Art History Patrons I - Enrico Scrovegni

A Plaster cast of a portrait sculpture of Enrico Scrovegni, by Marco Romano, 1317-1320, in the sacristy of the Scrovegnii Chapel / Arena Chapel, Padua

In 1305, Enrico Scrovegni commissioned Giotto, the preeminent early Renaissance artist, to design and decorate a chapel in Padua, Italy. Scrovegni was a rich man..His family fortune had come through usury. At this time charging excess interest when loaning money was considered to be usury, a sin so grave that it resulted in exclusion from the Christian sacraments, and many early bankers were concerned lest their trade jeopardized their souls. It was considered an unjust way to make a living and it certainly was looked down upon by the church. Remember the story of Jesus casting the moneylenders from the temple? Enrico Scrovegni was just such a moneylender.

Exterior of the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, Italy

Enrico's father, Reginaldo Scrovegni had started the family business. He apparently had quite a reputation. In Dante's Divine Comedy poem Inferno, Dante says that he saw Reginaldo in the inner ring of the Seventh Circle of Hell, where the violent are eternally punished.Usurers are considered violent because, usurers sin against Art, and Art is the Grandchild of God.

Interior of Scrovegni Chapel, Padua, Italy

The Scovegni Chapel at Padua is considered one of the most important masterpieces of Western art.The two most notable cycles of frescoes in the chapel, are highlights from the Life of Christ and the Life of the Virgin Mary. At the end of the chapel, depicted on the entire wall, is the Last Judgement.

Of the Life of Christ fresco cycle, probably the most famous panels are the Lamentation (left) and Christ's Entry into Jerusalem (right) Either of these were probably in your Art History textbook.

Scrovegni's Padua Chapel was sited next to Enrico's palace, where he intended it to serve as his burial chapel.It is thought that the building of this chapel was part of a campaign to seek absolution for his own and his father's sins. It was conceived at least in part as penance. A rich man trying to buy his way into heaven.

In the Last Judgement fresco at the end of the Chapel, Giotto has painted his patron Enrico Scrovegni  positioned precariously between heaven on the left and hell on the right...

carrying the entire chapel ( world? ) on his shoulder. Forgive me, Enrico, but I can't help but think of this....

Enrico's bid to buy himself into heaven, eventually came to naught. In 1320 he fled the wars and civil strife that plagued Padua at the time and settled in Venice. In 1328 he was formally banned from Padua.He died in Venice eight years later, in 1336.

Art History Weirdness - Oskar Kokoschka and his Alma Mahler Doll

In 1912 the great Austrian expressionist painter Oskar Kokoschka started a passionate, tempestuous  affair with Alma Mahler. Alma was coming off a bad stretch. Her first husband, Gustov Mahler, 19 years her senior and Director of the Vienna Opera, had died in 1911.Three years earlier, their daughter, Maria had died of scarlett fever. In the wake of Maria's death, Alma had begun an affair with the Bauhaus architect, Walter Gropius. But with Gustov's death, Alma quit Gropius, whom she would eventually marry. Here's Tom Lehrer's take on Alma Mahler:

Enter Oskar. It has been said that when Kokoschka wasn't making love to her, he was painting her. Kokoschka painted and drew Alma compulsively and is the subject of his best known painting, Bride of the Wind. It is considered his crowning achievement and a tribute to his love for her.

Oskar Kokoschka - Bride of the Wind - 1914-15

Kokoschka's intense possessiveness wore on Alma, and the emotional vicissitudes of the relationship tired them both. Alma eventually rejected Kokoschka after a 3 year relationship, explaining that she was afraid of being too overcome with passion.

Kokoschka was devastated and in 1915 volunteered for service as an Austrian cavalryman in WWI. In the same year he was seriously wounded, shell shocked on two occasions. While recovering in a hospital in Dresden, doctors decided he was mentally unstable.

Here's where it gets weird.

In 1918, upon his release and recovery, Kokoschka hires a Munich dollmaker, Hermine Moos, to fashion a life-sized doll of Alma Mahler. Kokoschka provided Moos with many detailed drawings and a life sized oil sketch.On August 20, I9I8 he wrote to Moos:
"Yesterday I sent a life-size drawing of my beloved and I ask you to copy this most carefully and to transform it into reality. Pay special attention to the dimensions of the head and neck, to the ribcage, the rump and the limbs. And take to heart the contours of body, e.g., the line of the neck to the back, the curve of the belly. Please permit my sense of touch to take pleasure in those places where layers of fat or muscle suddenly give way to a sinewy covering of skin. For the first layer (inside) please use fine, curly horsehair; you must buy an old sofa or something similar; have the horsehair disinfected. Then, over that, a layer of pouches stuffed with down, cottonwool for the seat and breasts. The point of all this for me is an experience which I must be able to embrace!" In December Kokoschka eagerly demanded of Hermine Moos: "Can the mouth be opened? Are there teeth and a tongue inside? I hope." 

The packing-case arrived. Kokoschka writes: "In a state of feverish anticipation, like Orpheus calling Eurydice back from the Underworld, I freed the effigy of Alma Mahler from its packing. As I lifted it into the light of day, the image of her I had preserved in my memory stirred into life. "He got his servant to spread rumors about the doll, to give the public impression that she was a real woman: "for example, that he' had hired a horse and carriage to take her out on sunny days, and rented a box for her at the Opera in order to show her off"

 

Alma Mahler Doll with Hermine Moos (?)

