Raphael to Renoir
Candy box displays like “Raphael to Renoir: Drawings from the Collection of Jean Bonna”at the Metropolitan Museum are natural crowd pleasers: They’re very much about comparison shopping and personal taste. History is here if you want to find it; but if you don’t, that’s O.K. Enjoy.
“Study of a Young Woman Viewed in Full Length, Her Right Arm Resting on a Plinth,” by Francois Boucher, 1761.
The Met exhibition starts with an ink wash image of a praying man by Vittore Carpaccio. With its pooled darkness and springy lines, it is substantial, bold without being a tour-de-force. In it, three fundamental properties of drawing meet: material fragility, calligraphic propulsion, and painterly, even sculptural weight.
The show has other memorable examples of drawing-as-writing, such as Parmigianino’s “Holy Family with Shepherd’s and Angels.” In a catalog interview, Mr. Bonna says that Parmigianino is one of his favorites though on the whole he appears to favor more a resolved, painting-like solidity of form.
A red chalk study of Raphael of three running, shouting soldiers straddles the line between drawing and painting.
But in a pair of pastel portraits of rosy-cheeked children by Jean-Simeon Chardin, there is no line. This is painting, pure and simple.
And in a few we approach the realm of sculpture. Look at a masterfully shaped and shaded 15th-century drawing of a man in a turban, now attributed to an unnamed artist in Giovanni Bellini’s circle, and you are as likely to think clay and marble as ink and chalk, the media actually used.
“Coastal Landscape with a Battle on a Bridge,” circa 1655, by Claude Lorrain.
Mr. Bonna has picked up some fine landscapes: the show has three Claude Lorrain pastorales, and a precision-tooled view of London architecture by Canaletto. But the image of figure, human or otherwise, is the collection’s bottom line.
In some cases, the context is religious. The head of a young woman ravishingly drawn by by Federico Barocci comes under this category. She’s as cool as a Piero della Francesco Madonna but with real blood in her veins.
Her portrait is one of several in the show, some identifiable as such, some not. We know that the sitter in a remarkable childhood portrait by Francois Clouet is the future French king Francois II. At age twelve, he already looks like the world-weary adult he would never grow to be. In 1559, a few years after the portrait was made, he ascended the throne. A year later he died, still in his teens.
Then there are likenesses of real-life, ordinary people who come with no recorded histories or names. A woman with a dispepsic expression in a drawing by Jean-Baptiste Greuze is one; whether she’s reacting to a lifetime of disappointment or one bad meal we can’t know.
In Watteau’s colored chalk drawings of three female heads, many things come together: drawing, painting, writing, reality, fantasy, sweetness and something else. It’s the something else —perishablity maybe; the idea that you could crumple these things up and toss them away — that gives drawing its peculiar distinction as a medium, and turns even a dessert tray of a show into a nourishing meal. N.Y. Times
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September 8th, 2010
Thank you! I just today admired a Greuze drawing in Vinna In the Albertina and I was happy to be able to see a similar one on the Internet. Gorgeous art.
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