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.pdfto accommodate progressive trends. Since the presidency (1944−1949) of Munnings, who was notorious for his opposition to modern art, its policy has become more liberal and the conflict between official ‘Academy’ art and creative art has narrowed. But something of the opinion from the late 19th century, continued up to the mid 1970s, and the function of the Academy at its inception to provide exhibitions of the best contemporary work from year to year has been challenged by the competitive claims of the commercial galleries and of such bodies as The Arts Council of Great Britain. The annual Royal Academy summer exhibition still remains a popular event, however, and the Academy regularly organizes historical exhibitions of the highest quality.
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Romanticism
Movement in the arts flourishing in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. Romanticism is so varied in its manifestations that a single definition is impossible, but its keynote was a belief in the value of individual experience. In this it marked a reaction from the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the order of the Neoclassical style. The Romantic artist explored the values of intuition and instinct, exchanging the public discourse of Neoclassicism, the forms of which had a common currency, for a more private kind of expression. The German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel in his Lectures on Aesthetics (1818) wrote ‘in Romantic art the form is determined by the inner idea of the content of substance that this art is called upon to represent’.
Romanticism is commonly seen as the antithesis of Classicism, and the two concepts аre sometimes used in a very general sense to designate polarities in attitude that may be seen in the art of any age — thus Raphael might be described as a ‘classical’ artist, whereas his contemporary Giorgione is a ‘romantic’ one. However, the exponents of both Romanticism and Classicism share a concern with the ideal rather than the real, and that there is sometimes no firm dividing line between the two approaches is shown by the use of the term ‘Romantic Classicism’ to describe certain works that show a Romantic response to antiquity. Both Romanticism and Classicism embrace concepts of nobility, grandeur, virtue, and superiority. But where the Classical seems a possible ideal which will adapt man to his society and mould that society into an orderly setting for him, the Romantic envisages the unattainable, beyond the limits of society and human adaptability. The Classical hero accepts the fate over which he has no control and triumphs nobly in this acquiescence, otherwise he would not be a hero. The Romantic hero pits himself against a hostile environment and at no time comes to terms with it even if he reaches his goal, otherwise he would not be Romantic.
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Romanticism represents an attitude of mind rather than a set of particular stylistic traits and involves the expression of an idea that tends to have a verbal rather than a visual origin. In this context a ruined temple is more significant than a new one because it is more suggestive of the passage of time and human frailty. What is broken or partial can never be archetypally Classical because the Classical object is whole and coherent, not fragmentary. A view that finds a ruined temple beautiful is a Romantic view, though the temple may once have been a Classical masterpiece. Romanticism lends itself more easily to expression through music and literature than through the visual arts, as a sense of the infinite and the transcendental, of forces exceeding the boundaries of reason, must necessarily be vague — suggestive rather than concrete, as it must be in painting and even more so in sculpture. On the other hand, although there is no specific Romantic school in architecture, the Gothic Revival, especially in its early, non-scholarly phase, is an aspect of Romanticism.
Almost by definition, the leading Romantic artists differ widely from one another — Blake and Turner in Britain, Delacroix and Géricault in France, Friedrich and Runge in Germany. The movement of which they were a part died out in the mid 19th century, but in a broader sense the Romantic spirit has lived on, representing a revolt against conservatism, moderation, and insincerity and an insistence on the primacy of the imagination in artistic expression.
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Michelangelo Buonarroti
(1475−1564)
Florentine painter, sculptor, draughtsman, architect and poet, one of the greatest figures of the Renaissance, indeed of world art. In 1488 he entered Ghirlandaio’s workshop but transferred after a year to the tutelage of Bertoldo in the Medici antique sculpture garden, a kind of academy, about which little is known. One of his earliest works, The Battle of the Lapiths and Centaurs (c. 1492, Florence, Casa Buonarroti), was based on a relief by Bertoldo. During the upheavals which followed the death of his patron, Lorenzo the Magnificent, Michelangelo left Florence, arriving in Rome in 1496. There, he completed his first major sculptures, Bacchus (1496−1497, Florence, Bargello) and a Pietà (completed 1499, Rome, St. Peter’s). The latter, with its brilliant mastery of the difficult problems involved in depicting a full-length male figure stretched across a woman’s lap, and its flawlessly beautiful finish, established his reputation and ensured that his return to Florence in 1501 was greeted with important commissions.
