cold fish, yet her hand rests on his shoulder.
Is it possible there isn’t the apparent estrangement seen at first view? Is it a hand of pure affection? I hope so.
I like this portrait. I tire of his ballerinas and fatigued washerwomen.
JP
7. Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino (1609)
El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos) (1541–1614)
El Greco (Domenikos Theotokopoulos), Fray Hortensio Félix Paravicino, 1609
Oil on canvas, 112.1 x 86.1 cm
Isaac Sweetser Fund (04.234)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Photo credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Bridgeman Images
This is a surprising El Greco.
The subject was Hortensio Félix Paravicino, a monk of the Trinitarian Order, also known for his skills as a poet and orator. He was a close friend of El Greco.
Hortensio was pleased with the portrait. He wrote a sonnet praising it.
O Greek divine! We wonder not that in thy works
The imagery surpasses actual being
But rather that, while thou art spared the life that’s due
Unto thy brush should e’er withdraw to Heaven
The sun does not reflect his rays in his own sphere
As brightly as thy canvases …
Whew!
In Malcolm Rogers’s Director’s Choice,1 he says, “Peravicino’s tunic, occupying the centre of the painting, suggests the importance of the subject’s life as a monk and how Christianity forms the very core of his existence.”
And indeed, seventeenth-century Spain was a deeply religious place. However, sitting here in the twenty-first century, all of that seems somewhat absurd — perhaps because I’ve never been exposed to such a fervour. So when I look at this painting, I have to wonder: Is this a portrait of a religious figure or is it a portrait of an aesthete who is merely wearing the clothes of a monk?
The definition of aesthete is “one who professes a special appreciation of the beautiful and endeavours to carry his ideas into practice.” In truth, to me the sitter looks to be a flighty, off-the-wall actor whose brilliant insecurities are hidden by the monk’s costume and the trappings of the Bible. It seems to me that we have here a nervous theatre director in the wings. Or a slightly crazed writer who thinks unconventional thoughts.
H.W. Janson, in his famous History of Art — the staple when I was a kid — says, “Yet the mood is one of neither reverie nor withdrawal. Paravicino’s frail, expressive hands and the pallid face, with its sensitive mouth and burning eyes, convey a spiritual ardor of compelling intensity. Such, we like to think, were the saints of the Counter Reformation — mystics and intellectuals at the same time.”2
This shows you that when El Greco was good (he assigned much to assistants), his portraiture could hold its own with Titian.
JP
8. The Dead Christ with Angels (c. 1524–27)
Rosso Fiorentino (Giovanni Battista di Jacopo)
(1494–1540)
Rosso Fiorentino (Giovanni Battista di Jacopo), The Dead Christ with Angels, c. 1524–27
Oil on panel, 133.4 x 104.1 cm
Charles Potter Kling Fund (58.527)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Photo credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Bridgeman Images
Imagine if you were a painter just after Raphael, Leonardo — what would you do? What could you create to surpass the greats? How could you outdraw Raphael? You couldn’t. Hence artists had to try other trails.
There were touches of elongated lines in the last paintings of Michelangelo, a style the Mannerists pursued, producing more willowy figures, more elongated forms. Mannerists spread from Tintoretto to El Greco and more pronounced ones: Parmigianino, Pontormo, and Rosso Fiorentino. He painted The Descent from the Cross in Volterra, Italy, which hinted at the birth of acrylic paints, electric colours, and jolting forms. Here are acid colours — unreal, garish hues — a revolt against the balance ideal of the High Renaissance.
There is a painting of this rare master in America! The Dead Christ has the elongated drape of the Mannerist painting. Christ is dead but oddly relaxed. Christ’s body here is carved, a coffee-coloured marble soon for a resurrection. A tiny hand feeling his chest wound, so tentative and tender. His face lightly whiskered, grey lips, a sense of sleep.
Note Christ’s long-boned thigh and his ballerina toes. See the young, pretty angels, all kissy-kissy, spring-coiled tresses, wings meant for flight. More whispering nothings than grieving beings. But what pretty blouses!
So much for his paintings; what of the man? Fiorentino’s life is larded with apocryphal stories.
He falsely accused a friend of stealing hundreds of ducats from him — this according to Vasari, who would have known him. When the accused was found innocent, he sued Rosso for libel. Rosso, too stubborn to eat his words, took poison “rather than be punished by others.”
He was vain, proud of his red hair, and with a fine presence, which he enhanced by keeping a tame ape.
I am a little too old for this.
JP
9. Susie (1988)
Lucian Freud (1992–2011)
Lucian Freud, Susie, 1988
Oil on canvas, 27.3 x 22.2 cm
Melvin Blake and Frank Purnell Collection (2003.37)
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
© Estate of Lucian Freud
Photo credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Bridgeman Images
What a singular, staggering artist! What depth, what evocation of the human form and spirit is found in his paintings. Susie resonates with raw purpose, shattering our expectations of artistic representation. Lucian Freud became best known for his unabashed use of nudity and his grotesque portraits, but it would be a waste of feeling, betray a hardness, not to see the beauty in this face.
Grandson of Sigmund, Freud moved to London while still very young, after living for only a few years in Germany. During his studies, his talent for portraits
