Court Art for Duke Federico Gonzaga in Mantua

Titian
Portrait of Federico II Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua
ca. 1530
oil on panel
Museo del Prado, Madrid

Titian
St. Jerome in Penitence
ca. 1531
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Titian
Madonna of the Rabbit
ca. 1525
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Titian
The Entombment
ca. 1520
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Titian
The Supper at Emmaus
ca. 1535
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

"The art world in Mantua between Mantegna's death (1506) and Giulio Romano's arrival (1524) had been dominated by good, local artists, enlivened by occasional visits from some excellent masters from neighboring cities.  The arrival of Raphael's pupil [Giulio Romano] marked a radical change in the city's artistic life.  . . . Fortified by [Federico] Gonzaga's unconditional support – the artist and his patron were the same age and shared similar tastes and sensibilities – Giulio moved freely and without undue concern in court circles.  . . .  He did not interact with the local artistic community; instead he simply ignored it and imposed himself as a sort of hegemonic figure in the world of Gonzaga's artistic politics."

"Diana Brodart has undertaken a careful study of the relationship between the great Venetian master [Titian] and Federico Gonzaga. She has been able to document about forty of Titian's pictures that were sent from Venice to Mantua.  These canvases were executed either for the duke himself, who often sent them as gifts to influential figures in the imperial court in order to solicit favors, or for important people at his court.  For example the castle warden, Giovan Giacomo Calandra, owned a Titian Mary Magdalen, and Count Nicola Maffei's The Supper at Emmaus is now in the Louvre.  The significant number of paintings Titian made for Mantua, including Federico's portrait in the Prado and The Virgin with the Rabbit, Saint Jerome, and The Entombment of Christ, all now in the Louvre, suggests a well-established relationship between the artist and the Gonzaga, and one that, because it was so visible in the small world of art in Mantua, must have had the blessing of Giulio Romano.  Because their spheres of expertise were so different, Giulio could have had no legitimate fear of being overshadowed by his Venetian colleague: Titian was famous for his canvases while Giulio had essentially given up easel painting.  He must have known that Titian had no intention of leaving Venice or of competing with him directly in Mantua.  The artists appear to have known one another and even to have had a friendly relationship, as we can tell from several surviving letters, as well as the portrait Titian made of Giulio in about 1536.  The latter was recently acquired by the province of Mantua and is now exhibited at the Palazzo Te.  Titian paints Giulio proudly holding a drawing bearing the plan of a centralized building."

Titian
Portrait of Giulio Romano
ca. 1536
oil on canvas
Provincia di Mantova

Giulio Romano
Triumph of Titus and Vespasian
ca. 1536-40
oil on panel
Musée du Louvre

Giulio Romano and workshop
Pluto driving his Chariot
ca. 1532-36
oil on panel
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Giulio Romano and workshop
Ceiling Panels with Episodes from the Story of Psyche
1526-28
fresco
Sala di Psiche
Palazzo Te, Mantua

Giulio Romano and workshop
Mars and Venus Bathing
1526-28
fresco
Sala di Psiche
Palazzo Te, Mantua

Rinaldo Mantovano assisting Giulio Romano
Zephyr propelling Psyche over the Sea
1527
oil on stucco
Sala di Psiche
Palazzo Te, Mantua

Giulio Romano and workshop
Ceiling Panels with Mythological Figures
1526
fresco
Sala dei Cavalli
Palazzo Te, Mantua

Giulio Romano and workshop
Assembly of Gods on Olympus (detail)
1532-34
fresco
Sala dei Giganti
Palazzo Te, Mantua

Giulio Romano and workshop
Fall of the Giants (north wall)
1532-34
fresco
Sala dei Giganti
Palazzo Te, Mantua

"Giulio Romano put together an enormous workshop of artists who could work up and then execute his designs while maintaining, as far as possible, a uniform stylistic tone.  The master established the overall decorative framework of a room, the composition of its figural groups, and the placement of individual figures in an impressive number of drawings.  His assistants then translated them, using a system of squaring, into cartoons that allowed the original idea to be transferred onto the walls themselves.  Even the most talented artists who spent time in Giulio's workshop, like the Bolognese sculptor Francesco Primaticcio, had to rein in their own stylistic impulses in order to sustain a uniformity that reflected the master's style.  And with little documentary evidence to help us, it is very difficult to distinguish individual hands in the decorative cycles."

