French Gem Hosts a Baroque Blockbuster Draped in the Sublime Shadows of Velázquez and El Greco

PARIS — “Baroque Splendors” at the Musée Jacquemart-André imports a dynamic darkness to the heart of the City of Light. The museum is Paris’s version of New York City’s Frick Collection — a glamorous personal trove that sparkles with idiosyncrasy. The mansion on Boulevard Haussmann — no mean address — houses a host of Renaissance treasures. This special show, though, is devoted to the sublime shadows of the Baroque.Baroque Art emerged at Rome in the early 1600s and dominated Europe until the mid-1700s. One founding father was Caravaggio, whose canvases brought a cinematic charisma of spotlights and shadows. The Baroque prospered as a kind of propaganda arm of the Counter-Reformation — the effort by the Catholic Church to reassert its authority in the wake of the Protestant Reformation. The Baroque’s rococo richness is a riposte to Lutheran austerity.While the artists of the Baroque looked to Rome for spiritual guidance, the movement acquired an indelibly Hispanic character. Its flourishing was tied to the ascendence of the Spanish Habsburgs in the Siglo de Oro, or Spanish Golden Age. The word “Baroque” comes from the Portuguese barroco for a flawed pearl. A new aesthetic bloomed that, in its sweep and drama, directed the viewer toward submission to Crown and Church.‘The Wedding at Cana’, by Nicolás de Correa, 1696. Via Hispanic Society of America“Baroque Splendors” is created in collaboration with the Hispanic Society of America, a reminder of the days when Spain’s dominion held sway in both the Old and New Worlds. The heart of this show are the Spanish masters Diego Velázquez and El Greco Velázquez’s “Portrait of a Little Girl” is a rare study of a child who does not bear aristocratic blood. Her gaze is poised at the precipice of personhood. His “Las Meninas” could be the greatest painting ever made.Swaths of “Portrait” are unfinished, a technique which only magnifies the magnetism of her face. A different kind of portraiture is achieved by the Crete-born — it was then ruled by Venice — Doménikos Theotokópoulos, known as El Greco. An artist of astonishing originality who straddled the Renaissance and the Baroque, his “Pietà” here combines the colors of the Venetians, the frontality of Byzantine icons, and Michelangelo’s influence.The elongated figures and phantasmagoric pigmentation, though, mark this as unmistakably a work by El Greco. He wielded so distinctive a brush that he is often reckoned to be a precursor to Expressionism and Cubism, movements that flowered centuries after his death. El Greco’s move to Toledo in 1577 was a turning point in his art. Though Greek by birth and Italian by training, it was in Spain that he found his mystical metier.The relation between religious devotion and painterly detail is underscored in Sebastián Muñoz’s sumptuous “Maria Luisa of Orléans, Queen of Spain, Lying in State.” Its subject is the public display of the dead body of the French-born wife of King Charles II of Spain. She is dressed in the habit of a Carmelite nun, but the chapel that holds her is a spectacle of splendor, all golds and mournful blacks. Cherubs bawl for the death of the sovereign. ”Pietà,’ by El Greco (Doménikos Theotokópoulos), 1590. Via Hispanic Society of America“The Wedding at Cana,” by Nicolás Correa, comes from New Spain, or what is now Mexico. It is a gem of the genre of enconchados, paintings on wood panels inlaid with iridescent mother-of-pearl. Crafted at the intersection of fine and decorative arts, enconchados were inspired by Japanese Nanban lacquerwares, a hybrid form created from the encounter between Far Eastern craftsmen and Spanish and Portuguese traders. “The Wedding of Cana” is so visually intense that it is almost difficult to look at, as the mother-of-pearl creates a shimmering effect that seems to replicate to portend the moment of a miracle. One could say of the Baroque more generally that it was a feast of faith. Behind it, though, lurked an anxiety — about absolute monarchies on the verge of democratic revolutions, and spiritual truths under fresh challenge. It was a last gasp of glory now gone.

French Gem Hosts a Baroque Blockbuster Draped in the Sublime Shadows of Velázquez and El Greco

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