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The fresco of the Battle of Cascina, which was intended to complement Leonardo’s Battle of Anghiari in the Palazzo Vecchio, now survives only in fragmentary copies, but the David (1501−1504, Florence, Accademia), symbolizing the civic pride of the Florentines, still exudes its formidable sense of latent power. Once more in Rome, in 1505, Michelangelo came under the patronage of Julius II. An exacting taskmaster, the Pope launched him on two Herculean projects. The first, a massive tomb monument for the Pope, calling for 40 figures, brought forth the unfinished Slaves (before 1513, Paris, Louvre), but eventually had to be completed on a vastly reduced scale by assistants, nearly four decades later. Of the finished tomb in S. Pietro in Vincoli, Rome, only the Moses (1513−1516) is entirely from Michelangelo’s own hand.
The Sistine Ceiling (1508−1512) proved an equally daunting but more fruitful commission. Working virtually unaided, under the most testing conditions, Michelangelo revealed his vision of human aspirations to divine nature with an awesome combination of Florentine grace and Roman grandeur. Here, the Creation, the Deluge and the Drunkenness of Noah were witnessed by Prophets, Sibyls and the elegant Ignudi — examples of perfect human beauty — in a marriage of Christian and classical elements that may have stemmed from the Neoplatonic theories circulating at Lorenzo’s court.
Michelangelo worked in Florence from 1516 to 1534, his main undertaking in this period being the Medici Chapel (1519−1534) in S. Lorenzo with his tombs of Lorenzo and Giuliano de Medici. He returned to Rome in a more pessimistic frame of mind and his Last Judgment fresco (1536−1541) on the altar wall of the Sistine Chapel reflected a post-Reformation gloom, with its wrathful Christ and its emphasis on the terrible punishments inflicted on the damned. Muscular, contorted figures replaced the earlier, more graceful nudes. Architectural commissions — in particular the rebuilding of St. Peter’s — took up much of Michelangelo’s time in later years, but he also produced some deeply religious drawings of the Crucifixion and the Holy Family for his friend, Vittoria Colonna. The same intense piety pervades his frescos (1542−1550) for the Pauline Chapel in the Vatican, and is present again in ‘The Rondanini Pietà’ (Milan, Castello, Sforzesco — left unfinished at his death), where the figures of the Virgin and Christ merge together in a starkly modern image of frailty and grief. Michelangelo’s art inspired awe in his contemporaries, who called him ‘divine’, and his effect on European art has been incalculable. For three centuries after his death hardly any artist of consequence who expressed himself through the medium of the human body remained untouched by his influence.
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Moscow Museums
National Museum of Fine Arts (Pushkin Museum). The museum includes former collections of the Museum of Modern Western Art and the Tretyakov Gallery. It was built in 1812 in neo-Greek style. The basis of the collection consists of sculptures and paintings from the Hermitage Museum, Leningrad, and from various other museums and former private collections. There is a fine group of Egyptian sculpture and artifacts, as well as finds from the Black Sea area, including Scythian or Scytho-Greek jewelry.
