'Florence' exhibition at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich

The big exhibition in the world of early Renaissance art at the moment is 'Florence and its Painters' at the Alte Pinakothek in Munich. The National Gallery can make a claim to that title with its Bellini and Mantegna exhibition but the Pinakothek wins for the sheer number of extraordinary exhibits and the range of artists represented. Sub-titled 'From Giotto to Leonardo' provides the scope of the artists featured in the exhibition and there are paintings, statues, drawings, books and reconstructed altarpieces. There is a record number of works by Fra Angelico with 11 paintings and three drawings, panels by Giotto, paintings and drawings by Domenico Ghirlandaio and his brother Davide, Donatello, works by Fra Filippo Lippi and by Filipino Lippi, Botticelli, Verrocchio and Leondardo and a host of other Florentine artists. The range of exhibits is quite astonishing with excellent labels and explanatory notes in German and English.

The earliest works are a mere 700 years old and are three small panels by Giotto: the Last Supper, the Crucifixion and Christ saving the souls from Limbo (with Adam and Eve at the front of the queue to get out of Limbo). I'm always astonished that small paintings that old have somehow managed to survive over the centuries and retain much of their colour - that is a great tribute to artistry of the masters' workshops and the skills of the craftsmen who mixed the paints for their masters, prepared the panels or cleaned the brushes. We'll never know their names but an artist of Giotto's stature had a good sized workshop to help him in his endeavours. The downside to seeing these panels is that they're displayed in what is effectively a corridor which is busy so there's not the comfort or convenience to really look at them undisturbed.

Also in the corridor are a group of six paintings by Agnolo Gaddi, two large life-sized paintings of St Nicholas of Bari and St Julian. The more interesting is St Nicholas, the forefather of Father Christmas and Santa Claus. Nicholas gave three bags of gold anonymously to the three daughters of his neighbour to provide them with a dowry and prevent their father selling them into prostitution. That was his first kindly act on his long journey into sainthood. Isn't it odd how stories start? The other small panel shows St Nicholas saving a ship at sea during a storm.

Various artists at the time and later tackled the stories around St Nicholas (there is a panel Fra Angelico in the Vatican Museums with the same story of saving a ship) but I quite liked this version by Gaddi and it works well in the context of the exhibition - Giotto worked at the start of the 1300s and Gaddi towards the end of the century, so he makes a nice springboard into the works from the 1400s which make up the majority of the exhibition.

The next room is full of the wonders of Fra Angelico and Fra Filippo Lippi as well as others, roughly contemporary but with very different approaches to life and art. Despite being a friar Filippo fathered his son, Filipino Lippi, on a Dominican nun whose name we don't know. That doesn't mean he hasn't created some wonderful art.

The first painting in the room is the gorgeous Virgin & Child with it's rich cloth of gold background partially obscuring the Roman columns of the room within while the Virgin looks at her child serenely and the child offers the viewer a blessing. I've loved this painting since I first saw it at an exhibition in Paris in 2011, the gorgeous rich blues and reds of the Virgin's clothes and the passive, almost glowing child, gazing out at the viewer. It really is a wonder. The other paintings and drawings by Fra Angelico are arranged around a reproduction of the former high altarpiece at San Marco in Florence and are included elsewhere in this blog.

A really nice touch is that there is also a small panel by Benozzo Gozzoli near the Fra's paintings - Gozzoli was a pupil and assistant to the Fra who became a master in his own right and he painted the walls of the private chapel of the Medicis in their palace in Florence. On the opposite wall is a small Annunciation painting by Zenobi Strozzi who was also thought to have worked in the workshop of Fra Angelico (although with less documented proof than with Gozzoli). Here's Gozzoli's small predella panel of 'St Zenobius Resuscitating a Dead Child'.

Moving round the room you come to a lovely, delicate 'Annunciation' by Fra Filippo Lippi with the angel Gabriel kneeling before the Virgin while, up in the top left-hand corner we see God the Father channelling his energies through a dove to represent the Holy Spirit and straight down to the Virgin, the moment of conception. Gabriel holds the stem of a lily for purity and the Virigin has just got up from reading a book. Look at the detail of the house and garden, with Filippo practicing his skills at the new-fangled thing called perspective. It's quite a large painting and is dated at around 1444 so other painters had already made inroads into naturalism and perspective. Filippo doesn't sound like someone who followed 'the rules' and his addition of God to the scene and the setting in a well-to-do house would probably have been quite dramatic at the time.

Further round the room you find three paintings of the Virgin and Child by Fra Filippo Lippi from different periods in his career. Two are hung on the walls and one is in a glass case so you can see the drawing of a face on the back of the painting. The earliest painting uses the cloth of gold motif as a screen behind the Virgin while the mid-period painting has a landscape, an emerging skill for artists at the time. The third one uses a conch shell as the background, showing that classical Roman influences were taking hold.

