Jean-Luc Baroni Lucian Freud: A Walk to the Office (no. 55 ), actual size JEAN-LUC BARONI PAINTINGS SCULPTURES DRAWINGS 2014 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am very grateful to Alexandra Chaldecott and Joanna Watson for their dedication in researching and writing this catalogue. Christopher Apostle, Francesca Baldassari, Jean-Marc Baroni, my son Pietro Baroni, Antonio Berni, Giuseppe Bertini, Anna Bozena Kowalczyk, Christina Buley-Uribe, Suzanna Caviglia, Hugo Chapman, Martin Clayton, Pierre Etienne, Chris Fischer, Saverio Fontini, Daniel Greiner, Neil Jeffares, Paul Joannides, Mattia Jona, Annemarie Jordan Gschwend, Neil Jeffares, William Jordan, Francesco Leone, Laurie and Emmanuel Marty de Cambiaire, Laetitia Masson, Alessandro Morandotti, Ekaterina Orekhova, Anna Ottani Cavina, Francesco Petrucci, Anna Reynolds, Aileen Ribeiro, Jane Roberts, Clare Robertson, Cristiana Romalli, Annalisa Scarpa, Paul Taylor and the Warburg Institute, Cinzia Virno, Emanuele Volpi, Joanna Woodall, Selina Woodruff-Van der Geest, Tiziana Zennaro. Last but not least, I am also very grateful to my wife Cristina for her unrelenting patience and for her continued help and support. Jean-Luc Baroni All enquiries should be addressed to Jean-Luc Baroni at Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., 7/8 Mason’s Yard, Duke Street, St. James’s, London, SW1Y 6BU. Tel: +44 (20) 7930-5347 e-mail: [email protected] © Copyright Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., 2014 Designed by Saverio Fontini - Printed in Italy by Viol’Art – Florence – email: [email protected] renze.it 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am very grateful to Alexandra Chaldecott and Joanna Watson for their dedication in researching and writing this catalogue. Christopher Apostle, Francesca Baldassari, Jean-Marc Baroni, my son Pietro Baroni, Antonio Berni, Giuseppe Bertini, Anna Bozena Kowalczyk, Christina Buley-Uribe, Suzanna Caviglia, Hugo Chapman, Martin Clayton, Pierre Etienne, Chris Fischer, Saverio Fontini, Daniel Greiner, Neil Jeffares, Paul Joannides, Mattia Jona, Annemarie Jordan Gschwend, Neil Jeffares, William Jordan, Francesco Leone, Laurie and Emmanuel Marty de Cambiaire, Laetitia Masson, Alessandro Morandotti, Ekaterina Orekhova, Anna Ottani Cavina, Francesco Petrucci, Anna Reynolds, Aileen Ribeiro, Jane Roberts, Clare Robertson, Cristiana Romalli, Annalisa Scarpa, Paul Taylor and the Warburg Institute, Cinzia Virno, Emanuele Volpi, Joanna Woodall, Selina Woodruff-Van der Geest, Tiziana Zennaro. Last but not least, I am also very grateful to my wife Cristina for her unrelenting patience and for her continued help and support. PAINTINGS Jean-Luc Baroni All enquiries should be addressed to Jean-Luc Baroni at Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., 7/8 Mason’s Yard, Duke Street, St. James’s, London, SW1Y 6BU. Tel: +44 (20) 7930-5347 e-mail: [email protected] © Copyright Jean-Luc Baroni Ltd., 2014 Designed by Saverio Fontini - Printed in Italy by Viol’Art – Florence – email: [email protected] renze.it 4 5 MASTER OF THE FEMALE HALF-LENGTHS Antwerp, first half of the 16th Century 1 The Virgin and Child Oil on panel. 38 x 30 cms. (15 x 11 ¾ in). This beautifully preserved panel painting is an exceptional example of the work of an artist or workshop so far not precisely identified but clearly recognisable on the basis of style and quality. Other examples can be seen in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, the Metropolitan Museum, New York, the National Gallery, London, the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam and the Art Institute, Chicago, amongst other collections. Max Friedlander, the historian of Netherlandish Art, believed the artist or artists to have been active in Antwerp or possibly Mechelen during the 1520s and 1530s; he analysed the figure style as being close to Bernart van Orley and where there are landscapes, likened them to Joachim Patinier’s1. More recently, the similarity has been noted with the works given to Ambrosius Benson, who is sometimes thought to have had workshops in two different cities, Antwerp and Bruges and who equally had a successful career producing refined panels on a domestic scale. The nomenclature is based on a specific group of panels depicting aristocratic ladies in half-length scenes, often interiors, reading, writing or playing musical instruments, while others shown with a jar, the attribute of Mary Magdalen. The present picture belongs to a group of representations of the Virgin and Child, some as here, focused entirely on the figures and others in broader, landscape settings. The artist shows great delicacy in the treatment of drapery and hair; here the voluminous folds of the red robe contrast with the minute and subtle detailing of the veil on the Virgin’s head and the border of fur at her neck, while rolling waves of hair flow over her shoulder towards the almost luminescent pallor of the Christ Child’s short curls and alabaster skin. Echoes and borrowings from other Netherlandish artists have been frequently