Paolo Veronese: The Petrobelli Altarpiece; Reconstructing a Renaissance Masterpiece
Tuesday, February 10, 2009 - Sunday, February 7, 2010
This fall the Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin is pleased to present Paolo Veronese: The Petrobelli Altarpiece, on view October 4, 2009 – February 7, 2010. In 2008, the museum announced an important discovery regarding a work in the Blanton’s collection by Venetian master Paolo Veronese (1528 – 1588). Head of an Angel, part of the museum’s Suida-Manning Collection, had recently been identified as a fragment of a long-lost masterpiece by Veronese. The identification was made by Dr. Xavier Salomon, a Veronese expert and curator of the Dulwich Picture Gallery outside London. While conducting research for an upcoming exhibition, Salomon began to suspect that the Blanton painting was in fact the head of Saint Michael, the central figure in the so-called Petrobelli altarpiece, created around 1565, at the height of the artist’s career. Recent X-rays and other tests performed by Stephen Gritt, conservator at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, confirmed this hypothesis. Three other fragments from the altarpiece had been previously identified in the collections of Dulwich, Ottawa, and the National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh. These works, along with the Blanton’s newly identified Saint Michael, have recently undergone treatment and will be reunited for the first time in more than two centuries. The reconstructed altarpiece, along with corresponding X-rays, made its debut in Dulwich in February 2009, and will travel to the Blanton in October for the only US presentation.
While the Blanton’s painting had always been recognized as a fragment from a larger work of Veronese’s mature activity, Salomon suspected that it might correspond to the figure of Saint Michael that once stood at the center of the altarpiece. One of three paintings by Veronese at the Blanton, the work was acquired in 1998 as part of the Suida-Manning Collection, which had been one of the finest collections of Old Master paintings and drawings in private hands, including important works by Correggio, Parmigianino, Rubens, Vouet, Lorrain, Ricci and Tiepolo. The acquisition not only transformed the museum’s holdings, it also connected the Blanton with major American and European institutions and their projects. This discovery and the painting’s role in an international exhibition are only the latest examples. Jonathan Bober, the Blanton’s curator of prints, drawings and European paintings states, “We are elated by this discovery and struck by its implications. Thanks to Salomon’s wonderful intuition and diligent investigation, we now understand the specific context, function, and quality of the work. The identification of the visual and iconographic core of a major project by one of the greatest painters of the sixteenth century is no small thing.”
Around 1565 Veronese was commissioned to do the altarpiece by the cousins Antonio and Girolamo Petrobelli for the church of San Francisco at Lendinara, a small town near Padua. The resulting painting depicted each cousin with his patron saint at the sides of the composition, Saint Michael at the center, and the Dead Christ supported by angels above. One of the largest altarpieces in the sixteenth-century Italy, measuring over five meters high, it was cut down and sold in pieces when, following the suppression of the Franciscan Order, the church was closed in 1788. Writing in 1795 about the altarpiece and its dismemberment, the local historian Giovanni Battista Sasso noted that, “It was sold in quarters, as one does with butcher’s meat.” Dulwich acquired its piece in 1811. After passing through various English hands, the pieces at Edinburgh and Ottawa arrived in the early twentieth century. The intervening history of the Blanton’s fragment is unknown before 1938, when William Suida published it.
For the exhibition, the altarpiece will be reconstructed and exhibited alongside X-rays and blown up details of the work. Supplemental exhibitions drawn from the Blanton’s extensive holdings of Italian art will be on view to provide further context. Salomon recently presented his research and this discovery at the National Gallery of Art, London, and in a recent issue of The Burlington Magazine. This important discovery reinforces the treasures within the Suida-Manning collection and provides an excellent opportunity to re-evaluate this important work.
This exhibition is a collaboration between Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, in association with the Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin.
Presentation at the Blanton is funded in part by Cathy and Giorgio Borlenghi and Jessica and Jimmy Younger. Additional support is provided by Alessandra and Kurt Dolnier and Patricia and Dee Osborne. Travel for the exhibition is provided by a grant from the Still Water Foundation and by Continental Airlines.
Gallery TextWhile the Blanton’s painting had always been recognized as a fragment from a larger work of Veronese’s mature activity, Salomon suspected that it might correspond to the figure of Saint Michael that once stood at the center of the altarpiece. One of three paintings by Veronese at the Blanton, the work was acquired in 1998 as part of the Suida-Manning Collection, which had been one of the finest collections of Old Master paintings and drawings in private hands, including important works by Correggio, Parmigianino, Rubens, Vouet, Lorrain, Ricci and Tiepolo. The acquisition not only transformed the museum’s holdings, it also connected the Blanton with major American and European institutions and their projects. This discovery and the painting’s role in an international exhibition are only the latest examples. Jonathan Bober, the Blanton’s curator of prints, drawings and European paintings states, “We are elated by this discovery and struck by its implications. Thanks to Salomon’s wonderful intuition and diligent investigation, we now understand the specific context, function, and quality of the work. The identification of the visual and iconographic core of a major project by one of the greatest painters of the sixteenth century is no small thing.”
