Masterpieces from

Plain English Script

THE QUEEN'S GALLERY, BUCKINGHAM PALACE

Welcome

Welcome to the Queen’s Gallery, and to our exhibition Masterpieces from Buckingham Palace. These notes contain the same information as the audio-description provided for hearing visitors. They are adapted from a script produced by ATS with information from a number of experts whose names are included at the end of these notes.

Stop 1

Welcome to the Queen’s Gallery and to Masterpieces from Buckingham Palace. This is an extraordinary selection of Dutch, Flemish and Italian from the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. Most of them usually hang in the splendid Picture Gallery in Buckingham Palace, designed by the architect John Nash. They are arranged on the walls there in two rows.

In today’s exhibition we see these paintings outside the grand interior of Buckingham Palace. We can get much closer to the paintings, which allows us to focus more on the works themselves. We can think about why they caused a stir at the time they were painted, why they are called ‘masterpieces’, and why some people think they are still important for us today – or maybe why they aren’t.

The artists who created these works have become famous because of the wonderful quality of their paintings. We suggest that their fame is because of some fairly simple characteristics of their works. People can be really good at something, but that does not mean that what they do is complicated. We can see how they use paint to make a picture of their world in different and exciting ways. But what they are doing is copying nature. They are making something real in front of you. We want visitors to the exhibition to stop and look closely and slowly at the paintings. Try to find a detail which shows that the artist is doing something different to everyone else. As we explore the exhibition we will see images of people and places which were made centuries ago. But even so, they give us new ways of looking at ourselves and our surroundings today. We want visitors to make up their own minds about why some paintings deserve to be called ‘masterpieces’.

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Jan Steen (1632–75), A Woman at her Toilet, 1663, RCIN 404804

The woman in this is rich. Her jacket is made of expensive material – it looks like silk-satin and it is trimmed with fur. She is wearing a silk petticoat as well. If we look closely at her legs, we see that there are slight marks just below her knee. These are where her garters – made of ribbons – held up her stockings. It looks like she may have just taken her stockings off, so perhaps she is undressing.

Dutch is interesting for all sorts of reasons. One of them is that it shows us a very wide range of interiors, from luxurious to basic. What tells us that an interior is luxurious? One sure sign is a marble floor, and silk hangings on beds with beautiful linen, and Turkish carpets on tables. All of these are signs of an expensively furnished interior. But natural daylight is a good sign too, because it means there is a large window, which was a very expensive thing to have at the time.

It is almost as if the artist, Jan Steen, has painted two pictures. There is the scene inside the room, and then a view in front of the open door, framed by a decorated archway, with objects on a stone ledge. One of them is a lute, which has a broken string so it can’t be played. There is a musical score and a skull with ivy vine growing through it. The reference to music is about something which exists for a moment and then disappears. The skull reminds us of death.

This is a type of still life suggesting that life is fragile and it comes to an end all too quickly. It is known as vanitas painting. The meaning of these paintings is that it does not matter how rich you are – in the end you will die just like everyone else. These Dutch artists were also very good at creating a three-dimensional feeling in their paintings, as in the paintings below by Steen, Vermeer and de Hooch (the painting Cardplayers in a Sunlit Room by de Hooch is hanging nearby). They used patterns on the floor – alternating squares of different colours to create the illusion of three-dimensional space. They used mathematics to work out the distance between objects in real life and how to paint them on a canvas in a way which makes the viewer feel they are looking into a room.

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Johannes Vermeer (1632–75), A Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman (‘’), Early 1660s, RCIN 405346

This painting is A Lady at the Virginals with a Gentleman, also known as The Music Lesson, by the Dutch artist . It tells us a lot about the way that the artist worked.

When an artist is deciding what to paint they have an idea in their mind about what the most important parts of their painting will be. For example, the faces of people in the painting might be most important, and they will take a lot of time and care to get them right. After that they will give some attention to their clothes. But the background will probably come last in order of importance so they spend much less time on that. But Vermeer is different. He seems to give equal attention to every part of the painting.

