Cocktails with a Curator_ Veronese's Wisdom and Strength

Good evening, and welcome to this episode of Cocktails with a Curator. I am Xavier Salomon, the Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator at The Frick Collection. We're in the West Gallery at The Frick Collection, and looking to the end of the gallery, there are two of my favorite works in the museum, the two grand allegories by Paolo Veronese. These were acquired in 1912 by Henry Clay Frick from an English collection and brought to New York to decorate this grand picture gallery that he was building in those same years at the house at 1 East 70th Street. You see them flanking the door to the enamels gallery, as it is known today. And all the way to today, even though the door was changed by John Russell Polk, the architect in the 1930s, to match the entrance into the Oval Room on the opposite side, the Veroneses still hang on that wall and flank that door since the creation of the house. There are two paintings which were believed to be pendants, as we will see. And this week I will talk about the one on the right, and next week I will talk about the one on the left. Here they are. And since I am talking about Italian paintings, I will have an Italian cocktail this evening. This is a Negroni. The Negroni was invented supposedly in 1919 in Florence, in Italy. And Count Camillo Negroni went to his favorite bar and asked for a change to be made to his Americano, which is another type of cocktail, and he asked to strengthen it by substituting club soda with gin. So this is gin, Campari, and sweet vermouth, always garnished with a peel of orange. Salute! So the two grand allegories by Veronese at the Frick are the objects in the entire museum that have the most prestigious provenance. And the provenance, of course, is the history of the work of art before it reached the museum. And these two paintings belong to some of the most famous art collectors in Europe from the sixteenth century onwards. They first appear in the seventeenth century in the inventories of Emperor Rudolf II in Prague, and the two paintings were part of a group of Veronese works which belonged to the emperor and were displayed in the castle in Prague. In 1648, the Swedish troops sacked Prague and brought the art collection of Rudolf to Sweden, where it became part of the Royal Collection of the Kings of Sweden. Queen Christina of Sweden, later in the seventeenth century, famously abdicated and converted from Protestantism to Catholicism and moved to Rome and brought with her the collection of paintings from the castle in Stockholm to Rome. And so these two paintings then traveled to the Papal City and remained there. They were inherited by Cardinal Azzolino, who was the main heir of Christina of Sweden, and subsequently passed on to the Odescalchi family, an aristocratic family in Rome. Later, in the eighteenth century, the Odescalchi sold the collection to the Duke d'Orléans. And so the paintings, after having been in Prague, Stockholm, and Rome, moved to Paris and spent most of the eighteenth century in the Palais Royal in Paris. With the French Revolution, however, the Duke d'Orléans sold the collection, and there was this very famous sale at the end of the eighteenth century in London where, finally, most of the collection was dispersed and many English aristocrats and collectors acquired works from the collection. These two paintings together were acquired by the great collector Thomas Hull, and they were displayed first in his London house and then in his house in Sussex called Deep Dean. And it was from the Heirs of Hope that Frick acquired the works in 1912. So we're in front of two very grand pictures. I think they're actually the largest paintings at the Frick, independent paintings. The only ones that I think are larger are the Fragonard canvases. But these, as I said, traveled across Europe and belonged to many rulers and great collectors. And the history of where they were and how they've traveled is particularly fascinating in itself. But Rudolf II, and subsequently Christina Sweden, the other Skalkis, the Duke d'Orléans, didn't own just these two Veroneses. They were part of a larger set of works by Veronese, which included two other large paintings of about the same size. The Mars and Venus United by Love on the left, which is now at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and on the right, the Hersey, Aglauros, and Mercury in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge. Even though it was long believed that these four paintings were painted on canvases the same size to go together as a group of four, painted for Rudolf II, we now know that Veronese painted them at different points in his career. The two Frick canvases in the mid-1560s, the one at the Met probably in the early 1570s, the one at the Fitzwilliam in the early 1580s. And they were probably also painted for different patrons. The origins of these four works are still somewhat shrouded in mystery, but they all reached a collection of Rudolf II probably through slightly different roads and were all together there in Prague in the seventeenth century. Three of these allegories were reunited for the first time in 2006 in an exhibition at the Frick. And here you see the two Frick paintings flanking the Metropolitan one. And this was the first exhibition I curated at the Frick when I was a Mellon Fellow there. And the Fitzwilliam picture, like the Frick pictures, cannot leave the collection for regulations to do with the will of the founder of the museum. So it's impossible to have all four in the same place, but this was a unique opportunity to see the three New York canvases together on the same wall. Rudolf II also owned these four square canvases by Veronese. And again, we don't quite know who they were painted for originally. They're from about the same time as the Frick canvases a little bit later. And they're the so-called Allegories of Love. And they seem to show four different types of relationships between men and women. So there are some are positive, some are negative. And the traditional titles of these four works are Top Left Unfaithfulness, Bottom Left Respect, Top Right Scorn, and Bottom Right Happy Union. And so they're supposed to represent different ways in which couples can behave in a love relationship. How all of these canvases, these eight canvases, and there were actually more, reached the collection of Rudolf, we still don't know. But it is clear that all of them were painted by Veronese for patrons either in Venice or in Europe, and that subsequently all of them reached Prague. Today we focus on the canvas on the right at the Frick. And as I said, this is a grand allegorical subject. Allegory is the way in which the invisible is made visible. So the idea of these paintings is, how do you represent