Around 1565 Veronese was commissioned to do the altarpiece by the cousins Antonio and Girolamo Petrobelli for the church of San Francisco at Lendinara, a small town near Padua. The resulting painting depicted each cousin with his patron saint at the sides of the composition, Saint Michael at the center, and the Dead Christ supported by angels above. One of the largest altarpieces in the sixteenth-century Italy, measuring over five meters high, it was cut down and sold in pieces when, following the suppression of the Franciscan Order, the church was closed in 1788. Writing in 1795 about the altarpiece and its dismemberment, the local historian Giovanni Battista Sasso noted that, “It was sold in quarters, as one does with butcher’s meat.” Dulwich acquired its piece in 1811. After passing through various English hands, the pieces at Edinburgh and Ottawa arrived in the early twentieth century. The intervening history of the Blanton’s fragment is unknown before 1938, when William Suida published it.
For the exhibition, the altarpiece will be reconstructed and exhibited alongside X-rays and blown up details of the work. Supplemental exhibitions drawn from the Blanton’s extensive holdings of Italian art will be on view to provide further context. Salomon recently presented his research and this discovery at the National Gallery of Art, London, and in a recent issue of The Burlington Magazine. This important discovery reinforces the treasures within the Suida-Manning collection and provides an excellent opportunity to re-evaluate this important work.
This exhibition is a collaboration between Dulwich Picture Gallery, London, and the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, in association with the Blanton Museum of Art, The University of Texas at Austin.
Presentation at the Blanton is funded in part by Cathy and Giorgio Borlenghi and Jessica and Jimmy Younger. Additional support is provided by Alessandra and Kurt Dolnier and Patricia and Dee Osborne. Travel for the exhibition is provided by a grant from the Still Water Foundation and by Continental Airlines.
The Life of the Artist
With Titian and Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese (1528-1588) formed a triumvirate that not only dominated painting in sixteenth-century Venice but invented a new kind of representation. Prior to their activity, painters had been concerned with ideal appearance. With different emphases but a common ambition, the three great Venetian painters turned to visual experience of the real world and, through tangible pigment and emphatic brushwork, how painting can approximate what the eye perceives. Their unprecedented naturalism prepared the revolution of Baroque style, inspired its first masters––Caravaggio, the Carracci and Rubens alike––and laid the foundation for the kind of representation that would dominate European art for the next three hundred years.
With Titian and Tintoretto, Paolo Veronese (1528-1588) formed a triumvirate that not only dominated painting in sixteenth-century Venice but invented a new kind of representation. Prior to their activity, painters had been concerned with ideal appearance. With different emphases but a common ambition, the three great Venetian painters turned to visual experience of the real world and, through tangible pigment and emphatic brushwork, how painting can approximate what the eye perceives. Their unprecedented naturalism prepared the revolution of Baroque style, inspired its first masters––Caravaggio, the Carracci and Rubens alike––and laid the foundation for the kind of representation that would dominate European art for the next three hundred years.
In this epochal development, Veronese’s painting had numerous distinctions. His drawing was the most rehearsed, elegant and precise of all the Venetian painters, and the closest to Central Italian examples. His compositions were the most deliberated, soundly structured and carefully arranged––the most classical. Above all, his palette was probably the most complete of any painter’s––no hue, no value was alien––and his understanding of the behavior of light was incomparably sensitive. Three centuries later, Delacroix would write in his journal, “To my mind he is perhaps the only artist who could grasp the very secret of nature… I owe everything to Paolo Veronese.” To this day he remains the painter’s painter.
Around 1563, Veronese was at the height of his powers. In projects like the enormous Wedding at Cana for the refectory of San Giorgio Maggiore (today in the Louvre) and the advancing decoration of his own church, San Sebastiano, his style reached new levels of visual coherence and grandeur. Meanwhile, Veronese was receiving major commissions from across the Veneto, including the decoration of the Palladian villa at Maser and the altarpiece for the church of San Giorgio in his native Verona. It was a bold statement when the cousins Antonio and Girolamo Petrobelli, leading citizens of the small town of Lendinara, near Padua, engaged Veronese to create an altarpiece for their family’s newly renovated chapel in the church of San Francesco. The result, the so-called Petrobelli Altarpiece, stood for more than two centuries as the greatest work in the immediate region and one of Veronese’s major accomplishments.