In this painting, he takes care to paint accurately all the different surfaces and materials in the scene. He shows how the light interacts with them in different ways, depending on what they are made of. The light creates shadows on the plain plaster wall. It bounces off the mirror’s hook and the brass studs on the chair. Vermeer uses the light to draw our attention to different textures and surfaces: window panes are reflected on the smooth glaze of the white jug and dimples in the metallic plate sparkle beneath it. When painting the carpet, Vermeer has painted fine trails and spots of different colours – bright yellows, blues and reds – across the surface of the paint. This suggests the way that the different coloured threads of the carpet tangle against one another and then spread out slightly as they fold over the side of the table.

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Gerrit Dou (1613–75), The Grocer’s Shop, 1672, RCIN 405542

A striped curtain hanging from a stone archway has been pulled back. We are being invited into a grocer’s shop on a busy morning. There are pots planted with flowers in front of a stone ledge and objects on top of it – a wicker basket, salt, a dish of lemons, a red covered glass jar and a cake that looks like a cushion. The objects seem to project into our space, us into the scene.

The artist, , was one of ’s first pupils. He founded the fijnshilders, which means ‘fine painters’, in his native city of Leiden, 50 kilometres south-west of Amsterdam. They were known for their careful attention to detail.

Gerrit Dou painted with very fine brushes. People said he was obsessed with getting the details right. He was very worried that dust settled on his paintings so he had them covered with an umbrella constantly to keep dust off them. Being concerned about the effect of dust on his painting just shows how much he wanted to get the details absolutely right.

He lived in the Dutch which had just become independent. Political and economic power was in the hands of the middle class people. There were no aristocratic patrons to commission works, so artists painted first and found a buyer later. To make works which would please their new clients – enthusiastic shopkeepers and merchants – they painted the world that those people lived in, with home interiors and scenes of everyday life. In the 18th century they became known as ‘genre’ paintings.

Everybody wanted to have a painting in this style. The paintings are astonishing. You would not believe that an artist could paint such realistic detail, with such an accurate glimpse of the world. Dutch paintings in the 17th century were often valued by the amount of work that the artist had put into it.

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Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–69), Christ and St Mary Magdalen at the Tomb, 1638, RCIN 404816

This is the scene at dawn on the third day after Jesus Christ was crucified. Mary Magdalene arrives at his tomb to anoint his body with oil from a glazed jar, but she finds his body has gone. Instead there are two angels sitting where Jesus’s body had been. Rembrandt’s painting captures the moment just after Mary has asked a passer-by if he knows where the body has been taken. When the man says her name, a startled Mary recognises him as Jesus.

Mary Magdalene is half lit and half in shadow. The light is coming from the rising sun but also from where Jesus is standing. She is in a moment of confusion, between recognition and uncertainty.

In the Bible story in St John’s Gospel, Mary at first mistakes Jesus for a gardener. In this scene Rembrandt shows us his naughty sense of humour. He paints the scene with Jesus dressed as a gardener wearing a big sun hat and carrying pruning shears and a spade.

Towards the bottom left hand corner of the painting, we see an expensively dressed couple going down the stone steps into dark shadow away from Jesus and Mary Magdalene. On the bridge in the middle ground a tiny figure walks on his own towards the rising sun. On the way he meets three others who have turned their backs on it.

This seems to be the artist stressing the idea of turning towards the light of God. Some people are not turning towards the light and some people are turning towards the light. The message for us is that we should be with those turning towards the light. This is a perfect subject for Rembrandt, who was a master of painting light. He was also master of storytelling.

Like many of the Dutch paintings in this room, Christ and St Mary Magdalen at the Tomb was reframed in the 1970s with a dark moulded wooden ‘ripple’ frame. It has a gilded ‘sight edge’, which is the inner section of the frame around the picture. This style was chosen to go with the painting and to imitate the type of frame it might originally have had in the 17th century. It is similar to the one hanging on the wall in de Hooch’s Cardplayers below.

Nowadays, we are much more thoughtful about the frames that we use for our paintings. We look back at historical examples, and about when the painting came into the , and also about where it is going to be hung.