Kokoschka was ultimately disappointed with the result, a clumsy construction of fabric and wood wool. He complained that the shag carpet-like skin was not life-like enough. Despite the doll's shortcomings, she turned out to be a compliant substitute companion and muse. The live Alma Mahler long gone, Kokoschka started a series of paintings of the doll.

Oskar Kokoschka - Woman in blue - 1919

 

Oskar Kokoschka - Self Portrait with Doll - 1920-21

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Kokoschka drew and painted the doll in many poses, many of them sexually suggestive. (See painting above.) More than 80 pen and ink drawings survive

After several moths, despite Kokoschka's effort, expense and energy, he decided to dispense with the fetish. "I engaged a chamber orchestra from the Opera. The musicians, in formal dress, played in the garden, seated in a Baroque fountain whose waters cooled the warm evening air. A Venetian courtesan, famed for her beauty and wearing a very low-necked dress, insisted on seeing the Silent Woman face to face, supposing her to be a rival. She must have felt like a cat trying to catch a butterfly through a window-pane; she simply could not understand. Reserl paraded the doll as if at a fashion show; the courtesan asked whether I slept with the doll, and whether it looked like anyone I had been in love with... In the course of the Party the doll lost its head and was doused in red wine. We were all drunk."

The next day, a Police patrol happened to glance through the gates, and seeing what was apparently the body of a naked woman covered with blood, they burst into the house suspecting some crime of passion. And for that matter, that's what it was... because in that night I had killed Alma... In the grey morning light the refuse collectors removed Kokoschka’s dream of Eurydice's return.

The Portinari Altarpiece by Hugo Van Der Goes

One of my favorite Flemish paintings from the later half of the fifteenth century is the Portinari Altarpiece by Hugo Van Der Goes. This huge triptych (central panel - 8' 3.5" W × 10'W, wings - 8' 3.5"H × 4' 7.5' W) was commissioned by Tommaso Portinari, in 1474 . Portinari was a Florentine living in Bruges at the time and was the manager of the local D'Medici bank. Upon his death in 1483, the painting was transported to Florence and installed in the Church of Saint'Egidio where it created a stir within the Florentine artistic community. There had been Florentine artists that had traveled to Flanders to study Flemish art and the works of  Van Der Weyden and Van Eyck were known among Florentine artists, but this was probably the first time that a Flemish tour de force had been available for viewing and study by local painters.

 The scale of the figures was considered old school by local painters as Italian art at the time was interested in the consistently scaled integration of human figures into a rationally receding architectural setting using linear perspective. The scale of Van Der Goes figures on the other hand, was based on hierarchy of importance. The main figures of Mary and Joseph and the Shepherds are large, the patron Saints in the wings smaller and the patron family and the angels, the smallest. Scale aside, the Florentine artists were struck by the realism in Van Der Goes work, in particular in the drapery,flowers, animals and above all the human character and emotion made a deep impression.

But what I think is pivotal was the time frame in which it arrived and the fact that this was an oil painting. This painted appeared in Florence on the cusp of the explosion of the Italian High Renaissance. Up until this point, Italian artists painted primarily in fresco and tempera. Could the Portinari Altarpiece have turned on Italian artists to to possibilities of oil paint? The explosion in the usage of oil paint in Italian art seems to coincide with the arrival of this painting.

The subject of the painting is the adoration of the newborn Jesus by Mary and Joseph, a host of angels and a few shepherds, who have rushed in from the fields. It is based on the visionary writings of Medieval Swedish mystic St. Bridget, who described Mary kneeling to adore the Child immediately after giving birth. Oddly, here is the baby Jesus laying alone on the ground, which seems to me a very northern construct. Italian images of Mary and Jesus are all touchy-feely, and show  genuine warmth with a lot of TLC. But here the newborn is looking quite solitary, flailing away in the dirt. Upon closer inspection, he is actually lying on rays of light, but that doesn't seem to be much in the way of a comfort upgrade. The painting is choker-block full of symbolism which I won't go into here, but another aspect of the painting that I'll note is that Van Der Goes has chosen a Flemish landscape for the setting complete with bare trees and December skies rather that Bethlehem. This follows the Flemish trend of portraying biblical events in contemporary settings.

The background is populated with narratives that support the main theme. On the left is Mary and Joseph traveling to Bethlehem, in the center are the Three Magi, who have yet to make the scene and on the right, the shepherds are visited by an angel.

One more thing. In his outstanding book, Secret Knowledge, British artist David Hockney presents compelling evidence the the Portinari Altarpiece was painted with the assistance of a camera obscura. He sites that "the composition was not constructed according to the laws of single point linear perspective, but instead has many different viewpoints, many different windows onto the world - it has a multiwindow approach. We see each figure straight on, regardless of where they are in the scene." Fascinating stuff.

Van Der Goes' life is fairly well chronicled, as he was the Dean of the Painter's Guild of Ghent from 1468 - 1475. He seems to have had problems with melancholia and depression. At the height of his success and fame, he entered a monastery outside of Brussels as a lay brother. This did not interrupt his career, however and he continued painting, completing the Portinari Altarpiece behind monastery walls. In 1481, five years after it's completion, Van Der Goes suffered a mental breakdown and died a year later.