There are paintings of the Italian, Spanish, Flemish, Dutch, German, English, and French schools. Among the principal works are The Annunciation by Botticelli; Rodrígues Vásquez by El Greco; and several paintings by Rembrandt, Rubens, and Cranach. The French is much the richest collection, particularly in the impressionists, which were gathered by the Russian collectors Shchoukin and Morozov; these men were among the first to recognize the modern French painters. The museum’s French section ranges from Corneille de Lyon through Poussin, Claude Lorraine, Watteau, Boucher, Chardin, Fragonard, Greuze, David, Géricault, Delacroix, Ingres, Courbet, and Corot (Recollections of Pierrefonds). Impressionist and postimpressionist paintings include works by Manet, Monet, Degas (Kneeling Woman;
Woman at her Toilet), Renoir (the delightful Portrait of Jeanne Samary and Two Girls in Black), Pissarro, Cézanne (the characteristic Still Life with a Sugar Bowl; Mardi Gras; a version of The Bathers; Pine Trees and Aqueduct, also called The Viaduct), Van Gogh (the bold The Sea at Saintes-Maries; Prisoners Exercising; The Red Vineyard, Arles; Auvers Landscape in the Rain), Gauguin (the Tahitian Те Tiare Farani; Aha oe Feii? What, Are You Jealous?; Rupe, rupe: Fruit Gathering), Toulouse-Lautrec, and Signac. There are also canvases by Vuillard, Marquet, and Matisse (Bronze Figures with Fruit; Spanish Woman with a Tambourine). Picasso is represented by nine pre-1914 paintings, including the early Harlequin and his Partner, The Embrace, Portrait of Jaime Sabartйs (Le Bock), Majorcan Woman, Queen Isabeau, and the cubist Violin and Glass.
The museum also houses French sculptures in marble and bronze from the 18th to the 20th century, including works by Houdon, Rodin, and Maillol, among others.
Tretyakov Gallery (Museum of Russian Art). Museum named after Pavel M. Tretyakov, a collector who founded it in 1856. The gallery contains about 50,000 works, including the world’s finest collection of 17th and 18th century Russian icons. There are 18th-century portraits, done in a Gainsborough style, by Rokotov, Levitsky, and Borovikovsky.
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In the 19th century section there are large academic historical pictures done by such artists as Bryulov, Ivanov, Vereshchagin, Surikov, and Vasnietsov. Among the numerous landscapes, Levitan expresses the spirit of the Russian countryside, while Shishkin is under impressionist influence. Fantasy and Pre-Raphaelite influence are seen in Vrubel. Genre painting, generally humorous, is represented by a group of minor painters.
There are a number of paintings by the ‘wandering’ group of artists who aimed at realism in the 1870s. Among these are portraits by Ghe, Kramskoy (Portrait of Tolstoy, 1873), and Perov (Dostoyevsky, 1872). Repin, considered the greatest Russian painter of the 19th century, is represented by the Portrait of Moussorgsky (1881), some large, conventional figure compositions, and a number of fine studies and small paintings. Many Soviet painters, among them Deyneka and Sarian, are also shown. Other Russian works of the 20th century, including paintings by Chagall, Kandinsky, Malevich, and Larionov, may be seen only by special authorization.
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Sir Peter Paul Rubens
(1577−1640)
Rubens, Sir Peter Paul (1577−1640). Flemish painter and designer, the greatest and most influential figure in Baroque art in northern Europe. He was born at Siegen in Westphalia, the son of a Protestant lawyer from Antwerp who moved to Germany to escape religious persecution, and he returned to Antwerp in 1587 with his mother soon after his father’s death. He had been baptized a Calvinist in Germany, but he became a devout Catholic. His masters were three fairly undistinguished painters of Antwerp, Tobias Verhaecht, Adam van Noort, and Otto van Veen. The first two could teach him no more than the local tradition, but van Veen was a man of some culture, who had spent about five years in Rome, and he no doubt inspired his pupil with a desire to visit Italy. Rubens became a master in the Antwerp painters’ guild in 1598, and after working with van Veen for two more years he set out for Italy in 1600. Very little of Rubens’s early work survives, and his style was largely formed in Italy, where he was based until 1608. He worked for Vincenzo Gonzaga, Duke of Mantua, visiting most of the principal art centres of Italy to make copies for the ducal collection and also in 1603−1604 travelling to Spain when he accompanied gifts from Vincenzo to Philip III (1578−1621). The most important centres of his activity in Italy, however, were Genoa and Rome. In Genoa he painted some stately aristocratic portraits (Marchesa Brigida Spinola-Doria, NG, Washington, 1606) that inspired