In the past, the frames chosen for the paintings in the Collection were changed to suit the taste and fashion of the time. In the last room of the exhibition there is a group of paintings bought by George the Third from Joseph Smith, the British Consul in . When they came to London their simple travelling frames were replaced with carved, gilt frames, named after the Italian artist Carlo Maratta. See the image below:

The frames were extended and made more grand by George the Fourth He used three different patterns. The grandest ones had coats of arms and trails of flowers in the corners. Some of George the Fourth’s frames were changed later on. Prince Albert disliked the shadows cast by the high outer edge of deep Regency frames. He also wanted to give the Collection a more uniform look. Many of the paintings in this room have the frames that Albert ordered for the Picture Gallery at Buckingham Palace. They are shallow gilt frames with a moulded ornament decorated with a leaf pattern, like the one below:

Glass was introduced to the frames in to the gallery in 1859 to protect the paintings from the pollution and smog of London.

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Jacob van Ruisdael (1628–82), Evening Landscape: A Windmill by a Stream, 1650, RCIN 405538 Nicolaes Berchem (1620–83), A Mountainous Landscape with Herdsmen Driving Cattle down a Road, 1673, RCIN 405345

As the day draws to a close, large clouds roll across a wide sky. They block the last rays of the sun and cast a dark shadow over a pond and a rickety, tumbledown barn behind a windmill.

The artist, , based this painting on close observation of the countryside around Amsterdam. He tried to capture the individual characteristics of different leaves and plants. The glassy appearance of the pond and the different trees are typical features in a Dutch landscape going off into the distance.

The painting by Nicholas Berchem is hanging nearby. It shows cattle being herded along a winding path. The scene is bathed in golden light.

This painting shows us an imaginary Italian landscape with all the features that we think the perfect Italian landscape should have. It is much more attractive and charming, more like a dream mountain landscape. There are herdsmen who are crossing the mountains, but we do not have a feeling of what it is really like to be hard at work in the countryside. There is not much mud – unlike in the Ruisdael painting. In the middle distance on the left, we see people spreading out cotton or linen in the fields to be bleached by the sun. Their work is part of the landscape. Ruisdael’s painting also contains a windmill which is a clear symbol of Dutch industry – it is probably a flour mill.

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Willem van de Velde the Younger (1633–1707), A Calm: A States Yacht, a Barge and many other Vessels under Sail, 1659, RCIN 407275

Other countries in Western Europe were jealous of Dutch transport in the 17th century. Passenger ferries criss-crossed the country through interconnected rivers and canals, whilst herring boats fished the waters of the North Sea. Ships belonging to the wealthy Dutch East India Company returned from south-east Asia full of spices, tea, coffee, porcelain and silk. The central place of ships and boats to Dutch power and wealth gave rise to a new branch of art – maritime paintings.

At first artists were mainly interested in the way the ships were built and the latest techniques used by builders to make them better. But later on in the 17th century the landscape part of the painting became as important as the ships. This painting is by Willem van de Velde in the 1650s – the middle of the 17th century. Here we have a calm sea, where the sea reflects the sky. The ships do not stand out as much as the viewer expects. Their sails look a bit like clouds; their forms are reflected in the water. The artist includes a very wide range of ships in the painting but the sky and the sea dominate the scene.

And even though there is just enough breeze in this scene to cause the flags on the boats to flap – magnificent red, blue and gold on the ceremonial ship – the water hardly ripples. If you have a perfectly flat sea, reflecting a blue sky with clouds, there is nothing to give the viewer a feeling of distance. That feeling of the distance between the foreground and background of the paintings is created by objects getting smaller, and also by a change in contrasts and intensity of the colours, so that everything gets greyer as it goes further into the distance.

Today we describe 17th-century paintings as Dutch if they were created in the Dutch Republic, which is modern-day Holland. But if they come from what is now Belgium and Luxembourg we describe them as Flemish. The difference dates back to 1648 when the Eighty Years’ War ended and the Peace of Münster recognised that the Protestant United Provinces in the north of the Netherlands were independent from the Catholic-dominated south, ruled by Spain. The Protestant provinces were the Dutch Republic.

