Masterworks on Display, and on Hold

As one of the city’s premier galleries for over three decades, Salander-O’Reilly has mounted numerous museum-quality shows featuring the likes of Rembrandt, Turner, and Constable. The art world is currently holding its breath over the latest developments at the gallery. A rash of lawsuits brought against the gallery has resulted in the indefinite postponement of what was to have been its most spectacular project yet: two exhibitions of master artworks organized in association with Whitfield Fine Art, a London gallery specializing in Italian Baroque art.“Masterpieces of Art” featured more than 50 works, principally by Italian artists from between the 15th and 17th centuries, but also including Spanish, Dutch, Flemish, and French paintings. “Caravaggio” was to comprise several works by the Baroque master, among them the much talked-about “Apollo the Lute Player,” installed in a re-creation of the private study of Cardinal Francesco del Monte. Lavish catalogues, with essays detailing the rediscoveries of a number of these works, accompanied both exhibitions.While everything is now on hold, a preview of the exhibitions earlier this week showed an unfolding procession of masterworks. A ground-floor gallery of mostly Florentine paintings included Pontormo’s exceptionally fetching portrait of a young woman (c. 1525–28). Unlike the artist’s usually attenuated figures, the subject had a full-blooded presence that made her despondent expression particularly touching. On another wall, contemporaneous paintings by Pontormo and his teacher del Sarto (c. 1517–18 and ca. 1513, respectively), both depicting the Madonna and child with the infant John the Baptist, made for a fascinating comparison. Two small bronze figurines (ca. 1520–40) derived from wax or clay models by Michelangelo were a delight, at once spontaneous and monumental. The catalog informs us that a luminous, if somewhat affected, Parmigianino painting (c. 1531–35) of a female nude garlanding a winged horse was once in the possession of Sir Joshua Reynolds. (Reynolds, in fact, may have been responsible for touching up the extensions on either side of the panel.)The second floor offered a remarkable selection of paintings by Rubens, Van Dyck, Annibale Carracci, Vouet, and Goya. In a small third-floor gallery, Correggio’s “Head of Christ” (not dated), gloriously, unabashedly earnest in sentiment, hung across from Botticelli’s small but imposing “Madonna and child” (c. 1500).In the larger adjacent gallery, visitors would have recognized Venetian works from previous Salander installations, among them a fine Titian self-portrait and Tintoretto’s “Deposition from the Cross” (c. 1560–64), which lent an extraordinary gravity to a complex design; in this painting Christ’s arm slips with momentous weight from the cloth sling containing his body. For many of these works, the catalog scrupulously details the expert confirmations of their attributions — an important point, as a number of them are recent rediscoveries.The greatest discovery, however, dominated the room devoted to Caravaggio. Following its recent cleaning, “Apollo the Lute Player,” long thought to be a copy, has recently been identified by authorities as an autograph work. It seems even to predate the two previously known versions of the subject, because the artist’s corrections — visible in X-rays — and the canvas’s close conformity with a description of the painting from around 1625 suggest that it is the original. (Sotheby’s, which auctioned the canvas in 2001, has questioned the attribution.) Like most works here, it was to be available for purchase, for a reported $100 million.The clarity of the illumination in “Apollo” was indeed remarkable, as it imparted an almost fierce crispness to the petals of a bouquet, a light-refracting glass vase, and the resolute contours of the youth’s white garments. Hanging on another gallery wall was “The Shepherd Corydon with a Ram,” a contemporary copy (possibly by Caravaggio himself) of a painting that also originally hung in del Monte’s study. Affixed overhead was a life-size reproduction of the painting executed by the artist on the ceiling of the cardinal’s studio. A fascinating catalog essay by Clovis Whitfield discusses the symbolic connections between the details of these three paintings, which all date to c. 1599, and also offers a unique theory about the artist’s working methods. With an impressive array of arguments, Mr. Whitfield proposes that the artist projected his subjects with a concave mirror onto the canvas, a procedure that would explain idiosyncrasies of his work: the absence of preparatory sketching, the dramatic tonal contrasts, and his peculiar cut-and-paste compositions, in which various figures — and sometimes the same model in different poses — overlap heavily in space.Caravaggio’s “Saint Francis at Prayer” and “Sleeping Cupid” (both undated) hung on adjacent walls. The latter is only tentatively attributed to the artist, but its angling light carved the forms of the Cupid — as earthy and robust as a street urchin — with a kind of refined fury.Ultimately I found myself drawn more to the coherent gravity of Titian and Tintoretto, whose colors dramatized the rhythmic purposes of objects rather than their illumination. But the immense, unique reward of these two exhibitions is that they allowed one to experience and reconsider great art in an intimate setting. “Masterpieces” and “Caravaggio” would have been ravishing shows. One hopes that, in whole or part, they will at some point become available for public viewing.

Masterworks on Display, and on Hold

Masterworks on Display, and on Hold

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