From saints to strumpets

11 April 2012
The Weekender

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Those of us who have spent many a wet weekend in search of enlightenment by traipsing through the country houses of the National Trust and the indigent aristocracy may take flight at the thought of an exhibition dominated by Peter Lely's portraits of plump women, all with the features of a pet spaniel stricken with what for centuries was known as goitre, a morbid enlargement of the thyroid gland. In every kind of rural residences, from ducal palace to the modest lodge to which the desuetudinous families of nabobs now retire, the visitor will find these women, their eyes bulging, their throats softly swollen, their flesh white, their bosoms in part temptingly revealed, portrayed as shepherdesses, saints and goddesses, most of them the repetition of a variant by a nameless toiler in the Lely studio, or the variation of a repetition, dulled by the dust and dirt of centuries. No sight is more aesthetically and intellectually numbing than a corridor of umpteen versions by Lely's studio assistants, unless, of course, it is a corridor of Knellers.

As the National Portrait Gallery must be well aware of this, it is brave indeed to have mounted an exhibition devoted simply and solely to women at the court of Charles II, notable philanderer, but in doing so it performs a considerable service for both us and Lely, for with prime originals of often quite astonishing quality, it rescues the despised Sir Peter from the no-man's-land of unremembered face-painters and compels us to recognise him as a man of estimable ability when confronted with the Herculean task of both recording and flattering a mob of women assembled to amuse the king and cause trouble in his trousers. Lely emerges as a triumphant-colourist, a master painter who had drilled into the assistants who painted drapery for him as much sense of form as any sculptor of the day, as an ingenious ringer of changes whose minor adjustments to a stock composition could effect variations far beyond their weight, even as a painter whose paintings, when most carefully chosen, a Saatchi or Serota might be pleased to own.

There is nothing of backpassage gloom about this exhibition. It blazes with colour and, well before he is halfway through it, the visitor is aware that a cumulative sensuality pervades the gallery for, piled Pelion on Ossa, so to speak, these women are so evidently creatures of provocation and pleasure beneath whose sumptuous draperies there is perspiration and lubricity. These portraits are discreet pornography and before them we must imagine this marquess and that earl comparing notes, this marquess and that earl, grown old, remembering. But did Lely tell the truth? Perhaps not. Perhaps-only when the truth could no longer be concealed, as when the Duchess of Lauderdale had reached her fifties, grown humped with lard about her shoulders and, now very plain indeed, could Lely paint a sometime strumpet as she really was, a greedy petulance about her features, quite unbeddable unless as Potiphar's wife. Having told the truth about this disagreeable woman, he then skilfully diverts us from it with bravura painting of the sleeve over her right elbow and, behind her left, a hint of sunset landscape worthy of Gainsborough; with these devices we see only rich colour and seductive detail - we do not see her.

When a direct comparison is possible, as in portrayals of Louise de Keroualle, Lely gives us the face as though through a Vaselined lens, but contemporary French painters, more scrupulously tied to observation. give her the face of a myopic kitten; they also divert with details of the dress, its patterned materials and rich embellishments competing for attention with the head, while Lely gives us clothing that is rich and simple, formed as a bold sculptural support to an ideal bosom and an idealised head. In his full-length portrait of the Duchess of Norfolk, the underlying pose is so classical as to suggest derivation from an antique sculpture - one might even suggest the Venus de Milo had it not lain undiscovered until 1820, so pronounced is the forward thrust of the belly and the left leg. As for other references in Lely's work, for which Van Dyck must not be forgotten as presiding genius, it is possible that his portrait of Charlotte Fitzroy as a child with an Indian servant boy was inspired by Murillo, a version of whose Two Boys eating Melon and Grapes (recently exhibited at Dulwich) Lely may even have sold to Sir Ralph Bankes, one of his many male sitters.

Among the lesser painters in this exhibition, the portraits by Verelst, Gascar, Gennari, Wissing, Huysmans and Voet are, by and large, preposterous, and one of the two Knellers is a workshop wreck, the inclusion of which is inexcusable; of English painters there is only one (both Lely and Kneller were German by birth), John Michael Wright, whose portrait of Grace Wilbraham is such a masterpiece of observed character that its exquisite baggage of clothing and symbolism is noticeable only at a second glance as the carefully contrived and even pretty support for a wonderfully realised plain face.

One leaves this exhibition amused, informed, delighted indeed, and determined to be less dismissive of poor Lely.

It is a pity that around the corner, at the National Gallery, such careful reconsideration was not given to Masaccio, the brilliant young Florentine painter, born in 1401, whose influence lasted throughout the 15th century and is evident even in the work of Michelangelo. He painted a major altarpiece for a church in Pisa in 1426, payments spread over the whole year, but with a note of impatience towards the end suggesting that we should look for the co-operation of assistants in what survives of it. Dismantled and dispersed in the late 16th century, it is now seriously incomplete, most of its remaining 11 panels very small and scattered wide. To have reunited them, as they now are in Room I, gathered about the gallery's Madonna and Child, which was its central section, is a triumphant achievement, but to have done so little with them is dumb laziness.