But in reality there is no real difference between Dutch and Flemish paintings at this time. They are not two different traditions – they come from the same tradition which went in different directions. The royal collectors during the 18th and 19th centuries did not see any difference between Dutch and Flemish paintings. They used the word Dutch or Flemish to refer to very skilful painters who could make landscapes and scenes from everyday life very effectively.

Flemish painting was dominated by . He worked in the manner of an Italian , tackling every possible art form, working from a huge studio, specialising in religious paintings. Nothing was too large or too ambitious for him. The other great Flemish artist is , a portrait painter who painted for royal families all over Europe. These artists had many other artists working in their studios but they also influenced lots more.

There are no artists quite like them in the Dutch Republic. Rembrandt perhaps comes close. He had a large studio like they did, but he was never as powerful as Rubens. There are other great names in , like Johannes Vermeer, but they never had the influence that an artist like van Dyck had. To viewers today, Vermeer is a fantastic artist, but in the context of Dutch art in the 17th century, he was just another painter of interiors.

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Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), Milkmaids with Cattle in a Landscape (‘The Farm at Laken’), c.1617–18, RCIN 405333

This countryside image is full of girls with rosy cheeks, plump dairy cows and a sturdy bull. There is a wheelbarrow full to the top with onions, cabbages and celery. A basket is piled so high with fruit that the girl cannot carry it by its handle, so she balances it on her head.

The artist is Sir Peter Paul Rubens. He did not have enough space to show all the richness of the Flemish landscape. After doing quite a lot of the painting he realised that the wooden panel he had chosen for it was too small. So, he added pieces of wood to the left, the top and the right edges. About seven centimetres was added on the left, and about 13 or 14 centimetres on the top and the right sides. The join shows as a slight ridge or crack along the surface of the painting.

The original composition of the painting was carefully planned. But the extra portions on the left and the right are painted much more freely – Rubens seems not as concerned about these sections compared with the area he designed in advance. In some places the does not quite work: for example, on the right-hand side the farmer riding his horse and leading another to water looks a little bit too small for that position in the painting.

Rubens was a devout Roman Catholic: he painted the Church of Our Lady of Laken in the distance – in the top right-hand corner of the original panel. Making the painting larger meant he could extend the broad, sweeping sky into a vision of Heaven with a flock of descending doves. This landscape is a message about peace and the positive effect it has. For Rubens peace was the single most important thing to hope for.

Rubens starts to paint landscapes right at the end of his career. By then he had done everything and had nothing to prove. He had bought a country house and everything that goes with being a gentleman. It seems that Rubens painted landscapes for his own pleasure: they were not for sale. This makes Rubens landscapes particularly special – it feels like they have been made with love.

Rubens is a Flemish artist, but he learned about the tradition of painting landscapes when he travelled around Italy. His work combined Italian and Flemish traditions.. The Flemish tradition started with artists like Pieter Bruegel. Bruegel’s landscapes were not simply the scenery where something was happening – they became the subject of the painting.

Rubens wanted to show as much of the land as he possibly could. Just as he had done with the Farm at Laken, Rubens also extended these two landscapes, Summer and Winter, hanging on either side of this work.

It is possible to make out the seam where pieces of canvas have been sown together – there is a ridge running along the surface, which becomes more obvious over time. It seems as though the artist could not be contained by the space that he started with, so he had to spread out and extend the canvas in order to fit in more detail and more life.

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Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) The Assumption of the Virgin, 1611–12, RCIN 405335

The shining figure of Mary, mother of Christ, is carried up into heaven – the word for being carried up like this is an ‘assumption’. She is surrounded by a whirling mass of cherubs (babies with wings) which are also called putti. The artist gives us his impression of heaven as a place that simply cannot be described – it lies outside human understanding.

This painting is not a finished work. It is a modello – a preparatory sketch in oils. It is one of two designs made by Rubens in 1611 for an altar piece in Antwerp Cathedral. Even so it looks very much like a finished work. It is particularly important because it shows how Rubens worked, which was very different from the way anybody else had worked before.

Usually preparatory sketches were drawn in black using a pen. Colour was added at the final stage which was far less important. Working in colour from the start meant that when Rubens wanted to change something, he just painted over the top. Over time some of this paint has become see-through, revealing traces of earlier designs.