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van Dyck when he worked in the city, and in Rome he found the basis of his own grandiose style in the antique, the great Renaissance masters, and Annibale Carracci. On learning that his mother was seriously ill, Rubens returned to Antwerp in 1608, but she died before he arrived. Italy had become Rubens’s spiritual home (he usually signed himself ‘Pietro Pauolo’) and he must have intended returning, but his success in Antwerp was so immediate and great that he remained there, and in spite of his extensive travels later in his career he never saw Italy again. In 1609 Rubens was appointed court painter to the Archduke Albert and his wife the Infanta Isabella, the Spanish Viceroys in the Netherlands, and in the same year he married the 17-year-old Isabella Brant, the daughter of an eminent Antwerp lawyer. The portrait of himself and his wife (Alte Pinakothek, Munich) that he presumably painted to mark the occasion gives a marvellous picture of Rubens on the threshold of his great career — handsome, vigorous, and dashingly self-confident. In the next few years he established his reputation as the pre-eminent painter in northern Europe, his first two resounding successes being the huge triptychs of the Raising of the Cross and the Descent from the Cross (Antwerp Cathedral, 1610−1611 and 1611−1614), which showed his mastery of history painting in the Grand Manner and the immense vigour of his style.
The demand for Rubens’s work was extraordinary, and he was able to meet it only because he ran an extremely efficient studio. It is not known how many pupils or assistants he had because as court painter he was exempt from registering them with the guild. The idea of him running a sort of picture factory has been exaggerated, but even a man of his seemingly inexhaustible physical and intellectual stamina (he habitually rose at 4 a. m. and according to a contemporary account could work whilst dictating a letter and holding a conversation with visitors) could not carry out all the work involved in his massive output with his own hands. Rubens both collaborated with established artists (‘Velvet’ Brueghel, van Dyck, Jordaens, Daniel Seghers, Snyders, and others) and retouched pictures by pupils, the degree of his intervention being reflected in the price. Generally his assistants did much of the work between the initial oil sketch and the master’s finishing touches. Modern taste has tended to admire these sketches and his drawings (in which his personal touch is evident in every stroke of brush, chalk, or pen) more than the large-scale works, but Rubens himself would surely have found this attitude hard to comprehend, for the sheer scale and grandeur of the finished paintings gives them an extra, symphonic dimension.
Rubens not only painted virtually every type of subject, but also designed tapestries, book illustrations, and decorations for festivals, as well as giving visual directives for sculptors, metalworkers, and
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architects. ‘My talents are such’, he wrote in 1621, ‘that I have never lacked courage to undertake any design, however vast in size or diversified in subject.’ So huge was his output, indeed, that it is difficult to put a figure on it; the Corpus Rubenianum, the first attempt in the 20th century, at a complete scholarly catalogue of his work, began publication in 1968 and is expected to be completed in about thirty volumes. His biggest commission in Flanders was for the decoration of the Jesuit church (a building he may also have had a hand in designing), but almost all his work there was destroyed by fire in 1718. From outside Flanders, those who sought his services included the royal families of France, England, and Spain. For Marie de’ Médicis (mother of Louis XIII of France) he did a series of twenty-five enormous paintings on her life (Louvre, Paris, 1622−1625); for Charles I of England he painted a series of canvases representing the reign of his father James I (completed 1635) for the ceiling of the Banqueting House in London; and for Philip IV of Spain he embarked in 1636 on a series of more than a hundred mythological pictures for his hunting lodge, the Torre de la Parada (the series was incomplete when Rubens died and most of the finished paintings — executed by assistants from his modelli — were destroyed in 1710 when the building was sacked during the War of the Spanish Succession).