It is the perfect opportunity to discuss the various reconstructions that have been proposed, but apart from the gallery's own feeble attempt to place the panels in one wholly unconvincing order, the problem is ignored. To have put the pieces in a larger room with the gallery's imposing altar attributed to Jacopo di Cione, of 1370, its 12 panels the subject of an intriguing but logical reconstruction, would have helped the nonspecialist visitor to realise with what a problem the Masaccio confronts us; the presence of the gallery's three panels by Lorenzo Monaco for an altar celebrating the Coronation of the Virgin, 1407-9 separated by the columns of a (new) frame, but conceived as a single pictorial space, might have suggested a possibility for the two largest missing panels of the Masaccio altar; and a decent photograph of Fra Angelico's altar of The Descent from the Cross ( Florence, 1430-4) would have been of particular interest in showing how Masaccio's small vertical panels of saints were probably incorporated in the frame. This scrappy little exhibition, however, offers no sensible suggestions as to how the altarpiece appeared when first installed in Pisa.

What passes for a catalogue fails to quote in full the only account we have of it, by Vasari, from the mid 16th century. He describes it as "... Our Lady and Child, with some small angels playing music at her feet ... placed between St Peter, St John the Baptist, St Julian and St Nicholas ... In the predella (the lowest register of panels that forms a footing to the altar) are scenes from the lives of these saints in small figures ... Above, to complete the picture, arranged in several squares (rectangles?) are many saints round a crucifix." The four named saints are missing; was the pictorial space of the central panel, with its foreground steps, continued in these flanking panels, or were they entirely self-contained? Were the saints in pairs, or was each standing in a separate niche? If standing, the scale of these figures must have been smaller than the Virgin who, seated, fills the available space and could not stand in it.

We have three predella panels, illustrating the Adoration of the Magi and episodes from the lives of the four saints - do these establish the width of the altarpiece, or could there have been five, not necessarily of the same dimensions? How many "squares" (or rectangles) are missing from "round a crucifix" and how does the gallery's proposed placing of the panels of Saints Paul and Andrew make sense in this particular? Is it not odd that the scale of the figures is so thoroughly inconsistent from each panel to the next and that no group of panels has any obvious proportional relationship with any other?

Of Masaccio himself we know very little other than that he died at the age of 27, poison perhaps the cause, according to Vasari, who characterises him as an amiable bumbler following in the footsteps of Donatello the sculptor and Brunelleschi the sculptor, architect and expert in perspective. The National Gallery suggests that he may have been Donatello's pupil or apprentice and insists on the sculptural quality of his conception - but this is truly evident only in the Madonna and Child, enthroned like some massive ancient Roman sculpture (her torso disproportionately long or her legs too short), a weighty child logically seated on a weighty thigh, the axes of these figures contrapuntal. As an aside, the gallery should have pointed out how damaged this panel is, how the flesh tones have been rubbed thin to reveal the underpaint, how the exact form of the arch cannot now be determined and how the bottom of the panel has been cut by perhaps as much as eight inches. As for perspective, this is brilliantly accomplished in the establishment of an exact viewpoint and in the recession of the steps and throne; in other panels, as in the folly of explaining the attitude of Christ's head in the Crucifixion as an attempt to compensate for the height and angle at which the panel was to be seen, requiring compensation for foreshortening, the command of perspective is clumsy and inadequate - the painter here, probably not Masaccio, was unsuccessfully attempting, not perspective, but a touch of realism in a figure slumped in exhaustion. Something of the same fault is to be seen in the figure of St Joseph in the Nativity predella panel.

Taking the National Gallery's panel as a benchmark, it is difficult to argue convincingly for Masaccio's hand in any other panel. One must argue that the predella panel of Saints Julian and Nicholas is by a very weak assistant; that The Adoration of the Magi is by the eloquent but essentially late Gothic hand that painted the Crucifixion; that the third predella panel is by another hand; and that the remaining panels, all of single saints, are by yet another. Was this sort of scrutiny not precisely the point of bringing the 11 panels together? Was not minute examination of the panels with all the technology available to us another precise point? Was not a serious attempt at the reconstruction of an altar still in some senses late Gothic, but evidently reflecting the intellectual ferment of the early Quattrocento Renaissance, the most important purpose of this exhibition? How could the National Gallery so fail to do its duty, fail even to be interested in the possibilities and be so complacent in its dull incompetence?

Painted Ladies, National Portrait Gallery, St Martin's Place, WC2. Saturday-Wednesday 10am-6pm. Thursday-Friday 10am-9pm. Admission £5. Until 6 January. Masaccio, National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, WC2. Daily 10am-6pm (Wednesday 9pm). Admission free. Until 11 November.

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