abstract concepts through a visual image? And it's almost like a huge puzzle where you have to understand the different parts to understand the whole. And so when you look at this painting, there is this wonderful setting of great marble columns and the sort of golden and green drapery in the background, the landscape opening on the left. But you have three human figures, a woman, a man, and a young boy. And who are these three figures? So by identifying them and unpacking the symbols in this painting, the message of the canvas is finally revealed. On the right is a bearded man covered in a lion's skin and resting on a wooden club. This is clearly the image of the ancient hero Hercules. And when you compare the Veronese depiction with this famous sculpture of Hercules, an ancient Greek sculpture known as the Farnese Hercules, which at the time in the sixteenth century was in Rome in the Farnese Palace and is now in the Archaeological Museum in Naples, you see exactly what Veronese was thinking about. We don't know if Veronese ever actually traveled to Rome. He probably didn't. But he must have known the Farnese Hercules through drawings and engravings and versions of it and copies of it. And so you see that Hercules here is resting in a very similar way on the club on the right. In this case, his hand is on it rather than the weight of his body. The lion's skin is wrapped around his body rather than wrapped around the club, as in the Farnese Hercules. But the features of the figure are somewhat similar. But Hercules is also sort of slouching. He's sort of falling down. And this is part of the message of the picture. Below Hercules is another mythological figure, a little boy with wings, Cupid. And both of these figures, Hercules and Cupid, signify different things. Hercules has always been interpreted as a representation of strength. And, of course, the manly strength of Hercules, who has his twelve labors and is victorious in his twelve labors, a very strong man. Cupid as the god of love, the person, the mythological figure, that causes love among human beings. But Cupid is actually sitting on a flag, on a banner of some kind, with gold letters and red fabric. And he holds in his proper left hand a scepter. That's the end of a scepter, which is resting over a royal crown. And as you move around the picture, you realize that there are other objects. So the female figure has her foot firmly placed over a globe. Unclear if it is a terrestrial or celestial globe, but it seems to be a terrestrial one. And below the terrestrial globe, there are more scepters and coins and various jewels. And on the left, this peculiarly designed crown. And that specific crown is actually the imperial crown. This is the imperial crown of Rudolf II in the Schatzkammer in Vienna. And even though it's not precisely identical, it is very similar in design. And it clearly implies that the crowns on the floor refer to both kingdoms and empires. Just above the crown, there is an inscription. An inscription is a Latin inscription which reads, Omnia vanitas. All is vanity. And this comes from the Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes. The famous sentence, Vanity of vanities, says the preacher. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. Suddenly with this phrase, you start understanding the rest of the picture. How all is vanity. Strength, love, the kingdoms of the earth, the empires of the earth, money, flags, nations, wealth. All of this is vanity. So what is at the center of the picture? And the center of the picture is this woman. And the woman is not immediately identifiable as a mythological creature. She's not a goddess. She's not a heroine of classical antiquity. But she stands proudly over everything else. She is partly naked. One of her breasts is revealed. She has this wonderful drapery that covers her, especially this incredible piece of cloth with gold-blue designs over white. It's always worth remembering that Veronese is a great painter for fabric because also his brother was in the fabric industry. So I always think that he may have actually borrowed pieces of textiles from his brother and used them in his paintings. But this is one of the most wonderful fabrics in any of his works. But the key element of this figure is the shining sun placed over her forehead. So she looks up to heaven, and there is this light with a face in it, which is a sort of miniature depiction of the sun. So going back to the overall picture, things start to fall into place. And how did you identify these figures? And, of course, Hercules and Cupid would have been easily identifiable by anyone who had a basic culture in the sixteenth century in Europe. But the central figure would have been equally recognizable to people at that time. It is less recognizable to us today, but she is a representation of divine wisdom. In the early seventeenth century, treatises were actually published, the most famous of which is the Iconologia by Cesare Ripa, where you would almost go as if in a dictionary and read up various concepts and how you would represent them. So that is the book where you go, you want to see how to represent the four seasons, the various months of the year, various concepts, friendship, hatred, love, and it tells you how to do so. And if you look at divine wisdom in that book, this is a description. A beautiful woman, often represented nude or semi-naked, with the light of the sun shining on her forehead. And, of course, she looks up to heaven. So what is the picture telling us? It's telling us that all is vanity, but divine wisdom conquers it all. And if you read the Book of Ecclesiastes in a different passage from the one of the quote, Omnia vanitas, there is another passage that tells, remember, wisdom is better than strength. And so what the picture is telling us today, but also what I've told the patrons at the time, was that divine wisdom was the most desirable virtue to pursue, the most desirable quality to have, and that wisdom in life is infinitely better and more important than brute strength, represented by a toppling Hercules, who's sort of falling down, even though he's strong. The Cupid below, wisdom is more important than love, and wisdom is clearly more important than all the power and all the wealth people can gather in the world. A very interesting picture for an emperor to own and for various rulers and members of aristocratic families in Prague, in Stockholm, in Rome, in Paris, and eventually in London, and even for a man like Frick to have. And I always wondered if, when he was smoking his cigar in the West Gallery, how much he thought about the message in this painting. I look forward to seeing you all next week for another episode of Cocktails with a Curator, where we're going to be looking at the other Veronese painting. We'll see you then.