– extracts from The Art of Mantua: Power and Patronage in the Renaissance by Barbara Furlotti and Guido Rebecchini, translated by A. Lawrence Jenkens (Getty, 2008)

Giulio Romano and workshop
Fall of the Giants
1532-34
fresco
(photographed by Candida Höfer in 2010)
Sala dei Giganti, Palazzo Te, Mantua

Court Art (North Italian Renaissance)

Girolamo da Cremona
Pentecost
ca. 1460-70
tempera on vellum
(manuscript leaf)
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

"Italian artists of the fifteenth century applied mathematical principles in designing a painting. These Renaissance rules of composition – frequently adapted and rethought – would have an impact on European painting continuously down to our own day. In this miniature of Pentecost (the descent of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles), nearly all the elements are arranged symmetrically around an invisible central axis. The solemn, columnar figure of the Virgin Mary along with the Holy Spirit in the form of a radiant descending dove indicate this axis. Equidistant from the axis appear the windows, the portals in the flanking walls, the pair of candlesticks on the mantel, and the apostles themselves. The two groups of apostles are organized in a mirror image of one another, a back row of three, a middle row of two, and in the foreground one each. The kneeling figures open around the Virgin like a pair of wings welcoming us. We look over the shoulders of the foremost apostles to participate."

"The artist avoids the monotony of strict symmetry by varying details, such as the colors of the apostles' robes, the men's gestures, and the arrangement of books around the candles, and by showing an open window (with a view) opposite a closed one. The geometric clarity of this design, the Virgin's imposing height, and the tall proportions of the room give this scene a monumental quality, even though the miniature itself measures only eight inches from top to bottom."

"The illuminator is Girolamo da Cremona (fl. 1458-1483), a protégé of the great painter Andrea Mantegna (circa 1431-1506). Girolamo moved among the powerful courts of Northern Italy. He illuminated books in Ferrara, Mantua, Siena, and Venice. Besides the thoughtful composition, another pleasure of Girolamo's art is his ability to describe the different textures of materials, from the stone window frames and the window's bull's-eye glass to the dull red bricks of the walls and the dyed leather bookbindings. The Pentecost was made for a liturgical book or a book of private devotion. No other part of the manuscript has come to light."

– text by curator Thomas Kren from Masterpieces of the J. Paul Getty Museum: Illuminated Manuscripts (Getty, 1997)

Andrea Mantegna
Uffizi Triptych
The Ascension of Christ, The Adoration of the Magi, The Circumcision
ca. 1460-64
tempera on panel
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Andrea Mantegna
Uffizi Triptych
The Ascension of Christ
ca. 1460-64
tempera on panel
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Andrea Mantegna
Uffizi Triptych
The Adoration of the Magi
ca. 1460-64
tempera on panel
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

Andrea Mantegna
Uffizi Triptych
The Circumcision
ca. 1460-64
tempera on panel
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence

The extract below and those following are from The Art of Mantua: Power and Patronage in the Renaissance by Barbara Furlotti and Guido Rebecchini, translated by A. Lawrence Jenkens (Getty, 2008)

"As soon as he arrived in the city, Mantegna took preeminence in the artistic life of Mantua.  . . .  [His] first important commission from Ludovico Gonzaga was the decoration of the chapel in the Castello di San Giorgio, executed in the first half of the 1460s. It is unfortunately impossible to reconstruct the whole of Mantegna's original intentions there with any confidence, although some of the panels almost certainly traceable to the chapel still survive. They include three paintings in the Uffizi (The Ascension of Christ, The Circumcision, and The Adoration of the Magi); a Death of the Virgin at the Prado in Madrid; and a fragment of Christ Welcoming the Virgin in Heaven, which is now in the Pinacoteca Nazionale in Ferrara. Robert Longhi correctly identified the latter in 1934 as having been cut down from the upper part of the Madrid panel."

Andrea Mantegna
Christ Welcoming the Virgin in Heaven
ca. 1462
tempera on panel
Pinacoteca Nazionale di Ferrara

Andrea Mantegna
The Death of the Virgin
ca. 1462
tempera on panel
Museo del Prado, Madrid

"These paintings and an unknown number of others from the same work, were likely inserted in a wooden framework on the wall of the small chapel intended for the private use of the marquis. The miniaturist's precision in the details assumes that the curious and admiring viewer could linger over the pictures, noticing the shadings in the marble, the distant landscapes, and the rocks with small, delicate plants sprouting from their crevices, as well as the colorful range of figures with tall hats and eastern turbans who are watching their kneeling king offer his precious gift to the Christ Child. Reality and the sacred story collide in the Madrid panel: just beyond the doleful scene of the apostles mourning the death of the Virgin, a broad window opens to offer a view of the lowest of the Mincio's three lakes, the covered Ponte San Giorgio that spans it, and boats floating in the distance."