For example, where the apostles are lifting up the slab over the tomb of the Virgin, looking rather surprised by the empty tomb, there is a hand in the middle of the slab. It is difficult to see whose hand it is because there is no arm to go with it. It seems that this was where St Peter’s hand used to be, but Rubens changed his mind.

Later, Rubens also changed his mind about the whole lower section. The finished painting, which is four and a half times bigger than this work, combined the top part of this sketch with the bottom section of another design which he had done at the same time.

Stop 10

Sir Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641) Christ Healing the Paralytic, c.1619, RCIN 405325

This was painted by Anthony van Dyck when he was just 20 years old. People looking at it in the 17th century would have ‘read’ the canvas from left to right, starting with the grimy faces of the two men in the left-hand corner, waiting to be healed. In front of them, looking at Jesus with eyes full of hope and thankfulness, is the hunched form of the paralysed man who has now been cured. He has got up from his bed but is still holding his frayed blanket. His shirt falls from his shoulder revealing pale skin, prominent veins and bones.

The way he is painted shows that he is ill. In the 17th century people would have also seen him as a sinful person. For them there was no difference between a person’s physical and moral condition. Behind the central figure of Jesus is an apostle. He is healthy but disapproving. He does not yet understand the miracle that has just taken place.

Putting together a scene in this way was very popular at this time. It is very much an ‘in your face’ way of painting. There is no space above or on either side of the figures. As viewers we are taken right into the middle of the scene. If feels as though we are next in the queue to meet Christ. Anthony van Dyck tells us as much about these three main characters through their hand gestures as through the expressions on their faces. The paralysed man’s hand is bent at the wrist but is opening us as the paralysis leaves his body; Christ’s healing hands reaching out; the apostle’s fingers peep out from beneath his cloak, wrapped defensively around his body.

Stop 11

Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), Self-Portrait, 1623, RCIN 400156

This self-portrait was painted by Rubens for Charles the First when he was Prince of Wales. He depicts himself as an elegant courtier. The paintings shows off his exceptional artistic skill which is exactly what it was intended to do.

Usually artists bring a face or figure to life on the flat surface of a canvas or panel by contrasting highlights and shadows. This is a technique known as modelling. But Rubens also makes an effect of three dimensions by changes in colour. Warm reds, oranges and yellows in the face make it appear closer to us than the cooler colours of the shadows and background which seem to move away from the viewer. In some areas there are unexpected touches, which are very effective. For example, there is a dark blue line that he uses to suggest a vein running from his eye towards his nose. Even though the colour is nothing like any colour found on a healthy face it does not look completely unrealistic. And underneath Rubens’s other eye, the one in shadow, there are dabs of bright coral pink. Rather than painting his eyelashes, Rubens has painted dashes of bright colour which contrast with the shadow underneath the eye. This gives the impression that the eyelashes are there without him needing to show them.

Stop 12

David Teniers the Younger (1610–90), A Kermis on St George’s Day, 1649, RCIN 405952

A banner of St George flutters in the spring breeze over a crowded tavern yard. David Teniers the Younger has painted a kermis, a service at the local church, visible in the top right-hand corner, followed by festivities at the local tavern – with a fight along the way …

There are so many people, so many different episodes, so much to look at. It’s a non-stop record of life in action.

A bagpiper looks on as two men at a crowded table in the foreground make a bet; a couple kick up their heels in an energetic dance; behind them a woman wards off the amorous advances of a leering suitor. An old man standing back from the crowd leans on his staff, looking on knowingly.

One of the strongest influences in art in Holland and in Flanders in the 17th Century, was the work of in the previous century. Pieter Bruegel the Elder had so many strings to his bow, including landscape and figure painting, but one thing that he was extremely influential in was the idea of the comic, peasant figure that could be used to tell stories. Teniers followed that tradition – he uses these different comic figures again and again in his paintings.

In the bottom right hand corner of the scene the day’s festivities have caught up with one red- capped reveller. He’s passed out, face down, on an upturned barrel; the half-empty bottle in front of him and the earthenware dish and mussel shells on the ground are evidence of a day of feasting and indulgence.