The main room is full of treasures, with a painting of the Virgin & Child by Leonardo da Vinci almost hidden amongst the wealth or wonderful art. There are drawings by Pollaiuolo, bronzes by Donatello, paintings by Filipino Lippi (the son of Lippi senior), Botticelli, Lorenzo di Credi, Botticini, Domenico and Davide Ghirlandaio, Fra Bartolomeo and others. I mean, wow! It's not quite like being in the Uffizi but this is pretty close. I suppose the only real omission was anything by Michelangelo but you can't have everything and I suppose he really belongs to the 1500s. It was actually quite exciting wandering around this large room and finding wonder after wonder with no idea what you might stumble upon next.

Another reconstructed altar was that of Santa Maria Novella in Florence with the large painted altarpiece and two side panels by Domenico Ghirlandaio. I've marvelled at his frescos in that church and was delighted to see a rough drawing of one scene in the frescos showing the birth of the Virgin, but I'd never seen the large, main painting before, showing the Virgin and Child enthroned with saints and angels.

Here we see Saints Dominic, Michael, John the Baptist and Thomas below the Virgin and Child, St Dominic since Santa Maria Novella was and is a Dominican church. Santa Maria Novella is one of the great churches of Florence and it's a delight to see what would've been behind the high altar all those years ago.

A bit further into the exhibition, in the section covering the rise of portraiture in Florence (influenced by the great paintings of the Northern Renaissance) are two paintings of young ladies, one by Davide Ghirlandaio and one by Domenico Ghirlandaio. The brothers worked together in Domenico's workshop. I've only ever seen paintings by Davide in the Academia in Florence and I wasn't all that impressed so it was really nice to see these two small portraits side by side and not be able to tell who painted which. Clearly, there's more to Davide to explore.

The last painting in the exhibition (or, at least, the last big one in the final room) is a strangely surprising 'Lamentation" by Botticelli that has been restored especially for this exhibition. It's a big, almost life-sized painting with colours that glow (my photo doesn't do it justice).

There's none of the frivolity or playfulness of his earlier paintings, this is full-on religious, serious art.  Look at that composition, with everyone at an angle other than St Paul who stands upright, representing the true church. The thing that really caught my eye was the detail of grass curling around the toes and drapery, individual blades of grass, not just generic green foreground. And the body of the dead Christ almost glowing against the black of the Virgin's cloak. This is a very clever piece of art with a very serious subject for an altarpiece. Earlier in the exhibition we see Botticelli's 'Adoration of the Magi' which is a very different work, with his fops and dandies showing off their clothes and tights to best effect. This is most definitely a later piece by a man who's lived, loved and experienced pain.

I was really blown away by this exhibition. Such a great concept, such great works of art and something that must've taken years to put together, getting agreements to the loans and the conditions around the loans. I suspect something like 3-5 years has gone into planning and delivering this exhibition and I must congratulate everyone involved. It really is astonishing. Now that the Alte Pinakothek is on my radar for exhibitions I'll be keeping a watchful eye on whatever it does next. Thank you.

And, just because I can, here's the lovely 'Annunciation' by Zenobi Strozzi with Gabriel dressed in Fra Angelico pink.

'Botticelli Reimagined' at the Victoria & Albert Museum

On Friday afternoon I trotted off to the eagerly awaited new Botticelli exhibition at the V&A in South Kensington. I first heard about it about a year ago, so it's been a long-time coming. It's another one of those 'here's a painting by the artist and here are some more he influenced' type of exhibitions but we were also promised lots of Botticelli's so I'm okay with that.

The exhibition is in three parts. Firstly, very modern works that have been inspired by Botticelli, then a section on the Pre-Raphaelites that helps to 're-discover' Botticelli in the 1800s, and finally a large display of Botticelli paintings (and those of his workshop) and drawings. The latter was, for me, the highlight since that's what I wanted to see.

I found the first section rather unappealing. It didn't seem to be so much about the influence of Botticelli, more about people doing their own versions of 'The Birth of Venus' and 'Primavera'. To be fair, the title of the exhibition is 'reimagined', but it's still mainly these two iconic paintings.

We see snatches of film, paintings and prints, photographs recreating 'Venus' and even Dolce & Gabbana dresses made with 'Venus' printed cloth. Um, ok. Some of it was very meh and some at least made me do a double-take to check what I was actually looking at, but now of it made me go wow. There was nothing I wanted to see again (including the Magritte man with Primavera on the back of his coat).

Someone's put a lot of effort into tracking down these often odd pieces and, while I'm not convinced it was worth the effort, it more than adequately shows the influence of Signor Botticelli still lingers, or at least the influence of these two paintings, either to be loved or ridiculed.

