Trees, Sky, even to his handling, have the same rude and wild character which animates his figures.”23 Rosa’s popularity in the first half of the twentieth century was such that in 1948 Kirk Askew organized a monographic exhibition at

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52. Salvator Rosa (1615–1673), Self-Portrait, ca. 1647. Oil on canvas, 99.1 × 79.4 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Bequest of Mary L. Harrison, 1921, 21.105. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

the Durlacher Galleries that included the Bandits on a Rocky Coast, as well as paintings from the numerous public collections that had acquired his works.24 Askew’s efforts were critical in keeping Italian Baroque painting before curatorial eyes during these decades—it was he, for example, who sold the Museum a version of Domenico Fetti’s Good Samaritan that was long thought to be a candidate for the primary version of the composition, although it was later relegated to the status of a replica.25

Among the Museum’s early purchases of works by Wittkower’s triumvirate of popular artists was the 1927 acquisition of Bernardo Strozzi’s David with the Head of Goliath, a disappointing work derived from a finer version in Dresden, which was nonetheless introduced as the pictorial equivalent of the “triumphant expression” found in Baroque architecture.26 Rounding out this early group of Italian Baroque acquisitions is Ribera’s Holy Family, discussed above as a purchase of 1934. This work

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53. Salvator Rosa (1615–1673), Bandits on a Rocky Coast, 1655– 60. Oil on canvas, 74.9 × 100 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Charles B. Curtis Fund, 1934, 34.137. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

was found to be particularly appealing because it was not characteristic of the artist’s usual approach. As the painting came from famous English collections (Sir Thomas Baring [1799–1873] and his descendants, and Henry Lascelles, 6th Earl of Harewood [1882–1947]) and had been cited as such in the writings of William Buchanan, Gustav Waagen, and others, the dealer, Arnold Seligmann, Rey & Co., asked a considerable sum, $20,000 dollars; the reduction that the Museum was able to negotiate reflected the perception that “Ribera is not one of the fashionable artists at present.”27 Some unexpected Italian Baroque paintings entered the collection through individual gifts made in the 1950s and 1960s. One, Massimo Stanzione’s Judith with the Head of Holofernes (ca. 1640), a gift from

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the renowned collector of Dutch paintings Edward W. Carter (1911–1996) in 1959, is unusual in light of the collector’s taste, yet it demonstrates Carter’s eye for the richly dramatic.28 Another, Artemisia Gentileschi’s Esther Before Ahasuerus (fig. 54), was the gift of Elinor Dorrance Hill (1907–1976), later Elinor Ingersoll, a Campbell Soup heiress and president of the Preservation Society of Newport, where she lived in a Charles Platt house called the Bois Doré. She bought the painting from Acquavella Gallery in New York, where it had arrived in 1959– 60, having belonged to the Harrach collection in Vienna and then the dealer Alessandro Morandotti in Rome. Ingersoll had made yearly donations to the Metropolitan Museum (trustee Douglas Dillon once wrote to her saying she was “just great”), but there was little

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known about her artistic interests to prepare for the purchase, loan, and donation of this monumental work by the Roman artist.29 Had she seen the exhibition Il Seicento Europeo: Realismo, Classicismo, Barocco in Rome in 1956, in which the Gentileschi appeared? Was she attracted to the artist for historical reasons? Did she buy the picture with the Museum’s collections in mind? The Italian seventeenth-century paintings were still so poorly represented, as curator Claus Virch (1927–2012) wrote to remind her.30 In time, perhaps more documentation will come to light to give us more insight into this particular gift. In any case, it is noteworthy that at this point—the late 1960s—a large proportion of the Italian Baroque paintings on view in the Museum were by Neapolitan artists or artists active in Naples, including a rather highly touted Christ and the Woman of Samaria, purchased as a work by Battistello Caracciolo in 1936 (as a consolation prize in place of a Caravaggio), but deaccessioned by the Museum as a work by the Master of the Sarasota Supper at Emmaus in 1980. The 1960s and 1970s were pivotal decades in the development of a more systematic approach to the Baroque collection; or, more accurately, in laying the groundwork for such an approach. Academic study of the field was thriving, and much of it was happening in New York. This is underscored by the activities of Rudolf Wittkower (chairman of the Columbia University Department of Art History and Archaeology from 1956– 69) and the important 1965 exhibition in Detroit mentioned previously. Wittkower’s collaborators on the exhibition, working under the direction of Frederick Cummings in Detroit, included Robert Manning (1924 –1996) and Bertina Suida Manning (1922–1992), Donald Posner (1931–2005), and Olga Raggio (1925–2009), all of whom were active in New York as scholars and collectors. (Raggio retired as a distinguished research curator at the Metropolitan Museum in 2008.) Some years earlier, when Wittkower had finished the first edition of his volume in the Pelican

History of Art series, Art and Architecture in Italy, 1600 –1750, he thanked a small group of people, chief among them Howard Hibbard and Milton J. Lewine, his fellow Columbia faculty members.31 Also at this moment, the art market in New York for Italian Baroque pictures was taking shape. This is a complex story, but the connections of Paul and Eula Ganz to the Metropolitan’s Department of European Paintings are pertinent. Theodore Rousseau was in contact with Paul Ganz (1910 – 1986) from 1963, and Ganz continued to have excellent relations with Anthony Clark (1923–1976), head of the department briefly in the mid-1970s and a noted scholar of eighteenth-century painting in Rome, and later with Everett Fahy (b. 1941), a longtime chairman of the department and a key player in the formation of the Museum’s collection of Italian Baroque paintings. From 1963 through the mid-seventies, Paul and Eula Ganz placed more than two dozen paintings by a variety of artists on loan to the Metropolitan. These works represented all the major schools of Italian painting, ranging from Alessandro Allori to Francesco Trevisani and including Pietro della Vecchia, Giacomo del Po, Giuseppe Maria Crespi, and Alessandro Turchi, to name but a few. From the paper trail alone it is difficult to reconstruct the spirit in which these loans were undertaken, although it appears that there was mutual understanding and an easy giveand-take between the parties and a continuous movement of pictures back and forth between the Ganzes’ residence on Park Avenue and the Museum. Paul Ganz later sold a number of his pictures; for example, several were ultimately acquired by Channing Blake (1946–1993) and then given to the Museum of Fine Arts in Springfield, Massachusetts. One of Ganz’s eighteenth-century paintings, Gaspare Traversi’s Portrait of a Priest (or Canon), which he loaned to the Museum in the mid-1960s, has since 1987 been part of the collection of the Museo di Capodimonte, Naples.32 In 1973, Fran-

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54. Artemisia Gentileschi (1593–1651/53), Esther Before Ahasuerus. Oil on canvas, 208.3 × 273.7 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of Elinor Dorrance Ingersoll, 1969, 69.281. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

cesco Cairo’s fragmentary but haunting Herodias (fig. 5 in this volume) was given to the Museum by Paul Ganz in honor of Rudolf Wittkower. That seems paradigmatic of the moment, and, as he stated in a letter at the time, it confirmed that Ganz helped introduce paintings “that the Metropolitan hadn’t yet awoken to.”33 During the same period, a small number of important acquisitions were being made by the

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Metropolitan, reflecting a desire to pursue “firstrate pictures by the great artists,” in John Pope-­ Hennessy’s (1913–1994) descriptive words, for the permanent collection.34 This was made possible in large part by Charles (1925–1986) and Jayne (b. 1919) Wrightsman, who began buying Italian Baroque paintings in the late 1950s and giving them to the Museum in 1973. In 1971, the Museum purchased from Thomas Agnew & Sons in London

Buying Baroque

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Annibale Carracci’s Coronation of the Virgin (fig. 55), a key statement of the artist’s early years in Rome.35 Long in the possession of the Aldobrandini family in Rome and their descendants, the painting arrived in London in the early nineteenth century. The vicissitudes of this seminal work over the next 150 years summarize enormous changes in taste and attitude toward the Italian Baroque. In England it was hailed as a masterpiece and appeared in many of the great nineteenth-century exhibitions. It was sold in 1856 to the Duke of Newcastle for about 420 pounds; yet, when Denis Mahon bought it from a descendant through an intermediary in 1937, he paid 50 pounds 8 shillings. Mahon discussed the picture in his Studies in Seicento Art and Theory (1947), and it appeared in another of the taste-changing exhibitions of the mid-1950s, the Mostra dei Carracci, organized in Bologna in 1956 by Cesare Gnudi, Francesco Arcangeli, and Andrea Emiliani.36 Mahon returned to the subject in one of his famous articles assessing the themes of the exhibition upon its close (1957). All of this laid the groundwork for Everett Fahy’s assertion in 1972 in the Museum’s Bulletin that The Coronation of the Virgin “has a good claim to being the single most important Italian baroque painting in America. A work of great beauty and historical significance, it strengthens the Museum’s collections in an area where they are conspicuously weak.”37 The Coronation of the Virgin was soon surrounded by other major paintings, gifts of the Wrightsmans, often purchased in consultation with Everett Fahy and exhibited at the Museum before being formally given. Guercino’s Samson Captured by the Philistines (purchased 1979, given 1984) (fig. 56) and Vocation of Saint Luigi Gonzaga (purchased 1957, given 1973); Domenichino’s beautiful copper Landscape with Moses and the Burning Bush (purchased 1970, given 1976); and Guido Reni’s Charity (purchased 1968, given 1974) established an impressive corpus of Emilian paintings, to which additions (such as Ludovico

Carracci’s early Lamentation, acquired in 2000) would later be made.38 In 1981, John Pope-Hennessy made the important acquisition of Andrea Sacchi’s Marcantonio Pasqualini Crowned by Apollo, which had been in the Spencer Collection at Althorp House in Northamptonshire since 1758. In his inimitable fashion, Pope-Hennessy wrote frankly on the purchase forms that he had known the painting since he was a child, and that although he may have “thought it rather grotesque” at that time, he later accepted the view that “it is one of the finest Roman paintings of the second quarter of the 17th century in private ownership.”39 With this cluster of recent additions, a more representative view of the Italian Seicento began to appear in the galleries, with truly important works around which curators and collectors could build. Wittkower rightly noted that one of the greatest effects of postwar scholarship and collecting was the reevaluation of a whole host of painters, what he called a “conquest of a vast new artistic territory.” This new breadth of interest was slow to percolate into the Museum’s collecting priorities. In a memorandum written in 1977, and referred to earlier, Pope-Hennessy reviewed the state of the Baroque gallery and reiterated his belief that “it is important that the first-rate pictures by the great artists (Annibale Carracci, Domenichino, Reni, Guercino) should be shown worthily.” To his mind, this was to the exclusion of some of the lesser-known works, and he returned works on loan that did not fit his definition. There were exceptions, such as the powerful Tobit Burying the Dead by the Neapolitan Andrea di Lione, which had been sold by Paul Ganz to a private collector in 1973 and was still on view at the Metropolitan in 1977; it was admired by Pope-Hennessy and came to the Museum permanently in 1989.40 And very soon after 1977 the canon of paintings deemed worthy began to expand at a great rate. A decade later Eula Ganz donated Pietro Testa’s Alexander the Great Rescued from the River Cydnus in

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55. Annibale Carracci (1560 –1609), The Coronation of the Virgin, after 1595. Oil on canvas, 117.8 × 141.3 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Purchase, Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876–1967), by exchange, and Dr. and Mrs. Manuel Porter and Sons Gift, in honor of Mrs. Sarah Porter, 1971, 1971.155. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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memory of Paul Ganz.41 Around that time Everett Fahy wrote to her expressing his feelings about the sea change that had taken place in the taste for Baroque painting: “You can imagine how moved I was to see all the old ‘friends’ again. They brought back memories of happy evenings spent with you and Paul and your growing circle of baroque enthusiasts. I also realized how the two of you were in the vanguard of a change in taste. When you started to collect, the Met had embarrassingly few 17th and 18th century pictures. Who would have thought that the Museum would ever acquire works by Mattia Preti, Andrea Sacchi, or Giulio Cesare Procaccini?”42 Another chapter had really begun. In recent years, the Museum’s expansion of interest and

collecting in the Italian Seicento—and then into the eighteenth century, which has barely been touched upon—has been even more noteworthy: to Fahy’s list would be added paintings by Scarsellino, Pier Francesco Mola, and Marcantonio Franceschini, as well as by Corrado Giaquinto, Pierre Subleyras, and Francesco Trevisani. Better late than never.

56. Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Il Guercino; 1591–1666), Samson Captured by the Philistines, 1619. Oil on canvas, 191.1 × 236.9 cm. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Charles Wrightsman, 1984, 1984.459.2. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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Notes

Introduction



1. Zafran 1994, 22, 100n10. 2. Von Erffa and Staley 1986, 447, no. 516; Lloyd 2013, 151, fig. 142. 3. Zafran 1994, 23, 100n23. 4. Ibid., 24 –26, figs. 1, 2. 5. James 1907, 183, cited in Zafran 1994, 35, 102n100. 6. Ruskin 1972, 144 – 45, cited in Zafran 1994, 38, 102n120; Hersey 1987, 74. 7. Hersey 1987, 73. 8. Jarves 1960, 75. 9. Norton 1860, 177, 312, cited in Zafran 1994, 39, 103n130. 10. Dempsey 1988, 101. 11. Quoted in Hibbard 1969, 19. 12. Ojetti, Dami, and Tarchiani 1922. 13. Sitwell 1924, 36, cited in Zafran 1994, 45, 104n180. 14. Wehle 1929, 187. 15. See Zafran 1994, 47– 48. 16. Bowron 2015, 106–15. 17. Bowron 1994, 41, fig. 1. 18. Ojetti, Dami, and Tarchiani 1922, no. 962; the painting was loaned by Achillito Chiesa, Milan. 19. Bowron 1994, 47. 20. Ibid., 49, fig. 5. 21. For Ganz’s paintings in Ponce, see Held, Taylor, and Carder 1984, passim; for the paintings acquired by Mary Jane and Morton Harris, see, for example, Spike 1980, nos. 4, 24, and 44; and for Channing Blake, see the illustrated checklist Gifts of Mr. Channing Blake: Museum of Fine Art, Springfield, Massachusetts (Springfield: n.d.). 22. Sotheby’s, New York, Important Old Master Paintings, January 28, 1999, lot 240. 23. Berenson 1948, 258. 24. Bowron 1994, 52, fig. 8. 25. Zeri 1976, vol. 2, 439– 41, no. 312; 441– 42, no. 313; 492–93, no. 374; and 473–74, no. 354. See also Mazaroff 2015, 60 – 65. Chapter 1

1. A full biography of John Ringling has not been published; his collecting and the history of the Museum also have yet to be

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fully explored. Relevant past publications include Weeks 1993; the essays in Ormond and De Groft 1996; and De Groft 2000. More recently, see Brilliant 2011 and the essay on John Ringling’s collecting in Brilliant 2009. Ringling’s collecting of Italian pictures is briefly surveyed in Tomory 1976, ix–xiii. 2. For the house, which also merits further scholarly study, see De Groft and Weeks 2004 and the chapter on the house in Dunlop and Lombard 2008. 3. For Böhler’s recollections of Ringling’s announcement that he wished to build an art collection and museum, see Böhler 1951, 11–17. 4. For example, see “Ringling Museum Will Be Open Next Winter” 1928. 5. On the openings, see Weeks 1997, 23–24. 6. The Christian Science Monitor, June 14, 1928. 7. For Ringling’s collecting of Baroque paintings, see Zafran 1997a, to which this essay is greatly indebted. 8. On the paintings and Ringling’s purchase of the works and taste for Rubens, see Brilliant 2012. For the collecting of Dutch and Flemish pictures in America generally, see Walter Liedtke’s introduction to Liedtke and Bauman 1992, 11–28, and Minty 2003. 9. Viscount Ridley sale, Christie’s, London, July 28 –29, 1926, lot 116 (Sassoferrato, as Maratta); Duke of Rutland sale, Christie’s, London, April 16, 1926, lot 16 (Giordano) and lot 22 (Tournier, as Manfredi). 10. For a succinct account of Holford’s collection and its dispersal, see Penny 2004, 367–70. Holford’s Dutch and Flemish pictures were sold at Christie’s, London, May 17–18, 1928; Ringling bought seven paintings in the 1928 sale. 11. Böhler 1951, 20. 12. Suida 1949. 13. For the collecting of and taste for Baroque paintings in America, see Zafran 1994, as well as the other essays in this volume. 14. The Museum’s board of directors included the Baltimore collector Henry Walters, the art dealers Joseph Duveen (1869–1939) and Robert Langton Douglas (1864 –1951), and the art historians August L. Mayer (1885–1944), Max J. Friedländer (1867–1958), and Detlev von Hadeln (1878 – 1935). The list can be found in “Ringling Museum Will Be Open Next Winter” 1928. 15. The letter is preserved in the Ringling Museum’s archives. 16. New York World, March 26, 1930. 17. This comment appears in an unpublished draft of Böhler 1951, preserved in the Ringling Museum archives. 18. For Austin, see Weber 1992; Gaddis 2000; and Gaddis 2001. See also Wadsworth Atheneum 1958. A full account of Austin’s Ringling years has yet to be written. 19. The letter is preserved in the Ringling Museum’s archives.

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20. Austin published a small book about the theater and its history in 1952, and Creighton Gilbert, the Museum’s curator, produced another publication on the subject in 1959. Most recently, see Currie and McKee 2006. 21. The Strozzi was acquired in 1949 from the dealer Julius Weitzner, who, in a letter of March 23, 1949, described the painting as “the most important and great strozzi i have ever seen. . . . This later item acquired a week or so ago in magnificent state will be surely acquired either by Boston or Kress Foundation (in fact Suida has twice been here asking price).” 22. The painting was acquired from the dealer Frederick Mont in 1955. 23. The correspondence relating to these negotiations is in the Museum’s archives. 24. Ringling Museums Annual, 1951, n.p. 25. Ibid. 26. Quoted in Jo Ann Lewis, “Baroque Under the Big Top: At the National Gallery, the Ringling Italian Collection,” Washington Post, April 5, 1986, C4. 27. Ringling Museums Annual, 1951, n.p. 28. Austin 1942, n.p. Chapter 2

1. On the early history of the Atheneum, see Saunders and Raye 1981 and Gaddis 1992, 11–16. 2. Wadsworth Gallery 1844 and Wadsworth Gallery 1850. 3. Cadogan 1991, 11, 274. 4. Ibid., 167– 68; see also Kellogg 1913, 370 –72, with a photo of her home, Elpstone, in New Hartford. 5. Recognition of Chick Austin’s contribution has been made in several Wadsworth Atheneum publications, beginning with the memorial exhibition catalogue, Wadsworth Atheneum 1958, and has continued with Cadogan 1991, 10 –19; Eugene Gaddis in Ayres 1992, 19–22; and in greatest detail in Gaddis 2000. The present author has written on the subject in Zafran 1994, 48 –50; Strinati and Vodret 1998, 41–55; and Zafran 2004, 11–38. Other writers who have noted Austin’s achievements include Mina Gregori in Cinotti 1975, 28 –29, and Nicholas Hall in Hall 1992, 29–31. 6. Gaddis 2000, 63, 65. 7. Published by Roberto Longhi in Vita Artistica 2, no. 1 (1927): 9–10, fig. 4; see also The Arts, February 2, 1929, 122; and Bowron 1990, 101, 343, fig. 718. 8. Exhibition of Italian XVII and XVIII Century Paintings and Drawings at the Fogg Art Museum, Cambridge, January 14 –February 9, 1929; and McComb 1934. See also Cadogan 1991, 13–14; and Gaddis 2000, 134. 9. Post 1922, 15–21. 10. Gaddis 2000, 32–33.