Stop 13 - PORTRAITS

Frans Hals (1580–1666), Portrait of a Man, 1630, RCIN 405349

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–69), Portrait of Agatha Bas (‘Lady with a Fan’), 1641, RCIN 405352

Rembrandt van Rijn (1606–69), Portrait of Jan Rijcksen and his Wife, Griet Jans (‘The Shipbuilder and his Wife’), 1633, RCIN 405533

Portraits can make their subjects look distant and cold, frozen in time and space. But here Rembrandt and paint a more complete picture, filling their sitters with life, character and movement.

Often the personality of someone in the painting matches the way that the artist has applied paint to the canvas. For example, in some areas of his Portrait of a Man Frans Hals gives his subject a kind of a boastfulness by applying paint so quickly that it almost flickers. To see this effect, the viewer needs to step back and look at the whole painting rather than close-up. In this way it becomes clearer what the artist is trying to do. He has used a jagged brush stroke to show movement in the sleeve. It makes his very expensive black cape appear to shine.

Rembrandt applies paint to achieve different effects. In his portrait of Jan Rijcksen and Griet Jans, she is bursting in to deliver a note to her husband, the shipbuilder. The artist suggests to us how long they have been married and how well they know each other through the wrinkles on their foreheads and hands. He uses the same technique in his portrait of Agatha Bas at her hairline. He does this using fine lines scratched with the back of a brush. They give a feeling of soft hairs around her temple.

In other places in both these portraits Rembrandt builds up the paint in dabs and piles. The painting becomes like a piece of sculpture. He uses thick lead white paint to create three dimensional forms, like an old man’s skin or a ruff, but especially the bodice worn by Agatha Bas. The threads running across it, and the jewels, look like something the viewer could actually reach out and touch.

It feels like the sitters might reach out and touch us too. The plain backgrounds push them forward and their poses make us feel like they are in our world and not just in the artist’s imagination. Frans Hals’ man is holding his right hand on his hip so that his elbow pokes out towards us. Rembrandt’s Agatha Bas holds onto the edge of a false, painted frame. It feels like if she dropped her fan, it would fall at our feet.

Stop 14

Andrea del Sarto (1486–1530) Portrait of a Woman in Yellow, c.1529–30 RCIN 404427

This painting of a woman in a billowy, yellow dress is not finished. It tells us something about the creative process of artist, . It is the first stage of an artist filling his subject with movement and life. The painting could be described as a number of layers: the bottom layer is a panel made of poplar wood, then there is a ground colour and then a sketch of the composition of the painting. This sketching is called ‘underdrawing’. It provides a guide to the artist. Here, for example, it shows where he is going to paint the creases in the skin on the woman’s neck as she turns her head slightly towards us.

When he had finished the under-drawing, del Sarto applied the first layer of coloured paint, known as imprimatura. He applied it in quite a physical way – in the largest yellow triangle in the woman’s sleeve, we can see palm prints and hand prints where the artist has worked the paint and spread it across the surface of the painting. The creases of his hand are left behind in the paint. When he had decided what the woman’s pose would be, and the position of the folds of her dress, Del Sarto left them and turned his attention to her face.

It is clear that he did a lot more work on her shirt and her face than on her sleeve. It looks like he intended to come back to the sleeve later. In fact he never came back to it. Del Sarto died, aged 44, during the second wave of a plague that swept through Florence in 1529. This unfinished portrait is a very sad sign that his life was cut short at a young age.

Stop 15

Parmigianino (1503–40) Pallas Athene, c.1531–8, RCIN 405765

This looks like a portrait of a noblewoman, but her metal breastplate and the decorated, highly polished gold brooch she is pointing to reveal who she is. On the brooch is a winged figure of Victory carrying an olive branch. Below her is a city, which seems to be Athens. And below the image of the city there is an inscription ‘Athene’. All these clues together tell us that we are looking at the Greek Goddess of wisdom, warfare and handicraft. She is also the goddess who takes care of Athens. Her name is Athena. The green material with an exposed hem, around her shoulders, is an unusual detail in a portrait of a goddess, but no doubt suggests the other activities she looks after, weaving and spinning.