Giovanni Cristoforo Romano
State Medallion of Isabella d'Este
ca. 1505
gold and enamel
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Andrea Mantegna
Parnassus
1496-97
tempera and oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Andrea Mantegna
Minerva Chasing the Vices from the Garden of Virtue
1502
tempera and oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

"Isabella d'Este came to Mantua from Ferrara in 1490, at the age of seventeen, as the wife of Marquis Francesco Gonzaga, a war captain who loved art but was even fonder of arms, dogs, and horses.  . . .  Her quarters [in Castello di San Giorgio] consisted of two camere, or chambers, and a series of smaller rooms including an oratory, a library, and the studiolo, or little studio, that would become one of her greatest sources of pride.  . . .  After a long visit to her father's court in 1495, Isabella began a radical renovation of her studiolo with the Belfiore example in mind. She decided that her walls should be decorated with paintings that were both edifying and beautiful, and she commissioned them from artists whom she judged to be the best of her day, including, first and foremost, Andrea Mantegna.  . . .  The first painting to be executed, between 1496 and 1497, was Mantegna's so-called Parnassus. Venus and Mars stand at the center of the composition and atop an arch-shaped, natural rock formation and in front of a screen of lemon trees; they dominate the scene from on high, while in the foreground the nine Muses dance to a tune Apollo plays on his lyre. Mercury stands to the right of this group with Pegasus, his winged horse. In the background on the left, Vulcan, Venus's cuckolded husband, is intent on forging the delicate net he will use to avenge his injured honor. The surviving documents do not say whether some humanist adviser gave the artist a text for this complicated scene, but it is certain that contemporaries interpreted Venus as Isabella d'Este, ruler of a harmonious world governed by love and music."

"Mantegna's second painting for Isabella, Minerva Chasing the Vices from the Garden of the Virtue, was executed in 1502.  Here the artist distances himself even further from the softer atmospherics of contemporary painting, a trend that Isabella herself especially favored. The figures of the Vices wade waist-deep through a swamp, each one with an identifying label: Avarice, Ignorance, Ingratitude, Sloth, and Treachery. They begin to disperse when Minerva, Diana, and another figure commonly identified as Chastity arrive, but in truth they seem to be in no great hurry with their stolid visages and their filthy, deformed bodies. They are accompanied by small groups of satyrs and a lascivious, unforgettable Venus – more earthbound than celestial – who shows herself in all her splendor balanced impossibly on the back of a centaur. Above and behind the perfectly pruned hedge a fantastic orange mountain rises up; a gray cloud, anthropomorphic in shape, stands out against the sky; and in a misty mandorla the figures of Justice, Fortitude, and Temperance wait for Minerva to accomplish her task."

Lorenzo Costa
Allegory of the Court of Isabella d'Este
1505
tempera and oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Andrea Mantegna and Lorenzo Costa
The Realm of King Comus
1506-1511
tempera and oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

"The first of Lorenzo Costa's paintings arrived in Mantua in 1505 – his so-called Coronation of Isabella d'Este [also known as Allegory of the Court of Isabella d'Este].  The principle group in this picture – in which the marchioness may have been pleased to be included – consists of four musicians in the presence of an elegantly dressed artist-courtier who draws the scene and a chronicler who records it in words, all in a space defined by a slender hedge. Two maidens, seated in the foreground near a grey heron, wrap garlands around the heads of sheep and a cow. It is not clear whom they represent. Diana the Huntress and a warrior, probably Cadmus, the husband of Harmonia, are posed as the tutelary deities of the event. At the feet of the warrior lies the lifeless body of a dragon, its head severed. A battle rages in the background while in the distance the glassy water blends into the blue of the horizon."

"Mantegna was in the preliminary stages of another painting for this series at the time of his death, on September 13, 1506. Treating an unusual subject – The Realm of King Comus – the work was finally finished in 1511 by Lorenzo Costa, who rose to a privileged position at the Mantuan court between Mantegna's death and the arrival of Giulio Romano in 1524."