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11. Sitwell 1924; Skipworth 1994, 192 (for the Kenneth Clark quote); and Osbert Sitwell, foreword, in Wadsworth Atheneum 1958, 15. 12. See Gaddis 2000, 61, 74, 222–24; and Zafran, Gaddis, and Hood 2004, 6. 13. Gaddis 2000, 155– 64, 226–29, 235– 44, 259– 62, 267–71. 14. Ibid., 185– 87, 199–220, 231–34, 245– 49; and Zafran 2004, 7–22. 15. See Gaddis 2000, 119–24, 169– 80, 189–93, 229–30. 16. Ibid., 119–20, 171–77, 191–93, 229–30. 17. Ibid., 143– 46, 239– 42, 286– 87, 316–17; Zafran 2000, 30 – 45; and Zafran 2003, 59–129. 18. The Hartford Times, October 25, 1927. On the Sumner Fund, see Gaddis 2000, 74 –75. 19. Both Askew and Hitchcock were among the friends who memorialized Austin in Wadsworth Atheneum 1958, 19–26, 39– 43. See also Cadogan 1991, 16; and Gaddis 2000, 57, 63– 64, 230 –31. 20. Invoice from Durlacher Brothers of October 19, 1928. This and all subsequent documents quoted are in the files of the Archives and Registrar’s Department of the Wadsworth Atheneum. For the Fetti, see Safarik 1990, 312, no. A 108. 21. Hitchcock 1930, 21–23. 22. Cadogan 1991, 218. 23. Ibid., 153–56; Zafran 2004, nos. 19 and 20. 24. Austin and Hitchcock 1930, 2–3. 25. Letter from Austin to Hurdle, December 28, 1929. On the exhibition, see Gaddis 2000, 135. 26. Letter from Askew to Austin, November 20, 1929. 27. Letters from Austin to Ringling, November 19 and December 28, 1929. On Ringling and the formation of his collection, see Zafran 1997b and the essay by Brilliant in this volume. 28. Undated letter from Valentiner to Austin. The Detroit painting is inv. no. 89.15. 29. See Salerno 1988, 177, no. 93. 30. Vassar College Art Gallery 1983, 170, inv. no. 17.1.9. 31. Cadogan 1991, 156–57. 32. See McComb 1930, 199–202; McComb 1929, 41; and Bowron 1990, 107, 205, fig. 212. 33. Cables and letters from Austin to Wildenstein, February 2, 18, and 19, 1930, and from Wildenstein to Austin, February 3, 18, and 20, 1930. 34. Gaddis 2000, 362. See Austin in the unpublished catalogue of the Wadsworth Atheneum’s Sumner Collection, 1945– 47, no. 59; and Zafran 2012, 34, no. 5. 35. See Rosenberg 1982, 364, no. 2; Nicolson 1974, 612; and Nicolson 1989, vol. 1, 87, no. 780, as “Master K.” 36. Letter from Wildenstein to Austin, December 24, 1936. 37. Letter from Wildenstein to Austin, January 14, 1939. See Spear 1975, 128 –29.

notes to pages 23–32

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38. For the oft-repeated story on the delivery of the wrong Strozzi to Hartford, see Cadogan 1991, 30; Gaddis 2000, 137–38; and Zafran 2004, 17–18, no. 30. 39. Hitchcock 1931, 14 –15. 40. Letter from Askew to Austin, November 7, 1932; Cadogan 1991, 81– 83. 41. Letter from Askew to Austin, February 9, 1932; Austin to Askew, letter of October 5, 1934; Cadogan 1991, 212–13. 42. Gaddis 2000, 313–14. 43. Cadogan 1991, 126–29; Zafran 2004, no. 21. 44. Letter from Byk to Austin, May 14, 1936; Cadogan 1991, 224 –27. 45. Text by Austin for unpublished catalogue of the Wadsworth Atheneum’s Sumner Collection, ca. 1943– 44. 46. Oral interview tape of Agnes Rindge Claflin, October 22, 1974. 47. Invoice from Galerie Sanct Lucas, Vienna, July 22, 1937; Cadogan 1991, 271. See Baldassari 1995, 56, fig. 8w. 48. Cadogan 1991, 134 –35; Baldassari 1995, 139, fig. 50w. 49. Cadogan 1991, 174 –76. 50. Ibid., 176–77. 51. Letters and a cable from M. Knoedler and Co. to Austin, November 27, December 9 and 29, 1936; Cadogan 1991, 171–74. 52. Cadogan 1991, 57–58. 53. Ibid., 266–70. 54. Letter from Askew to Austin, October 20, 1938; Cadogan, 1991, 266– 67. 55. Letter from Koetser to Austin, November 27, 1941. 56. Letter from Longhi to Cunningham, March 22, 1960; Cadogan 1991, 92–95, as “Follower of Caravaggio”; see also Zeri 1989, vol. 2, 652–54, fig. 772; Gregori and Hohenzollern 2002, 138; and Zafran 2004, 68, no. 15. 57. Durlacher Brothers invoice, 1942; see Cadogan 1991, 104 –5; Zafran 2004, no. 16. 58. Letter from Byk to Austin, April 14, 1941; Cadogan 1991, 165– 66. 59. Letter from Mahon to Cunningham, April 1, 1963; see also Salerno 1988, 427. 60. Letter from Byk to Austin, November 9, 1939. 61. Letter from Austin to Valentiner, January 18, 1940. 62. Wadsworth Atheneum 1940, no. 5. 63. Letters from Byk to Austin, March 7, April 8, 11, and 30, August 27, October 14 and 21, and December 3, 1940; January 16, May 29, June 19 and 26, 1941. 64. Letter from Austin to Huntington, June 10, 1943; see Cadogan 1991, 19; Gaddis 2000, 361– 62: Zafran 2004, 28 –29, no. 7. 65. The exhibition ran from June 26, 1943, to January 16, 1944. See Cadogan 1991, 19–20, and Gaddis 2000, 22–23. 66. Letter from Byk to Austin, June 21, 1943.

67. See Gaddis 2000, 373– 411. 68. Ibid., 364 – 65. 69. See Zafran 2001, 103–28. 70. Cadogan 1991, 208 –10. 71. Letter from Longhi to Cunningham, January 19, 1966; Marandel 2012, no. 14; see also Nicolson 1989, vol. 1, 163, no. 240. 72. See Cadogan 1991, 20, and Gaddis 1992, 22–23. 73. Cunningham 1951, 60. 74. Cadogan 1991, 249–51; Zafran 2004, 30, no. 24. 75. Letter from Koetser to Cunningham, February 18, 1949; “Hartford Thrives on Baroque,” 28; Cadogan 1991, 148 –51; Zafran 2004, no. 12. 76. Letters from Agnew to Cunningham, April 5, 15, and 19, 1956; Cadogan 1991, 213–16; see also Spike 1984, no. 57, and Zafran 2004, no. 12. 77. Letter from Longhi to E. Gregory, Cunningham’s secretary, October 30, 1956; E. Turner 1958, 1– 4. 78. “Collections” 1964. 79. Letters from Mont to Cunningham, December 13 and 24, 1963; Cadogan 1991, 220 –22. French scholars persist in attributing the painting to Guy François; see, for example, Rosenberg 1982, 246– 47, no. 29, and Zafran 2004, no. 14. 80. Letter from Longhi to Cunningham, February 15, 1964, and Longhi 1966, 74 –78. See also Felton 1969, 2–29, and Zafran 2004, no. 29. 81. Cadogan 1991, 99–101; Percy 1970, 2. 82. Cadogan 1991, 120 –21; and Zafran 2004, 90 –91, no. 26. 83. Letter from Matthiesen to Cadogan, January 25, 1985; Cadogan 1991, 222–25; and Zafran 2004, no. 11. 84. Peter Sutton, “Curator’s Choice,” What’s On at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Calendar, May–June 1997, 6. 85. Zafran 2004, no. 18. Chapter 3

1. A hefty stack of these redeemed IOUs was found only a generation later, when the fifteenth-century cupboard in which they had been hidden was restored. Luigi Grassi presumably did not want anyone—particularly his wife—to know that he had been financed by a moneylender. 2. An important client of Bardini was Stanford White (1853– 1906), the American architect and partner in the architectural firm of McKim, Mead & White. An example of the riches available at the time is provided by a marble statuette of Cupid that Bardini attributed to Michelangelo at auction in London in 1902 and that White installed as decoration in the Payne Whitney house at 972 Fifth Avenue at 79th Street in Manhattan (currently the home of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy in the United States); it has been thought recently to be an early work of Michelangelo. (See John

notes to pages 32–42

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Russell, “A Michelangelo on 5th Ave.? It Seems So,” The New York Times, January 23, 1996.) 3. The palace had been built in the 1830s by a Poniatowski prince in the Neoclassical style of the period. Sold in the early 1950s, it was demolished and replaced by an apartment house (in Florence, anything nineteenth century was, until recently, thought to be insignificant). The various grand reception rooms of the gallery were arranged in roughly chronological sequence. 4. Luigi Grassi did considerable business with Joseph Duveen, but generally through intermediaries. Prominent dealers, including Grassi, also purchased mostly through intermediaries or “runners.” 5. Bissell, Derstine, and Miller 2005, 136–39. 6. It was through Longhi’s influence and prestige that the first exhibition dedicated to Caravaggio was mounted in the Palazzo Reale in Milan (see Longhi 1951). 7. The German scholar Hermann Voss (1884 –1969) was another early champion of seventeenth-century art. 8. Ojetti, Dami, and Tarchiani 1922. 9. Contini 2002, 14 –17, 130 –35. 10. Ojetti, Dami, and Tarchiani 1922, 130 –31, no. 691; 149, no. 798. (In the mid-1990s another version of the composition appeared in a London sale.) 11. Ugo Bardini lived in a largely nineteenth-century villa near the top of the “Belvedere” hill south of the Arno River. The commercial gallery itself was located in the thirteenth-century Palazzo Mozzi at the bottom of the hill. After the death of Ugo Bardini, the palace remained closed for a long time, until it was bought by the Italian State; it is currently under restoration and will become a center for exhibitions and cultural events. Most of the gallery spaces remained closed after decades, and the bulk of their contents is presumed lost. 12. Barsanti and Contini 1999, 102, no. 31. 13. Heinrich Thyssen was the son of August Thyssen (1842– 1926), who is remembered as the “Andrew Carnegie of Germany.” A man of immense entrepreneurial ability, he built a huge steel-and-coal conglomerate that became one of Europe’s greatest industrial concerns. Heinrich Thyssen married a Hungarian noblewoman and assumed her family title. He moved to Lugano, Switzerland, in 1932 and, unlike his elder brother Fritz, was never a supporter of the Nazi regime. 14. In 1930, Heinrich Thyssen exhibited in Munich a sizable group of paintings that he had collected (Heinemann-­ Fleischmann 1930). On that occasion he was approached by the respected and influential Italian Baroque scholar Walter Friedländer, who expressed serious criticisms about the quality of the collection, suggesting that young Rudolf Heinemann become Thyssen’s advisor in the future.

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Heinemann had studied under Walter Friedländer at the University of Freiburg. 15. At the end of the Second World War and following the death of his father in 1947, Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-­ Bornemisza struggled to keep the collection (by then greatly enriched with the significant purchases of the later 1930s) together. He continued to expand the range of the Thyssen collection to include Italian pre-Renaissance works, German Expressionism, Russian modernism, and American nineteenth- and early twentieth-century art. 16. Pepper 1984b, 289, no. 198. 17. Rudolf Heinemann very seldom worked entirely alone. He never had a gallery (in New York, he operated from a small Fifth Avenue apartment filled with Tiepolo drawings) and invariably collaborated, in purchases as well as sales, with a limited number of firms he trusted: Agnew’s in London, and Newhouse, Rosenberg and Stiebel, and Knoedler Gallery in New York. He also partnered with a number of more private dealers such as Eugene Thaw and Frederick Mont. 18. Safarik 1990, 296–97. 19. Of the Point Breeze furnishings, two splendid Empire consoles are now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The two paintings by Luca Giordano were of identical size but not pendants since they date from different periods. They spent almost a century in the Roebling family of Princeton before being separated. 20. For Samuel H. Kress, see Perry 1994, 13–39, and for his acquisition of Italian Baroque paintings, Bowron 1994, 41–59. 21. Roberto Longhi is responsible for having invented the whimsical name “Il Pensionante del Saraceni” and assigning the impressive still life to this otherwise unidentified artist (see Longhi 1943, 23). The Longhi attribution seems to have stood the test of time, and, in due course, more works are now identified with this name. 22. See Grassi 2007, 11; for a concise summary of Contini as an art dealer, see 10 –13. 23. Contini Bonacossi 2007. 24. For Pichetto, see Hoenigswald 2006, 31– 41. 25. Bowron 1994, 47, 58n24. For the dealer Eugene V. Thaw’s informative reminiscences of Modestini and his role at the Kress Foundation, see Aronson 2007. 26. The Virgin and the Sleeping Child by Orazio Gentileschi was restored, and copied, by Mario Modestini when it belonged to Count Contini Bonacossi. It may have been intended for Kress but later passed to Thos. Agnew & Sons. It was sold in 1976 to William A. Coolidge and later bequeathed to the Fogg Art Museum; see Bowron 1990, 108. 27. For John Walker and his disinclination to accept Italian Baroque paintings for the National Gallery of Art, see Bowron 1994, 50 –53.

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28. In the late 1920s, when the Continis were still living in Rome, Alessandro undertook, at his own expense, the restoration and furnishing of the papal apartments at the top of Castel Sant’Angelo, where, among others, Pope Clement VII apparently took refuge during the Sack of Rome in 1527. For this, King Victor Emmanuel bestowed the title Conte on Contini. 29. Contini’s own collection was particularly rich in Spanish works of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There were also highly important earlier Italian and Renaissance paintings, as well as some Venetian eighteenth-century works, but he seems not to have had a taste for the Italian Baroque— except as a dealer. 30. Robert Manning worked closely with Chrysler and the newly formed Kress Foundation in the 1950s and ’60s as an adviser and agent. He also managed a small museum and exhibition space that was part of the now-defunct Finch College in Manhattan. Manning and his wife, Bertina Suida Manning, were for years prominent advocates for the study, exhibiting, and collecting of Italian Baroque art in America. 31. Christiansen and Mann 2001, 178 – 80, no. 36. Chapter 4

1. For information on the prewar period, see Zafran 1994, an extraordinarily thorough account of the history of collecting Italian Baroque painting in America, which should be read in tandem with this essay. “America,” imprecisely, is used to mean the United States in both essays (also see note 49 below). 2. Many colleagues and collectors responded to my queries and generously offered invaluable information (unpublished remarks cited in this essay are from private conversations and correspondence). I am particularly indebted to Carlo Croce, Joseph Connors, Nelson Shanks, Philip Sohm, and David Stone for their extensive input, and to Jenni Rodda of the Institute of Fine Arts for her invaluable assistance in tracking down the photographs for figs. 22 and 23. 3. It is difficult to gauge the impact of having been the only student in an upper-level course on Italian Baroque painting where Dowley (aided by a slide projectionist) lectured to me alone, with occasional one-on-one discussions. Less difficult to recognize was the germ he planted when he paused to ask me if I thought Agostino Carracci’s or Domenichino’s Last Communion of Saint Jerome was the better painting, and to explain my reasons. 4. Spear 1971. 5. Ibid., 52–53, no. 6 (Borgianni); 184 – 85, no. 72 (Valentin); and Spear 1972, 32–33, no. 14 (Valentin). The Borgianni recently sold for an astonishing £3 million (Sotheby’s, London, July 4, 2012, lot 30).

6. See Zafran 1994, 84, for other Italian Baroque paintings acquired by Cleveland during Lee’s and Lurie’s years. 7. Lavin 1975, 43, docs. 345– 46 and subsequent inventories. 8. See http://www.getty.edu/research/tools/provenance/ payments_to_artists/index.html. 9. For instance, Philip Sohm’s descendants in the field include Erin Campbell, Joanna Fassl, Alex Hoare, Giles Knox, Leslie Korrick, Karen Lloyd, Maria Loh, Carolina Mangone, and Genevieve Warwick. 10. See Spear 2010 for discussion of the phenomenon. 11. Among America’s great art museums, The Metropolitan Museum of Art at least has entered a “better late than never” phase (as Andrea Bayer characterizes it), unlike the National Gallery of Art and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, which were necessarily absent from the program of the Frick’s symposium “Going for Baroque” (September 2013) because they have collected so little Italian Baroque art (in the case of Philadelphia, nearly none). 12. Marandel 2012. The original exhibition (Corps et ombres: Caravage et le caravagisme européen), held at the Musée Fabre in Montpellier and the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse, was much larger. 13. Exhibitions devoted to selections from the Haukohl Collection have been held at the Taubman Museum of Art, Roanoke, Va. (2008); the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, Calif. (2011); and the Nevada Museum of Art (2014). 14. See Zafran 1994, 83, for a description of the exhibition. 15. For the Institute’s early history, see Bober 1962. 16. The painting in the background of fig. 23 is an anonymous Seicento Flute Player owned by the Institute of Fine Arts. 17. Acc. no. 1973.165. 18. The most detailed account of the formation of the Ganz collection remains Zafran 1994, 72–74. 19. For insightful comments on Wittkower’s influential teaching, especially on architectural historians, see Connors 2003, xvi–xvii. 20. Millon 2002, 6. 21. Nissman and Hibbard 1969. 22. Because neither the Department of Art History and Archaeology at Columbia nor the university’s archives could provide me with a list of Wittkower’s or Hibbard’s students, some who continued in the field undoubtedly have been overlooked (I have not cited their students who became architectural historians). 23. As they have in serving as editors-in-chief of the Art Bulletin between 1968 and 1988 (Posner, Martin, Hibbard, Spear). 24. For the history of the first forty years of Princeton’s department, see Lavin 1983. 25. Patricia Waddy (Syracuse University, emerita), George Bauer (University of California, Irvine, emeritus), Nicola Courtright

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(Amherst College), Gail Feigenbaum (Getty Research Institute), Jack Freiberg (Florida State University), Evonne Levy (University of Toronto), Michael Mezzatesta (Ars Mvndi, former director of the Duke University Museum of Art), John Beldon Scott (University of Iowa), and Steven Ostrow (University of Minnesota). 26. Acc. no. AP 2010.01. 27. On the Feigen collection, see Kanter and Marciari 2010. 28. Feigen’s and Fisch’s Sauli paintings were exhibited together in 2001; see Christiansen and Mann 2001, 172– 84, nos. 35–36. The Danaë owned by Feigen was acquired by the J. Paul Getty Museum at Sotheby’s, New York, on January 28, 2016. 29. Acc. no. 2006.54. 30. Christie’s, New York, January 30, 2013, lot 31 ($3,442,500). 31. For the Scarsellino, see acc. no. 2001.417. 32. For the Andrea di Leone, see acc. no. 1989.225. To my knowledge, the only publication on the Blake collection is an undated, illustrated brochure printed by the Springfield Museum, Gifts of Mr. Channing Blake, which contains a checklist of eleven paintings, nine sculptures, prints, and objects. 33. For a selection of many of the best works in the collection, see Grabski and Pope-Hennessey 1990. Recent sales of important paintings and drawings from Johnson’s collection occurred at Christie’s, London, July 8, 2014, and Sotheby’s, London, July 10, 2014. 34. As quoted in her obituary in the Art Newspaper, May 2013, 87. 35. On the troubling ethics raised by such loans, see Spear 2011, 635. 36. For an informative, personal homage to Johnson, with many illustrations of works she acquired from Matthiesen, including the Saraceni and her “Caravaggio” by Orazio Gentileschi, see Matthiesen 2013, 17–28. 37. Pope-Hennessy, in Grabski and Pope-Hennessey 1990, 10. 38. Christie’s, London, July 8, 2014, lot 40. 39. Relative to its size and quality, the collection is little published, despite occasional loans from it to exhibitions. For an overview of the collection (with illustrations of paintings by Preti, Annibale, Scarsellino, Cavallino, Strozzi, Sebastiano Ricci, Morandi, Crespi, and Franceschini), see Hann 2006. 40. On which see Zafran 1994, 96. Dr. Croce has approximately 355 paintings by Italians and foreigners who worked in Italy, of which about 185 are from the seventeenth century and 110 from the eighteenth century. 41. Schleier 2014. Other published paintings in the Croce collection are attributed to Assereto, Badalocchio, Cavallino, Ribera, Rosa, Schedoni, Stanzione, Strozzi, Volterrano, and Roman-period Vouet. 42. Nissman and Hibbard 1969, 48 – 49, no. 43, and 55–56, no. 56. 43. No catalogue of the more than fifty-five loans was published.

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Most widely known among Miller’s paintings is Francesco Cozza’s Esther and Ahasuerus. 44. See Smart 2004; Harris’s drawings are cited in the catalogue as from an anonymous lender. 45. Giuliano Briganti, Raffaello Causa, Andrea Emiliani, Oreste Ferrari, Cesare Gnudi, Francis Haskell, Jakob Hess, Otto Kurz, Benedict Nicolson, Rodolfo Pallucchini, Nicola Spinosa, Hermann Voss, and Ellis Waterhouse, to name some of the leading European scholars who have made significant contributions to the study of Seicento painting. 46. Notably, the collections of Frederick W. Field, David B. and Edward C. Goodstein, Damon Mezzacappa, Peter Jay Sharp, and Saul Steinberg, for which see Zafran 1994, 96–98. 47. Case Western Reserve (Erin Benay), Delaware (David Stone), Emory (Sarah McPhee), Indiana University (Giles Knox), Iowa ( John Beldon Scott), Maryland, College Park (Anthony Colantuono), Minnesota (Steven Ostrow), Oregon ( James Harper), Rutgers (Catherine Puglisi), and Temple (Tracy Cooper). Case Western, Delaware, and Maryland have both Northern and Southern Baroquists. This information is culled mostly from the 2012 edition of the College Art Association’s Graduate Programs in History of Art and Architecture. 48. There will be some inconsistencies in the numbers due to the differing ways professors’ specializations are cited on departmental websites and/or because they teach in multiple fields; except for Renaissance-Baroque, the table does not identify by chronology or geography the fields of architectural historians. Regardless of any imprecisions (and the absence in the table of appointments made after 2012–13), the overall pattern is revealing. 49. Occasionally there are nontenured and/or part-time teachers in the field, a pattern that confirms its second-class status. One example is Michigan, where Thomas Willette, replacing retired full professor Ward Bissell, is a lecturer. (Bissell was a student of Harold Wethey’s at Michigan, as were Robert Enggass and Michael Stoughton.) Even at the Institute of Fine Arts, despite the great tradition established by Friedländer and Posner, only a visiting Renaissance scholar occasionally teaches a course on the Italian Baroque. The situation is much better in Canada, where the Italian Baroque has a solid footing at the University of Toronto and there is an endowed chair in Southern Baroque at Queen’s University. 50. Spear 2010. Chapter 5



1. Baralt 1996, vol. 1, 25– 82. 2. Neumann Gandía 1913, 283. 3. Baralt 1996, vol. 1, 78 – 84. 4. Ibid., 284 – 87. 5. Ibid., 119.

