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MUNICH MASTERPIECES Some of the treasures from the Alte Pinakothek now on view at the National Gallery, London, described by F. M. GodfreyONE hundred and forty masterpieces from the Munich Pinakothek have recently been shown in Brussels, Amsterdam and Paris. It is this exhibition, largely the same as that now on view in London, which is here reviewed by the writer. It is an exhibition of rarest quality and absorbing interest. Happy kings and electors of Bavaria, propitiously situated and well connected, have contrived for four centuries to build up a collection where the Italian and Flemish Schools vied with the best that the national art of Germany had to offer. The story begins with some old king of Bavaria who in the sixteenth century ordered his painters to provide him with pictures of heroic and biblical subjects. But the first determined collector on an impressive scale was Maximilian of Wittelsbach, who, in the early seventeenth century, gathered up at one swoop the great harvest of Dürer altarpieces, with the four life-size apostles thrown into the bargain. Then came the barren years of the Thirty Years' War until another regal collector and connoisseur concentrated upon the great Flemings—Rubens, Bruegel, van Dyck-while not neglecting his Italian affinities. For he secured the world-famous seated portrait of Charles V, by Titian, with its rare intimacy of character-drawing in the wise and resigned old Emperor's face and with its baroque abandonment of the classical style of portraiture. The history of the Munich Pinakothek reads much like that of any other royal collection with its vicissitudes and changes of royal taste and patronage. Its real founder was King Ludwig I, who, in the early nineteenth century, saw with rare historical understanding that the great body of Dutch seventeenthcentury paintings sorely overbalanced the Quattrocento Italian and Flemish Schools. To him are due great altar pieces of Perugino and Botticelli and a famous collection of early masters from German and Flemish churches and monasteries. King Ludwig also built the noble classicist mansion, so well known to art-lovers all over the world, to house the permanent collection. In the present exhibition it is the Flemish School, besides the German and the Italian, where the selection is most catholic and of the very highest quality. Of Memling, Bouts and David, of Bruegel, Rubens and van Dyck the visitor will meet pieces of the rarest significance. Take the Adoration Triptych of the Harlemer Master Dirk Bouts who became the closest follower of the devotional spirit of van der Weyden, but who surpassed him in the presentation of the countryside. As in our Resurrection the figures are a little awkward and strained, but the setting is perfect, and one gets the impression that with Bouts the land scape came first and the figures second, so strong is the illusion of space and of atmosphere and so real are the flower-starred meadows, the winding rivers and the blue hills in the distance. There is no finer example for glowing colour and freshness of the green sward and rippling water than the paintings of this Flemish Primitive with his stiff, narrow-shouldered type of Christian men acting in the archaic mystery plays of his religious imagination. Bouts and Memling are moving messengers from the waning Middle Ages. The latter's St John the Baptist is broadly placed in the picture foreground, his large red mantle spreading over the greenery, a triangular composition, fairly balanced by the rocks and the trees of the middle-distance. The languid serenity of the Baptist's face, the foreboding gesture of the hand, harmonize strangely with the Elysian stillness of the landscape. It is a long spiritual journey from the stylish imagery and sustained piety of the early Flemings to the mythological exuberance and unashamed paganism at the other end of la peinture flamande. Rubens can be studied at the exhibition in twenty masterpieces, ranging from the passionate violence of the Battle of the Amazons-a wild melée of rearing horses and desperate warriors on the narrow confines of a bridge—to the proud domestic self-enjoyment of the prosperous brand seigneur who never tired of revealing the affluent beauty of his second wife Helen Fourment and the animal-charm of her children. The man of fifty-four, of universal fame as an artist and as a courtier and diplomat, married this Helen at the age of sixteen, feasting her ever after in paint, now in the magnificent robes of a Queen, in silk and silver and pearls, now as a nude in the fullness of body and limb, the splendour of Flemish womanhood. She stands as the principal actress in the London drama of the Rape of the Sabines and is shown in the Munich picture in her nuptial prime, in wistful, ethereal happiness, holding on her lap her first-born child, naked as Cupid. The resplendent lady, dressed in cool muslin, green velvet and black, is placed in a corner of a small recess, with a powerful pillar to balance the structural design. Then again he painted Helen as a proud young bride, showing her over house and garden of his princely Antwerp Residence. Nicolas is with them, youngest son of his first wife Isabella. Here we get a glimpse of his genius for landscape painting and architectural design in the stylish locanda and park where the colourful peacock spreads his wings, with fountain and tulip garden in the middle-distance. His `opulent colour and inexhaustible fancy', the rich inward fire and luminosity, the rhythm and unity of his compositions re-echo in the works of his masterpupil van Dyck. But the youthful Self Portrait in Munich, blue-eyed and golden-curled, shows no traces of the creative fury in the sensual self-indulgence of the poet and the dreamer who was yet to become the last and the most accomplished prince of court painters in the seventeenth century. It is the laudable ambition of our leading museums to strive after historical continuity. Munich is singularly successful in this respect. In the selections from the Italian Schools not many links are missing and we can follow the development from Giotto's broad forms and dramatic vigour to the dynamic and luscious Venetians, from Angelico's Golden Legend to the florid anatomies of Tintoretto. Of