Correggio
Allegory of the Virtues
ca. 1530
tempera on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Correggio
Allegory of the Vices
ca. 1530
tempera on canvas
Musée du Louvre

"There are, unfortunately, no account books to allow us to reconstruct the appearance of Isabella d'Este's studiolo or grotto in the Castello di San Giorgio in any detail. We know much more, however, about the dowager apartments remodeled for her in about 1520, when the aging Isabella retired to the ground floor of the Corte Vecchia at the Gonzaga family palace. Its location spared her from negotiating stairs, and the move also liberated her rooms at the castle for her son Federico (1500-1540) who had succeeded his father as marquis in 1519.  . . .  The extra space in the new rooms allowed the marchioness to add two pictures to the original nucleus of paintings that hung in her first studiolo, both of them commissioned in about 1530 from one of the greatest artists of the time, Antonio Allegri, called Correggio (ca. 1489-1534). Isabella asked him to paint two allegories of virtue and vice, which were to hang on either side of the entryway. These pictures completed the cycle Mantegna had begun some thirty years before and underscored its most profound meaning – the triumph of virtue over vice. We do not know if Correggio was given detailed instructions on how to represent these subjects, but certainly the decision to use tempera, by then out of fashion, must have been imposed on the artist by his patron in order to diminish the stylistic difference between the earlier and later works.  . . .  Here again Isabella asserts the primacy of virtue, the principle message of her paintings. Indeed it seems that she hoped her carefully assembled collection would be seen as a reflection of her own virtue."

Water Lilies

David Willetts
Lilies
1976
acrylic on board
Southampton City Art Gallery, Hampshire

Monet

Unable to get into the Monet show,
Too many people there, too many cars,
We spent the Sunday morning at Bowl Pond
A mile from the Museum, where no one was,
And walked an hour or so around the rim
Beside five acres of flowering waterlilies
Lifting three feet above their floating pads
Huge yellow flowers heavy on bending stems
In various phases of array and disarray
Of petals packed, unfolded, opening to show
The meaty orange centers that become,
When the ruined flags fall away, green shower heads
Spilling their wealth of seed at summer's end
Into the filthy water among small fish
Mud-colored and duck moving explorative
Through jungle pathways opened among huge fronds
Upon whose surface water drops behave
Like mercury, collecting in heavy silver coins
Instead of bubbles; some few redwinged blackbirds
Whistling above all this once in a while,
The silence else unbroken all about.

– Howard Nemerov (1979)

Jack Beal
Water Lilies
ca. 1975
lithograph
Art Institute of Chicago

John La Farge
Water Lily and Moth
ca. 1878
watercolor
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut

William Samuel Wright
Beau and the Water-Lily
ca. 1910
oil on canvas
Cowper and Newton Museum, Olney, Buckinghamshire

Reuben T.W. Sayers
The Water Lily
1850
oil on canvas
Manchester Art Gallery

Claude Monet
The Water Lily Pond
1899
oil on canvas
National Gallery, London

William Holt Yates Titcomb
Lily Pond and Orangerie, Goldney House, Bristol
1920
watercolour on paper
Bushey Museum and Art Gallery, Hertfordshire

Tom Clifton Butterfield
The Lily Pool
1905
oil on canvas
Bradford Museums and Galleries, Yorkshire

Winston Churchill
The Lily Pond at Coombe Place
ca. 1930
oil on canvas
National Trust, Chartwell, Kent

Edward Atkinson Hornel
Lily Pond
1905
oil on canvas
Dick Institute, Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, Scotland

Marianne North
Water-Lily and Surrounding Vegetation in Van Staaden's Kloof
ca. 1882
oil on panel
Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew

Claude Monet
Water Lilies
1906
oil on canvas
Art Institute of Chicago

Martin Johnson Heade
Water Lily
ca. 1885-1900
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Roger Fenton
Lily House, Botanic Garden, Oxford
1859
albumen silver print
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Idealized Military Costuming Painted in Britain

Robert Peake the Elder
Henry Frederick, Prince of Wales
in Jousting Armour
ca. 1610-12
oil on panel
St John's College, University of Cambridge

Frank Dicksee
The Two Crowns
1900
oil on canvas
Tate Britain

William Etty after Titian
Standard Bearer
ca. 1825-27
oil on canvas
York City Art Gallery

John Gilbert
The Standard Bearer
1885
oil on canvas
Temple Newsam House, Leeds

The Poet as Hero

You've heard me, scornful, harsh, and discontented,
     Mocking and loathing War; you've asked me why
Of my old, silly sweetness I've repented –
     My ecstasies changed to an ugly cry.

You are aware that once I sought the Grail,
     Riding in armour bright, serene and strong;
And it was told that through my infant wail
     There rose immortal semblances of song.

But now I've said good-bye to Galahad,
     And am no more the knight of dreams and show:
For lust and senseless hatred make me glad,
     And my killed friends are with me where I go.
Wound for red wound I burn to smite their wrongs;
And there is absolution in my songs.