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6. Ibid., 214. 7. “[El hombre] necesita soñar, sentir y emocionarse.” Ferré often repeated these words, which first appeared in print in his unpaginated pamphlet Discurso del honorable gobernador Luis A. Ferré en la ceremonia de la octava colación de grados del Conservatorio de Música de Puerto Rico, 30 de mayo de 1971 (San Juan, 1971). 8. Carroll 1975, 641. 9. Held, Taylor, and Carder 1984, 120 –22; see also Enggass 1959, 188; and Held 1961. 10. Graf 1976, vol. 1, 93–95, no. 239. 11. See Haskell 1980, 83. 12. Wendland 1999, vol. 1, 284 – 89. 13. Held, Taylor, and Carder 1984, 238 – 40. 14. “Professor Held Reports Sabbatical Achievements,” Barnard Bulletin, November 3, 1960, 4. 15. Letter from Julius S. Held to Luis A. Ferré, October 24, 1959, Archivo Histórico Luis A. Ferré. 16. See, for example, Zafran 1994, 38 –39. 17. See Held, Taylor, and Carder 1984, 130. 18. Letter from Mina Gregori to Luis A. Ferré, July 8, 1963, Archivo Histórico Luis A. Ferré. 19. Hartup and Aste 2008, no. 9. 20. Bologna 1958, 44 – 46, pl. 11; Ruggeri 1994. 21. Spear 1988. 22. Letter from Julius S. Held to Luis A. Ferré, October 24, 1959, Archivo Histórico Luis A. Ferré. 23. Held 1961, 317. 24. These include Lozoya 1960, Held 1961, Held 1962, Taylor 1966, Wittkower and Wittkower 1967, and Schleier 1980. 25. Rodríguez Deynes 1991, 53; other sources, such as Held 1961, contain inaccurate information about the history and layout of the building. 26. The Angel Healing the Blindness of Tobit was attributed to Giacinto Brandi when Ferré bought it. In the past, The Five Jesuit Martyrs of Cuncolim has been variously attributed to Niccolò Ricciolini, Francesco Mancini, a pupil or follower of Carlo Maratti, and Francesco Trevisani; see Held 1965, 109–10; Held, Taylor, and Carder 1984, 68 –70; Schleier 1980, 24, pl. 7; Goldsmith et al. 1991, 34, no. 3. I am grateful to Mario Epifani, who pointed out to me after the Frick’s symposium “Going for Baroque” (September 2013) that The Five Jesuit Martyrs of Cuncolim appears in the postmortem inventory of Cardinal Girolamo Colonna di Sciarra (1708 –1763) as the work of Sebastiano Conca; see Safarik 1996, 60 – 61, no. 240. 27. A study for Antiochus and Stratonice is in the Cleveland Museum of Art, inv. no. 2008.69. For the Ponce painting, see Held, Taylor, and Carder 1984, 12–14; Bowron and Kerber 2007, 16, fig. 18; Hartup and Aste 2008, no. 11. 28. Held 1961, 316, fig. 27; Ewald 1964, 9, fig. 3; Held 1965, 187– 88, fig. 18.

29. Nissman and Hibbard 1969, 34 –35, no. 27, fig. 12; Ewald 1964, 9, fig. 3; Hartup and Aste 2008, no. 7. 30. Gregori 1972, 64, note 76; McCorquodale 1974, 208, fig. 16. 31. Barsanti 1974b, 84ff., ill. 67; see also Held, Taylor, and Carder 1984, 118, and Gregori and Maffeis 2007, 26–27, and 152–54, no. 4. 32. Baralt 1996, vol. 1, 216–21. 33. For Traversi, see Held, Taylor, and Carder 1984, 302; and Hartup and Aste 2008, no. 12. 34. On French & Company, see Charissa Bremer David, “Building American Collections of European Tapestries: The Role and Influence of French & Company,” http:// tapestrycenter.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/12/4thannual-lecture-bremer-david-transcript1.pdf (accessed December 4, 2014). 35. For Guercino, see Held, Taylor, and Carder 1984, 140; and for the copy of Guido Reni, 246– 48. 36. See Salomon and Boccardo 2007. 37. Shapley 1973, 79, K.1761, fig. 143; Held, Taylor, and Carder 1984, 280 – 82. 38. Wittkower and Wittkower 1967, 186, fig. 7; Held, Taylor, and Carder 1984, 28. 39. Held, Taylor, and Carder 1984, 130 –32. 40. Held 1964, 26, fig. 14; Held, Taylor, and Carder 1984, 166; Hartup and Aste 2008, no. 8. 41. Wittkower and Wittkower 1967, 184. 42. Hartup and Aste 2008, 28. 43. Paul Ganz, who lived at 1185 Park Avenue, New York, is not related to the Swiss collector and Hans Holbein specialist of the same name who died in 1954. 44. See Spike 1980. 45. Schleier 1980, 20; Held, Taylor, and Carder 1984, xi. 46. Hartup and Aste 2008, no. 5. 47. Schleier 1980, 20. 48. In addition to the works already mentioned above, the collection comprises the following paintings, in order of acquisition: after Caravaggio, Christ on the Way to Emmaus (57.0018); Scipione Compagno, The Fall of the Rebel Angels (57.0025); Francesco Guarino da Solofra, A Female Martyr (57.0026); Evaristo Baschenis, Still Life with Musical Instruments (57.0032); Giovanni Francesco Romanelli (attrib.), The Abduction of Helen of Troy (59.0121); Giovanni Antonio Pellegrini, Jael and Sisera (60.0147); eighteenth century, Neapolitan, Triumphal Entry of a Prince (60.0160); Giovanni Francisco Barbieri, “Il Guercino,” Saint Sebastian (61.0170); Francesco di Mura, Apotheosis of Sculpture (61.0202); Salvator Rosa, A Lake Surrounded by Mountains (61.0203); Pietro Paolini, The Lute Player (61.0217); Giuseppe Bartolomeo Chiari, Christ in the House of Martha and Mary (61.0220); Giovanni Sorbi, Portrait of Ercole Lelli (61.0221); Paolo Antonio Barbieri, Still

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Life with Onions (62.0290); Carlo Cignani, The Infancy of Jupiter (62.0340); Luca Giordano, The Death of Seneca (63.0390); circle of Salvator Rosa, Witchcraft Scene (63.0392); Pier Francesco Mazzucchelli, “Il Morazzone,” The Flagellation (66.0596); Giovanni Battista Salvi, The Holy Family (63.0410); anonymous Genoese or Northern European, Roman Charity (63.0425); Giuseppe Puglia, “Il Bastaro,” The Judgment of Solomon (63.0441); Onorio Marinari, Christ and the Samaritan Woman (65.0561); Corrado Giaquinto, The Flight into Egypt (65.0579); Francesco Curradi, Abraham and the Three Angels (66.0597); Francesco Furini, Temperance (66.0598); Giuseppe Bartolomeo Chiari, The Martyrdom of Saint Peter (66.0599); Francesco Rosa, Hagar (66.0600); Sofonisba Anguissola, Portrait of a Young Man (66.0618); Pietro Ricchi, The Coronation of the Virgin (67.0655); Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione, Satyr and Nymph (68.0708); anonymous, seventeenth century, The Lamentation (69.0731); Antiveduto Gramatica, Young Woman Playing the Lute (70.0754); Pietro della Vecchia, The Four Ages of Man: Childhood (71.0762); Youth (71.0763); Manhood (71.0764); Old Age (71.0765); Cesare Dandini, Saint John the Baptist (74.0869). Chapter 6

1. See Agnew 1973. 2. I have drawn biographical information principally from conversations with Andrew Ciechanowiecki. See also Zamoyski 1987; Knox 2005; and González-Palacios 2014, 180 – 83. 3. The Galerie Heim, under the direction of François Heim, operated in Paris from 1954 until about 1986. 4. Heim 1966. 5. Terence Mullaly, The Daily Telegraph, 1966. 6. Commenting on the Autumn 1968 exhibition Baroque Paintings, Sketches and Sculptures for the Collector, Benedict Nicolson noted, “By the standards of twenty years ago, the prices are outrageous; by 1968 standards, reasonable. The majority of the exhibits are priced under £1000, and so are too cheap for the tycoon but within the range of the people who ought to be encouraged: those who are reasonably prosperous but scorn ostentation. They will find plenty to interest them.” See Nicolson 1968, 708, 711. 7. The Scotsman. 8. Lurie and Wixom 1982, 404 –5, no. 177. 9. Nicolson 1966, 381. 10. Heim Gallery 1971, no. 7. 11. Terence Mullaly, The Daily Telegraph, November 8, 1967. 12. Waterhouse 1978, 555, commenting on the Summer 1978 exhibition, noted that “[t]he catalogue, as is usual with Heim exhibitions, is very ingenious.” 13. Nicolson 1971a, 720. 14. Heim Gallery 1971. Benedict Nicolson noted in his review of

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the exhibition that “[t]hese premises in Jermyn Street are thus transformed into a Seicento Neapolitan palace.” See Nicolson 1971b, 345. 15. The exhibition drew an astonishing ninety-six thousand visitors at the Detroit Institute of Arts. 16. Knox 2005, 70. Chapter 7

1. This text is expanded from my essay “Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Italian Paintings at the Detroit Institute of Arts,” published as the introduction to Bissell, Derstine, and Miller 2005, 8 –11. I am grateful to Susan Higman Larsen of the Detroit Institute of Arts and Dan Giles of D Giles Limited for their permission to revise it. I warmly thank Edgar Peters Bowron and Inge Reist for their invitation to participate in the September 2013 symposium “Going for Baroque: Americans Collect Italian Paintings of the 17th and 18th Centuries,” sponsored by the Center for the History of Collecting at The Frick Collection, as well as Esmée Quodbach and Samantha Deutch, who assisted in arranging it. 2. Peck 1991, 23; see also Abt 2001, 51–54, and Clayton 1966, 12–17. 3. Avery 1883, in DIA Archives, box GRI I, folder 1/11. A Triumph of Bacchus after Annibale Carracci was in room H; three works after Reni (Aurora, after the Rospigliosi ceiling, Rome; a Magdalen after the original in the Sciarra-Colonna palace, Rome; and a portrait) were in rooms S, Z, and H; and the Pietro da Cortona was in room P. I am grateful to Maria Ketcham, the DIA’s librarian and archivist, and her assistants, Katelyn Jedro and Rebecca Applin, for access to numerous archival documents consulted in my research for this essay. I also thank Iva Lisikewycz for clarification on a number of points. 4. The pope’s painting was shown in room Z of the temporary structure designed by Mortimer L. Smith. F. Rank (“The Pope’s Picture,” The Detroit Art Loan Record, no. 20, October 27, 1883) proposed that it was by Fra Paolino da Pistoia (ca. 1490 –1547). E. Richardson 1944, 67, considered it seventeenth-century Venetian, loosely adapted after Fra Bartolommeo; Fredericksen and Zeri 1972, 227, listed it as seventeenth-century Italian. Everett Fahy, on a visit to the museum, April 17, 2003, thought it showed affinities with the work of Claudio Ridolfi (1570 –1644). The drive to get a work from the pope for the 1883 exhibition was started by Richard Storrs Willis, who had studied in Europe with Felix Mendelssohn and was helped along in this effort by his friends Rev. James G. Walshe of Detroit and Fr. Camillus Mazzella, a professor of theology in Rome; see Peck 1991, 188. 5. Letter, DIA Archives, box GRI I, folder 1/8. Mabley later became one of the original organizers of the museum.

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6. C. Burroughs 1920; although the introduction, 10, states that seventy-two paintings were accepted from Scripps, seventythree are listed. For more on Scripps, see Peck 1991, 23, as well as Keyes 2004. The Scripps media conglomerate was started by James’s younger half-brother, who had worked with him. 7. Scripps 1889, iii–vii. 8. Ibid. See also C. Burroughs 1920, 8; Peck 1991, 39; Clayton 1966, 18; Keyes 2004, 8; and Marandel 1986, 27. 9. Detroit Museum of Art, Annual Report of the Trustees, July 1896, 18 –19. 10. The Panini is from the Welsh Corbett-Winder collection and was previously owned by Sir Compton Domville, whose ancestor almost certainly purchased it in Rome during 1717–19, thus making it one of Panini’s earliest datable works. The other six later Italian paintings donated by Scripps were deaccessioned in 1991 and 2000. 11. Eric Zafran’s illuminating essay (Zafran 1994) is magisterial in scope and provides an excellent introduction to this subject. See also Hersey 1987, as well as Edgar Peters Bowron’s introduction to this volume and my fellow contributors’ essays. Rudolf Wittkower already had mentioned the eclipse of an appreciation of Baroque art brought about by Ruskin in his introduction to Cummings 1965, 12, an exhibition discussed later in this essay. 12. Zafran 1994, 38 –39, 44 – 45, and passim. 13. The 1935 acquisition, Portrait of a Lady, was considered the work of Pietro Longhi; it was subsequently attributed to Michelangelo Cerruti and Giacomo Ceruti, but is now considered the work of an unknown artist. Of the thirty-two paintings, five were deaccessioned in 1991, 2000, and 2002. 14. Two paintings believed to be works by Alessandro Magnasco were purchased in 1936 with funds provided by the Whitcombs; these were deaccessioned in 2000. 15. The Leoni entered the museum as a work by Carlo Saraceni; the Angeluccio and Cerquozzi entered the museum as by Claude Lorrain and Pieter van Laer. 16. Peck 1991, 66. 17. Valentiner and Burroughs 1927, 20 –21, 23. Murillo’s Assumption is illustrated in the image of the gallery on p. 23, as is the Champaigne Last Supper, the Scripps Sassoferrato, and the studio of Guercino painting; a Zurbarán portrait of a girl and Ribera head of a bearded man, along with the Tiepolo (then considered as by Giovanni Battista) and Ricci, were also in the room. Also in the gallery were a terracotta Madonna by Jacopo Sansovino and a bronze Rape of the Sabines by Giambologna. 18. Three Italian Baroque paintings have entered the collection since 1984. 19. Cummings 1965; see also Zafran 1994, 73, 81– 82. Other smaller exhibitions had taken place in the United States since

the earliest two, in 1929 at the Fogg Art Museum in Cambridge and in 1930 at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford; see Zafran 1994, 47– 49 and passim. See also Zafran in this volume for more on the Wadsworth Atheneum. 20. Documents in DIA Archives, directorate of F. Cummings, box 63. 21. Additionally, two later Italian anonymous still-life paintings were received as gifts in 1965, one of which long bore an erroneous attribution to Rachel Ruysch and one that until the early 1980s was considered as Spanish. 22. Peck 1991, 58. 23. See J. Patrice Marandel’s essay in this volume for more on the importance of Ciechanowiecki for the diffusion of the Italian Baroque in the United States. See also Detroit Institute of Arts 1974, in which the acknowledgments (unpaginated) state that Ciechanowiecki “first formulated” the concept for the Twilight of the Medici show, while those for the Golden Age of Naples catalogue, xii, state that that exhibition’s concept “began as an idea in conversation between members of the Art Institute of Chicago staff and Andrew Ciechanowiecki.” (See Detroit Institute of Arts 1981.) Chapter 8

1. For the earlier years of the university, see D. Turner 2001, chaps. 3–10. 2. See Steel 1984 and Townsend and Zafran 1994. 3. See Nakamura 1997. 4. Hope 1965– 66, 162. 5. One of his more humorous jibes is recorded in a letter of June 7, 1982, to Julius Weitzner (Bob Jones University, curatorial files). Commenting on President Reagan’s visit to the pope, he writes, “He has ruined my week, calling the Pope ‘Holy Father.’ The Pope may be a father—I do not doubt that, many of them have been, but there never yet was a holy one except God.” 6. D. Turner 2001, 196. 7. Posner and Weil-Garris Posner 1966– 67, 144. 8. Dr. Jones, Sr., in a Chapel talk, April 28, 1946; see D. Turner 2001, 30. 9. Zafran 1994, 68. 10. Ibid., 45– 68. 11. Ibid., 68. 12. Ibid., 52, 62. 13. Wheelock 2005, 166–74. 14. Reynoso 2006, 19. 15. Ibid. 16. Hope 1965– 66, 162. When the present writer first visited the Museum in 1973, piped music still played in the galleries. A request to turn it off was refused, but the volume was turned down.

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17. For an illustrated catalogue of the Italian paintings, see Pepper 1984a; for a selection, see Steel 1984; Townsend and Zafran 1994; and Nolan 2001. 18. Pepper 1984a, 26–27, no. 22.1. 19. Ibid., 4 –5, no. 2.1. 20. Townsend and Zafran 1994, 141– 42. 21. Pepper 1984a, 132–33; Townsend and Zafran 1994, 146. 22. Pepper 1984a, 97–98, nos. 98.1– 4. 23. Townsend and Zafran 1994, 149. 24. Ward 1995, 347n11. 25. Dr. Jones was constantly buying, selling, and trading paintings, and inevitably some works were deaccessioned from the collection which with hindsight he might have done better to retain. A notable example is Guercino’s Christ in Gethsemane (Scharf and Marlier 1962, 132), subsequently acquired by the North Carolina Museum of Art, but later sold at auction. The painting is today in the Pinacoteca Nazionale, Bologna. 26. Steel 1984, 117n7. 27. April 1, 1952 (Bob Jones University, curatorial files). 28. Baldassari 2015, 116, no. 31. 29. Reynoso 2006, 29. 30. Townsend and Zafran 1994, 162. 31. Ibid., 160. 32. See note 10. 33. Townsend and Zafran, 1994, 164. The Maratti was probably bought by Sir Erasmus Philipps, 5th Bt (1699–1743), who was in Italy 1738 – 41 and in Rome in 1740 (see Ingamells 1997, 767). 34. For illustrated catalogues, see Scharf and Marlier 1962; Jones 1968; Nolan 2001; and Kennedy and Nolan 2011. 35. Zafran 1994, 68. 36. D. Turner 2001, 194. 37. Jaffé 1989, 176, no. 145; Barnes et al. 2004, discussed 266, under no. III.26. 38. Steel 1984, 128 –30. Dated by David Steel to ca. 1630. Stomer is recorded in that year in Rome, from which he might have progressed via Venice. 39. See Malgouyres 2007, 52–54, 269. 40. For recent literature on this painting, see Pérez Sánchez and Navarrete Prieto 2005, 134 –36. 41. June 7, 1976 (Bob Jones University, curatorial files). 42. Jones 1968, 187. 43. Nolan 2001, 150. Chapter 9

1. Surprisingly little has been written about Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., as a collector. See Sutton, Amaya, and Zafran 1978, 8; Zafran 1978, 242–53; Zafran 1994, 62– 63 and 65– 68; Kuchta 1989. Jefferson Harrison, long-time chief curator of the Chrysler Museum, has written on Chrysler in Harrison 1991

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and Harrison 2007, 21. Chrysler’s life and accomplishments are surveyed in Curcio 2000, 658 – 61, and in a detailed study, Earle 2008. 2. See Earle 2008, 19. 3. Ibid., 22. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., 25; Curcio 2000, 624. See also T. Connors 1989, 4 – 6. 6. Earle 2008, 26; see also Harrison 2007, 11. 7. Earle 2008, 25. 8. Detroit Institute of Arts 1937. 9. Earle 2008, 34 –35. 10. Chrysler and Fox 1941. 11. “Chrysler Art on View,” The New York Times, February 2, 1941; Earle 2008, 36. 12. Earle 2008, 36–39. 13. Ibid., 41. 14. William Ruehlmann, “Man Behind the Museum,” VirginianPilot and Ledger-Star, October 19, 1980. 15. Curcio 2000, 623. 16. On the Bernini bust, see Zafran 1978, 252, fig. 17; Sutton, Amaya, and Zafran 1978, no. 13; and Harrison 1991, no. 37. 17. Portland Art Museum 1956. 18. According to the introductory text of Suida Manning 1957, 5. 19. Phone conversation with Alessandra Manning Dolnier in February 2013. 20. Earle 2008, 41, 44, 48, and 50 –51. 21. Suida Manning 1958. 22. Chrysler 1962. 23. Ibid. See John Canaday, “Art in Chrysler Exhibition Faces Canadian Challenge,” The New York Times, October 17, 1962, 1, 36. 24. “Strange Story of Walter Chrysler, Jr. Art Scandal—Colossal Collection of Fakes,” Life, November 2, 1962, 80 – 86; Newsweek, November 26, 1962, 6; and Time, October 26, 1962, 70. 25. Bowdoin College Museum of Art 1963. 26. These exhibitions were organized by Robert Manning at the Finch College Museum of Art, 62 East 78th St., New York City, and included Manning 1961; Manning 1962a; Manning 1962b; Manning 1964a; and Manning 1964b. 27. Manning and Suida Manning 1962. The Chrysler paintings included Valerio Castello, no. 19; Castiglione, no. 23; Magnasco, no 41; Strozzi, nos. 53 and 55. 28. Cummings 1965. The Chrysler paintings included Reni, nos. 80 and 81; Crespi, no. 118; Creti, no. 119; Sirani, no. 114; Preti, no. 152; Rosa, nos. 155 and 156; Magnasco, no. 182; and Liss, no. 193. 29. Manning 1967. 30. Earle 2008, 70 –74. 31. Ibid., 77, 84 – 86.

notes to pages 107–120

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32. Sotheby’s 1989. See Earle 2008, 148. 33. In conversation with the author. 34. Portland Art Museum 1956, no. 28; Manning 1962a, no. 3; Manning 1967, no. 19. For the attribution, see Posner 1971, vol. 2, 21, no. 47. 35. Manning 1962a, no. 6; Manning 1967, no. 20. See Abdo 2010, 358, no. 976. 36. Portland Art Museum 1956, no. 30; Manning 1962a, no. 7; Manning 1967, no. 21; Zafran 1978, 243, pl. V; Sutton, Amaya, and Zafran 1978, no. 2; Harrison 1991, no. 18. Although the date of purchase for this painting has sometimes in the past been given as 1950, there is documentary evidence in the Museum’s file that David Koetser still owned it in 1953, so the purchase date of 1954 seems correct. 37. Portland Art Museum 1956, no. 34; Suida Manning 1958, no. 7; Manning 1962a, no. 15; Manning 1967, no. 27; Zafran 1978, 243, pl. VI; Sutton, Amaya, and Zafran 1978, no. 3; Harrison 1991, no. 22; and Salerno 1988, 191, no. 110. 38. Manning 1967, no. 28. 39. Manning 1962a, no. 10; see Spear 1982, vol. 1, 260 – 61, no. 91b. 40. Manning 1962a, no. 19; Manning 1967, no. 35. 41. Portland Art Museum 1956, no. 45; Bowdoin College Museum of Art 1963, no. 3; Manning 1962a, no. 35; Manning 1967, no. 57; Sutton, Amaya, and Zafran 1978, no. 10; Harrison 1991, no. 46. 42. Chrysler Museum of Art, inv. no. 2009.8. Sold at Hôtel Drouot Richelieu, Paris, May 20, 2009, 18 –21, lot 42. For the attribution, see Francucci 2009, 107, fig. 123; for Boncori in general, see Schleier 2003, 134 – 48. 43. Manning 1962a, no. 26; Manning 1967, no. 54. 44. Portland Art Museum 1956, no. 44; Manning 1962a, no. 30; Manning 1967, no. 53; Zafran 1978, 246, pl. III; Sutton, Amaya, and Zafran 1978, no. 9; Harrison 1991, no. 47. 45. Manning 1962a, no. 21; Manning 1967, no. 49. 46. Manning 1962a, no. 38; Manning 1967, no. 58. 47. Manning 1964a, no. 20; Manning 1967, no. 33. 48. Bowdoin College Museum of Art 1963, no. 24; Manning 1964a, no. 21. 49. Exhibited Manning 1964a, no. 19, when still owned by Oscar Klein. 50. Manning 1964a, no. 22; Manning 1967, no. 32; Harrison 1991, no. 29; see also Spike 1984, no. 47. 51. Sotheby’s 1989, lot 76. 52. See F. Richardson 1964, fig. 5; and Anelli 1996, 389, no. R88. 53. Bowdoin College Museum of Art 1963, no. 15; Manning 1964a, no. 15; Manning 1967, no. 29. 54. Portland Art Museum 1956, no. 33; Manning 1964a, no. 17; Manning 1967, no. 25; Lemoine 2007, 276–77, no. 91. Information from Patrick Matthiesen in an e-mail of May 27, 2013.