After the death of the Archduke Albert in 1621, Rubens became a trusted adviser to the Infanta Isabella, and she sent him on diplomatic missions to Spain (where he met Velazquez) in 1628−1629 and to England (where Charles I knighted him) in 1629−1630. In this role his polished manners and his prodigious linguistic skills were put to good advantage — apart from Flemish and Italian, he spoke French, German, Latin, and Spanish.
Rubens’s wife died in 1626 and in 1630 he remarried; his bride was the 16-year-old Hélène Fourment, daughter of a rich silk merchant and the niece of his first wife. The second marriage was as happy as the first, and Rubens’s love of his family shines through many of his late paintings (Hélène Fourment with Two of her Children (Louvre, c. 1637)). In 1635 he bought a country house, the Château de Steen, between Brussels and Malines, and in his final years he developed a new passion for painting landscapes — marvellously ripe works that led Constable to declare ‘In no branch of the art is Rubens greater than in landscape.’ Superb examples are in the National Gallery and the Wallace Collection, London.
Rubens’s influence in I7th century Flanders was overwhelming, and it was spread elsewhere in Europe by his journeys abroad and by pictures exported from his workshop, and also through the numerous engravings he commissioned of his work. In later centuries his influence has also been immense, perhaps most noticeably in France, where Watteau,
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Delacroix, and Renoir were among his greatest admirers. Because of the unrivalled variety of his work, artists as different in temperament as these three could respond to it with equal enthusiasm.
Rubens’s work is found in most major galleries; those with particularly fine collections include; the Prado, Madrid; the Alte Pinakothek, Munich; the Louvre, Paris; and the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna. London is perhaps the richest of all cities in his work, with fine collections at the Courtauld Institute Galleries, Dulwich College Picture Gallery, the National Gallery, and the Wallace Collection, and in the ceiling of the Banqueting House, the only one of Rubens’s major decorative schemes still in the position for which it was painted.
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Neoclassicism
The dominant movement in European art and architecture in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, characterized by a desire to recreate the heroic spirit as well as the decorative trappings of the art of Greece and Rome. A new and more scientific interest in Classical antiquity, greatly stimulated by the discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum, was one of the features of the movement, and it is also seen as mounting a reaction against the light-hearted and frivolous Rococo style. The order, clarity, and reason of Greek and Roman art appealed greatly in the Age of Enlightenment, and in France the Neoclassical style held strong moral implications, being associated with a change of social outlook and a desire to restore ancient Roman values into civil life. It is, indeed, in the paintings of David, with their antique grandeur and simplicity of form, and their heroic severity of tone, that Neoclassicism finds its purest expression, but the style was born and had its centre in Rome. Mengs and Winckelmann were in the vanguard of the movement there, and other leading figures from all over Europe — Antonio Canova, John Flaxman, Gavin Hamilton, Bertel Thorvaldsen — spent the main or important parts of their careers in the city. Many American artists worked there too — notably the sculptor Horatio Greenough, who was a pupil of Thorvaldsen — and took the Neoclassical style back to their country. Winckelmann, the prime propagandist of the movement, saw Classical art as embodying ‘noble simplicity and calm grandeur’, but there was great stylistic variation within the Neoclassical movement, Angelica Kauffmann, for example, painting in a delicate and pretty manner.
There is, moreover, no firm dividing line between Neoclassicism and Romanticism, even though in some ways they appear to be at opposite spiritual poles. In the revival of interest in antique art, archaeological zeal could easily give way to a nostalgic yearning for a lost Golden
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Age, and the term ‘Romantic Classicism’ is sometimes used to characterize an aspect of Neoclassicism in which an interest in antiquity is tinged with Romantic feeling. In fact the antipathy between Classics and Romantics (exemplified by Ingres and Delacroix, for example) was unknown before the 19th century, and it was only in the mid 19th century, at a time when the antique revival style was out of fashion, that the word ‘Neoclassicism’ was coined — originally a pejorative term with suggestions of lifelessness and impersonality. These negative connotations have clung tenaciously to the term, and the ardent aspirations of the founders of Neoclassicism have been obscured by the fact that the more decorative aspects of the movement — Wedgwood pottery, for example — have become more closely associated with the word in the public consciousness than have the great masterpieces of David and Canova.