Botticelli the large canvas of the Lamentation illustrates the last period of the artist who tinder the influence of Savonarola's penitential sermons resigned himself to the puritanical treatment of Christian subjects. Here the emotion of grief is carried to its height by the distraught movements of the figures, their bodies bent in violent curves, the grey sombre colouring and the living tomb of the rocky cave. The Quattrocento Madonna type is well represented by Fra Filippo Lippi's Virgin and Child. The runaway monk who married his model, Lukezia Buti, a nun, is at once a miniaturist-designer and an accomplished connoisseur of fusion of colour. With his Pre-Raphaelite delicacy of flowing rhythm and line he created the Florentine type of Madonna, her oval pretty face of immaculate outline and purity, set against an imaginary background of rock and of river, the perfect Tuscan harmony of the sensual with the spiritual. Here, surely, are the roots of the feminine grace and the `fluent play of line' which Raphael learnt from Perugino, although the latter's modelling is firmer and his heads and figures are more substantial with their warns, sunburnt flesh-tones. This can be seen in the marvellous altarpiece by Perugino, where the Virgin, like Beatrice to Dante, appears to St Bernard in a vision. It has been said that Perugino's figures are `architectonic members in the effect of space'. And, indeed, the beautiful Renaissance arches, leading the eye to enchanted distances of an Umbrian hillside, enhanced by the slender outline of a tree and domed by an azure sky of incredible blueness, give to the picture an exhilarating warmth and intensity. Raphael's Madonna Canigiani of 1507 terminates the Florentine period of the painter whose Christian humanism has deeply influenced our pictorial conception of the holy personages. Raphael has also been counted among the greatest space-composers of all times; and the triangular composition of the Holy Family, where the figure of Joseph forms the apex, with the kneeling women and playing children as base, was painted under the influence of Fra Bartolomeo and his experiments in structural design. Not only is the grouping firms and melodious in itself, but its relation to the surrounding countryside is a supreme pictorial solution, where man is shown as the centre of the universe, with an infinity of recession behind him. Outside Italy the painting of Christian subjects never entirely lost its Gothic character. Christ rising from his grave in Bouts' Resurrection, an ascetic and angular figure, with the slender angel repeating the vertical heavenwards is as Gothic in feeling as is the crowded canvas of Greco's Despoiling o f Christ. The throng of men arrayed behind the Redeemer, His eyes upraised in mystical exaltation, His powerful frame clad in a garment of vinous red, the heads above Him, the crisscrossed halberds, all emphasize the verticals as in a Gothic cathedral. Or again, you can see Christ wreathed, as it were, by the henchman, the three Mary's, the man in armour, the group of thieves. It is a picture of subdued violence, equally remote from the gentilezza of Raphael as from Murillo's religious sentiment, revealed in his Thomas de Villanueva. No doubt, Greco, with his stark play on the emotions and his ghostly facial expressionism, was the strongest force of the CounterReformation. The bias of the Munich exhibition is towards national characteristics and it is not unnatural that the German School should be superbly represented, from Stefan Lochner, the German Angelico, to Adam Elsheimer whose miniature landscapes and nightpieces aroused the admiration of Rubens. The Holy Family riding through sombre woodland on their Flight into Egypt, guided by torchlight and watchfire, profoundly influenced Rembrandt's conception of the chiaroscuro. The great German masters of the sixteenth century are shown in celebrated altarpieces, mainly of Nativities and Adorations. There are some powerful Reformation portraits by Cranach the Elder, a quaint picture of a Sleeping Soldier, a mass of flesh sunk in animal torpor, by Bernard Strigel, Hans Baldung's graceful classical Nude and his strangely attractive portrait of the young Count Palatine in gold lace and fur with a modish cap, more dandy than warrior, yet with a clear eye and firm mouth in the pale, somewhat decadent face, superbly lit and delineated. How much more sympathetic is this than Dürer's cold analytic intelligence of the Oswolt Krel portrait, where the artist's habit of imposing his own philosophical temper upon his sitters is clearly manifest. Yet this subtle calligraphy of delineation which Dürer used to such purpose in his exploration of character is the achievement of his maturity. The Paumgartner Altar of the Adoration, painted in his youth for St Catherine's Church of his native Nuremberg, is perhaps the most significantly German of the Munich Collection; poetic, fanciful, huddled and angular. Here the ruined arches and masonry of a Renaissance courtyard lend massive architectural foil to the holy scene and lead the eye in agreeable perspective to the country without, while the approaching shepherds and a large family of donors join in the feast. The noble shape of Joseph, the ample Virgin above him, containing in parallel and converging lines a wealth of significant detail, decisively influenced the German conception of the Nativity. The present writer is conscious of grave omissions in his survey. The breath-taking portraits by Titian, Giorgione and Velazquez, the exquisite satire, superbly painted, of Goya's Queen Mary Louie of Spain require intimate and prolonged scrutiny. There are Murillo's melon- and pastry-eating urchins from Seville, some exquisite Dutch genre paintings and the intensely moving heroic passion cycle by Rembrandt. The official catalogue ends with a picture of Chardin's Turnip-cleaner, a housemaid at her daily drudgery, solidly planted amongst her kitchen utensils, an arrangement in tonal values and light, an apparently casual composition, yet closely related to Velazquez' concentrated feeling for what is tangible and concise and glowing in everyday objects. It is the essence of painting. Illustrations
Right: EL GRECO (1541-1614).
Despoiling of Christ
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