55. Manning 1967, no. 26; Zafran 1978, 242, fig. 15; Harrison 1991, 19; Lemoine 2007, 244 – 45, no. 45. 56. Portland Art Museum 1956, no. 42; Suida Manning 1958, no. 63; Bowdoin College Museum of Art 1963, no. 21; Manning 1967, no. 48; Harrison 1991, no. 40. 57. The subject of the painting has occasionally been identified as Apollo and Marsyas; Portland Art Museum 1956, no. 53; Suida Manning 1958, no. 50; Manning 1967, no. 52; Zafran 1978, 249, fig. 12; Sutton, Amaya, and Zafran 1978, no. 7; Harrison 1991, no. 43. 58. Manning 1964a, no. 49; Manning 1967, no. 51. 59. Portland Art Museum 1956, no. 48; Manning 1967, no. 61; Zafran 1978, 251, pl. VII; Sutton, Amaya, and Zafran 1978, no 11; Harrison 1991, no. 50. 60. Manning 1967, no. 60. 61. See Milkovich 1964, 38. 62. Manning 1967, no. 44; Zafran 1978, 247, pl. IV; Sutton, Amaya, and Zafran 1978, no. 6; Harrison 1991, no. 36. 63. Manning 1962b, no. 28; Manning 1967, no. 46; Janson 1980, 80 – 81. 64. Portland Art Museum 1956, no. 41. 65. Manning 1967, no. 45. 66. Milkovich 1964, 38. 67. Portland Art Museum 1956, no. 36; Manning 1962b, nos. 15, 16; Bowdoin College Museum of Art 1963, nos. 19, 20; Manning 1967, nos. 37, 38; Zafran 1978, 246, fig. 7; Sutton, Amaya, and Zafran 1978, no. 4; Harrison 1991, no. 34. 68. See St. Louis Art Museum 1975, 104. 69. In conversation with the author. 70. Suida Manning 1958, no. 52; Manning 1962b, no. 17; Manning 1967, no. 39. 71. Portland Art Museum 1956, no. 35; Bowdoin College Museum of Art 1963, no. 17; Manning 1962b, no. 20; Manning 1967, no. 36; Spike 1999, no. 205. 72. Manning 1962b, no. 22; P. & D. Colnaghi 1950, no. 9; and Briganti 1951, 48, fig. 24. 73. Suida Manning 1958, no. 9; Manning 1967, no. 47; Zafran 1978, 246, fig. 6; Harrison, 1991, no. 26. 74. Portland Art Museum 1956, no. 37; Manning 1967, no. 40; Zafran 1978, 246, fig. 5. 75. Manning 1962b, no. 3. 76. Ibid., no. 2. 77. Sotheby’s 1989, lot 67. 78. Manning 1962a, no. 13; Bowdoin College Museum of Art 1963, no. 11; Manning 1967, no. 47; see also Bean and Vitzthum 1961, 106–22. 79. Manning 1962b, no. 37; Manning 1967, no. 50; Spike 1984, no. 69; Sotheby’s 1989, lot 80. 80. Harrison 1991, no. 44. 81. Manning 1962b, no. 45; Manning 1967, no. 64.

notes to pages 120–126

03 Notes.indd 151

151

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82. Manning 1962b, no. 43; Manning 1967, no. 65; Zafran 1978, 247– 48, fig. 8; Sotheby’s 1989, lot 83. 83. Portland Art Museum 1956, no. 50; Manning 1962b, no. 46; Manning 1967, no. 70; Sotheby’s 1989, lot 78. 84. Portland Art Museum 1956, no. 40; Suida Manning 1958, no. 69; Manning 1964b, no. 60; Manning 1967, no. 43; Zafran 1978, 248, fig. 9; Sutton, Amaya, and Zafran 1978, no. 5; Sotheby’s 1989, lot 60. 85. Portland Art Museum 1956, no. 38; Suida Manning 1958, no. 8; Manning 1964b, no. 47; Manning 1967, no. 30; Harrison 1991, no. 25. 86. Suida Manning 1958, no. 58; Sotheby’s 1989, lot 61. 87. See Milkovich 1967, 50, no. 19; Manning 1964b, no. 28; Manning 1967, no. 22. 88. Portland Art Museum 1956, no. 31; Suida Manning 1958, no. 62; Manning 1964b, no. 25; Manning 1967, no. 23; Milkovich 1967, 52, no. 20. 89. Portland Art Museum 1956, no. 32; Manning 1964b, no. 24; Manning 1964a, no. 16; Manning 1967, no. 24; Milkovich 1967, 68, no. 28; Zafran 1978, 249, fig. 11; Harrison 1991, no. 24. 90. Suida Manning 1958, no. 40; Manning 1964b, no. 85; Manning 1967, no. 56; Zafran 1978, 248 – 49, fig. 10; Sutton, Amaya, and Zafran 1978, no. 8; Harrison 1991, no. 45. 91. Portland Art Museum 1956, no. 47; Manning 1964b, no. 91; Manning 1967, no. 55; Geiger 1949, 88, col. repr. 356; Dayton Art Institute 1999, 247. 92. The painting was most likely acquired from Central Picture Galleries and is probably the companion to The Torture of Ixion, Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico, for which, see Manning 1964a, no. 42. 93. Sotheby’s 1989, lot 28. 94. Ibid., lot 65. 95. Bowdoin College Museum of Art 1963, no. 7; Manning 1967, no. 42; Sotheby’s 1989, lot 68. 96. Sotheby’s 1989, lot 62. 97. Zafran 1978, 252, fig. 16. 98. Portland Art Museum 1956, no. 29; Bowdoin College Museum of Art 1963, no. 2; Sotheby’s 1989, lot 69. 99. On Chrysler’s friendship with Jack Tanzer, see Earle 2008, 95–97. 100. Comment made to the author. Chapter 10

1. Zafran 1994, esp. 24, 42– 43, 46– 47, 53–54, 73, 83, 87– 88, 91. 2. Rogers Fund, 1952 (52.81). For provenance, exhibition history, and complete references for works in the Metropolitan Museum’s collections, see http://www.metmuseum.org/ collections. 3. Mahon 1952. 4. Letter from Denis Mahon to Theodore Rousseau, December

152

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22, 1951, Archives, Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 5. See, respectively, letter from Denis Mahon to Theodore Rousseau, April 13, 1952; letter from Bernard Berenson to Francis Henry Taylor, director, July 4, 1952 (copy); both Archives, Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Mahon 1953, 33. 6. Longhi 1951; Arcangeli et al. 1959; Christiansen 2009, 36. 7. See Bowron 1994, 52; Rowlands 1996, 19–20. 8. Spike 2010, 175–78, no. 50. 9. Archives, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Paintings European and American—Declined Gi—Goh. XP 1660. Gnoli acted on the Museum’s behalf from 1928 –29, and again from 1932– 40. For the Brera’s purchase of the painting, see Pacia 2009. 10. Samuel D. Lee Fund, 1934 (34.73). Wehle 1934, 119. 11. Victor Wilbour Memorial Fund, 1959 (59.32). Hibbard 1969, 19, 22. 12. Rousseau 1954, 4. 13. Rogers Fund 1906 (07.66). 14. Pope-Hennessy 1984, 233, writes of the acquisitions in 1906 that “good and bad purchases continued in an unending stream.” When The Birth of the Virgin first arrived in New York, it was thought to represent the Presentation in the Temple, and sometime later the Birth of Saint John the Baptist; in 1958 Ferdinando Bologna (Bologna 1958, 76) correctly identified the subject. 15. Letters (copies), Archives, Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Assistant Secretary to Roger E. Fry, August 30, 1906, and Roger E. Fry to Mr. Kent, October 5, 1906. 16. “Principal Accessions, February 20 –March 20, 1906,” in Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art 1, no. 5 (1906): 72. 17. Rudolf Wittkower, introduction to Cummings 1965, 11. He considered all three artists “provincial masters.” 18. Bequest of Mary L. Harrison, 1921 (21.105). 19. On Wilde’s sojourn in Florence, see Wright 1959 and Wright 1969. My thanks to Frank Dabell for alerting me to these articles. 20. Zafran 1994, 24 –25; Scharf and Marlier 1962, 139; Pepper 1984a, 100 –101. 21. Sale, New York, Dumont, March 22, 1848. This was an interesting moment for the arrival of Baroque paintings in New York, as Thomas Jefferson Bryan also included seventeenth-century works among those he exhibited in his “Bryan Gallery of Christian Art” in the 1850s; see Zafran 1994, 38. A letter (Archives, Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art) from a member of the Livingston family to the curator Bryson Burroughs in 1921 describes the works from the Thomson sale purchased

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by Anson Livingston at the 1848 sale and the connections between the two families. 22. Charles B. Curtis Fund, 1934 (34.137). Askew was in active communication that year with curator Harry Wehle, negotiating further with him, unsuccessfully, about a painting on copper, a Landscape with a Baptism attributed to Domenichino that had come from the Holford Collection. 23. “Appreciation for Salvator Rosa” 1935; L. Burroughs 1935. 24. Durlacher Brothers 1948. 25. Rogers Fund, 1930 (30.31). 26. Fletcher Fund, 1927 (27.93); deaccessioned 2014. Wehle 1929. 27. Archives, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Purchased. Ribera. Holy Family. P1660. Memorandum by Bryson Burroughs to the Trustees. 28. Gift of Edward W. Carter, 1959 (59.40). Carter’s Dutch paintings were featured in an exhibition (see Walsh and Schneider 1981) that was shown at the Metropolitan Museum in 1982. The Stanzione painting was sold to the collector by Harry Sperling, working for F. Kleinberger Galleries, New York, two names that appear regularly in the Museum’s archives. Carter made many later loans to the Museum, but almost always of Dutch and French paintings; see Archives, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Edward W. Carter (C24484). 29. Gift of Elinor Dorrance Ingersoll, 1969 (69.281). Archives, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Mrs. Nathaniel P. Hill (Elinor D.). H554. Letter (copy) from Douglas Dillon, 1976. 30. Salmi 1956, no. 114. Archives, The Metropolitan Museum of

Art. Mrs. Nathaniel P. Hill (Elinor D.) H554. Letter (copy), Claus Virch, 1969. 31. Wittkower 1958, xxiii. 32. Information from Archives, Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 33. Gift of Paul Ganz in memory of Rudolf Wittkower, 1973 (1973.165). Letter from John Walsh, Jr., to Mr. Paul Ganz, September 7, 1973, Archives, Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 34. Memorandum written by John Pope-Hennessy, April 5, 1977; Archives, Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 35. Purchase, Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876–1967), by exchange, and Dr. and Mrs. Manuel Porter and sons, Gift, in honor of Mrs. Sarah Porter, 1971 (1971.155). For complete provenance, exhibition history, and references, see http://www.metmuseum.org/collections. 36. Cavalli, Arcangeli, and Emiliani 1956. 37. Fahy 1972, 208. 38. For these works, see Fahy 2003, 27–32, no. 7; 32–34, no. 8; 38 – 42, no. 10; 45– 49, no. 12. 39. Archives, Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art. 40. Gwynne Andrews Fund, 1989 (1989.225). 41. Gift of Eula M. Ganz, in memory of Paul H. Ganz, 1987 (1987.75). 42. Archives, Department of European Paintings, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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153

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———. 1997. “The Dream Realized: The Building of the Museum.” In Ormond and De Groft 1997, 10 –25. Wehle, Harry B. 1929. “Some Italian Baroque Paintings.” Bulletin of The Metropolitan Museum of Art 24 (7): 187–90. ———. 1934. “A Painting by Jusepe Ribera.” Bulletin of The Metropolitan Museum of Art 29 (7): 119–22. Wendland, Ulrike. 1999. Biographisches Handbuch deutschsprachiger Kunsthistoriker im Exil: Leben und Werk der unter dem Nazionals­ ozialismus verfolgten und vertriebenen Wissenschaftler. 2 vols. Munich: Saur. Wheelock, Arthur K., Jr. 2005. Flemish Paintings of the Seventeenth Century: The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art. Wittkower, Rudolf. 1958. Art and Architecture in Italy, 1600 to 1750. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1958. Wittkower, Rudolf, and Margot Wittkower. 1967. “Puerto Rico’s Museum.” Apollo 85:187. Wright, Nathalia. 1959. “The Italian Son of Richard Henry Wilde.” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 43 (4): 419–27. ———. 1969. “The Italian Son of Richard Henry Wilde: A Sequel.” The Georgia Historical Quarterly 53 (2): 201– 4. Zafran, Eric M. 1978. “From the Renaissance to the Grand Tour.” Apollo 107: 242–53. ———. 1994. “A History of Italian Baroque Painting in America.” In Townsend and Zafran 1994, 21–108. ———. 1997a. “A Collection of Baroque Masterpieces.” In Ormond and De Groft 1997, 72–79. ———. 1997b. “John and Lulu.” In Ormond and De Groft 1997, 43–55.

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———, ed. 2000. Calder in Connecticut. Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art in association with Rizzoli International. ———, ed. 2001. Gauguin’s Nirvana: Painters at Le Pouldu, 1889–90. Exh. cat., Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford. New Haven: Yale University Press; Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. ———. 2003. “Springtime in the Museum: Modern Art Comes to Hartford.” In Surrealism and Modernism from the Collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum, by Eric Zafran and Paul Paret. Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press. ———, ed. 2004. Renaissance to Rococo: Masterpieces from the Collection of the Wadsworth Atheneum. Exh. cat., The John and Mabel Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota; The Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford. New Haven: Yale University Press. ———. 2012. Masters of French Painting, 1290 –1920, at the Wadsworth Atheneum. Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, in association with D Giles, London. Zafran, Eric M., Eugene R. Gaddis, and Susan Hood. 2004. Ballets Russes to Balanchine: Dance at the Wadsworth Atheneum. Exh. cat. Hartford: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. Zamoyski, Adam. 1987. “The Apollo Portrait: Andrew Ciechanowiecki.” Apollo 126 ( July): 38 – 40. Zeri, Federico. 1976. Italian Paintings in the Walters Art Gallery. 2 vols. Baltimore: Walters Art Gallery. ———, ed. 1989. La natura morta in Italia. 2 vols. Milan: Electa.

references

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Contributors

Inge Reist is Director of the Center for the History of Collecting at The Frick Collection and Frick Art Reference Library, where her first position was as Assistant Curator and Lecturer from 1980 to 1983. She received her Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1984 and returned to the Frick as head of its Photoarchive and later chief of Research Collections and Programs. She established the Center for the History of Collecting in 2007. She has taught at Columbia and Rutgers Universities as well as Hunter College, has lectured widely on European art at museums and conferences, and her articles have appeared in most major journals. From 2005 to 2011, she chaired the Association of Research Institutes in Art History. Her publications and public lectures focus primarily on art collecting, and include A Market for Merchant Princes: Collecting Italian Renaissance Paintings in America (volume editor, Penn State University Press, 2015); British Models of Collecting and the American Response: Reflections Across the Pond (volume editor, Ashgate, 2014); Collecting Spanish Art: Spain’s Golden Age and America’s Gilded Age (coedited with José Luis Colomer, The Frick Collection with the Centro de Estudios Europa Hispánica and Center for Spain in America, 2012); Provenance: An Alternate History of Art (coedited with Gail Feigenbaum, Getty Research Institute, 2012); “Sacred Art in the Profane New World of Nineteenth-Century America,” in Sacred Possessions: Collecting Italian Religious Art, 1500 to 1900, ed. Gail Feigenbaum and Sybille Ebert-Schifferer (Getty Research Institute, 2011); “The Fate of the Palais-Royal Collection, 1791–1800,” in La circulation des oeuvres d’art / The Circulation of Works of Art in the Revolutionary Era, 1789–1848, ed. Roberta Panzanelli (Rennes: Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2006). She also maintains her interest in Renaissance and Baroque art, recently writing an essay for the Blackwell companion series, and an essay, “The Classical Tradition: Mythology and Allegory,” in Paolo Veronese: A Master and His Workshop (Sarasota: The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, 2013). Edgar Peters Bowron received his B.A. from Colgate University and his M.A. and Ph.D. from the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University. He began his professional career at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and has subsequently worked in a number of American art museums, including the Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The Walters Art Gallery, and The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. He has served as director of the North Carolina Museum of Art, director of the Harvard

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University Art Museums, and senior curator of paintings at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. From 1996 through 2014 he served as the Audrey Jones Beck Curator of European Art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. His writings include numerous articles and essays and collection and exhibition catalogues, including for the exhibitions Art in Rome in the Eighteenth Century (Philadelphia Museum of Art and Museum of Fine Arts, 2000); Bernardo Bellotto and the Capitals of Europe (Museo Correr, Venice, and Museum of Fine Arts, 2001); Best in Show: The Dog in Art from the Renaissance to Today (Bruce Museum, Greenwich, and Museum of Fine Arts, 2006); Pompeo Batoni: Prince of Painters in Eighteenth-Century Rome (Museum of Fine Arts and National Gallery, London, 2007– 8); Antiquity Revived: Neoclassical Art in the Eighteenth Century (Musée du Louvre, Paris, and Museum of Fine Arts, 2009–10); and Titian and the Golden Age of Venetian Painting: Masterpieces from the National Galleries of Scotland (High Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, Museum of Fine Arts, 2010 –11). His most recent publication is Pompeo Batoni (1708–1787): A Complete Catalogue of His Paintings, 2 vols. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). Virginia Brilliant is The Ulla R. Searing Curator of Collections at The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida. To date, she has been the lead curator for the exhibitions The Triumph of Marriage: Painted Cassoni of the Renaissance (with the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 2008), Gothic Art in the Gilded Age: Medieval and Renaissance Treasures in the Gavet-Vanderbilt-Ringling Collection (with the Preservation Society of Newport County, 2009–10), Peter Paul Rubens: Impressions of a Master (with the Royal Museum, Antwerp, 2012), and Paolo Veronese: A Master and His Workshop in Renaissance Venice (2012–13). At present she is leading a renovation and reinstallation of the Ringling’s permanent collection galleries, and is writing a catalogue of the Museum’s Italian, Spanish, and French paintings, which will be published in 2017. Before coming to the Ringling, she held curatorial positions at the Cleveland Museum of Art (2006– 8) and the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles (2005– 6), and obtained her M.A. and Ph.D. in the field of early Italian painting and sculpture from the Courtauld Institute of Art in London (2001 and 2005), following a B.A. in history and history of art at University College London (2000). Eric M. Zafran was The Susan Morse Hilles Curator of European Art at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, until his retirement in 2012. Educated at Brandeis University, where he was a curatorial assistant at The Rose Art Museum, and at New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts, Zafran received his Ph.D. in 1972. In addition to the Wadsworth Atheneum, Zafran has held distinguished curatorial appointments at The Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia; the High Museum, Atlanta; the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; and the Jewish Museum in New York. He has served as the principal organizer of numerous

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exhibitions, including Drawings from Georgia Collections, 19th & 20th Centuries (1981); The Rococo Age: French Masterpieces of the Eighteenth Century (1983); and Master Drawings from Titian to Picasso: The Curtis O. Baer Collection (1985), all High Museum of Art, Atlanta; The Illegal Camera: Photography in the Netherlands During the German Occupation, 1940 –1945 (1996); and Camille Pissarro in the Caribbean, 1850 –1855: Drawings from the Collection at Olana (1996–97), both at the Jewish Museum, New York; and Santa Barbara Collects: Impressions of France (Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1997). Zafran has also authored numerous publications on the permanent collections of the museums where he has held appointments, including Fifty Old Master Paintings in the Walters Art Gallery (1988), essays on the formation of the Ringling Museum’s collections (1996), and the Boston Museum of Fine Arts’ first volume of its French Paintings catalogue (1998). In 1992, Zafran contributed the still-essential introductory essay “A History of Italian Baroque Painting in America” for the Philbrook Museum and New Orleans Museum of Art exhibition catalogue Botticelli to Tiepolo: Three Centuries of Italian Paintings from Bob Jones University. He is most recently the editor of Fantasy and Faith: The Art of Gustave Doré (New York: Dahesh Museum of Art; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).

and coauthored (with Philip Sohm) Painting for Profit: The Economic Lives of Seventeenth-Century Italian Painters (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). A selection of his more than one hundred scholarly articles was reissued as From Caravaggio to Artemisia: Essays on Painting in SeventeenthCentury Italy and France (London: Pindar Press, 2002). He serves as a consultant to the Prince of Wales Museum, Bombay, on its collection of European paintings. While teaching at Oberlin College as Mildred Jay Professor of Art History, he directed the Allen Memorial Art Museum for eleven years (1972–83), and held interim appointments as Distinguished Visiting Professor at George Washington University and Harn Eminent Scholar at the University of Florida. He served as editor-in-chief of The Art Bulletin (1985–88) and has received numerous awards, including the Daria Borghese gold medal for the best book of the year on a Roman subject (Renaissance and Baroque Paintings from the Sciarra and Fiano Collections [Rome: Ugo Bozzi, 1972]), a postdoctoral Fulbright to Italy, and grants from the American Council of Learned Societies, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts, the National Humanities Center, and the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations (twice for the latter’s Bellagio Center).

