At the Frick, Another Reunion for Long-Lost Siblings
By ROBERTA SMITH
The New York Times
Published: October 7, 2006
“Cimabue and Early Italian Devotional Painting”runs through Dec. 31 at the Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street, Manhattan; (212) 288-0700.
Things happen when talent travels. So it was in New York in the late 1930’s and early 40’s, when the Surrealists fled war-torn Europe and helped speed the development of Abstract Expressionism. Or even in the 1590’s, when the Japanese overlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi, on the warpath in Korea, forcibly relocated whole villages of Korean potters to Japan, ensuring his country’s greatness in ceramics.
And so it was, too, sometime in 12th- or 13th-century Florence, when, according to Giorgio Vasari, the city fathers, distressed by an evident dearth of gifted local painters, summoned artists trained in the Byzantine style, and their presence contributed to the early stages of the Italian Renaissance. That at least is how it looks in “Cimabue and Early Italian Devotional Painting,” a jewel-box exhibition at the Frick Collection, organized by Holly Flora, a former curatorial fellow at the Frick and now curator at the Museum of Biblical Art in Manhattan.
Cimabue (about 1240-1302) is one of the Big Three — with Duccio and Giotto — who laid the groundwork for the early Italian Renaissance. His name is as weighty as it is mysterious, partly because so few of his works survive. This tiny exhibition makes his greatness crystal clear. At its center are two small works newly attributed to him, “The Flagellation of Christ,” which the Frick acquired in 1950, and “The Virgin and Child Enthroned With Two Angels,” a recently discovered work that is now in the collection of the National Gallery in London.
The Cimabues are teamed with four other small works, all from local museums. But there is plenty to look at, not the least because each involves multiple images. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has lent a triptych by a Florentine contemporary of Cimabue, known only as the Magdalen Master, and a diptych by Pacino di Bonaguida, a younger follower, also represented by four images on vellum from the Morgan Library and Museum.
The Met has also sent over a beautiful little reliquary diptych whose images are reverse glass paintings in gold and black. They all fit perfectly into the Frick’s small Cabinet Gallery, which is, aptly, the size of a private chapel.
The ensemble conspires to give us a narrow, concentrated view of a turning point in art and religion. It pinpoints a time when the use of Gothic gold was dwindling, one-point perspective was imminent, and artists were approaching a greater range of subjects with a greater degree of naturalism. A more personal kind of worship was on the rise too, one that encouraged the faithful to re-experience the suffering of Jesus’ life less as a path to heaven than to humility on earth. This suffering had to be made real, which is where naturalism came in.
The Frick show is the culmination of a series of recent events that unfolded at a dizzying rate. Previously unknown to scholars, “The Virgin and Child Enthroned” emerged in 2000 from a British private collection, headed for auction. Inklings that it might be a Cimabue quickly emerged. The panel was brought to New York for a side-by-side inspection with the Frick’s similarly small “Flagellation,” where its Cimabue-ness firmed up, as did that of the Frick panel, whose attribution had been cloudy for decades. (Caught between pro-Cimabue and pro-Duccio camps, each led by prominent scholars, the Frick had until recently diplomatically stuck with “Tuscan School” since 1968.)
The two little panels matched in wood and paint composition, in the little pinpricks in their gold backgrounds (defining halos), in their nearly identical measurements. Even the hinge marks and the intermittent red borders agreed. Most important, they were stylistically of a piece, so much so that it seemed likely that they were from the same altarpiece.
Suddenly the world had not one but two new widely agreed-upon Cimabue panels, pushing to six, or maybe eight, a number that had previously hovered between four and six. “The Virgin and Child” was diverted from auction with help from the British government, partly in lieu of estate taxes. Over the last two years the panels have been reunited in exhibitions in London and Pisa, and now it is New York’s turn. It seems doubtful that they will be together again anytime soon.
So savor their mutually illuminating beauty and commonalities while you can, starting with the noticeably sad, noble, carefully shadowed faces of the enthroned Madonna and the adult Jesus, who both look directly toward the viewer, full of tragic foreknowledge. Take in the delicate gestures of flanking figures, whether the angels beside the Virgin’s throne, or the two whip-wielding tormentors in “The Flagellation.”
There are telling details, like the foliate carvings on the Virgin’s throne and the balustrade in the middle ground of “The Flagellation,” or the transparent textiles; the one on which the Virgin sits foretells the one serving as Jesus’ loincloth in “The Flagellation.”
Other garments add atmosphere: the skillfully diaphanous angels’ robes, bordered in a white-on-black-on red geometric pattern, have a regularity that is as reassuring as the asymmetry of the tormentors’ bright clothes is not.
In both these paintings Cimabue zeroes in on an emotional instant that seems to encompass real time, as Giotto did after him. The angels touch the throne as if gently sliding it forward like a gift; the tormentors are prepared to strike.
But the more abstract, shared majesty of space and scale is just as important, as is the way the central figure commands each panel, anchored to something greater that is both worldly and not. In “The Flagellation,” the column to which Jesus is tied bisects the panel from top to bottom. The chassis of the Madonna’s throne is an arching empty hemisphere, suggesting both a basilica and the globe.
The Magdalen Master’s triptych and di Bonaguida’s diptych provide a fascinating before and after for the Cimabues. You may have come across the triptych in the medieval galleries at the Met, but probably not displayed so close-up, or so well lighted. Suggesting an artist made giddy by the attractions of Byzantine formality and the possibilities of naturalism, it is packed with pictorial and narrative events.
The triptych centers on a Madonna and Child Enthroned, surrounded by smaller scenes that culminate in a depiction of Christ in Majesty. He sits before a handsomely striped mandorla edged by an undulating, ribbonlike pink band; both motifs evoke the Ravenna mosaics. The Last Supper, with Judas in a black halo, includes an extraordinarily elaborate repast, including several detailed renderings of knives. A flagellation scene features a tautly twisted white column. In short, this painting is a blast, stoked by a palette limited to gold, white, pink, red and a (by now) blackish blue.
Di Bonaguida’s relatively sedate diptych mainly shows how quickly Cimabue’s influence spread. Yet he comes very close to the master’s emotional and compositional clarity in the works on vellum here. The Morgan manuscript, “Scenes From the Life of Christ,” is without a text. It is temporarily unbound, which is why you can see four images at once. Each image fills a page: a Flagellation, a Mocking of Christ, a Crucifixion and a Lamentation.
The colors are eye-poppingly fresh, especially a nearly fluorescent orange that is distributed judiciously among shades of blue, green and pink — except in the Crucifixion scene, where its absence seems appropriate. Throughout, the figures have a wonderful, slightly rubbery liveliness and stubby, comic-book hands. In the last image the mountains that rise behind the mourners are pale green and pronged; they echo the beseeching hands of the Mary Magdalen.
Together these works highlight the radical simplicity and directness of Cimabue’s art, without letting it completely steal the show.
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