Reconstructing a Renaissance Masterpiece
The subsequent history of the Petrobelli Altarpiece is one of misfortune and eventual serendipity. In 1782, following the suppression of the monastic orders in Italy, San Francesco was demolished. The altarpiece ended up in the hands of a Venetian dealer, and in 1789 it was cut into marketable pieces. Their origin was forgotten and their subjects were confused. One fragment entered Dulwich Picture Gallery at its founding in 1811. In 1862 two more fragments were described in the collection of the Duke of Sutherland, and the relationship of all three fragments was recognized for the first time. Those two fragments were acquired by the National Gallery of Scotland in 1913 and by the National Gallery of Canada around 1924. In the 1930s, the Veronese scholar Detlev von Hadeln connected the fragments with a description of the altarpiece in a local guidebook of 1795. His research, however, was not published until 1978. Only then did the identification of the Petrobelli Altarpiece become generally known.
There remained the mystery of the altarpiece’s central figure. When overpaint was removed from the canvases at Dulwich and Edinburgh, in 1948 and 1958 respectively, the features of a Saint Michael––an arm with a spear and a wing, a hand with a balance holding a soul, the extremities of a prostrate Satan––came to light. Had the figure been too damaged to save, or had it been lost? The answer came in 2008. On a visit to the Blanton, Xavier Salomon, curator at Dulwich and a Veronese expert, realized that Veronese’s Head of an Angel in the Suida-Manning Collection could be that of the missing Saint Michael. Its size, canvas, palette and touch all corresponded. Technical analysis by Stephen Gritt, chief conservator at the National Gallery of Canada, proved that it was. An X-radiograph showed the addition of a strip of canvas along the left edge and at its bottom a square shape with fluting. When the altarpiece was mutilated, a scrap with a bit of column was attached to create a balanced composition.
This exhibition unites the four surviving fragments of the Petrobelli Altarpiece and reconstructs its appearance for the first time. The fragments have been unframed, the Blanton and Ottawa fragments restored , and all assembled within a new framework inspired by other altarpieces by Veronese. Neutral-colored board fills areas where the original canvas is missing. The reconstruction reveals a work of grand scale––one of the artist’s largest––seemingly vast space, vibrant color, and the wonderfully plausible daylight for which Veronese is famed. Passages like the figures’ heads, the soaring putti and the cloudbank demonstrate the extraordinary control and fluency of his brush. At the same time, the explicit symmetry and distinct levels of the composition are unusual for the artist. Such formal aspects and the similarly schematic subject––the Petrobelli cousins, guided by their namesakes, protected from sin by Michael, redeemed by Christ’s incarnation and sacrifice––reflect a provincial destination and the patrons’ conservative taste. The reconstruction adds an important and distinctive work to the oeuvre of a great painter.
Among its riches of Italian Renaissance and Baroque art, the Suida-Manning Collection counts three paintings by Paolo Veronese. The identification of the Head of Saint Michael and the reconstruction of the Petrobelli Altarpiece put one of these in literal and spectacular context. The presence of two other major works by Veronese, loaned by the National Gallery of Canada, offers useful comparisons with the Altarpiece itself. Although not necessarily altarpieces, both are religious subjects intended for public settings, that is, display in church. The Repentant Magdalene is a completely autograph and very well preserved creation of only a few years after the Altarpiece, but more intimate in scale and probably for a metropolitan setting. The Rest on the Flight into Egypt is a grandiose work of around a decade later, but more generalized in its effects and executed in large part by Veronese’s workshop. In turn, these works help explain the place of the other two Suida-Manning works, the Heads of Cherubs and the Annunciation, in Veronese’s development and practice.
Veronese at the Blanton
Among its riches of Italian Renaissance and Baroque art, the Suida-Manning Collection counts three paintings by Paolo Veronese. The identification of the Head of Saint Michael and the reconstruction of the Petrobelli Altarpiece put one of these in literal and spectacular context. The presence of two other major works by Veronese, loaned by the National Gallery of Canada, offers useful comparisons with the Altarpiece itself. Although not necessarily altarpieces, both are religious subjects intended for public settings, that is, display in church. The Repentant Magdalene is a completely autograph and very well preserved creation of only a few years after the Altarpiece, but more intimate in scale and probably for a metropolitan setting. The Rest on the Flight into Egypt is a grandiose work of around a decade later, but more generalized in its effects and executed in large part by Veronese’s workshop. In turn, these works help explain the place of the other two Suida-Manning works, the Heads of Cherubs and the Annunciation, in Veronese’s development and practice.
Putting Veronese’s art in broader context are several other smaller exhibitions drawn from the Blanton’s own extensive holdings of sixteenth-century Italian art. In museum’s second gallery of European painting, a recently conserved fragment from a major Venetian picture of the time, Jacopo Bassano’s Saint John the Baptist joins the his late Sacrifice of Isaac––another fragment from a large composition––as well as a fine suggestion of Tintoretto’s late style, his son Domenico’s Portrait of a Man. In the adjacent gallery, “Prints and Drawings in the Time of Veronese” (through 15 November) offers some two
dozen works by contemporaries, followers and interpreters of the master . Finally, on the mezzanine walkway, “Altarpieces in the Time of Veronese” presents three works that involve narrative subjects and show parallel developments in other Italian schools of painting.