Legacy 12- Van Dyck

Plague visions in Dulwich

Apr 4, '12 10:03 AM for everyone

A last little post before Easter and a longish silence; I’m away in Cornwall cat sitting for a friend over Easter, staying on for a bit afterwards and then, after a couple of days at work, off to Aarhus in Denmark for a conference.

At the weekend I took myself off to Dulwich Picture Gallery, which bills itself as being the oldest purpose built art gallery in the UK.  It’s the product of a strange bit of political history.   In the 1780s Stanislaw Poniatowski, the last King of Poland, decided that his realm urgently needed a national art collection.  This may sound a bizarre priority given the problems facing Poland at the time but it fitted into a wider attempt on his part to push through the modernisation of the country in a desperate attempt to ensure its survival in the face of greedy neighbours like Catherine II of Russia (who just happened to be Stanslaw’s one-time lover) or Joseph II of Austria.  He therefore commissioned a couple of Anglo-Swiss art dealers called Bourgeois and Desenfans to assemble a collection for him.   They completed the job around 1795- sadly just in time for Poland to disappear from the map for the next 125-odd years.  Left with some 200 canvasses on their hands, Bourgeois and Desenfans spent the next two decades or so trying to offload them as a unit.  The tried the Russians twice but got no reply.   The tried the British Government but they were rather busy fighting Napoleon and whatever money was available for art purchases was tied up on projects like buying the Parthenon Marbles from Lord Elgin.  In the end Bourgeois left the lot to Dulwich College on condition that they were put on display (a bit of a double edged “benefaction” as it involved the school in major capital outlay) and that the gallery included his mausoleum.   The collection finally opened to the public in 1817.

The gallery building is intriguing; Sir John Soane designed it and, considering he didn't have any real precedents to work from when it came to building an art gallery, he did a remarkably good job (lots of indirect light, provided by high set windows  set well above the line of the highest paintings, plenty of space to move round in).   The core collection is a bit of a mixed bag.  It very nicely reflects what was available on the market in the early 1790's and what was fashionable.  There's nothing earlier than 1500 in date and very little overtly religious art (fashion was only just beginning to swing towards the medieval, the huge dispersion of medieval/early Renaissance art from Italian and Flemish churches and monasteries was only just beginning with Joseph II's attempts to impose "Enlightened" reform on the church in his lands and the French Revolution hadn't really begun to make an impact).    There are lots of Dutch landscapes (bought by the yard, it sometimes seems), some rather optimistic attributions which have been knocked back to "studio of"- and a few really top rate Rembrandts and Rubenses and Poussins.

I had gone to see an exhibition on Van Dyck in Sicily.  This was not huge- he only created sixteen paintings there, though that is considerably more than he probably intended to do.  He had got to Sicily in 1624 to paint the portrait of the Spanish viceroy, Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy.   There was a nice bit of masculine vanity on display.  Emanuele Filiberto gets a suitably "I'm the boss here and I know it" portrait showing him in full armour (see above).   The actual suit of armour was part of the show- except that it had been made for him when he was eighteen, some twenty years before, and he had long since outgrown it.  Presumably he kept old armour in his wardrobe, whether in the hope that one day he'd lose enough weight to squeeze back in or because top range armour was very expensive and a work of art in its own right.

Presumably that ought to have been the end of things except that the plague broke out in Palermo, the port was closed and Van Dyck was trapped there.   The Viceroy died.   Van Dyck did a certain amount of portrait work (though his main local backer was a decidedly louche Dutch merchant who dabbled in the theft of precious stones) but people were understandably more worried about other things and Van Dyck had to turn his hand to religious paintings.  In particular he found a profitable niche doing paintings of Saint Rosalia.  She's the patron saint of Palermo and her relics had just been discovered in a cave on the mountain which overlooks the city- and she was instantly enlisted as the city's intercessor to make the plague go away.  

Unlike most of the saints rediscovered at the height of the Counter-Reformation, she wasn’t an obscure Roman martyr out of the Catacombs but a medieval hermit of noble birth who in all probability had really existed, though not much was known about her and she didn’t have a well defined existing image in religious art.   Van Dyck set about remedying this defect.    In all, Van Dyck did five paintings of her, using the same model and the same dress in all of them.  This established Rosalia as a blonde in a rough brown habit with a close cousinhood to standard depictions of the Magdalene after she’d had her conversion, even down to the skull kept as a meditation aid.  She appears in various poses looking to persuade the Almighty to stop the plague falling on a rather vaguely characterised Palermo.   Not all the Heavenly Host seem so persuaded- note the cherub holding his nose in the bottom left corner below…..

To be honest, I'm never quite so persuaded by Van Dyck when he's being religious as against his portrait work, though it is fascinating to see him caught up in the charged religious atmosphere triggered by the plague.   Palermo may be a rather vaguely defined presence at best in the Saint Rosalia paintings but there is a real sense that her intercession mattered to him- which of course it did in an immediately personal way.   On the portrait side, the show also included a wonderful portrait of Sophonisba Anguissola, the best known female painter of her day whom Van Dyck clearly admired and respected.  She was 92 and her eyesight wasn’t what it had been but she still gave the young whippersnapper advice on his technique- her formidable presence can still be felt in the painting below.

Hope everybody has a wonderful break- and doesn’t get snowed in!