Marco Grassi was born in Florence, son of an American mother and Arturo Grassi, a well-known third-generation art dealer. Shortly after the Second World War, the family moved to the United States, where Grassi completed his education at Princeton. After military service, he returned to Italy entering as an apprentice in the Gabinetto del Restauro of the Uffizi in 1959. His formal training in paintings conservation continued in Rome and in Zürich. By 1962, Grassi was conducting a private conservation practice in Florence, and in 1964 he became visiting conservator of the Thyssen-Bornemisza Collection at the Villa Favorita in Castagnola, Switzerland, a position he held until the collection was relocated to Madrid in 1990. In 1970, Grassi closed his Florence studio and began a practice in New York that continues to this day. About ten years ago Grassi and his son Matteo formed “Grassi Studio,” a partnership that deals in European Old Master paintings. Since 2009, he has served on the Board of the American Foundation for the Courtauld Institute of Art and, in 2013, became its President. Other board and advisory council positions include the Princeton University Art Museum, “La Fondazione” (formed under the auspices of the Italian Cultural Institute of New York), and IFAR (Institute for Art Research). He holds the rank of Commander in Italy’s Order of Merit.

Pablo Pérez d’Ors is the associate curator of European art at the Museo de Arte de Ponce in Puerto Rico, where he oversees an important collection of art dating from the late Middle Ages to the end of the nineteenth century. Since his arrival in Ponce in 2011, he has curated several exhibitions, including El Greco to Goya: Masterpieces from the Prado Museum; Decadence and Revolution: Art in Vienna, 1890 –1910; and Wise Men from the East: The Magi Portraits by Rubens. A specialist in Spanish seventeenth-century painting, he is also the author of the upcoming catalogue of Spanish paintings and sculptures in the museum’s collection (in press). Between 2009 and 2011, Pérez d’Ors was an Andrew W. Mellon Curatorial Fellow at The Frick Collection, where he worked on the exhibition The King at War: Velázquez’s Portrait of Philip IV. His research for the exhibition led to two publications in The Burlington Magazine which focus on Velázquez’s activity in 1644 and examine the connections between the Frick portrait and other paintings in light of new technical discoveries. He is also interested in the relationship between sacred oratory and the making, display, and collecting of religious images in the Spanish Golden Age.

Richard E. Spear earned his B.A. from the University of Chicago (1961) and M.F.A. and Ph.D. degrees from Princeton University (1963, 1965). His best-known publications are Caravaggio and His Followers (Cleveland: Cleveland Museum of Art, 1971, rev. ed., New York: Harper and Row, 1975), Domenichino (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), and The “Divine” Guido: Religion, Sex, Money, and Art in the World of Guido Reni (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997). Most recently he directed

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Contributors

J. Patrice Marandel has worked at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art since 1993. He was the co-organizer of the recent exhibition Bodies and Shadows: Caravaggio and His Legacy, which drew record attendance to LACMA. Before coming to LACMA, his career included appointments at the Rhode Island School of Design, the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. A specialist in eighteenth-century French painting, Marandel has published extensively on the subject, as well as on nineteenth-century and contemporary art. He was the organizer or co-organizer of many exhibitions, including Gray Is the Color at Rice

University, Houston; Frédéric Bazille and Early Impressionism at the Art Institute of Chicago; François Boucher, 1703–1770 at the Detroit Institute of Arts, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Grand Palais, Paris; The Golden Age of Naples in Detroit, Chicago, and Naples; Symbolism in Polish Painting, 1890–1914, in Detroit and Warsaw; Three Masters of French Rococo: Boucher, Fragonard, Lancret in Tokyo; and Luca Giordano, 1634–1705 in Los Angeles, Naples, and Vienna. Marandel has received many awards, including grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and a fellowship from the Guggenheim Foundation. He was made a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters of the French Republic. Andria Derstine was named the John G. W. Cowles Director of the Allen Memorial Art Museum at Oberlin College in 2012; she previously held curatorial positions there and at the Detroit Institute of Arts. She has curated numerous exhibitions of Renaissance through contemporary art, several in conjunction with such institutions as the Cleveland Museum of Art, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Phillips Collection, and the Yale University Art Gallery. Her scholarly expertise is in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French and Italian art; her dissertation, advised by Donald Posner, concerns the French Academy in Rome and the Accademia di San Luca during the period 1660 –1740. Among her numerous publications are the catalogues Allen Memorial Art Museum: Highlights from the Collection (Oberlin: Oberlin College, 2011) and Masters of Italian Baroque Painting: The Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 2005). She has additionally contributed essays and articles on Renaissance painting, eighteenth-century interior decoration, Venetian art, Nattier, and Monet to The Burlington Magazine and to publications of the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, the Getty Research Institute, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the El Paso Museum of Art, the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, and the Detroit Institute of Arts. Derstine has taught at New York University and Oberlin College, and has held fellowships from the Brown Foundation Fellows Program, the Center for Curatorial Leadership, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. She holds a Ph.D. from NYU and an A.B. magna cum laude from Harvard. Ian Kennedy was born in North Wales and educated at Cambridge University and the Courtauld Institute of Art . He then joined Christie’s, working first in London, then in New York, where he was in charge of the Old Master Paintings Department from 1976–1993. After that he ran the New York office of the London dealer Simon Dickinson. He then worked as Curator of European Paintings at the Nelson-Atkins Museum in Kansas City until 2013, and now lives in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, as an independent scholar. In 1989 he was responsible for the sale at a Christie’s New York auction of Jacopo Pontormo’s Halbadier from the Stillman Collection, which sold to the Getty Museum for a record 35 million

dollars. While at the Nelson-Atkins he conceived and curated an exhibition, The Railway: Art in the Age of Steam, with venues at the Walker Art Gallery Liverpool and the Nelson-Atkins. This was the first international exhibition of paintings and photographs of railroad subject matter. Kennedy is a specialist in the Italian Baroque and has contributed several articles on the subject to various art periodicals, including publishing two Elsheimer paintings from the Frankfurt tabernacle which he identified while working at Christie’s in London. He is also the author of a book on Titian in the Taschen series. His other interests include military history, especially the First World War, on which topic he has lectured at The Frick Collection, at other venues in New York, and at the National Museum of World War One in Kansas City. Andrea Bayer was educated at Barnard College and received her Ph.D. from Princeton University, where she wrote her dissertation, on the arts in Brescia in the early sixteenth century, under the direction of John Shearman. She has worked at The Metropolitan Museum of Art since 1989, first in the Department of Prints and Photographs and, from 1990, in the Department of European Paintings, becoming a curator in 2007. There she has been involved in numerous exhibitions, including Jusepe de Ribera, 1591–1652 (1992); Giambattista Tiepolo, 1696–1770 (1996); Dosso Dossi: Court Painter in Renaissance Ferrara (1998 –99); The Still Lifes of Evaristo Baschenis: The Music of Silence (2000 –2001); Painters of Reality: The Legacy of Leonardo and Caravaggio in Lombardy (2004); Antonello da Messina: Sicily’s Renaissance Master (2005–2006); Art and Love in Renaissance Italy (2008 –2009); and most recently The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini (2011) and Bellini, Titian, and Lotto: North Italian Paintings from the Accademia Carrara, Bergamo (2012). Bayer has written extensively on North Italian painting of the Renaissance, including two Museum Bulletins on painting north of the Apennines (2003 and 2005) and a chapter on the arts of Brescia and Bergamo in Venice and the Veneto, ed. Peter Humfrey, Artistic Centers of the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). Some of her lecturing in recent years has concentrated on collecting and connoisseurship, including two papers for The Frick Collection’s Center for the History of Collecting (2010 and 2013). She has served as coordinating curator for Curatorial Studies, the graduate program run by the Metropolitan Museum and the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, from 2007, and was the interim head of the museum’s Department of Education in 2009. She was a member of the Center for Curatorial Leadership class of 2012 and was a member of the team responsible for the complete reinstallation of the European Paintings galleries, opening in May 2013. In early 2014 she was appointed co-chair of the Director’s Exhibition Committee and was named the Jayne Wrightsman Curator on July 1, 2014. Her most recent exhibition is Unfinished: Thoughts Left Visible (2016), which was the inaugural show at the Metropolitan Museum’s Breuer building on Madison Avenue.

Contributors

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List of Artists

A Abbiati, Filippo (1640 –1715) Albani, Francesco (1578 –1660) Algardi, Alessandro (1598 –1654) Allori, Alessandro (1535–1607) Alma-Tadema, Lawrence (1836–1912) Andrea di Lione. See Leone, Andrea di Angeluccio (Angeluccio de Paesi, active ca. 1640 –50) Arcimboldo, Giuseppe (1527–1593) Assereto, Gioacchino (1600 –1649) B Baciccio, Il. See Gaulli, Giovanni Battista Badalocchio, Sisto (1585–1647) Baglione, Giovanni (1566–1643) Balducci, Giovanni (called Il Cosci; 1560 –1631) Balestra, Antonio (1666–1740) Bamboccio, Il. See Laer, Pieter van Barbieri, Giovanni Francesco. See Guercino, Il Barocci, Federico (1528 –1612) Baschenis, Evaristo (1617–1677) Basetti, Marcantonio (1586–1630) Batoni, Pompeo (1708 –1787) Battistello, Il. See Caracciolo, Giovanni Battista Bazzani, Giuseppe (1690 –1769) Bazzi, Giovanni Antonio. See Sodoma, Il Beinaschi, Giovanni Battista. See Benaschi, Giovanni Battista Bellini, Giovanni (1431/36–1516) Bellis, Antonio de (ca. 1616– ca. 1656) Bellori, Giovanni Pietro (1613–1696) Bellotti, Pietro (1625–1700) Bellotto, Bernardo (ca. 1721–1780) Bellucci, Antonio (1654 –1726) Benaschi, Giovanni Battista (also Giovanni Battista Beinaschi; 1636–1688) Bernini, Gian Lorenzo (1598 –1680) Berrettini, Pietro. See Cortona, Pietro da Bettera, Battista (life dates unknown) Bianchi, Pietro (1694 –1740) Bijlert, Jan van (ca. 1597–1671)

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Bilverti, Giovanni (1576–1644) Bloemaert, Abraham (1566–1651) Boeckhorst, Jan (1605–1668) Boncori, Giovanni Battista (1643–1699) Bonito, Giuseppe (1707–1789) Bonone, Carlo. See Bononi, Carlo Bononi, Carlo (1569– ca. 1632) Bonvicino, Alessandro. See Moretto da Brescia Borgianni, Orazio (1575/78 –1616) Bottani, Giuseppe (1717–1784) Botticelli, Sandro (Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi; 1445–1510) Boullogne, Louis de, the Younger (1654 –1733) Boulogne, Valentin de (1591–1632) Brandi, Domenico (1683–1736) Brandi, Giacinto (1621–1691) Braque, Georges (1882–1963) Brescia, Moretto da. See Moretto da Brescia Bronckhorst, Jan van (1648 –1726/27) Buonarroti, Michelangelo. See Michelangelo Burne-Jones, Edward (1833–1898) C Caliari, Paolo. See Veronese, Paolo Cagnacci, Guido (1601–1663) Caillebotte, Gustave (1848 –1894) Cairo, Francesco (also Francesco del Cairo; 1607–1665) Calder, Alexander (1898 –1976) Calvaert, Denys (ca. 1540 – 1619) Cambiaso, Luca (also Luca Cambiasi, Cangiagio; called Lucchetto da Genova; 1527–1585) Campeche, José (1751–1809) Campi, Vincenzo (ca. 1530 –1591) Canale, Giovanni Antonio. See Canaletto, Il Canaletto, Il (Giovanni Antonio Canale, called Il Canaletto; 1697–1768) Canini, Giovanni Angelo (ca. 1609/17–1666) Cano, Alonso (1601–1667) Cantarini, Simone (1612–1648) Caracciolo, Giovanni Battista (called Il Battistello; 1578 –1635) Caravaggio, Il (Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, called Il Caravaggio; 1571–1610) Carlevaris, Luca (also Luca Carlevariis, Carlevarijs; 1663–1730) Carlone, Giovanni Battista (1603–1684) Carnevale, Fra (Fra Bartolomeo di Giovanni Corradini; active ca. 1445–1484) Caro, Lorenzo de (1719–1777) Caroselli, Angelo (1585–1652) Carpioni, Giulio (1613–1678) Carracci, Agostino (1557–1602) Carracci, Annibale (1560 –1609) Carracci, Lodovico (also Ludovico Carracci; 1555–1619) Castello, Valerio (1624 –1659) Castiglione, Giovanni Benedetto (1609–1664)

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Castillo, Antonio del (1616–1668) Cavaliere Calabrese, Il. See Preti, Mattia Cavaliere d’Arpino, Il. See Cesari, Giuseppe Cavaliere Tempesta, Il. See Mulier, Pieter, the Younger Cavallino, Bernardo (1616–1656) Cavarozzi, Bartolomeo (ca. 1590 –1625) Cavazzone, Francesco. See Cavazzoni, Francesco Cavazzoni, Francesco (also Francesco Cavazzone; 1559–1612) Cecco Bravo, Il (Francesco Montelatici, called Il Cecco Bravo; 1601–1661) Cecco del Caravaggio. See Buoneri, Francesco Cenni di Pepi. See Cimabue Cerano, Il (Giovanni Battista Crespi, called Il Cerano; 1573–1632) Cerquozzi, Michelangelo (1602–1660) Cerruti, Michelangelo (1663–1748) Ceruti, Giacomo (1698 –1767) Cesari, Giuseppe, Il Cavaliere d’Arpino (1568 –1640) Champaigne, Jean-Baptiste de (1631–1681) Champaigne, Philippe de (1602–1674) Chardin, Jean Siméon (1699–1779) Chiari, Giuseppe (1654 –1727) Church, Frederic Edwin (1826–1900) Cignani, Carlo (1628 –1719) Cigoli, Lodovico (also Ludovico Cigoli; 1559–1613) Cimabue (Cenni di Pepi, called Cimabue; documented 1272–died 1302) Coccapani, Sigismondo (1585–1643) Cole, Thomas (1801–1848) Conca, Sebastiano (1680 –1764) Copley, John Singleton (1738 –1815) Cortona, Pietro. See Pietro da Cortona Corvi, Domenico (1721–1803) Cosci, Il. See Balducci, Giovanni Costanzi, Placido (1702–1759) Cozza, Francesco (1605–1682) Crespi, Daniele (1597/1600 –1630) Crespi, Giovanni Battista. See Cerano, Il Crespi, Giuseppe Maria (1665–1747) Cretey, Pierre-Louis (active 1681–1685) Creti, Donato (1671–1749) Curradi, Francesco (1570 –1661) D Dalí, Salvador (1904 –1989) Dandini, Cesare (1596–1657) Degas, Edgar (1834 –1917) Do, Giovanni. See Juan Dò Dò, Juan (also called Giovanni Do; 1604?–1656) Dolci, Carlo (1616–1686) Domenichino, Il (Domenico Zampieri, called Il Domenichino; 1581–1641) Doré, Gustave (1832–1883) Dughet, Gaspard (also called Gaspard Poussin; 1615–1675)

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Dujardin, Karel (1622–1678) Dürer, Albrecht (1471–1528) Dyck, Anthony van (1599–1641) E Eeckhout, Gerbrand van den (1621–1674) Elsheimer, Adam (1578 –1610) Ernst, Max (1891–1976) F Falciatore, Filippo (1718 –1768) Falcone, Aniello (1607–1656) Ferri, Ciro (1634 –1689) Fetti, Domenico (1589–1623) Fiasella, Domenico (1589–1669) Filipepi, Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni. See Botticelli, Sandro Flinck, Govert (1615–1660) Forabosco, Girolamo (1605–1679) Forlì, Melozzo da. See Melozzo da Forlì Fra Carnevale. See Carnevale, Fra Francanzano, Francesco (1612–1657) Franceschini, Baldassare (called Il Volterrano; 1611–1690) Franceschini, Marcantonio (1648 –1729) François, Guy (ca. 1578 – ca. 1650) Fra Paolino da Pistoia. See Paolino da Pistoia, Fra Fra Vittore (also Fra Vittore Galgario). See Ghislandi, Giuseppe Furini, Francesco (1603–1646) G Gainsborough, Thomas (1727–1788) Galgario, Fra Vittore. See Ghislandi, Giuseppe Galizia, Fede (1578 –1630) Gandolfi, Gaetano (1734 –1802) Gargiulo, Domenico. See Micco Spadaro Gauguin, Paul (1848 –1903) Gaulli, Giovanni Battista (called Il Baciccio; 1639–1709) Gellée, Claude. See Claude Lorrain Gennari, Benedetto (1563–1658) Gennari, Cesare (1637–1688) Gentileschi, Artemisia (1593–1651/53) Gentileschi, Orazio (1563–1639) Géricault, Théodore (1791–1824) Ghislandi, Giuseppe (called Fra Vittore, also Fra Vittore Galgario; 1655–1743) Giaquinto, Corrado (1703–1766) Gimignani, Giacinto (1606–1681) Gimignani, Lodovico (1643–1697) Giordano, Luca (1634 –1705) Goya, Francisco de (Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes; 1746–1828) Granacci, Francesco (1469–1593) Grebber, Pieter de (ca. 1600 –1653)

Artists

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Greco, El (Domenikos Theotokopoulos, called El Greco; 1541–1614) Greuze, Jean-Baptiste (1725–1805) Guardi, Francesco (1712–1793) Guercino, Il (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Il Guercino; 1591–1666) Guidaccio da Imola (1425/30?–1510) Guidobono, Bartolomeo (1654 –1709) H Haen, David de (ca. 1585–1622) Hals, Frans (1580 –1666) Heem, Jan Davidsz. de (1606–1684) Herrera, Francisco, the Elder (ca. 1590 –1654) Herrera, Francisco, the Younger (1627–1685) Honthorst, Gerrit van (1592–1656) Hunt, William Holman (1827–1910) I Imola, Guidaccio da. See Guidaccio da Imola J Jouvenet, Jean (1644 –1717) Juanes, Juan de (ca. 1510 –1579) K Keilhau, Eberhart (called Monsù Bernardo; 1624 –1687) L Laer, Pieter van (called Il Bamboccio; 1599–?1642) Lanfranco, Giovanni (1582–1647) Langetti, Giovanni Battista (1625–1676) Lauri, Filippo (1623–1694) Lawrence, Sir Thomas (1769–1830) Lazzarini, Gregorio (1655–1730) Lebrun, Charles (1619–1690) Léger, Fernand (1881–1955) Leone, Andrea di (also Andrea di Lione, 1610 –1685) Leoni, Ottavio (1578 –1630) Liberi, Pietro (1605–1687) Lippi, Lorenzo (1606–1665) Liss, Johann (ca. 1597–1631) Long, Edwin (1829–1891) Longhi, Pietro (1701–1785) Lorrain, Claude (Claude Gellée, called Claude Lorrain or Le Lorrain; 1600 –1682) Lupicini, Giovanni Battista (1575–1648) Luti, Benedetto (1666–1724) M Mabuse, Jan. See Gossaert, Jan Maderno, Carlo (1556–1629) Maes, Nicolaes (1634 –1693)

Maffei, Francesco (1605–1660) Magnasco, Alessandro (1667–1749) Mancini, Francesco (ca. 1679–1758) Manfredi, Bartolomeo (1582–1622) Maratta, Carlo. See Maratti, Carlo Maratti, Carlo (also Carlo Maratta; 1625–1713) Master of the Hartford Still-Life (active ca. 1600) Master of the Open-Mouthed Boys (active 1615–1625) Master of the Sarasota Supper at Emmaus (dates unknown) Matteis, Paolo de (1662–1728) Matisse, Henri (1869–1954) Mazzola, Girolamo Francesco Maria. See Parmigianino, Il Mazzucchelli, Pier Francesco. See Morazzone, Il Mellin, Charles (1597–1649) Melozzo da Forlì (Melozzo degli Ambrogi, called Melozzo da Forlì; 1438 –1494) Mengs, Anton Raphael (1728 –1779) Merisi, Michelangelo, da Caravaggio. See Caravaggio, Il Micco Spadaro (Domenico Gargiulo, called Micco Spadaro; 1609/10 –?1675) Michelangelo (Michelangelo Buonarroti; 1475–1564) Milani, Aureliano (1675–1749) Miró, Joan (1893–1983) Mola, Pier Francesco (1612–1664) Mondrian, Piet (1872–1944) Monsù Bernardo. See Keilhau, Eberhart Monsù Desiderio. See Nomé, François de Montauti, Antonio (ca. 1685–after 1740) Montelatici, Francesco. See Cecco Bravo, Il Montemezzano, Francesco (ca. 1540 –after 1602) Morazzone, Il (Pier Francesco Mazzucchelli, called Il Morazzone; 1573–1626) Moretto da Brescia (Alessandro Bonvicino, called Moretto da Brescia; ca. 1498 –1554) Mulier, Pieter, the Younger (called Il Cavaliere Tempesta, 1637–1701) Mura, Francesco de (1696–1782/84) Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban (1617–1682) Muttoni, Pietro. See Vecchia, Pietro della N Nomé, François de (called Monsù Desiderio, 1593–after 1644) Novelli, Pietro Antonio (1603–1647) Nuvelone, Carlo (Carlo Francesco Nuvolone; 1609–1702) O Oller, Francisco (1833–1917) Orrente, Pedro (1580 –1645) Orsi, Prospero (ca. 1558 –1633) Ottoni, Lorenzo (1658 –1736) P Pace, Ranieri del (1681–1738)

