Monday, April 29, 2019

Alessandro Allori (1535-1607) - Late Mannerism, Florence - I

Alessandro Allori
Portrait of a Young Man
ca. 1560
oil on panel
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Alessandro Allori
Portrait of Bianca Cappello
before 1587
tempera on plaster
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Alessandro Allori
Allegorical Portrait of a Young Man
in the guise of Mercury slaying Argus

ca. 1575-80
oil on panel
Harvard Art Museums

Alessandro Allori
St Jerome
1606
oil on panel
Princeton University Art Museum

In 1929 the great art historian Walter Friedlaender felt able to dismiss "Alessandro Allori, who flooded all Tuscany with his insipid pictures."  The adopted ward and apprentice of Agnolo Bronzino (1503-1572), Allori inherited a Florentine Renaissance style of scrupulous drawing and complex, elongated postures.  Much of his subsequent career was devoted to Medici service – designing tapestries; painting portraits, cabinet miniatures, altarpieces; executing vast decorative schemes in fresco for villas and churches.  Yet well before Allori's death in 1607, the "Mannerist" movement had begun to lose vigor and drift out of fashion.  He has consequently been punished by many writers for the historical accident of his time and place, his awkward positioning between eras.  Too little praise has been granted to his compensating strengths of design, construction, draftsmanship and sheer painterly craft.   

Alessandro Allori
Venus disarming Cupid (detail)
ca. 1570
oil on canvas
Musée Fabre, Montpellier

Alessandro Allori
Venus disarming Cupid
ca. 1570
oil on canvas
Musée Fabre, Montpellier

Alessandro Allori
Venus disarming Cupid
ca. 1570
oil on panel
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Alessandro Allori
Miracles of St Fiacre
ca. 1596
oil on panel
Basilica di Santo Spirito, Florence

Alessandro Allori
Miracles of St Fiacre (detail)
ca. 1596
oil on panel
Basilica di Santo Spirito, Florence

Alessandro Allori
Abduction of Proserpine
1570
oil on panel
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Alessandro Allori
Hercules crowned by the Muses
ca. 1568
oil on panel
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Alessandro Allori
Christ in the House of Martha and Mary
1605
oil on panel
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Alessandro Allori
Christ and the Woman taken in Adultery
1576-77
oil on panel
Basilica di Santo Spirito, Florence

Alessandro Allori
Christ and the Woman taken in Adultery
1576-77
oil on panel
Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

The pair of duplicate paintings directly above serves as an additional demonstration of the distinction made at the end of the just-previous post on Massimo Stanzione – variations in national styles and standards of cleaning and conservation.  The version of Allori's Christ and the Woman taken in Adultery that has spent the past couple of centuries in Russia still displays the Old Master dimness of old varnish (and old dirt).  The version still housed in the Florentine church for which it was created probably looked much the same until the mid-20th century – when the Italians rather suddenly decided that their immense heritage of old paintings required a general brightening.  As far as I am aware, no one has theorized that the abrupt demand for brighter more colorful museum paintings coincided with the mass dissemination of Technicolor movies and Kodachrome film.