Neoclassicism is related to but can be distinguished from Greek Taste, which was a fairly superficial fashion for Greek-inspired decoration, and from the Greek Revival, which in architecture was a movement expressing a new interest in the simplicity and gravity of ancient Greek buildings. It began seriously in the 1790s and culminated in the 1820s and 1830s. Greek architecture became widely known in the west only around 1750−1760 and in the early days of Neoclassicism it was regarded as primitive and few architects cared to imitate it.
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Diego Rodriguez de Silva у Velazquez (Velásquez)
(1599−1660)
Velazquez is the greatest of Spanish painters. From 1613 to 1618 he trained in his native Seville with Pacheco, whose daughter he married. He was very precocious, and in an early work such as The Immaculate Conception (c. 1618, London, NG) he had already broken away completely from the rather dry Mannerist style of his master to create a personal kind of naturalism. The figure of the Virgin is modelled very solidly in rich clotted paint and with complete mastery of light and shade. Most of Velazquez’s early works were religious scenes or bodegones, to which he brought a new dignity (An old woman cooking eggs, 1618, Edinburgh, NG of Scotland), but on a trip to Madrid in 1622 it was his noble and severe portrait of the great poet Luis de Gуngora (Boston, MFA) that attracted attention.
He was recalled to Madrid in the following year by Philip IV’s First Minister, the Duke of Olivares, and became court painter. His career at court, principally as a portraitist, was one of unbroken success. Philip had a very high opinion of his personal as well as his professional
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qualities, and the prestigious court posts with which he was burdened limited his output as a painter.
Velazquez’s work was always based on acute observation of nature, but his means of expression developed with increasing freedom and subtlety throughout his career, as he used paint to render not what the mind knows to exist but what the eye sees. Thus, in his mature works, the brushwork when viewed at close range seems blurred and at times more abstract than descriptive, but at the correct distance coalesces to render form and atmosphere with astonishing vividness. The great group portrait ‘Las Meninas’ (1656, Madrid, Prado), his most complex work, is the most celebrated instance of Velazquez’s ability to create a visual world which seems almost palpable in its reality, and in his superb series of equestrian portraits of the 1630s (Prado) he had shown that he had complete mastery of space, form and atmosphere in exterior as well as interior settings.
With this growing technical sophistication went a deepening ability to analyse character, and Velazquez always showed total respect for the individuality of his sitters, whether he was portraying Philip IV, the ruler of the world’s greatest empire, or the pathetic court dwarfs, of whom he left an unforgettable series of paintings (Prado). Velazquez’s greatest single portrait is Pope Innocent X (1650, Rome, Galleria DoriaPamphili), painted on the second of his two trips to Italy (1629−1631, 1649−1651), where, responding especially to the great Venetian masters, who helped to loosen his brushwork, he seems to have been much happier than in the stuffy atmosphere of the Spanish court.
Apart from portraits and religious and mythological works, which he produced intermittently throughout his career, Velazquez also painted a few very fresh landscapes, some female nudes, оf which one survives (London, NG), and one of the greatest of all history paintings, The surrender of Breda (1634−1635, Prado). It is impossible fully to appreciate Velazquez’s genius outside the Prado, and like most Spanish painters he was largely unknown outside his native country until the Napoleonic Wars. In the 19th century, however, his work came as a revelation to progressive artists, notably Manet, who regarded Velazquez as the greatest painter who had ever lived.
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Joseph Mallord William Turner
(1775−1851)
English painter, the most original genius in landscape painting during the 19th century. A precocious artist, he was admitted to the Royal Academy Schools in 1789 and exhibited his first water-colour at the Academy in 1790. From 1792 he began the practice of sketching
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