'Bust of a Woman' (c. 1470–1480) by Andrea del Verrocchio

Good evening. Thank you for joining us tonight for this 50th episode of Cocktails with a Curator. It's really kind of an anniversary cocktail. So in keeping with this landmarking nature, I decided to talk to you about one of the most prized objects at the Frick, this unbelievably beautiful Carrara marble bust of a woman by Francesco Labrana. Francesco is usually considered to be an Italian sculptor. But as many of you may know, Italy didn't become a state until the 1860s. Before then, the Italian peninsula was made up of many small states, usually at war with each other. But there was this idea that because of a shared heritage, a shared language to an extent, there was one nation, Italy. But the borders of this nation actually extended beyond the borders of modern day Italy. And we see that Francesco Labrana, actually, his real name was Frane Vranjanin. Vranjanin means from Vrana. Vrana was this town close to Zadar in modern day Croatia. And hence the name Francesco de la Vrana. Because U and V were not distinct letters in 15th century Italian, he soon came to be known as Francesco de Laurana. And now we call him Francesco Laurana. Anyway, the area where Francesco was born, which was then under Venetian control, was historically and is historically known as Dalmatia. So tonight I decided to pair this episode with a cocktail, frankly, a very strong one, known as Dalmatian. It's made of just vodka, grapefruit juice and sugar and black pepper syrup. So cheers! We know nothing about Francesco before 1453, when we find him at work in Naples on this fascinating project of the marble arch for the Castelnuovo, the new castle, with a number of other sculptors. And another crucially important work by Laurana is this Madonna, this virgin child in Noto in Sicily. She's signed by him and dated 1471. Here we find the same attitude in the carving of the face that we find in a handful of very powerful female busts of the 15th century. Three of them you see here. The Frick exemplar is on the left and it's paired with another bust, which was formerly in Berlin, that you see in the middle, and another one in Washington on the right. So some have speculated that at least one or two of these must be fakes, must be 19th century forgeries. And that's basically impossible for the Frick bust, which is always assumed to be original, because it was found in the early 18th century in the port of Marseille in the south of France and was then believed to be an antique bust of Agrippina. And it was published as such as early as in 1801. And you see the illustration of that publication here. The bust remained in France until it was acquired in 1914 by the art dealer Duveen. We have encountered him many times during these episodes of cocktails. And Duveen bought it from Princess Susanne d'Orange, who was the Marquess of Meillinesle. And here you see the princess's chateau where the bust was kept until 1914. Two years later, in 1916, Frick bought it and has stayed at the Frick ever since. As to the Washington bust, it was compared, so to speak, in the flesh once with the Frick original. Some years ago, while the Frick bust was undergoing some conservation treatment, and you see it was halfway through a cleaning process here, but despite the very close analysis that were done, experts could not reach a unanimous verdict as to the originality of the Washington bust. So it's very, very complex to understand that. The bust in Berlin, which you see here in a fantastic picture by the photographer Clarence Kennedy, was destroyed during World War II. And it was destroyed during the bombing of Berlin. And you see images of post-war Berlin here, also in color, to just give a sense of the extent of the dramatic destructions that the city underwent during the last years of war. The bust in Berlin was broken in two during the bombing, and the head remained in Berlin while the rest of the bust was taken by the Russians to Moscow. And the two pieces have never since been reunited, also because of the Cold War, obviously, and all that. But recently, curators in Moscow and Berlin decided to restore the missing half, each to restore the missing half of their piece, sort of duplicating the original work. Actually, the scars of history here are still visible. You can still recognize what's original and what's not, what's in gesso and what's in marble. But there is an attempt to move on while acknowledging the horrors of the past. It is obviously a very controversial decision, and some of you may disagree with it. But I think it certainly shows courage, and it really illustrates the challenges that you can sometimes face as a curator of an Old Masters collection. And that's really why I wanted to include this slide here, because sometimes we may think that art, especially the Old Masters, exists in some sort of a vacuum. But they are actually there for us to not just to contemplate and love, but actually one of the most beautiful aspects of working with objects as old as these is that really they come with a long history. And art history is not just about the creation of these works. It's also about the torturous way which has brought them to us here for us to look at today. And it's always a wonderful way of looking back at our history and our mistakes, to look at art which has suffered such as this. Anyway, judging from the remains of the bust and the old photographs, there is really no reason to believe that this wonderful bust was a fake. Some have said that the motifs in the base could not be carved by a 15th-century sculptor, but that's nonsense because you can find them all over the arch in Naples, which I've shown you before where Laurana worked. So we've seen that these three busts are probably busts of the same person, and probably they are all original. The fact that they are so many suggests that this was a very, very important woman. And given that Laurana mostly worked in Sicily and only later in his life moved to southern France to work, it's usually assumed that this must be a woman belonging to the dynasty of the southern Aragonese kings of Naples. But honestly, the fact that the bust was found in Marseille and the fact that we know that Laurana worked in southern France could really suggest that this is, in fact, a French lady. But that hypothesis has never really been considered by scholars. So normally the bust is identified either with the wife of King Alfonso II of Naples, Hippolyta Maria Sforza, of Milanese origins. And you see her here in these two manuscript illuminations. And you see that she's wearing kind of a similar headwear. And there are some superficial similarities, but it's very hard to say. Or sometimes it's identified with her daughter, with Hippolyta's daughter, Isabella d'Aragona, who married her own cousin, Giangaleazzo Sforza. So she went back to Milan, where her mother came from, and became the Duchess of Milan. So you see here Milanese portraits of