Parmigianino’s red chalk drawing in preparation for this work shows he originally planned to paint Athena with more rounded features. He had already started to transfer the sketch onto this canvas using lead white paint when he also changed his mind about her pose. This can be seen in the x-ray below:

His original drawing is still there underneath the finished painting. It can be seen in an X-ray because X-rays show up areas of white paint, which contains lead. That means we can see both the drawing underneath the paint at the same time as the paint on top of it. In the finished painting Athena looks downwards more. The artist’s changes to his original ideas have made her seem more like she lost in her thoughts.

In each one of this group of three paintings it is the bright colours that attract our attention – yellow in the first, then green and, in ’s painting of the Madonna and Child, (see below) the bright blue of Mary’s cloak, a colour known as ultramarine. The pigment used for this colour was rare and expensive.

The word ultramarine means ‘from beyond the seas’. It was originally used to describe a number of different objects brought from distant places overseas, but over time it came to mean just one – the strong blue pigment extracted from a precious stone called lapis lazuli, which was mined in what is now Afghanistan.

The colours and materials available to artists in the 16th century were very limited, compared with the variety available today. Everything was made from raw, natural materials.

Boats arriving in Venice bringing bright blue chunks of lapis lazuli in their cargo had no problem finding buyers for this material. Compared to the deep blue of ultramarine, the shades of blue that artists had used before looked weak and pale. So they decided that the work needed to get ultramarine from the lapis lazuli was worth it. The rocks were ground into powder then resin, wax, gum and linseed oil were added to make a soft dough. When this was placed in a chemical solution and squeezed and pressed it released the colour. When the liquid dried up, the precious powdered pigment remained.

For many years ultramarine was used only for depictions of the Virgin Mary, but artists like Titian started to use it for non-religious subjects – for ordinary skies as well as Christian heaven. Others took this a step further. There is one particular work in this exhibition which we have already seen where ultramarine was used a lot, although it was not obvious. In The Music Lesson, Vermeer mixed ultramarine into several of his paints to create the clear light and cool shadows. He even used it in the floor tiles – a very expensive way of getting just the right shade of black.

Stop 16

Lorenzo Lotto (c.1480–1556), Portrait of Andrea Odoni, 1527, RCIN 405776

The subject of this painting is the wealthy merchant from Venice, Andrea Odoni. He fixes us firmly in his gaze. It feels like we are as much with him as he is with us.

Odoni was a well-known collector of paintings, sculpture, coins and gems. The sculptures in the paintings are copies of ancient statues that were probably in his collection. Usually when an artist paints a portrait of a collector of objects they show them looking at their collection. Here it feels like Andrea Odoni is not looking at any of the objects but is inviting us to have a conversation about them. This turns collecting objects into a sociable, communal activity rather than something done by the collector on his own.

It is unusual for a portrait of a single person to be in landscape format like this. Here the artist, , uses the format to tell us about the important of his sitter. Odoni dominates the scene. His extra-large, fur-trimmed black gown pushes his collection of sculptures right to the edges of the canvas where it meets the frame.

Actually the painting and the frame have been together for a long time. The painting was certainly in this frame by 1700. The delicate repeated pattern of acanthus leaf and flowers in is inspired by a French design. It is a pattern seen on other paintings in the Royal Collection.

Another frame in the exhibition which must be seen is around Filippo Lauri’s Jacob Fleeing Laban, just before the exit. The picture below shows four clear rows of delicate carving.

Inside the middle hollow of the frame there is a carved ornament against a black background. Conservation work done 8 or 10 years ago uncovered this black ground and the wavy leaf ornament inside. It is a very detailed design, and the carving is of outstanding quality.

Stop 17

Guido Reni (1575–1642) Cleopatra with the Asp, c.1628, RCIN 405338

In this painting Cleopatra, Queen of Egypt, holds a poisonous snake – an asp. It has been smuggled to her in the basket of shining fruit in the shadows to her left. In these final moments of her life, as the asp is about to bite and inject the poison that will kill her, the Queen raises her eyes to heaven and stretches out a hand as if she is praying.

