Art Review | 'Rome After Raphael'

A Window Into the Turbulence of 16th-Century Rome

By KAREN ROSENBERG
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
January 29, 2010

Early in the 16th century Rome and Florence were locked in a heated rivalry. Florence had the Medicis, or what was left of them; Rome was in ruins — it had been sacked in 1527 — but it had the papacy, and with it the promise of rebuilding. The best artists were frequently caught in between.

That contest is now playing out at two New York museums. The Met has a magnificent survey of drawings by the Florentine mannerist Bronzino, and the Morgan Museum & Library has unveiled “Rome After Raphael,” a show of some 80 Italian drawings from its collection.


Morgan Library & Museum

Giulio Clovio’s illuminated manuscript the “Farnese Hours,” with “The Crucifixion of Christ” and “Moses and the Brazen Serpent.”

The Morgan’s exhibition is the clear underdog — the Met’s Bronzino includes rare loans and new attributions — but it covers a lot of ground. The show moves, in fits and starts, from the High Renaissance to Mannerism and the nascent Baroque.

And it’s enlivened by a competition of its own: the classic match-up of Raphael versus Michelangelo. Drawings by both artists, and their followers, pit Raphael’s sprezzatura, or relaxed refinement, against Michelangelo’s vein-popping muscularity.

A sketch after Michelangelo’s “David,” made shortly before Raphael left Florence for Rome, transforms the hero into an ancient caryatid. He holds a stone in his palm, but also supports a vessel on his head. His pose, angular in the sculpture, becomes one long, gentle curve.

Another Raphael drawing, of a male figure symbolizing an earthquake, is a study for a set of tapestries in the Sistine Chapel. Here the artist, perhaps mindful of the competition on the ceiling, adopted a brawnier and more vigorous style. The effect is disconcerting, especially when you think about the subject matter.


Morgan Library & Museum

A sketch by Michelangelo of David and Goliath.

Also in Raphael’s camp is Parmigianino, who enjoyed just three years in Rome before the sacking forced him and other artists to flee to the countryside. In his characteristically wispy drawing after Michelangelo’s “Pietà,” the Virgin wilts over her son. It’s easy to see why Vasari referred to Parmigianino as “Raphael reborn.”

The show includes only two drawings by Michelangelo: a hefty “Annunciation” in black chalk and a more casual page of sketches of David and Goliath. But you can see some of his other compositions ably handled by his followers, Giulio Clovio and Daniele da Volterra. Clovio’s study of Michelangelo’s “Dream of Human Life” surrounds a nude youth with vignettes of vice: gluttony, greed, sloth and so on. Michelangelo’s original, in the Courtauld, is thought to have been a gift for the young nobleman and object of his affection, Tommaso Cavalieri.

“Rome After Raphael” was organized by Rhoda Eitel-Porter, a curator and head of the drawings and prints department at the Morgan. The show has no catalog, but there is plenty of information on the walls and at the museum’s Web site, http://themorgan.org.

Just as interesting as the constant one-upmanship of Rome’s artists is the fact that the city was newly flush with sacred and secular capital. Free-spending popes and bankers employed large numbers of artists as they rebuilt the city, after Charles V’s depredations, in the image of its antiquarian glory.


Morgan Library & Museum

Giulio Clovio's study of Michelangelo's “Dream of Human Life.”

Among the many classically themed works at the Morgan is a fascinating manuscript by the French artist Étienne Dupérac, which pairs drawings of Roman ruins with imagined reconstructions. The album (dated 1569-75) is thought to have been made as a gift for Pope Gregory XIII.

Few projects were more lavish than the Villa Farnese, the country home of, as the Romans called him, Gran Cardinale Alessandro Farnese and a benchmark of Late Mannerism. Farnese commissioned the Zuccaro brothers, Taddeo and Federico, to paint extravagant and highly illusionistic frescoes. The Morgan owns several of their studies, which are fluid (Taddeo) and feverish (Federico).

Farnese also commissioned, from Giulio Clovio, a spectacular illuminated manuscript known as the “Farnese Hours.” The Morgan owns this too and has opened it to a folio that shows the Crucifixion on the left and an image of Moses and the Brazen Serpent on the right. Both are based on works by Michelangelo.

The Protestant Reformation and the Counter-Reformation also brought numerous artistic commissions, as styles changed to suit evolving definitions of piety. On view alongside the drawings are two indulgences, granted by Popes Julius II and Leo X; one has a blank space left for the purchaser’s name.

Among the sketches for portentous biblical scenes are lighter and more expressive figure and nature studies. Consider the pair of resting cows drawn by Raphael’s follower Polidoro da Caravaggio, or the head of a curly-bearded man by Francesco Salviati.

Many other works of similar vivacity appear in the final and most enjoyable section of the show. Here drawings by Annibale Carracci and Giuseppe Cesari edge Late Mannerism into the Baroque.

Carracci’s “Eroded Riverbank With Trees and Roots” anticipates the naturalism of 17th-century Dutch landscapes. But it’s his “Flying Putto,” a dimple-kneed cherub swiftly rendered in black chalk, that leaves papal pomp and circumstance in the dust.

Cesari’s charming “Portrait of a Lady Holding a Book,” which dates from around 1588, could pass for a Watteau. And the figures in his “Expulsion of Adam and Eve From Paradise” aren’t really leaving Eden; they’re saying good riddance to the tumult of 16th-century Rome.

“Rome After Raphael” continues through May 9 at the Morgan Library & Museum, 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street; (212) 685-0008, http://themorgan.org.