her, one in the charterhouse of Tavia, close to Milan, and the other one in a drawing by Bernardino de Conti at the Uffizi. So soon Giangaleazzo, Isabella's husband, was killed by his own tutor, Ludovico Almoro, leading to a very unhappy and unsafe widowhood for Isabella. She even used to sign her letters, Isabella unique in misfortune. Maybe she was a bit of a drama queen. Anyway, it is true that she suffered quite a lot at the time, but she was soon rewarded because after the French invasion of Italy in 1499, aged about 30, she was granted the title of Duchess of Bari in Apulia, and she moved south and led a splendid court life there for the rest of her life. Unfortunately, nobody has ever been able to identify the scenes of the classicising reliefs on the bays, which may give us a clue as to the identity of the woman, obviously. However, they seem to show scenes of female heroism against male violence and male threat, somehow a story befitting Isabella's. And unfortunately, again, we haven't yet found a convincing explanation for the inscription DMS on the base of the column, which you see in the picture at the bottom. So if you have any ideas, please submit them to us. Some have thought that busts such as these could be ideal portraits of feminine beauty, and so they wouldn't describe any actual existing woman. Frankly, I don't think that at this stage, before the rediscovery of many antique female busts and the discussion also around the competition between poetry and the arts and the visual arts for the representation of female beauty, I don't think that before all that, the idea, the notion of an ideal female bust was culturally possible, let's say. But it is true, it is certainly true, that there is some kind of abstraction, idealisation here that is going on. You don't see any wrinkles in this woman's face. You don't see any kind of defects. You don't really see the flesh of her face. You only see perfectly geometrical shapes somehow, which also makes this bust very modern. And that's one of the reasons why these busts were so much loved by 20th century artists, scholars and architects and art critics. However, I think that the similarity with the Virgin and Child in Noto and others that we use to attribute the busts, we should actually look at this relationship the other way around. And these are really Madonna-like representations of real women, I think, that points to their virtue as women. Obviously, a notion of virtue that is aligned with Christian ideals. However, we also shouldn't forget that it was according to our later all-white neoclassicism, obsessed with the whiteness of marble, that these works were stripped of their original polychromy. Luckily, one of them in Vienna still retains its original colors, and it really gives us a sense of how much closer to life these works would have been with colors on them. But what was a bust like this used for? That's the other question. What was the function of these works? Looking at the Frick bust from the side, we realize that the back is very flat. And also, this woman is sort of tilting her head downwards, which probably means that this bust was placed in a niche up high on a wall. And we do know the function of at least one of Laurana's busts, which was installed on a funerary monument, which you see recorded here in a very simple drawing. And this was the monument of Eleanor of Aragon, who was the Countess Peralta di Caltabellotta in Sicily. And this monument was in the convent of Santa Maria del Bosco di Caltamauro, again in Sicily. And here really comes as a little surprise, and a detail not to ignore, Eleanor had died in 1405, so some 25 years before Laurana was even born. So this really tells us that these busts could also be funerary. They could definitely be made after the end of the sitter's life. So really, who knows who the Frick bust may portray? It's really a $1 million question. If we look at the contextless, minimalist way in which the funerary bust of Eleanor is beautifully and lyrically almost installed at Palazzo Batellis in Palermo by the Italian architect Carlo Scarpa, if we look at this, we really realize it's so hard for curators to find a balance between a display which is contextual and tries to make sense of these busts as historical products, and the temptation to isolate them, also because of how precious they are and how rare they are, and the way they invite contemplation, really, almost religious contemplation. And here you see how the bust was displayed at 1 East 70th Street. It used to be in the vestibule before the anteroom of the boucher room, so really a go-through space where it wasn't really paid much attention to it by the public, unfortunately, and it was usually facing the vecchietta in the same space. So it wasn't completely isolated, but not too many people paid attention to it, as I said, and it used to stand on this pedestal, which was inspired by similar examples in the Morgan Library in New York. Now at Frick Madison, we tried to do something different. We had the Laurana bust flanked by two other portrait busts, one of Beatrice of Aragon, which is again by Laurana and is very seldom on display at 1 East 70th Street. And if you think about it, it's amazing how the Frick has two of just a handful of Laurana busts in the world. And on the other side you see the female bust, again by Verrocchio, a Florentine sculptor, the master of Leonardo da Vinci, whose marble busts of women are, again, exceedingly rare. So the two busts on the sides came in the 1960s to the collection as a gift of John D. Rockefeller, Jr., and we've decided to show them with their gilded 20th-century vases, which sort of nuance the transition between these white marble busts and the gilded panels of the early Italian paintings in the next room. But it also reminds us, these vases remind us, that the materiality of these busts was originally much more complex than it looks now. So you see that also with the carpets farther back, you see that a lot at Frick Madison is about material, we have a focus on material at Frick Madison. And it's also funny in a way that these 15th-century busts at the Frick, all the 15th-century busts at the Frick are busts of women and are all in marble and are all from the same decade, probably. So it really gives us a sense of the range of the stylistic possibilities and the stylistic choices made by Italian artists at the time. But it also tells us about the balance between naturalism and abstraction where it came to female portraiture. But when you realize that just a few rooms down, all the 16th-century busts that are on display are of male sitters and are in bronze, well, you start wondering if that's just the case or if maybe materials are somehow gendered. And you also wonder about the taste of the people who acquired these works. So do come to Frick Madison and really let's ask together new, different questions of the same objects. Thank you and see you soon for another episode. Goodbye.