Artists

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169

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Paesi, Angeluccio de. See Angeluccio Palma Giovane, Jacopo (ca. 1548 –1628) Palma Vecchio, Jacopo (1480 –1528) Panini, Giovanni Paolo (1691–1765) Paolino da Pistoia, Fra (1488 –1547) Pareja, Juan de (1606–1670) Pellegrini, Giovanni Antonio (1675–1741) Pensionante del Saraceni, Il (active ca. 1610/20) Peruzzi, Domenico (life dates unknown) Piazzetta, Giovanni Battista (1683–1754) Picasso, Pablo (1881–1973) Pietro da Cortona (Pietro Berrettini, called Pietro da Cortona;1596/97–1669) Pignoni, Simone (1611–1698) Pistoia, Fra Paolino. See Paolino da Pistoia, Fra Pittoni, Giovanni Battista (1687–1767) Po, Giacomo del (1652–1726) Post, Frans (1612–1680) Poussin, Gaspard. See Dughet, Gaspard Poussin, Nicolas (1594 –1665) Preti, Mattia (Mattia Preti, Il Cavaliere Calabrese; 1613–1699) Procaccini, Giulio Cesare (1574 –1625) R Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio or Santi; 1483–1520) Régnier, Nicolas (also Niccolò Renieri; 1591–1667) Rembrandt (Rembrandt van Rijn; 1606–1669) Renesse, Constantijn van (1626–1680) Reni, Guido (1575–1642) Renieri, Niccolò. See Régnier, Nicolas Renoir, Pierre-Auguste (1841–1919) Reynolds, Sir Joshua (1723–1792) Ribera, Jusepe de (1591–1652) Ricci, Sebastiano (1659–1734) Ricciolini, Niccolò (1687–1772) Ridolfi, Claudio (1570 –1644) Riminaldi, Orazio (1593–1630) Robusti, Jacopo. See Tintoretto, Jacopo Romanelli, Giovanni Francesco (1610 –1662) Romano, Giulio. See Giulio Romano Roncalli, Cristofano (ca. 1553–1626) Rosa, Pacecco de (Francesco de Rosa, called Pacecco de Rosa; 1607–1656) Rosa, Salvator (1615–1673) Rossi, Mariano (1731–1807) Rubens, Peter Paul (1577–1640) Ruysch, Rachel (1664 –1750) Ryder, Albert Pinkham (1847–1917) S Sacchi, Andrea (1599–1661) Sacchi, Pier Francesco (1485–1528)

170

Sagrestani, Giovanni Camillo (1660 –1731) Salimbeni, Ventura (1568 –1613) Salvi, Giovanni Battista, da Sassoferrato. See Sassoferrato, Il Santi, Raffaello. See Raphael Sanzio, Raffaello. See Raphael Saraceni, Carlo (1579?–1620) Sassoferrato, Il (Giovanni Battista Salvi da Sassoferrato, called Il Sassoferrato; 1609–1685) Scarsella, Ippolito. See Scarsellino, Il Scarsellino, Il (Ippolito Scarsella, called Il Scarsellino; ca. 1550 –1620) Schedoni, Bartolomeo (1578 –1615) Schiavone, Andrea (ca. 1510 –1563) Scorza, Sinibaldo (1589–1631) Serodine, Giovanni (1600 –1630) Sirani, Elisabetta (1638 –1665) Sirani, Giovanni Andrea (1610 –1670) Sodoma, Il (Giovanni Antonio Bazzi, called Il Sodoma; 1477–1549) Sole, Giovan Gioseffo dal (1654 –1719) Solimena, Francesco (1657–1747) Spadaro. See Domenico Gargiulo, called Micco Spadaro Stanzione, Massimo (1585–1656) Steen, Jan (1626–1679) Stella, Jacques (1596–1657) Stom, Matthias. See Stomer, Matthias Stomer, Matthias (also Matthias Stom; ca. 1599/1600 –after 1652) Strozzi, Bernardo (1581–1644) Subleyras, Pierre (1699–1749) Sweerts, Michael (also Michiel Sweerts; 1618 –1664) T Tanzio da Varallo (Antonio d’Enrico Tanzio, called Tanzio da Varallo; ca. 1575–1633) Tassi, Agostino (1578 –1644) Teniers, David, the Younger (1610 –1690) Testa, Pietro (1611–1650) Tiarini, Alessandro (1577–1668) Tibaldi, Pellegrino (1527–1596) Tiepolo, Domenico. See Tiepolo, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista (also Giambattista Tiepolo; 1696–1770) Tiepolo, Giovanni Domenico (also Domenico Tiepolo; Giandomenico Tiepolo; 1727–1804) Tintoretto, Jacopo ( Jacopo Robusti, called Il Tintoretto; 1519–1594) Titi, Tiberio (1573–1627) Titian (Tiziano Vecellio; ca. 1485/90?–1576) Torelli, Felice (1667–1748) Tournier, Nicolas (1590 – ca. 1638) Traversi, Gaspare (also Gaspare Giuseppe Traversi; ca. 1722–1770) Trevisani, Francesco (1656–1746) Trumbull, John (1756–1843) Turchi, Alessandro (1578 –1649)

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V Vaccaro, Andrea (1604 –1670) Vaccaro, Domenico Antonio (1678 –1745) Valdes Leal, Juan de (1622–1690) Vannuccio, Francesco di (active 1356–1389) Vanvitelli. See Wittel, Gaspar van Varallo, Tanzio da. See Tanzio da Varallo Vassallo, Anton Maria (also Antonio Maria Vassallo; ca. 1620 –1664/73) Vecchia, Pietro della (Pietro Muttoni, called Pietro della Vecchia, also Pietro Vecchia; 1603/051678) Velázquez, Diego (Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez; 1599–1660) Veronese, Paolo (Paolo Caliari, called Paolo Veronese; 1528 –1588) Victors, Jan (ca. 1619–1676) Vignali, Jacopo (1592–1664)

Vignon, Claude (1593–1670) Vitali, Alessandro (1535–1612) Volterrano, Il. See Franceschini, Baldassare Vouet, Simon (1590 –1649) W West, Benjamin (1738 –1820) Wickenden, Robert (1861–1931) Wittel, Gaspar van (also Caspar van Wittel, called Vanvitelli; 1652/53–1736) Wright of Derby, Joseph (1734 –1797) Z Zampieri, Domenico. See Domenichino, Il Zanchi, Antonio (1631–1722) Zurbarán, Francisco de (1598 –1664)

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Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. Abbiati, Filippo, Saints, 111 Agnew, Thomas. See Thos. Agnew & Sons Albani, Francesco, 57, 64, 132 Saint John the Baptist, 19 Algardi, Alessandro, 81 Allori, Alessandro, in the Ganz collection, 135 American taste for Baroque painting of businessman-collectors, 2, 20. See also Chrysler Art Museum; Chrysler, Walter P., Jr.; Chrysler, Walter P., Jr., collection; Ringling, John eighteenth-century taste: in the 1840s and 1850s, 5; in the late eighteenth century, 2; and the picturesque, 108 and the international art market, 40, 44, 49, 106. See also Bardini, Ugo; Grassi, Luigi; Heim Gallery; Kress Foundation; Weitzner, Julius the invisible web of art historians, 7, 70, 83, 146n45; Alfred Moir, 56, 60, 63, 99; Eric Zafran, 4 –5, 7, 106, 111; Friedländer, Walter, 57–58, 57n22; Getty’s Provenance Index, 56; Heim Gallery catalogues, 82– 83. See also Berenson; Clark; Columbia; Connors; Cummings; Fiocco; Ganz; Grassi; Harvard University; Held; Hibbard; Lee; Longhi; Mahon; Manning; Marangoni; Montagu; New York University; Nissman; Ostrow; Posner; Princeton University; Scripps; Stanford University; Steel; Taylor; University of Chicago; Voss; Waterhouse; Wittkower; Yale University; Zeri in the 1950s and 1960s, 106 and the 1922 exhibition in Florence at the Palazzo Pitti, 7– 8, 22, 44 role of New York dealers, 14 –15, 84, 118. See also Arnold Seligman, Rey & Co.; Ciechanowiecki; Contini-Bonacossi; Duveen Brothers; Knoedler Gallery; Weitzner and the taste of culturally liberal Protestants, 40, 104, 107– 8 waning of interest: anti-Baroque sentiments of Bernard Berenson, 5– 6; anti-Baroque sentiments of Charles Eliot Norton, 6, 95; in Rubens, 19; Ruskin-influenced nadir, 5– 6, 95, 106, 149n11 See also Chrysler Art Museum; Chrysler, Walter P., Jr.; Ciechanowiecki, Andrew; Clark, Anthony M.; Cleveland Museum of Art; Crocker Art Museum; Detroit Institute of Arts; Kress Foundation; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Minneapolis Institute of Arts; Ringling, John; Thos. Agnew & Sons; Walters, Henry

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Angeluccio, acquisition of works by, 97, 149n15 Arcimboldo, Giuseppe, paintings by school of, 35 Arnold Seligman, Rey & Co., 7, 34, 37, 130, 134 Arpino, Il. See Cesari, Giuseppe Art in Italy 1600 –1700 (Detroit, 1965), 100 catalog, 99, 119, 131–32 Cummings organization of, 54, 99, 101 loans to, 13, 119 Art Institute of Chicago Baroque collection, 32 Francis Dowley’s teaching at, 54, 56, 145n3 John Maxon, 57, 60, 84 nineteenth-century works, 118 Arts Club of Chicago, Chrysler Collection showing, 116, 118 Askew, Pamela, studies with Walter Friedländer, 57 Askew, R. Kirk, Jr. and Austin’s acquisitions for the Wadsworth, 31–32, 34 and Durlacher Brothers, 31, 132; exhibition featuring paintings from the numerous public collections that had acquired his works, 132–33 Assereto, Gioacchino, 102 Austin, A. Everett “Chick,” Jr., 24 biographical details: interest in theater and dance, 30; travels to Europe, 30, 34 as the director of the Ringling Museum, 16, 23–24, 57 network of Harvard friends, 31 and Paul Byk, 34, 35–36 and the Wadsworth Atheneum: acquisitions for, 7, 25, 31–35; The Painters of Still Life, 34 –35 Badalocchio, Sisto Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, 76–77 Susannah and the Elders, 19 Baglione, Giovanni acquisition of works by, 11, 62 The Body of Christ Prepared for Burial, 108 Balducci, Giovanni, 13 Balestra, Antonio, Nativity by Cretey attributed to, 32 Barberini-Corsini collections and the Corsini Family, 46, 48 Death of Germanicus of Nicolas Pousin, 46 Bardini, Stefano, 42 Bardini, Ugo gallery in home of, 144n11 and Stanford White, 143– 44n11 Barocci, Federico, 63 and Salimbeni, 107– 8 Baschenis, Evaristo paintings: purchased for the Wadsworth Atheneum by A. Everett Austin, Jr., 25; Still Life with a Lute and Violin, 127; Still Life with Musical Instruments, 147n48 Basetti, Marcantonio, depiction of the bishop saint Maurilius, 74

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Batoni, Pompeo acquisition of works by, 13, 112 Antiochus and Stratonice, 71, 71 Samson and Delilah, 102 Baum, Dwight James, 18 Bazzani, Giuseppe, acquisition of works by, 49 Bean, Jacob, 99, 126 Bellini, Giovanni and American taste in Italian are in the early twentieth century, 6 Portrait of Joerg Fugger, 51 Bellis, Antonio de, Sacrifice of Noah, 13 Bellotti, Bernardo, View of the Tiber with Castel Sant’Angelo, 97 Bellotti, Pietro, Sleeping Hunter and Cook, 124 Bellucci, Antonio, Architectural Capriccio with a Self-Portrait in the Costume of a Venetian Nobleman, 118 Benaschi, Giovanni Battista and American taste for Baroque painting, 111 Neptune and Nereids, 126 Saint Cecilia with Angel Musicians, 111 Berenson, Bernard emphasis on Dutch, “Great Masters” of the Dutch, Flemish, and English schools, 5– 6 and the Grassi family, 42, 44 on Guido Reni, 6, 131 and John Walker, 13–14 and Robert Longhi, 44 Berg, Salomon van, 68 Bernini, Gian Lorenzo: acquisition of work by, 61 Bust of Christ by school of, 118 Catholic triumphalism of, 111 exhibition of terracottas by, 63 on Guido Reni, 6 Saint Sebastian, 46 scholarhip on, 60, 99 Bettera, Battista, still life on musical instruments attributed to, 35 Bianchi, Pietro acquisition of works by, 11 Mercury and Argus, 76 Bijlert, Jan van, Saint Mary Magdalene Turning from the World to Christ, 114 Bilverti, Giovanni, 34 Blake, Channing, 62 Bloemaert, Abraham, Christ and the Samaritan Women, 114 Blunt, Anthony, 7, 83 Bob Jones University Museum & Gallery ambience of, 106–7, 115, 149n16 collection, Anglo-American paintings, 115 collection of French seventeenth-century paintings, 114 collection of Italian works, 108 –13; Dead Christ Mourned by Angels of Piettro della Vecchia, 111, 112; Joseph Sold into Bondage by His Brethren, 108, 110; Landscape with the Baptism of Christ, 5, 108, 132;

174

Protestant taste reflected in Italian holdings in, 104, 106–7, 108; Saint John the Evangelist of Domenichino, 108, 109 collection of Northerlandish paintings, 113–14 collection of Spanish Baroque works, 114 –15 establishment in 1965 of, 104 –5 size of the collection of, 104 See also Jones, Bob (Robert Reynolds Jones, Jr.) Bode, Wilhelm von, 42, 97–98 Boeckhorst, Jan, Adoration of the Magi, 114 Böhler, Julius, and Ringling’s Baroque collection, 18, 21, 23 Bonacossi, Count Contini, The Virgin and the Sleeping Child of Orazio Gentileschi, 144n26 Boncori, Giovanni Battista, Card Players, 123 Bonito, Giuseppe, Musical Party, 126 Bononi, Carlo, 82 Adoration of the Shepherds, 99 depiction of the bishop saint Maurilius, 74 Booth, Ralph Harman, 99 Borgianni, Orazio popularity of, 54 –55 scholarship on, 44 Bottani, Giuseppe, 112 Botticelli, Sandro, Madonna of the Magnificat, 107 Boullogne, Louis de, the Younger Musical Party, 14 Visitation, 114 Boulogne, Valentin de, Samson, 54, 55, 56 Bowron, Edgar Peters, studies with Donald Posner, 57 Brandi, Domenico, Pastoral Landscape with a Donkey, 126 Brandi, Giacinto, acquisition of works incorrectly attributed to, 97, 111, 147n26 Braque, Georges, 118 Bronckhorst, Jan van, Apostasy of Solomon, 114 Bryan, Thomas Jefferson, 14, 22, 102, 152–53n21 Burne-Jones, Edward, Sleep of King Arthur in Avalon, 74 Burroughs, Louise, 132 Byk, Paul, 34, 35–36 Cadogan, Jean, 39, 142n5 Cagnacci, Guido aquisition of, 63, 64 Martha Rebuking Mary for Her Vanity, 52 Caillebotte, Gustave, 118 Cairo, Francesco Herodias, 11, 12, 58, 136 Judith with the Head of Holofernes, 26 Calvaert, Denys, Saint Francis Adoring the Christ Child, 108 Campeche, José, 68 Campi, Vincenzo, Fruit Stall by Galizia formerly attributed to, 35 Canaday, John, 119 Canaletto, Il acquisition of works by, 6

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Piazza San Marco, 97 scholarship on, 57 Canini, Giovanni Angelo, drawings by, 64 Cano, Alonso, 21 Cantarini, Simone, exhibited by the Heim Gallery, 87 Cantor Arts Center. See Stanford University Museum of Art Caracciolo, Giovanni Battista Annunciation, 34 Christ and the Woman of Samaria by the Master of the Sarasota Supper at Emmaus attributed to, 135 Magdalen at the Cross, 76 Saint Sebastian, 30 scholarship of Diane De Grazia, 61 Caravaggio acquired first by the Wadsworth Atheneum, 7, 21, 46 exhibitions of paintings of: Caravaggio and the Seventeenth Century, 36; in Italian Painting of the Sei- and Settecento, 32; in the Palazzo Reale in Milan, 144n6 John Ruskin’s relegation to “the School of Errors and Vices,” 5 paintings: Allegory of Vanity, 13; Boy with the Basket of Fruit, 46; Card Players attributed to, 32; Cardsharps, 24, 56, 61; The Chastisement of Love by Manfredi attributed to, 32; Christ on the Way to Emmaus, 147– 48n48; Crucifixion of Saint Andrew, 11; David with the Head of Goliath, 46; The Denial of Saint Peter, 56; Entombment of Christ, 108; Martha and Mary Magdalen (Conversion of the Magdalen), 101; The Musicians, 128 –29, 129, 130 –31; Portrait of a Young Boy, 32; Saint Catherine of Alexandria, 24, 46, 47; Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy, 7, 35–36, 36, 46; Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness, 14, 46, 130; Saint Sebastian, 32 scholarship on, 56–57; Walter Friedländer’s, Caravaggio Studies, 57. See also Longhi, Roberto; Mahon, Denis Carlevaris, Luca, 44 Carlone, Giovanni Battista Joseph’s Brothers Showing Jacob the Bloodstained Coat, 108 Joseph Sold into Bondage by His Brethren, 108, 110 Carnevale, Fra, “Barberini panels,” 46 Caro, Lorenzo de, pair of Old Testament works by, 102 Caroselli, Angelo, 63 Carpioni, Giulio, 64, 87 the Carracci acquisition of paintings by, 5, 8, 19, 44; works by followers collected by Ringling, 21 Annibale: The Coronation of the Virgin, 99, 137, 138; Venus, a Satyr, and Two Cupids, 120; A Vision of Saint Francis, 8 Annunciation: attributed to, Annibale by Donald Posner, 62; attributed to, Ludovico by Gail Feigenbaum, 62 Holy Family, 37 John Ruskin’s relegation to “the School of Errors and Vices,” 5 Ludovico: Christ Healing the Blind, 22; The Dream of Saint Catherine of Alexandria, 8, 10; Flagellation, 108; Lamentation, 137 Carter, E. W., 134, 153n28 Castello, Valerio: acquisition of paintings by, 62; Diana and Actaeon

with Nymphs, 126; The Legend of Saint Geneviève of Brabant, 39, 39, 120, 126 Castiglione, Giovanni Benedetto, Moses Striking the Rock, 97, 126 Castillo, Antonio del, Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness, 114 Cavaliere d’Arpino, Il. See Cesari, Giuseppe Cavallino, Bernardo acquisition of paintings by, 11, 61, 62, 63, 97 Daedalus and Icarus attributed to, 37 Flight into Egypt, 35 Procession to Calvary, 125–26 The Supper at Emmaus attributed to, 87 paintings by followers of, Marriage of Tobias, 125–26 Cavazzoni, Francesco, Legend of the Finding of the True Cross, 107 Cecco Bravo, Il, 63 The Prophet Balaam and the Ass, 45 Cecconi, Angelo, 44 Cerano, Il (Crespi, Giuseppe Maria): acquisition of works by, 11, 62, 63, 87, 97, 135 exhibited by the Heim Gallery, 87 paintings: The Continence of Scipio, 123, 123; Madonna of the Goldfinch, 123; Self-Portrait of the Artist in His Studio, 34 Cerruti, Michelangelo and Giacomo Ceruti, Portrait of a Lady, 149n13 Cesari, Giuseppe, Il Cavaliere d’Arpino, 21, 63, 64, 108 Annunciation, 108 Champaigne, Jean-Baptiste de Christ and the Woman of Samaria, 98 Last Supper, 98, 149n17 Champaigne, Philippe de, 114 Chardin, Jean Siméon, 118 Charfnadel, Guy, 84 Chiari, Giuseppe, 11, 112 Chiarini, Marco, 90, 99, 99159 Christiansen, Keith, 60, 62, 63 Chrysler Art Museum Giuseppe Maria Crespi, The Continence of Scipio, 123, 123 1958 Inaugural Exhibition at, 119 Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences as former name of, 120 See also Chrysler, Walter P., Jr., collection Chrysler, Walter P., Jr., 117 biographical details: brother Jack, 119; father (Walter P. Chrysler, Sr.), 116, 118; marriage to Jean Outland, 118; mother (Della), 116 Chrysler Building: gallery in, 116, 119; sale of, 118 See also Chrysler, Walter P., Jr., collection Chrysler, Walter P., Jr., collection: Baroque painting as an interest, 75, 118; and the advice of New York Dealers, 118, 127; exemplars of Neapolitan Baroque, 124 –25; Robert Manning’s system of dividing it into regional schools, 120; Strozzi paintings, 126 breadth of, 118 compulsive trading habits affected by, 120

index

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Chrysler, Walter P., Jr., collection: (continued) exhibitions of: in Baroque Paintings from the Collection of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., 119, 150n26; in A Century of Masters from the Collection of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., 119; at the Detroit Institute of the Arts, 116; fakes unknowingly shown in The Controversial Century, 1850 –1950: Paintings from the Collection of Walter P. Chrysler, Jr., 119; at the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences, 119–20; at the Portland Art Museum, 119 scale of, 61 scholarship on, 150n1 See also Chrysler Art Museum Ciechanowiecki, Andrew and the diffusion of the Italian Baroque in the United States, 14, 149n23 and the Heim Gallery, 14, 78, 82; selling of, 90 The Twilight of the Medici: Late Baroque Art in Florence, 1670 –1743 organized by, 87, 90, 99, 102 Cignani, Carlo Infance of Jupiter, 77 in Nelson Shanks’s collection, 63 Cigoli, Lodovico acquisition of works by, 11 Mercury and Argus, 76 Clark, Anthony M. collection of, 85 influence of, 84, 106, 112, 126, 135 Clark, Kenneth, 30, 35 Cleveland Museum of Art acquisition of Italian Baroque painting, 11, 49 curators: Ann Tzeutschler Lurie, 11, 54; Sherman Lee, 11, 49, 54, 56, 84 opening of, 11 Clifton, James, 61 Coccapani, Sigismondo, Moses and the Daughters of Jethro, 99, 102 Colnaghi. See P.D. Colnaghi & Co. Colt, Thomas, 62, 119 Columbia University Florentine exhibition at, 63 Italian Baroque scholars educated at, 61, 64t1 See also Connors, Joseph; Cummings, Frederick J.; Ganz, Paul H.; Hibbard, Howard; Lavin, Irving; Wittkower, Rudolf Conca, Sebastiano acquisition of works by, 112 Landscape with Monks and Sailors attributed to, 71 Connors, Joseph, 59, 60 Constable, W. G., 37 Contini-Bonacossi, Alessandro biographical details, 50, 51 dispersal of the collection of, 51 and the Kress collection, 7– 8, 13, 14, 50 –51 Cortona, Pietro da. See Pietro da Cortona Corvi, Domenico, Miracle of Saint Joseph Calasanz, 39