– Siegfried Sassoon (1916)

Gonzales Coques
Portrait of a Royalist Officer in Armour
ca. 1645
oil on canvas
Cannon Hall Museum, Barnsley, Yorkshire

William Dobson
Portrait of a Royalist Officer with a Page
1642
oil on canvas
National Trust, Knole, Kent

Richard Brompton
Admiral Sir Charles Saunders
ca. 1772-73
oil on canvas
National Maritime Museum, London

John Hoppner
Francis Rawdon-Hastings, 2nd Earl of Moira
ca. 1795
oil on canvas
Lady Lever Art Gallery, Liverpool

William Owen
Captain Gilbert Heathcote, RN
ca. 1801-1805
oil on canvas
Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, West Midlands

Arthur William Devis
Portrait of a Grenadier
ca. 1805
oil on canvas
National Army Museum, London

Martin Archer Shee
Lieutenant-Colonel Sir Henry Vassal Webster
ca. 1814
oil on canvas
Hastings Museum and Art Gallery, Sussex

Francis Grant
Arthur Walsh, 2nd Baron of Ormethwaite
1847
oil on canvas
National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth

Franz Xaver Winterhalter
Major-General Sir John Douglas
ca. 1850
oil on canvas
Museum of the King's Royal Hussars, Winchester

Harold Speed
Edmund Antrobus
in the uniform of a Grenadier Guard
1913
oil on canvas
Antrobus House, Amesbury, Wiltshire

Noel Denholm Davis
Captain Albert Ball
1917
oil on canvas
Museum of the Mercian Regiment, Nottingham

The Loneliness of the Military Historian

Confess: it's my profession
that alarms you.
This is why few people ask me to dinner,
though Lord knows I don't go out of my way to be scary.
I wear dresses of sensible cut
and unalarming shades of beige,
I smell of lavender and go to the hairdresser's:
no prophetess mane of mine,
complete with snakes, will frighten the youngsters.
If I roll my eyes and mutter,
if I clutch at my heart and scream in horror
like a third-rate actress chewing up a mad scene,
I do it in private and nobody sees
but the bathroom mirror.

In general I might agree with you:
women should not contemplate war,
should not weigh tactics impartially,
or evade the word enemy,
or view both sides and denounce nothing.
Women should march for peace,
or hand out white feathers to arouse bravery,
spit themselves on bayonets
to protect their babies,
whose skulls will be split anyway,
or, having been raped repeatedly,
hang themselves with their own hair.
These are the functions that inspire general comfort.
That, and the knitting of socks for the troops
and a sort of moral cheerleading.
Also: mourning the dead.
Sons, lovers, and so forth.
All the killed children.

Instead of this, I tell
what I hope will pass as truth.
A blunt thing, not lovely.
The truth is seldom welcome,
especially at dinner,
though I am good at what I do.
My trade is courage and atrocities.
I look at them and do not condemn.
I write things down the way they happened,
as near as can be remembered.
I don't ask why, because it is mostly the same.
Wars happen because the ones who start them
think they can win.

In my dreams there is glamour.
The Vikings leave their fields
each year for a few months of killing and plunder,
much as the boys go hunting.
In real life they were farmers.
They come back loaded with splendour.
The Arabs ride against Crusaders
with scimitars that could sever
silk in the air.
A swift cut to the horse's neck
and a hunk of armour crashes down
like a tower. Fire against metal.
A poet might say: romance against banality.
When awake, I know better.

Despite the propaganda, there are no monsters,
or none that can be finally buried.
Finish one off, and circumstances
and the radio create another.
Believe me: whole armies have prayed fervently
to God all night and meant it,
and been slaughtered anyway.
Brutality wins frequently,
and large outcomes have turned on the invention
of a mechanical device, viz. radar.
True, valour sometimes counts for something,
as at Thermopylae. Sometimes being right –
though ultimate virtue, by agreed tradition,
is decided by the winner.
Sometimes men throw themselves on grenades
and burst like paper bags of guts
to save their comrades.
I can admire that.
But rats and cholera have won many wars.
Those, and potatoes,
or the absence of them.
It's no use pinning all those medals
across the chests of the dead.
Impressive, but I know too much.
Grand exploits merely depress me.

In the interests of research
I have walked on many battlefields
that once were liquid with pulped
men's bodies and spangled with exploded
shells and splayed bone.
All of them have been green again
by the time I got there.
Each has inspired a few good quotes in its day.
Sad marble angels brood like hens
over the grassy nests where nothing hatches.
(The angels could just as well be described as vulgar
or pitiless, depending on camera angle.)
The word glory figures a lot on gateways.
Of course I pick a flower or two
from each, and press it in the hotel Bible
for a souvenir.
I'm just as human as you.

But it's no use asking me for a final statement.
As I say, I deal in tactics.
Also statistics:
for every year of peace there have been four hundred
years of war.

– Margaret Atwood (1995)