There is a wonderful contrast of colour here. Her face, nose, cheeks and lips, the tips of her fingers and her palm are still tinged with pink as is the edge of her shoulder. But her chest, neck and the rest of her hands seem to be turning a shade of green, which looks rather like marble. Here we are seeing a change, from life to death, or from flesh to stone.

The artist is . He uses tight brushstrokes to give Cleopatra’s skin a smooth, dull appearance which contrasts with the shining surface of her teardrop pearl earring and the scales of the squirming snake. The fabrics around her seem frozen and solid.

Stop 18

Claude Lorrain (1604/5–1682), Harbour Scene at Sunset, 1643, RCIN 401382

As the sun sets over the sea, the artist takes us on a journey to a Mediterranean harbour at the end of a hot summer’s day.

The lightest part of this painting is the bright white sun, setting just above the horizon. The white turns slowly into a hazy yellow which becomes a light blue and then a much darker blue. The architecture in the distance is grey and misty but even so there is a surprising amount of detail. On the other hand, the architecture in the foreground is picking up sunlight. It appears to be a shade of orange and the light has a sparkle, so that even the areas where the building has started to crumble away pick up the light in a clear and attractive way.

His style was often imitated by other artists, and also by forgers, so Claude (which is how he is known in English) kept track of his paintings by listing them in a book known as Liber Veritatis or ‘Book of Truth’. This book is now in the . Keeping a record meant that Claude’s customers could ask him to make another version of an earlier work which they liked. The original painting of this scene, listed in the Liber Veritatis, is now lost, but this version shows how Claude’s careful observation could stir up memories and make people think – something his imitators did not often manage to do.

Stop 19

Canaletto (1697–1768), The Bacino di San Marco on Ascension Day, 1733–4 RCIN 404417

This is Canaletto’s Ascension Day – or Festa della Sensa – in the Basin of San Marco at the entrance to Venice’s Grand Canal. The highly decorated red and gold boat, the Bucintoro, has just come back from the Adriatic Sea where the ruler of Venice has thrown a ring into the water as a symbol of the marriage between Venice and the sea. Eager spectators (including a few wearing carnival dress – a white mask and black cape) look on from gondolas or are crammed onto balconies. Right at the top of the Bell Tower a man views the scene through a telescope. Canaletto started his career in the theatre as a set painter. We can see echoes of his stage sets in many of his paintings, for example, in the way that he arranges his figures, which is very theatrical. He also changed some of the features of buildings in the background. This is not how these buildings in Venice actually looked. Instead Canaletto played around with their details to make them fit his composition.

There are often small indentations on his buildings where the artist cut into the wet paint, to reflect light or to mark out the positions of windows. We can also see compass points, from where he has used a compass to draw the round arches of the window frames. And just like there is in so many of Canaletto’s paintings there is a rich blue sky. It provides a contrast to the reflections in the water. It would also have been particularly attractive to the type of people who were buying his paintings – British Grand Tourists who visited Venice and wanted to take home a souvenir of the wonderful time that they had enjoyed in the city. They would be able to display these paintings at home in Britain, where the skies outside were not quite so blue.

We have now reached the end of our tour. We hope that, as you’ve explored the rooms of the exhibition, you have been drawn into the different worlds of the paintings and that you have decided which of them that you think are ‘Masterpieces’.

To find out more about works of art in the Royal Collection, please visit our website at www.rct.uk. There you can find out about future exhibitions and keep in touch by signing up to our e-Newsletter or by following us on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

If you have bought your ticket directly from us, you can return to The Queen’s Gallery, free of charge, for a year, by converting your ticket into a 1-Year Pass. Just sign the back and ask a member of staff to stamp it before you leave.

We hope you have enjoyed the exhibition.

When you have finished, please return this guide at the desk.

This script has been compiled from a tour produced by ATS with information from the following experts from Royal Collection Trust: Desmond Shawe-Taylor, Isabella Manning, Anna Reynolds, Alex Buck, Rosie Razzall and Claire Shepherd.