176

Costanzi, Placido, 112 Cozza, Francesco, Esther and Ahasuerus, 146n43 Crespi, Daniele, 87 Crespi, Giuseppe Maria. See Cerano, Il Cretey, Pierre-Louis, Nativity, 32 Creti, Donato acquisition of works by, 82 Musical Concert attributed to, 123 Croce, Carlo, collection of, 61, 63, 146nn40 – 41 Crocker Art Museum, 22, 145n13 Cummings, Frederick J., as curator of European Art at the Detroit Institute of Arts, 98 –99 Art in Italy organized by, 54, 99, 101, 132 The Golden Age of Naples: Art and Civilization Under the Bourbons, 1734 –1805, 102 Cunningham, Charles acquisitions for the Atheneum, 37, 39 directorship of the Art Institute of Chicago, 37 Curradi, Francesco Abraham and the Three Angels, 147– 48n48 Saint Lawrence, 19 Dalí, Salvador, 23, 31 Dandini, Cesare, exhibited by the, 87 Degas, Edgar, 31, 118 Derstine, Andria, studies with Donald Posner, 57 Detroit Institute of Arts Chrysler Collection shown at, 116 directors and curators: Edgar Preston Richardson, 98, 148n4; Mosby, Dewey, 101; Samuel Sachs II, 102; William R. Valentiner, 32, 35, 95, 97– 98, 106. See also Marandel, J. Patrice exhibitions: Art Loan Exhibition (1883), 92, 94, 102; The Golden Age of Naples: Art and Civilization Under the Bourbons, 1734 –1805, 102; The Twilight of the Medici: Late Baroque Art in Florence, 1670 –1743, 87, 90, 99, 102; Venice, 1700 –1800: An Exhibition of Venice and the Eighteenth Century, 98. See also Art in Italy 1600 –1700 (Detroit, 1965); Cummings, Frederick J. Italian Baroque paintings in the collection of, 22, 44 See also Cummings, Frederick J. Dickerson, C. D., 63 Dò, Juan, The Repentant Saint Peter, 126 Dolci, Carlo acquisition of works by, 19; and 1840s and 1850s American taste, 5; by Thomas Jefferson, 2 in John Ruskin’s “the School of Errors and Vices,” 5 paintings: Annunciation of Benedetto Gennari attributed to, 21; Blue Madonna, 19; Christ Child with a Garland of Flowers by school of, 34; Infant Christ with Saint John the Baptist, 127; Lamentation, 74; Madonna and Child, 99, 102; Saint John the Evangelist, 19; Saint Matthew Writing His Gospel, 13; Saint Praxedes of Pignoni incorrectly attributed to, 69, 70; Virgin and Child, 111

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Domenichino Christ at the Column, 62– 63 Landscape with Moses and the Burning Bush, 137 Last Communion of Saint Jerome, 6 Martyrdom of Saint Agnes, 6 Saint Cecilia with Angels attributed to, 122 Saint John the Evangelist, 108, 109 Saint Lawrence of Francesco Curradi attributed to, 19 The Way to Calvary, 8 Donahue, Kenneth, 57, 62 Doré, Gustave, Christ Leaving the Praetorium, 115 Dowley, Francis, 54, 56, 145n3 Dughet, Gaspard, 21 Dujardin, Karel, Hagar and Ishmael, 21 Dürer, Albrecht, Christ Among the Doctors, 46 Durlacher Brothers, 31, 35 Duveen Brothers, 39, 51 Dyck, Anthony van: diaspora of, 114 Saint Andrew, 73 Eeckhout, Gerbrand van den, Joseph Interpreting Dreams, 114 Elsheimer, Adam, 61 Fahy, Everett, 135, 137, 139, 148n4 Falciatore, Filippo, 102 Falcone, Aniello, The Supper at Emmaus attributed to, 87 Feigenbaum, Gail, 56, 62 Feigen, Richard L., 53, 61– 62, 85 Ferré, Luis, collections formed by and Held, Julius S., 57, 68 –70, 73, 74 –75, 77 and Paul Ganze, 11, 76–77 Ferri, Ciro, 87 Fetti, Domenico acquisition of paintings by, 22, 44, 97 Good Samaritan, 133 Portrait of a Man with a Sheet of Music, 49 Fiasella, Domenico Christ Healing the Blind, 19 Christ Raising the Son of the Widow of Nain, 19 Flight into Egypt, 111 Fiocco, Giuseppe, 7, 36 Fischer, Jacques, 84 Fisch, Mark, 15, 61– 62 Flinck, Govert Saint Matthew and the Angel, 114 Solomon Praying for Wisdom, 114 Fogg Art Museum. See Harvard University, Fogg Art Museum Forabosco, Girolamo, A Portrait of a Young Woman, 97 Forbes, Edward, 23, 28, 30, 37 Ford family Edsel, 97, 98

Eleanor, 97, 98, 99, 101 generosity of, 98, 99, 102 Ford Foundation, 80 Franceschini, Marcantonio, 63, 139 Fredericksen, Burton B., 13, 56 Frick, Henry Clay, 6, 8, 68 Friedländer, Walter, 57 Caravaggio Studies, 57 students of, 57–58 Thyseen collection criticized by, 144n14 Furini, Francesco biography of, 73 Cephalus and Aurora, 71–73, 72 Saint Christina, 21 Venus and Adonis or Diana and Endymion, 73 Galizia, Fede Fruit Stall, 35 Judith with the Head of Holofernes, 26 Galleria Luigi Grassi & Sons. See under Grassi, Luigi Gandolfi’s, Gaetano acquisition of paintings by, 59 Venus Receiving the Arms from Vulcan for Aeneas, 85, 102 Ganz, Paul H. collection of, 58, 62; dispersal of, 11, 135; scale of, 61 and Luis Ferré, 76–77 and Metropolitan’s Department of European Paintings, 135–36 as president of the Prince Matchabelli Perfume Company, 11, 76 Wittkower’s influence on, 11, 59, 136 Gardner, Isabella Stewart, 46 Gauguin, Paul, 31, 118 Nirvana, 37 Gaulli, Giovanni Battista Abraham’s Sacrifice of Isaac, 13 acquisition of, 11, 68 Death of Adonis, 76 Lot and his Daughters, 97, 112 Thanksgiving of Noah, 13 Gennari, Benedetto, Annunciation, 21 Gennari, Cesare, 64 the Gentileschi Artemisia: Esther Before Ahasuerus, 134, 136; Judith and Her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes, 98; Saint Matthew and the Angel incorrectly attributed to, 21 Orazio: acquisition of paintings by, 61; copied by Mario Modestini, 51; Danaë and the Shower of Gold, 52, 52–53, 146n28; Judith and Her Maidservant, 37; Lot and His Daughters, 15; The Virgin and the Sleeping Child, 144n26; Young Woman with a Violin, 99 Saint Louis Art Museum exhibitions on, 63 Géricault, Théodore, 118 Getty’s Provenance Index, 56 Ghislandi, Giuseppe, 49

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Giaquinto, Corrado acquisition of work by, 13, 102, 129 exhibited by the Heim Gallery, 87 paintings: Adoration of the Magi, 126; Penitent Magdalen, 62; Rebecca at the Well by Ranieri del Pace attributed to, 98, 99–101; Rest on the Flight into Egypt, 102 Gimignani, Giacinto, The Stoning of Saint Stephen, 76, 77 Gimignani, Lodovico, 112 Giordano, Luca acquisition of works by, 11 Austin and Hitchcock’s Bulletin article on, 31 paintings: The Abduction of Helen, 31; The Abduction of Europa, 31 Bacchanal, 20; The Birth of the Virgin attributed to, 131; The Calling of Saint Matthew, 4, 4; Christ Cleansing the Temple, 111; The Death of Seneca, 74; Ecce Homo, 14; Entombment of Christ, 99; Flight into Egypt, 19; The Judgment of Solomon, 49; The Rape of the Sabine Women, 49; The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, 87; Saint Luke Painting the Virgin, 73; Saint Sebastian Tended by Saint Irene, 32; The Toilet of Bathsheba, 87; Triumph of Miriam, 111 Goya, Francisco de, 118 Granacci, Francesco, Rest on the Flight into Egypt, 107 Grassi, Arturo admiration for Berenson, 43 taste in eighteenth century art, 44 Grassi, Luigi and Bernard Berenson, 42, 44 biographical details, 43; career as a dealer initiated, 42; Montagliari Palace home of, 42, 114n3; restoration work at Uffizi’s Gabinetto del Restauro, 42 business with Joseph Duveen, 144n4 Galleria Luigi Grassi & Sons, 41 Grassi, Marco, collection of, 44 Grebber, Pieter de, Adoration of the Shepherds, 114 Greco, El, 118 Greuze, Jean-Baptiste, 31 Gruber, Lester, 101 Guardi, Francesco, View of Dolo on the Brenta Canal, 98 Guercino acquisition of works by, 11, 44 exhibited by the Heim Gallery, 85, 87 paintings: The Annunciation, 19–20, 20; Apollo and Armor attributed to, 122–23; Assumption of the Virgin, 99; Christ and the Woman of Samaria, 15, 97; Joseph and Potiphar’s Wife, 20; Lot and His Daughters, 122; Mars with Cupid, 85; Saint Francis, 108; Saint Jerome, 83; Saint Sebastian with Armor attributed to, 35; Samson Bringing Honey to His Parents, 122, 122; Samson Captured by the Philistines, 137, 139; Semiramis Receiving Word of the Revolt of Babylon, 13; Toilet of Venus, 32; Vocation of Saint Luigi Gonzaga, 137 Guidaccio da Imola, Coronation of the Virgin, 107 Guidobono, Bartolomeo, 111 Haen, David de, Mocking of Christ, 114

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Hals, Frans, 21, 169 Harris, Ann Sutherland, 64, 84 Harris, Mary Jane, 62 Harvard University anti-Baroque sentiments of Charles Eliot Norton, 6, 95 Fogg Art Museum, 22, 23, 28; Caravaggio school paintings, 30, 32; Exhibition of Italian XVII and XVIII Century Paintings and Drawings (1929), 7; Jusepe de Ribera’s Saint Jerome, 30, 32 scholarship on Baroque art, 60 – 61, 64; Arthur McComb, 22, 30; Chick Austin, 28, 30 –31; Seymour Slive, 99 Hearst, William Randolph, 20, 22, 115 Heem, Jan Davidsz de, 21 Heim, François, 81, 83 Heim Gallery, 78 –91 and Andrew Ciechanowiecki, 14, 78, 82, 90 closing of, 78, 90 dealings, 39 exhibitions, 82; Baroque Sketches, Drawings, & Sculptures (1967), 82; Fourteen Important Neapolitan Paintings (1971), 87; Italian Paintings & Sculptures of the 17th and 18th Centuries (1966), 81– 82; Italian Paintings & Sculptures of the 17th and 18th Centuries (1976), 85; Paintings and Sculptures of the Italian Baroque (1973), 85 opening of, 78 scholarly catalogues of, 82– 83 Heinemann, Rudolf, 144n17 as an advisor to Heinrich Thyssen, 48, 144n14 Held, Julius S. on “the excitement of discovery,” 69 Oil Sketches of Peter Paul Rubens, 68 and the Ponce Museum of art, 57, 68 –70, 73, 74 –75, 77 survey written with Posner on 17th and 18th Century Art, 57 Herrera, Francisco, the Elder, Saint Catherine of Alexandria Appearing to the Family of Saint Bonaventure, 114 Herrera, Francisco, the Younger, 118 Hibbard, Howard, 60 collection of, 63 Florentine Baroque Art organized for the Metropolitan, 59– 60 on Guido Reni’s Immaculate Conception, 131 students of, 60 Hitchcock, Henry-Russell, Jr., 31, 32 Honthorst, Gerrit van, 57, 114 Hope, Henry, 104, 106–7 Huntington, Archer, 21 Hunt, William Holman, The Lady of Shallott, 37 Ingersoll, Elinor Dorrance, 134 –35, 136 James, Henry, 5, 78 Jarves, James Jackson, 6 Jefferson, Thomas, 2 John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art. See Ringling Museum Johnson, Barbara Piasecka, 62– 63

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Jones, Bob (Robert Reynolds Jones, Jr.): biographical information, 104, 105; interest in theater, 106 and Catholicism, 104 – 6, 111, 114, 149n5 eclectic taste of, 115 See also Bob Jones University Museum & Gallery Jouvenet, Jean, Christ with the Roman Centurion, 114 Juanes, Juan de, Pentecost, 114 Kimbell Art Museum, 15, 24, 61 King James II of England, private chael at Whitehall Palace, 21 Klein, Oscar, 8 Kleinberger, Frederick, 8 Knoedler Gallery, 24, 77, 125 “Barberini panels” sold by, 46 director Charles Henschel, 34 exhibition Masters of the Loaded Brush organized by students of Wittkower, 59 Koetser, David M. New York gallery opened by, 14, 37; American interest in Italian Baroque stimulated by, 118, 125 owned by, 151n36 still life attributed by Propero Orsi, 35 Kress Foundation acquisition of Italian painting, 13–14, 49–51; Ciechanowiecki’s encouragement of, 14; Contini-Bonacossi’s encouragement of, 7– 8, 14, 50 –51; and John Walker, 13–14; New York art dealers influence on collection of, 14 –15 curator Bertina Suida Manning at, 119, 145n30 division of the collection of, 13–14, 51, 73 Stephen Pichetto as an advisor to, 8, 51 Kress, Samuel H. early investments in Italian Baroque art, 7– 8 See also Kress Foundation Lanfranco, Giovanni acquisition of works by, 61 Giovanni Battista Benashi’s Neptune and Nereids attributed to, 126 paintings: Diana at the Bath, 63; exhibited by the Heim Gallery exhibition, 87; Saint Cecilia, 108 Langetti, Giovanni Battista Prometheus Bound, 127 Sisyphus, 102 The Torture of Ixion, 74, 75, 152 Vision of Saint Jerome, 11 Lappicirella, Leonardo, 84 Lastic, Georges de, 84 Lauri, Filippo, 62 Lavin, Irving, students of, 61, 145– 46n25 Lavin, Marilyn Aronberg, 56, 84 Lazzarini, Gregorio, Virgin in Glory with Saints, 28 Lebrun, Charles, Pentecost, 114 Lee, Eric, 61

Lee, Sherman Lee, 11, 49, 54, 56, 84 Léger, Fernand, 118 Leone, Andrea di (also Andrea di Lione), Tobit Burying the Dead, 126, 137 Leoni, Ottavio, acquisition of works by, 97, 149n15 Lewine, Milton J., 60, 135 Liberi, Pietro, Mercury and Venus, 124 Lippi, Lorenzo, 13 Liss, Johann acquisition of paintings by, 11 Cain and Abel, 124 Long, Edwin, Vashti Refuses the King’s Summons, 115 Longhi, Pietro popularity of, 6, 81 Portrait of a Lady attributed to, 149n13 Longhi, Roberto, 7, 36, 82 as “anti-Berenson,” 44 as a Caravaggio scholar, 37, 44, 44, 56 identifications: of a still life shown by Koetser, 35; of Jusepe de Ribera’s Sense of Taste, 39; “Il Pensionante del Saraceni” attribution, 144n21; of Tanzio da Varallo’s Saint Sebastian, 8 review of the Palazzo Pitti exhibition, 44 Lorrain, Claude acquisition of works by, 21, 31, 97 scholarship of Pamela Askew, 57 Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 14, 22, 57, 62 Lupicini, Giovanni Battista, 13 Lurie, Ann Tzeutschler, 11, 54 Luti, Benedetto, 82 Mabley, C. R., 94, 148n5 Maes, Nicolaes, 21, 114 Maffei, Francesco, Annunciation, 82 Magnasco, Alesandro acquisition of works by, 50, 97 paintings: Arcadian Landscape with Monks and Other Figures, 127; The Cloister School, 34; Landscape with Monks, 127; Landscape with Monks and Sailors by Alessandro Magnasco attributed to, 71; The Medici Hunting Party, 34; Presentation in the Temple, 34 popularity of, 30, 34, 81 Magnasco, Alessandro, popularity of, 30, 34 Mahon, Denis collection of, 44, 99, 137 at the opening of the exhibition Art in Italy, 99, 101 scholarship, 7, 84; on Annibale Carracci’s Coronation of the Virgin, 137; on Caravaggio, 56, 128, 130; on Guercino Saint Jerome, 83; on Holy Family attributed to Ludovico Carracci, 37; on Saint Sebastian with Armor attributed to Guercino, 35 Studies in Seicento Art and Theory, 137 Mancini, Francesco, The Five Jesuit Martyrs of Cuncolim attributed to, 147n26

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Manfredi, Bartolomeo acquisition of works by, 44, 102 The Chastisement of Love, 32 Fortune Teller, 102 Mocking of Christ, 62 Tobias Taking Leave of His Parents attributed to, 19 Manning, Robert and Bertina Suida collection of, 8, 11 exhibitions organized by and collaborated on: Art in Italy, 1600 –1700 (1965), 119, 135; Genoese Masters: Cambiaso to Magnasco, 13, 62 individual efforts by Bertina Suida, 126; on Bernardo Cavallino’s Procession to Calvary, 125–26; Giovanni Andrea Sirani Apollo and Armor correctly identified, 122–23; at the Kress Foundation, 119; on Mattia Preti’s Belisarius Receiving Alms, 125; notes for the 1958 Inaugural Exhibition at the Chrysler Art Museum, 119 individual efforts by Robert: attribution of Portrait of a Nobleman to Solimena, 126; catalogue for Chrysler collection exhibition at the Norfolk Museum, 120; exhibitions at the Finch College Museum of Art, 119, 145n30, 150n26; and the Saint Cecilia by Guido Reni in the Norton Simon collection, 52; system of dividing Chyrsler’s Italian Baroque holdings into regional schools, 120 scholarship: on Beinashci’s Saint Cecilia with Angel Musicians, 111; essays for Art in Italy, 1600 –1700, 99; studies with Walter Friedländer, 57 Mann, Judith W., 63 Marandel, J. Patrice on Andrew Ciechanowiecki, 78 –91, 149n23 as curator of early European painting at DIA, 102; The Golden Age of Naples: Art and Civilization Under the Bourbons, 1734 –1805 organized by, 102 Marangoni, Matteo, 7, 44 Maratti, Carlo acquisition of works of, 2, 5, 13, 34 exhibited by the Heim Gallery, 87 Landscape with Monks and Sailors by Alessandro Magnasco attributed to, 71 Madonna and Child with the Young Saint John the Baptist, 94, 153n22 Portrait of a Cardinal by Sasoferrato attributed to, 19 Martin, John Rupert, 54 Master of the Hartford Still-Life, 35 Master of the Open-Mouthed Boys, Portrait of a Young Boy, 32 Master of the Sarasota Supper at Emmaus Christ and the Woman of Samaria, 135 Supper at Emmaus, 21 Matisse, Henri, The Dance, 118 Matteis, Paolo de acquisition of works of, 102 Annunciation, 85, 86 Danaë, 101 Olindo and Sophronia Rescued by Clorinda, 126

