Bellini, Raw Pork and Opium
Left: Madonna Adoring the Sleeping Child, Giovanni Bellini, 1460s, not on view.
Top: The Night-Hag Visiting Lapland Witches, Henry Fuseli, 1796, gallery 633.
Bottom: The Nightmare, Henry Fuseli, 1781, Detroit Institute of Arts.
Right: The sleep of reason produces monsters, Francisco de Goya, 1799, not on view.
Getting the gestalt of gallery 633, titled Goya and the Eighteenth Century in Italy, was tough. Tiepolos, Goya's portraits from his “black period” - when he almost died from illness - and Fuseli’s Night-Hag.
The influences on Fuseli are noted: Bellini’s infant on a stone slab; classical pyramid compositions; masterful chiaroscuro. And his utterly personal vision not based on typical themes of the canon.
The Nightmare became a mark of Romanticism. “She was there, lifeless and inanimate, thrown across the bed, her head hanging down, and her pale and distorted features half covered by her hair.” - Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, 1818.
The narrator in Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) compares one of the paintings in the Usher House with Fuseli’s painting: “irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat upon my heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm.”
Freud had a copy of The Nightmare in his study, enamored of Fuseli’s aphorism, “One of the most unexplored regions of art are dreams.” Ernest Jones used the image for the frontispiece in his On The Nightmare.
Although rumors would attribute Fuseli’s visions to consuming raw pork and opium, the results were horrific, but not diseased. Somehow the Enlightenment brought fantasies floating in clouds, winged beasts, and demonic imagination.
Five Ways To Conjugate an Oil Sketch
Allegory of the Planets and Continents, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, 1752, gallery 633.
Top left: Madame Théodore Gobillard, Edgar Degas, 1869, gallery 815.
Top right: Woman with a Dog, painting and riccordo (14 fantasy portraits), Jean Honoré Fragonard, 1769, gallery 630.
Bottom left: Fontainebleau: Oak Trees at Bas-Bréau, Camille Corot, 1832, gallery 803.
Bottom right: Sketch for The Haywain, John Constable, 1820, not on view.
The general term “oil sketch” comes long after the creation of these rapid intuitive paintings. Earlier, more specific names were derived from the function of the work. The modello, for example, was made for clients and was a business task in ateliers. All of these forms were seen only as stages toward finished works and not considered worthy of public exhibition.
Modello: A finished presentation sketch specifically for “patron approval”. (Tiepolo’s proposal included this sketch for the Residenz Palace fresco in Würzburg, Germany.)
Ébauche: Unfinished (for any reason). (Degas, after several dry media studies, left the oil sketch unfinished. It was a favorite of Mary Cassatt.)
Riccordo: A reduced version of a large work for the artist’s records. (Fragonard, after completing his 14 fantasy portraits, copied each oil sketch as a thumb-nail for himself. Although not in oil, they are “riccordos of oil sketches”.)
Esquisse: Smaller than final. (Corot enlarged the small landscape (shown above) in his large biblical canvas Hagar in the Wilderness. Interesting to see a French Oak in the Palestine desert scene.) Met gallery 803. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/435962
Étude: Study (often fragmentary). (Constable, understandably proud of his “skying” period, studied the physics of the sky. “You can never be nubilous,” he told a friend, because “I am the man of clouds.”)
The French Academy battled over the oil sketch for 40 years. The Poussinistes denounced the rough gestures of the oil-sketching Rubénistes. “The loaded brush” won. I would have been a proud Rubéniste. Et vous?
“(The/A) (God/Devil) (is) in the Detail(s)”
Residenz at Würzburg, Germany: Stucco work, Antonio Bossi, White Hall, 1744-45; Insert: Allegory of the Planets and Continents detail, Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, grand staircase ceiling fresco, 1752-53.
I travelled to Germany a great many times (205 trips, 543 hotel nights, 530,000 + Lufthansa miles). When business trips spanned weekends, I kept regular company with three of the Pinakothek museums (Alte, Neue, der Moderne) in Munich. In a deep Tiepolo period, I visited his ceiling frescos at the Residenz, Würzburg.
The Residenz is an astonishing assemblage of European Arts: German, French, and Austrian architects; a Bohemian garden artist; Italian sculptors; and one lone Italian painter Tiepolo — who was brought in to create the largest fresco (600 square meters) in the world.
I had come for Tiepolo’s The Continents, especially the giant crocodile in The Americas - A rococo fantasy of our supposed wilderness.
But then I was stopped on the stairs, looking off to the left, at the walls; the hallucinatory surfaces with floating dragons. I had not known Antonio Bossi or his stucco work in the White Hall: What a room! An explosion of detail. Excess as ecstasy.
“Der liebe Gott steckt im detail”. - Early German proverb, commonly falsely attributed to Mies van der Rohe.
"Le bon Dieu est dans le detail." - Gustave Flaubert.
“If I were of the trade, I should naturalize art as much as they ‘artialize’ nature.” - Montaigne
Woods Half Empty?
I had a note to follow up on a description I found, when studying Brueghel’s landscape The Harvesters: “Peace and agriculture in a pre-Romantic ideal landscape, without sublime terrors.” I didn't think much on it until Cosimo. Here was terror; how is it ideal?
So I hunted . . . back to Edmund Burke on the sublime: "whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger . . . Whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror . . . and know there is an inherent pleasure in this emotion.” - A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, 1757.
After these immersions, in Burke and Breugel, beauty, Cosimo, and the sublime, I had a Met dream: “By a winged something, arrived six everything I write(s)”. These writings appeared as volumes of “Iberian ancient poetry”. Likely memories of the Arms and Armor galleries: Moorish verses engraved on chivalric weapons foretelling “a barbarous pandemic”. It felt just like A Hunting Scene.
“A Culture Is No Better Than Its Woods”
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