noted and in the case of the Virgin and Child compositions, the inspiration often comes from Rogier van der Weyden. These references are deliberately sophisticated underlining the cultivated atmosphere of the paintings coming from this studio. Friedlander considered the so-called Master of the Female Half-Lengths to be one of the most successful of the generation working alongside the “giants” such as Quentin Massys and Joos van Cleve. He remarks, however, upon the total absence of clues to aid identification of the hand, neither signatures nor monograms, inscriptions nor recorded commissions, although the Madonnas have a trademark in the small round metal or gold button which secures the Virgin’s robe, as here. It would appear that much of the work - around one hundred paintings have been attributed to this workshop - was sent to Spain for the hungry market there2 and given the relatively small scale of the panels and their refinement it may be presumed that they were made particularly for secular collectors and patrons of the arts. 6 7 ALONSO SANCHEZ COELLO Valencia 1531-1588 Madrid 2 Portrait of a Young Noblewoman wearing Fine Jewels and a Black Dress with Gold Embroidery in the form of Wheatsheaves and a High White Ruff Collar. Oil on panel. 35.2 x 25.3 cms. (13 ¾ x 10 in.) PROVENANCE: The Farnese Collection of the Dukes of Parma and Piacenza, the panel bears the wax seal of Ranuccio II Farnese (1630-1694) and four inventory numbers, one in red wax: I55, the second in grey-white oil: 472, a third in black: LB #43 and the fourth: 265 in thinner black. Recorded in the circa 1680 inventory of the Farnese collections in the Palazzo del Giardino in Parma as being in the “Camera di Venere del Cantone”: Un quadro alto oncie otto, largo oncie cinque e tre quarti in tavola. Una testa di donna giovine con ornato di gioie e perle, frappa al collo, vestita di nero con ricamo, di Mano Fiamenga n.1551. Private collection, France, M. Pontremoli (according to a label on the back of the old frame), possibly Emanuel Pontremoli, (1865-1956), French architect and archeologist and director of the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts, married to Suzanne Hecht). Born near Valencia, Sánchez Coello was educated in Portugal under the care of his grandfather who worked in the service of King Joao III. At the age of about twenty, having attracted the attention of the King, he was sent to Flanders to train in the studio of Anthonis Mor. He returned to Portugal in 1552, with Mor, when the latter was commissioned by Charles V to paint the various members of the Portuguese Royal family. Sánchez Coello stayed on in Lisbon after Mor’s departure working for the court until, in 1555, he moved to the old Castillan capital, Valladolid, in the service of Juana (1535-1573), sister to Philip II and widow of Joao, son and heir of Joao III, who had died after falling off his horse in 1554). In 1551, Charles V had decreed the succession, passing the Habsburg monarchy to his brother Ferdinand and the Spanish throne to his son Philip II. Infanta Juana was made Regent of Spain by Philip II when he left to marry Mary Tudor in 1554, with whom he reigned jointly in England until her death in 1558. After Philip II returned and when Mor left Spain definitively in 1560, Sánchez Coello took his place as Court Painter, Pintor de Cámera, as recommended by the Infanta Juana. He followed the King from Toledo to Madrid, which he, Philip, was in the process of permanently establishing as the Spanish capital. Sánchez Coello lived in the Casa del Tesoro and enjoyed status and favour, as well as a considerable fortune. Philip II became godfather to two of his children and granted him a position and influence greater than that of any other contemporary artist. As well as being a portrait painter, he was responsible for many of the numerous religious paintings commissioned by the King for the various new Royal palaces and churches. Interestingly, as Jonathan Brown has pointed out, his religious work sometimes lacks “the immediacy and incisiveness of his images of individual persons…” but in his altarpieces for the basilica of the Escorial, he effected a “remarkable synthesis between the divine and the human” by appearing to use real or at least very naturalistic men for his saints clothed in rich vestments, “a striking departure” and one that would be “an inspiration to the next generation of Spanish artists”2. Philip II was an avid patron of the arts, who like his father had depended upon Mor for representations of himself and his family but had also adopted Titian as a form of Court painter abroad. Sánchez Coello easily inherited Mor’s mantle and brought his own distinctive qualities to royal portraiture. Coello studied the works of Titian, which he encountered in the collections of both Charles V and Philip II, and while his precision of technique and exceptional skill at representing faces, cloth and jewels came initially from Mor, he himself developed a greater realism and an intensity of colour, in part through appreciation of the Venetian master.