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Matthiesen, Patrick, 62 Maxon, John, 57, 60, 84 Meade, Richard, 2, 4 Mellin, Charles, 114 The Metropolitan Museum of Art collection of eighteenth-century Central Italian paintings, 22; doubling of the number of rooms allocated to, 15, 128; Everett Fahy’s contributions to, 135, 137, 139, 148n4; Paul Ganz’s donations to, 11, 135–36; by individual gifts, 134 –35; and the Kress Foundation, 13–14, 51 directors and curators: Bryson Burroughs, 131, 152–53n21; Harry B. Wehle, 6; John Walker, 13–14, 51; Keith Christiansen, 60, 62, 63 Florentine Baroque Art, 13, 60, 73 Stephen Pichetto (consultant restorer), 8, 51 See also Clark, Anthony Micco Spadaro, acquisition of, 26 Milani, Aureliano, Combat of Achilles and Hector, 123 Miller, Dwight, 54, 63– 64, 82, 99, 146n43 Millon, Henry A. influence of Rudolf Wittkower on, 59 and the National Gallery of Art’s Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), 60 studies at Harvard, 60 Minneapolis Institute of Arts acquisitions from the Barberini-Corsini collections, 46 directors, Anthony (Tony) Clark, 57, 84 Italian Baroque painting acquired by, 13, 22, 32, 63 M. Knoedler & Company. See Knoedler Gallery Moir, Alfred, 56, 60, 63, 99 Mola, Pier Francesco acquisition of works by, 139 Saint John the Baptist Preaching in the Desert, 44 Montagu, Jennifer, 59, 82, 83, 127 Montauti, Antonio, 81 Mont, Frederick, 8, 11, 37, 39, 120, 126 Morazzone, Il acquisition of works by, 11 Agony in the Garden, 39 Moretto da Brescia, Allegory of Hope by Turchi attributed to, 97 Morgan, J. Pierpont, 6, 20 Mulier, Pieter, the Younger, Landscape with the Journey of Rebecca, 124 Mura, Francesco de Charity, 87, 89 modello for Robert of Anjou Witnessing the Construction of the Tempio di Santa Chiara, 126 Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban, 21, 28, 98 Assumption, 149n17 Museo Bardini, 42 Museo de Arte de Ponce: Italian Baroque paintings in the collection of, 77; Giacinto Gimignani, The Stoning of Saint Stephen, 76, 77; Giovannni Battista Langetti, The Torture of Ixion, 74, 75, 152

opening of, 70 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 32 “Barberini panels” acquired by, 46 Guercino’s Semiramis Receiving Word of the Revolt of Babylon, 13 W. G. Constable, 37 Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, 13 Museum of Fine Arts, Springfield, 62, 135 Museum of the American Circus, 23, 26, 27 National Gallery of Art in Washington acquisition of Italian Baroque paintings: Daniel in the Lions’s Den of Peter Paul Rubens, 106; and the Kress Foundation, 13–14, 51, 73 Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (CASVA), 60 directors and curators: C. D. Dickerson, 63 John Walker, 13–14, 130 Nelson-Atkins Museum Caravaggio paintings in the collection of, 56; Allegory of Vanity, 13; Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness, 14, 46, 130 New York University (NYU)/Institute of Fine Arts (IFA), Italian Baroque scholars educated at, 61, 64 1974 Florentine exhibition. See Detroit Institute of Arts, exhibitions, The Twilight of the Medici: Late Baroque Art in Florence, 1670 –1743 Nissman, Joan, 13, 60, 73 Nomé, François de, exhibition of works by, 35 Norton, Charles Eliot, anti-Baroque sentiments of, 6, 95 Novelli, Pietro Antonio Sense of Taste attributed to, 39 The Trinity Instructs the Archangel Gabriel to Announce the Incarnation to Mary, 111 Nuvelone, Carlo acquisition of works by, 11 paintings: Madonna and Child, 111; Virgin and Child with Saint Francis, 77 Ojetti, Ugo, 44 Oller, Francisco, 68 Orisi, Alessandro, 84 Orrente, Pedro Ecce Homo, 114 –15 Laban Seeking His Idols in the Camp of Jacob, 114 –15 Orsi, Propero, 35 Ostrow, Steven studies of Italian Baroque art, 56, 57 travelling exhibition, Baroque Paintings: Italy and Her Influence, 57 Ottoni, Lorenzo, 81 Pace, Ranieri del, Rebecca at the Well attributed to, 98, 99–101 Palazzo Pitti Marco Chiarini as director of, 99 Mostra della pittura italiana del Seicento e del Settecento in Palazzo Pitti (Florence 1922), 7– 8, 22, 30, 44; catalogue of, 45, 60; Roberto Longhi’s review of, 44

The Twilight of the Medici: Late Baroque Art in Florence, 1670 –1743, 87, 90, 99 Palma Giovane, Jacopo, Birth of the Virgin, 107 Panini, Giovanni Paolo Carnival Scene, 118 Gallery of Cardinal Gonzaga, 37 Interior of the Pantheon, 8 Ruins of a Triumphal Arch in the Roman Campagna, 94, 140n10 View of the Colosseum, 97 View of the Forum, 97 Pareja, Juan de, 21 P.D. Colnaghi & Co. and the collection of Italian art in the early twentieth century, 6, 11, 13, 14, 78, 124, 125; and the Marcello and Carolo Sestieri family, 84 exhibition Italian Paintings, 1550 –1780, 90 –91 and the Norton Simon collection, 52 Pellegrini, Giovanni Antonio exhibited by the Heim gallery, 87 Jael and Sisera, 147n48 Lot and His Daughters by Francesco Solimena originally attributed to, 70 Pensionante del Saraceni, Il Fruit Vendor, 97 Roberto Longhi’s invention of the name of, 144n21 Peruzzi, Domenico, Life of Furini, 73 Piazzetta, Giovanni Battista, Christ Disputing with Doctors, 20 Picasso, Pablo acquistions of work by, 31; The Studio, 116 exhibition of work by, 23, 30 and Walter Chrysler, Jr., 116, 118 Pichetto, Stephen, 8, 35, 51 Pietro da Cortona acquisition of works by, 7, 13, 61, 97 exhibited by the Heim Gallery, 81, 87 Malcolm Campbell’s scholarship on, 61 paintings: Condemnation of a Vestal Virgin, 92; Hagar and the Angel, 7, 20, 48 scholarship of Malcolm Campbell, 61 Pignoni, Simone acquisition of, 13, 63 Saint Praxedes, 69, 70 Pillsbury, Edmund (Ted), 61 Pitti Palace. See Palazzo Pitti Pittoni, Giovanni Battista Memorial to James, First Earl of Stanhope, 124 Sacrifice of Polyxena, 124 Po, Giacomo del, 135 Pope-Hennessy, John, 8, 62– 63, 131, 136, 137, 152n14 popes and papistry Bob Jones’s views of, 104 –5, 114, 149n5 Henry Hope’s criticism of, 104

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popes and papistry (continued) Pope Leo XIII, 92, 148n4 Pope Urban VIII Barberini, 45, 122 Posner, Donald, 58 on Annibale Carracci, Venus, a Satyr, and Two Cupids, 120 and Art in Italy (Detroit, 1965), 99, 135 on the Bob Jones Museum collection, 105 and the legacy of Walter Friedländer, 57–58; students of, 63 monograph on Annibale Carracci, 62, 76 Posner, Kathleen Weil-Garris, 105 Post, Frans (1612–1680), Brazillian landscape by, 21 Poussin, Nicolas Crucifixion, 34 Death of Germanicus, 46 Last Supper by Jean-Baptiste de Champaigne ascribed to, 98 Preti, Mattia Belisarius Receiving Alms, 125 Charity (or Begging Boys), 125 Christ Seats the Child in the Midst of the Disciples, 111, 113 exhibited by the Heim Gallery, 87 Feast of Herod, 13 The Martyrdom of Saint Peter, 87 The Return of the Prodigal Son, 87 Saint John the Baptist Preaching, 15 Salome with the Head of Saint John The Baptist, 26 Princeton University Italian Baroque Paintings from New York Private Collections (1980), 76 Italian Baroque scholars educated at, 54, 61, 64 John Rupert Martin, 54, 99 Procaccini, Giulio Cesare, 62 Proust, Marcel, 78 Raggio, Olga, and Rudolf Wittkower’s 1965 Detroit exhibition, 135 Raphael and American taste in Italian are in the early twentieth century, 6, 107 Spasimo di Sicilia, 107 Régnier, Nicolas acquisition works of, 97, 124 Death of Sophonisha, 124 Saint Matthew and the Angel, 21 Rembrandt challenges to collecting of, 21, 114 pictures from the school of. See Eeckhout, Gerbrand van den; Flinck, Govert; Renesse, Constantijn van; Victors, Jan Renesse, Constantijn van, Christ Before Pilate, 114 Reni, Guido acquisition of the work of, 11; and 1840s and 1850s American taste, 5; Saint Cecilia, 52; by Thomas Jefferson, 2 Berenson’s dismissal of, 6, 131 Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s view of, 6 in John Ruskin’s “the School of Errors and Vices,” 5– 6

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paintings: Adoration of the Magi, 49; Angel Appearing to Saint Jerome, 99; Charity, 137; Four Evangelists, 108; Head of Christ Crowned with Thorns, 5, 14, 94, 95; Immaculate Conception, 131; The Meeting of David and Abigail, 47, 48, 120; Saint Cecelia, 120; Saint Michael, 108; Saint Sebastian incorrectly attributed to, 34 Renoir, Pierre-Auguste, 118 Ribera, Jusepe de acquisition of works of, 21; by Thomas Jefferson, 2 Ecce Homo, 111 Holy Family with Saints Anne and Catherine of Alexandria, 131, 133–34 Saint Jerome, 30, 32 Sense of Taste, 39 Ricciolini, Nicollò, The Five Jesuit Martyrs of Cuncolim attributed to, 147n26 Ricci, Sebastiano, 124 acquisition of works of, 13 exhibition of paintings by, Heim Gallery’s Italian Paintings & Sculptures of the 17th and 18th Centuries, 85, 87 paintings: Camillus Rescuing Rome from Brennus, 97; Contest Between Apollo and Pan, 124; Miraculous Draught of Fishes (or Christ at the Sea of Galilee), 85, 87, 102 Richardson, Edgar Preston, 98, 148n4 Ridolfi, Claudio, Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine ascribed to circle of, 92, 148n4 Riminaldi, Orazio, 37 Ringling, John biographical details: birth and youth, 16; death of, 23 Ca’ d’Zan (“House of John”), 17, 23; building of, 16, 18; Venetianstyle paintings in, 18 circus legacy of, 18, 25; Ringling Brothers Circus founded by, 16 Kenneth Donahue as curator of, 57 Museum of the American Circus founded by, 23, 26, 27 taste for the Baroque, 18 –23; acquisition of Cortona’s Hagar and the Angel, 7, 20, 48; dedication to developing his knowledge of, 22; diversity of works acquired by, 20 –22; Rubens collected by, 19, 20, 21 See also Ringling Museum Ringling, Mable, 16, 18 Ringling Museum Baroque paintings in collection of, 18 –23, 25, 26–27; selection of toured in Japan, 104 board of, 22, 141n14 “Chick” Austin as the director of, 18, 23–24, 57 motives for founding of: Julius Böhler on, 21, 23; and Ringling’s circus legacy, 18, 25, 26; Ringling’s reticence in commenting on, 18 seventeenth century Spanish works, 21 Romanelli, Giovanni Francesco, 81, 87 The Abduction of Helen of Troy (attrib.), 147n48 The Discovery of Achilles Among the Daughters of Lycomedes, 127 Rorimer, James, 80

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Rosa, Pacecco de, Martyrdom of Saint Lawrence, 111 Rosa, Paulo, 84 Rosa, Salvator acquisition of works by, 13; and the influence of Richard Henry Wilde, 108, 132 Louise Burroughs’s appreciative article on, 132 paintings: Allegory of Study, 20; Bandits on a Rocky Coast, 132–33, 134; The Baptism of the Eunuch, 125, 125; Finding of Moses, 97; Landscape with the Baptism of Christ, 5, 108; Lucrezia as Poetry, 37, 38; Night Scene with Figures, 31; Progigal Son, 2; Saint John the Baptist Preaching in the Wilderness, 125 paintings by Carlone compared with, 108 Self-Portrait, 5, 37, 99, 132, 133 Rossi, Mariano, 112 Rubens, Peter Paul Julius Held’s scholarship on, 68 paintings: acquired by John Ringling, 19, 20, 21; Crucifixion from the studio of, 113–14; Daniel in the Lions’s Den, 106; Portrait of the Archduchess Isabella Clara Eugenia, 118 waning interest in, 19 Rueff, Jean-Georges, 84 Ruskin, John, 5– 6, 95, 106, 149n11 Ruysch, Rachel, still-life attributed to, 149n21 Ryder, Albert Pinkham, 170 Sacchi, Andrea, acquisition of works by, 82, 139 Sagrestani, Giovanni Camillo, Rebecca at the Well by Ranieri del Pace attributed to, 99–101 Saint Louis Art Museum Italian Baroque paintings in the collection of, 2, 63, 85, 119, 125 Judith W. Mann, 63 Salimbeni, Ventura and Federico Barocci, 107– 8 Saint Michael the Archangel Overcoming Satan, 107 Saraceni, Carlo acquistion of works by, 61, 87 Bath of Venus and Mars, 85 Death of the Virgin, 84, 85, 85 exhibited by the Heim Gallery, 85, 87 Holy Family in Saint Joseph’s Workshop, 39 Martyrdom of Saint Cecilia, 62– 63 Sassoferato acquisition of, 11, 132 Madonna and Child, 20, 94 Portrait of a Cardinal, 19 Saint Catherine of Siena Receiving the Crown of Thorns and a Rosary from the Christ Child, 81– 82 Virgin and Child, 127 Sauli, Giovanni Antonio, 61, 146n28 Scarsellino, Il acquisition of works by, 11 Fame Conquering Time, 39

Schedoni, Bartolomeo acquisition of works of, 13, 61 Charity (or Begging Boys) attributed to, 125 The Rest on the Flight into Egypt, 11 Schiavone, Andrea, Ruth and Boaz, 28 Schleier, Erich, 63, 71, 77, 82 Scorza, Sinibaldo, Pastoral Landscape with a Donkey attributed to, 126 Scripps, James Edmund Detroit Art Loan Exhibition funding, 92, 149n6 Head of Christ Crowned with Thorns by Guido Reni collected by, 5, 14, 95 portrait by Robert J. Wickenden, 93, 94 Sassoferrato acquired by, 97 Seligman, Arnold. See Arnold Seligman, Rey & Co. Serodine, Giovanni, 44 Sestieri, Marcello and Carlo, 84 Shanks, Nelson, 15, 63 Silberman, Elkan and Abris, 8 Simon, Norton collection of, 51–52 and Orazio Gentileschi’s Danaë and the Shower of Gold, 52, 52–53 Sirani, Elisabetta, Head of Christ attributed to, 73 Sirani, Giovanni Andrea Sirani, Apollo and Armor, 122–23 Sitwell, Sacheverell, Southern Baroque Art: A Study of Painting, Architecture and Music in Italy and Spain of the 17th & 18th Centuries, 7, 30 Sodoma, Il, Procession to Calvary, 107 Sohm, Philip, 56, 145n9 Sole, Giovan Gioseffo dal, Saint Mary Magdalene in Meditation, 123 Solimena, Francesco acquisition of works of, 2, 11, 13, 14, 103 in Heim Gallery exhibitions, 82; Italian Paintings & Sculptures of the 17th and 18th Centuries, 87 paintings: The Birth of the Virgin attributed to, 131; Dido Receiving Aeneas and, 87; Lot and His Daughters attributed to, 70; modello for The Holy Trinity with the Virgin and Saints, 82; Portrait of a Nobleman, 126; The Risen Christ Appearing to His Mother, 87, 88; Solomon Worshipping a Pagan God of Vaccaro attributed to, 99; The Virgin and Child with Saints Dominic and Catherine of Siena, 87 scholarship on, in Southern Baroque Art by Sacheverell Stiwell, 30 Spark, Victor, 11 Spear, Richard, identification of Saint Cecilia with Angels as incorrectly attributed to Domenichino, 122 Stanford University Museum of Art (now the Cantor Arts Center), 63 Stanzione, Massimo Judith with the Head of Holofernes, 134, 153n28 Lot and His Daughters attributed to, 87 Lot and His Family Rescued from Sodom by Two Angels, 126 Rest on the Flight into Egypt, 21 Steel, David H., Jr., 150n38 Steen, Jan, 21

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Stein, Gertrude Four Saints in Three Acts, 30 and Walter P. Chrysler, Jr, 116 Steinmetz, Joseph Janney, 25 Stella, Jacques, 114 Stomer, Matthias, Flight from Sodom, 114, 150n38 Strozzi, Bernardo acquisition of works of, 11, 22, 49 Adoration of the Shepherds, 14 Christ and the Woman of Samaria, 111 David with the Head of Goliath, 133 The Doubting of Thomas, 77 Martyrdom of Saint Justina, 126 Paolo Gregorio Raggi, 126 Portrait of a Man, 126 Saint Catherine of Alexandria, 30, 32–34, 33 Street Musicians, 98 Subleyras, Pierre, 139 Suida, Wilhelm E., 8, 22, 35, 106, 119 Sumner Collection Fund, 31 Sweerts, Michael, 31 Tanenbaum, Max, 87 Tannahill, Robert Hudson, 97, 99, 102 Tanzio, Antonio d’Enrico Saint John the Baptist in the Wilderness, 13 Saint Sebastian, 8, 9 Tanzio da Varallo, acquisition of works by, 49 Tassi, Agostino, 60 Taylor, René, 74, 77 Teniers, David.the Younger, 21 Testa, Pietro, Alexander the Great Rescued from the River Cydnus, 11, 81, 137, 139 Thaw, Eugene V., 51 Thomas Agnew & Sons, 37, 136–37 establishment of, 78 Thomson, Colonel James, 132 Thos. Agnew & Sons, 144n26 Thyssen-Bornemisza, Baron Hans Heinrich biographical details, 144n13 collection: acquisitions after WWII, 144n15; Rudolf Heinemann as an advisor to, 144n14 Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, 24 collection of, 44 Tiarini, Alessandro, 63 Tiepolo, Giovanni Battista acquisition of work by, 6 Immaculate Conception, 97 Madonna and Child with Adoring Figure, 97 A Portrait of a Young Woman attributed to, 97 Saint Joseph and the Christ Child, 97 The Triumph of Virtue and Nobility over Ignorance, 51

184

Tiepolo, Giovanni Domenico, Women of Darius Invoking the Clemency of Alexander, 95, 96 Tintoretto, Jacopo, The Visit of the Queen of Sheba to Solomon, 107 Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) Bacchus and Ariadne in the style of, 124 Christ and the Tribute Money, 14 Sacred and Profane Love, 46 Titi, Tiberio, Portrait of a Nobleman, 127 Torelli, Felice, Martyrdom of Saint Peter Martyr, 99 Tournier, Nicolas, Tobias Taking Leave of His Parents, 19 Traversi, Gaspare Musical Party of Giuseppe Bonioto attributed to, 126 Portrait of a Priest (or Canon), 135 The Quarrel, 37 The Seduction, 73 Trevisani, Francesco in collections, 135, 139 pair of allegories by, 62 The Five Jesuit Martyrs of Cuncolim attributed to, 147n26 Troppa, Girolamo, The Angel Healing the Blindness of Tobit by, 71 Turchi, Alessandro acquisition of works by, 61, 98, 135 Allegory of Hope, 97 University of Chicago, Francie Dowley’s teaching at, 54 Uzielli De Mari, 49 Vaccaro, Andrea acquisition of works of, 102 Erminia and the Shepherds, 32 Vaccaro, Domenico Antonio, Solomon Worshipping a Pagan God, 99 Valdes Leal, Juan de, 21 Valentin. See Boulogne, Valentin de Valentiner, William R., 32, 35, 95, 97–98, 106 Vannuccio, Francesco di, Crucifixion, 107 Vassallo, Anton Maria, Still Life, 49 Vassar College Art Gallery, 32 Vecchia, Pietro della acquisition of, 62, 135 Dead Christ Mourned by Angels, 111, 112 Philosopher, 123 portrait of Erhard Weigl, 123 Saul and David with the Head of Goliath, 123 Soldiers Playing Dice, 123 Velázquez, Diego, Portrait of Philip IV, 21 Veronese, Paolo, 23, 114 –15, 118 Viancini, Ettore, 84 Victors, Jan, Esther and Ahasuerus, 114 Vignali, Jacopo Triumph of David, 111 Venus and Adonis or Diana and Endymion of Furini attributed to, 73 Vignon, Claude, 114

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Vitali, Alessandro, portraits of Federico, Prince of Urbino, 97 Voss, Hermann authentication of paintings by, 34, 35, 37, 127 Die Malerei des Barock in Rom, 7 Vouet, Simon acquisition of work by, 21–22 Salome with the Head of John the Baptist attributed to, 114 scholarship on, 57 Waagen, Gustav, 125, 127, 134 Wachter, George, 62 Wadsworth Atheneum acquisitions of Italian Baroque paintings, 126; Caravaggio’s Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy, 7, 35–36, 36, 46; by “Chick” Austin, 7, 25, 28, 30 –35; Sumner Collection Fund support for, 31 exhibitions organized by “Chick” Austin: Italian Painting of the Sei- and Settecento, 32; Men in Arms, 35; The Painters of Still Life, 34 –35 as the first American museum to buy and authentic Caravaggio, 21 Peter C. Sutton as director of, 39 Walpole, Horace, 2 Walters, Henry, 20, 22, 141n14 Waterhouse, Ellis K., 7, 83 Weil, Mark and Phoebe Dent, 63 Weitzner, Julius, 8, 106, 125 biographical information, 106 and Luis Ferré, 71 West, Benjamin Moses and the Brazen Serpent, 115 Progress of Revealed Religion, 115 Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist, 2, 3 Whitcomb family Anna Scripps and Edgar Bancroft, 97

generosity of, 97, 98, 102 Wickenden, Robert J., James Edmund Scripps, 93 Wildenstein & Co., 32, 37, 52, 120 Wilde, Richard Henry, 4, 108, 132 Wittel, Gaspar van, vedute by, 44 Wittkower, Rudolf, 59 acquisitions for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 133 Art and Architecture in Italy 1600 –1750, 59, 135 Art in Italy 1600 –1700 (Detroit, 1965), 99, 135 as chairman of Columbia’s Department of Art History and Archaeology, 58 – 60; exhibition Masters of the Loaded Brush organized by students of, 59; influence of, 58 –59 lecturers on Gian Lorenzo Bernini, 99 on postwar scholarship and collecting of the Italian Baroque paintings, 137 Wölfflin, Heinrich, 7 Wright of Derby, Joseph, The Old Man and Death, 37 Wrightsman, Charles and Jayne, 136, 137 Yale University, Italian Baroque scholars educated at, 61, 64. See also Feigen, Richard L.; Pillsbury, Edmund (Ted) Zafran, Eric on American taste for Baroque painting, 4 –5, 7, 106, 111, 128, 145n1, 149n11 studies with Donald Posner, 57–58 Zanchi, Antonio, 82 Zeri, Federico, 39, 74 Zurbarán, Francisco de, 21, 98, 149n17 The Birth of the Virgin, 51–52 Saint Serapion, 37 Still Life with Lemons, Oranges, and a Rose, 52

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