Next up was a room full of paintings mainly by from the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (and sisterhood in some cases) to demonstrate Botticelli's influence on painting under the Victorian as his works were rediscovered after languishing in the second league of painters for most of the previous few hundred years. It's odd to think that someone so popular today was largely ignored for hundreds of years. The major contributors in this room are Burne-Jones and Rossetti and many of them have been included in other exhibitions over the past ten years or so, but there were a few paintings I hadn't seen before (such as this reimagined 'Venus' by Walter Crane) so that made it worth wandering round. But then, on to the main event of a large space given over to the works of Signor Sandro Botticelli himself.

Of course, when you think of Botticelli, everyone wants to see 'The Birth of Venus' and 'Primavera' but that's not going to happen unless you go to the Uffizi in Florence. Luckily, I have been to the Uffizi and they're a gorgeous sight. What we're given is a collection of religious paintings, mythological paintings, portraits and drawings, both by Botticelli and by his workshop and it's interesting to guess which were by him and which by his staff copying his style, some of more obvious than others.

It was interesting to see multiple versions of portraits of the same people and how the styles change slightly. It was also good to see styles unchanging over the years in some of the Madonna and Child paintings, with their heads looking the same, even at the same angles despite the years, with the backgrounds being different. There was series of round paintings with the Child's chubby face exactly the same in several different paintings.

More interesting to me was 'Mystic Nativity' which is on loan from the National Gallery and which I suspect everyone has seen on Christmas cards. It's surprisingly small with an awful lot of detail that rewards close scrutiny. The angels are dancing partway between heaven and Earth and three crowns are suspended just under their feet, presumably for the holy family. The central group of the family with a cow and donkey reminds me of the small painting above a door in Santa Maria Novella in Florence, also by Botticelli, so, perhaps, is another example of Botticelli repeating his successful compositions.

The shepherds are receiving crowns of laurel or olive branches suggesting the crown of thrones at the other end of Christ's life. If you look in the bottom corners of the painting you can also see small devils watching and, presumably, waiting their turn. It's all rather strange when you put the composition together and is very different from the other paintings on display.

I think my favourite painting was the large 'Pallas and the Centaur' which I can't remember seeing before. It shows Pallas Athene taming a warlike Centaur with his bow lowered. She's fondling his hair like a favourite pet and his head is bent towards to her, almost unwillingly like a wild creature she's just tamed.

It features Botticelli's trademarked flapping drapery with gorgeous designs and the many-layered wavy hair of both mythological figures. It's always worth a closer look at the background of paintings and it's nice to see the contemporary (for the time) ship sailing into the port of whichever land this happens to be. I went back to look at this painting several times - it rewards a repeat viewing.

It's been a long time coming but I enjoyed it and I'm pleased to have seen so many Botticelli's in one place, particularly seeing similar compositions and being able to compare them. It would've been nice to see more, of course.

Where Do Artists Rest?

Have you ever wondered where your favourite artists - writes, painters, sculptors, musicians and more - are laid to rest when they leave us to create elsewhere? I've never really thought about it before. We have Poet's Corner as a place to lay some of our writers in Westminster Abbey but that's a drop in the ocean of past creative people who made a significant contribution to all our lives whether we realise it or not. With the majority of artists we know their names and works, probably very little about their lives and very little about their deaths. With a minority, we know a lot.

On my recent sojourn to Florence I found the resting places of two great artists. The church of Santa Croce holds many treasures and is the resting place of many prominent Italians over the years. It holds the tombs of Galileo, Machiavelli and Rossini to name but a few. It also holds the ornate tomb of Michelangelo Buonarroti.

Michelangelo's is the largest and most ornate tomb in the church, a great big marker in marble and paint that shouts out to the world that here lies an important person waiting for his Lord to raise him up into the glory he depicted in his art. It was nice, in a way. to stand there watching group after group of tourists troupe to the tomb, stand for a few minutes listening to their guide or read their guidebooks and then move on. Everyone has heard of Michelangelo and it's nice that, for a few moments, he's uppermost in people's thoughts.

Not all artists are buried in the great places of the world on the tourist trails. Some rest in smaller, out of the way churches that most visitors don't have time to see. One of the big draws at the Uffizi Gallery is Alessandro Botticelli and the room that temporarily houses some of his works was packed out with tourist groups when I visited the other day. I could hardly move for the crowds and certainly couldn't see much so I moved on to less crowded rooms. Botticelli's resting place is far less busy and far more peaceful. He lies in the church of Ognissanti (All Saints) a mile or so from Santa Croce. His tomb is marked by a round  marble marker on the floor of a small side chapel and it was nice to see that someone had left some flowers for him.

It was quite odd to see a little cardboard box with the name 'Botticelli' written in capital letters in blue marker pen on the front sitting beside the marker for his tomb. Inside were lots of bits of paper left by visitors with messages to Botticelli, wishes or hopes, in all languages. The topmost was from someone wanting to be a footballer when he grows up. I don't really understand this since Botticelli isn't a saint but people clearly think he has the power to intervene in their fates. That is a strange but touching tribute to a painter. His art has touched people.