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JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID: A BI-CENTENARY EXHIBITION

Cathérine-Marie-Jeanne Tallart (Louvre), of whom no more is known than is told on the inscription: 'personne pieuse, charitable et célèbre par ses peines et par ses malheurs'. He did not choose sitters at random nor did he depict gens du peuple; for it was not the type but the individual personality which concerned him. And this is particularly borne out by the careful series of preparatory portrait studies made for the Jeu de Paume and the Sacre. All his portraits have a quiet intimacy which contrasts strangely with the grand clamour of his large compositions, and none of them, except perhaps the Napoléon (Coll. de Beistegui, Biarritz) has any trace of idealisation. This can be tested chronologically with the Alphonse Leroy (Musée Fabre, Montpellier), the enormous Lavoisier et sa femme (Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research, New York), the portraits of his mother- and father-in-law M. et Mme Pécoul (Louvre), the Gabrielle Charpentier (Musée de Troyes), the M. et Mme Sériziat, Juliette Récamier and Le Pape Pie VII (all Louvre) as well as with the little-known Mme David (Frontispiece). David's effect is made without fuss; it is the human being who counts. Even the associative objects of his setting are either introduced unobtrusively as with the Morbi Mulierum of Hippocrates in the Leroy or the coin and the Dictionnaire d'Antiques in the M. et Mme. Mongez (Musée de Versailles) - or made into essential parts of the composition - as with the big glass cylinder on Lavoisier's table. David was capable of caricature, as one can see in the drawings of Mirabeau-Tonneau and Mirabeau-L'Ainé (both Louvre). But he was not at his ease even in good-natured mockery. And the extent to which individuals could impose their personality even against his instinctive feelings is most evident in the drawing of Marie-Antoinette allant à l'échafaud (Louvre). The regicide was impressed and moved to record the scene in a work which recalls Baudelaire's phrase that he had 'quelque chose de tendre et de poignant à la fois'. In this drawing one is made aware of the great spiritual gulf separating David from Goya.

The full flavour of David's candour is most striking in his Self-Portrait of 1795 (Louvre). There he appears - it was painted during his first imprisonment - neither as political firebrand, nor as artistic dictator, nor even as disillusioned montagnard. Removed from public life, he saw himself as a simple painter, proud of and passionately devoted to his métier, clear-eyed and far-seeing. The face as a whole suggests openness and lack of cunning, doubt and devotion not determination and violence. But it is a face marked by an obvious division: the left half, with its drooping mouth, wide-open eye and sharply pointed brow, shows alertness, discontent, hardness and a degree of ambition; the right half, with finer features but altogether softer, shows great sensibility and idealism, but has the lost and questioning look of a dreamer. The active united with the passive, the defiant with the resigned: therein lies the key to the whole of David's life and art. It is the link between Le Serment des Horaces (1784) and Léonidas aux Thermopyles (1814) (both Louvre). It is the clue to his political fluctuations, to the weakness in his character. David was a croyant, not an enragé. And when betrayed by his beliefs he was not filled with rancour, but with a vision of the power of the artist - it was at this time that he drew the study for Homère récitant des vers (Louvre) - and with a sense of the folly of discord, which found expression in Les Sabines. His misfortune, however, was that his inspiration withered with his personal frustration.

For all that David was, until 1794, an 'artiste engagé' - and probably no earlier artist was so conscious of the social functions and utility of art - he was nonetheless deeply concerned with the pure practice of his art, with creating a vital contemporary pictorial idiom. In this he can be compared with Picasso. David could speak ardently in the Convention, design admirable revolutionary costumes (Musée de Versailles) and be the perfect régisseur of the revolutionary fêtes and obsèques. But at the same time he appointed the aged Fragonard ('Il consacrera ses vieux ans à la garde de chefs d'œuvre dont il a concouru, dans sa jeunesse, à augmenter le nombre.') as keeper of the new Muséum des Arts in the Louvre, suggested the purchase for it of works by Rubens, Rembrandt and Jordaens, and increasingly clarified and strengthened his own artistic language. All his greatest work was done under the direct inspiration of a new social order in the years 1785-95. And the most mature, most sublime of all is undoubtedly the Marat Assassiné (Musée des Beaux-Arts, Brussels), painted at the height of his political activity. Life-like, unidealised, simple, this is a scene which David saw; but by pictorial science he has transformed a moment of horror into an eternity of sublime martyrdom. Neither here nor elsewhere was he tempted to turn propagandist. The effect is purely pictorial: the weird one-sided composition, the head and arms parallel to the surface of the canvas, the light directed from a hidden source on the left, the large empty space filling the upper half of the picture. As a composition it is remarkably daring; in effect, it is deeply religious - it is so to speak the Pietà of the Revolution, and forms part of a devotional trilogy with the lost Le Peletier de Saint-Fargeau and Joseph Bara (Musée Calvet, Avignon).

Géricault spoke of David as 'le régénérateur de l'école française'. Delacroix called him 'le père de toute l'école moderne en peinture et en sculpture'. Such was his rôle, though it is no longer generally recognised. David was both the end of the eighteenth-century art - which one can see gradually disappearing through his successive Prix de Rome compositions Combat de Minerve contre Mars of 1771 (Louvre), Diane et Apollon perçant de leurs flèches les enfants de Niobé of 1772 (Comte d'Hérouville, Paris) an unfortunate absentee, La Mort de Sénèque of 1773 (Petit Palais, Paris) and Antiochus et Stratonice of 1774 (Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris), with which he won the prize - and the herald of the nineteenth century. The Hector of 1778 (Musée de Montpellier) announces Géricault and Delacroix, the exquisitely natural Vue du Jardin du Luxembourg of 1794 (Louvre) and the fine landscapes in the Italian sketch-book of 1783 (Dr. W. R. Valentiner, Los Angeles) look forward to early Corot, the Sacre (especially the group round the altar) contains elements of Courbet, and Mme Récamier elements of Manet. David had great pictorial invention and a pronounced dramatic sense; on the other hand he had little imagination. He rescued French Art from a degenerate prettiness and brought it back to reality, to the community. At the same time his style wavered between eighteenth-century elegance and nineteenth-century realism, between classical severity and romantic enthusiasm; there was always a conflict between le beau idéal and nature, without which he was powerless. It is a conflict which seems to be expressed in the juxtaposition of emphatic verticals and graceful, rippling arabesques, on which so many of his compositions are based: La Douleur d'Andromaque (Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris), Mme
 
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WOLFGANG FRITZ VOLBACH

Antonio Gentili da Faenza and the Large Candlesticks in the Treasury of St Peter's

ALTHOUGH our knowledge of Renaissance bronzes is well advanced as far as Florence and Venice are concerned, the same cannot be said of Rome. Inventories^1 and documents tell us that in the Quattrocento various goldsmiths, specially Tuscans, such as Ghiberti, Simone di Giovanni, Pollaiuolo, and Filarete, were summoned to the Papal Court; but apart from the great monuments of the two last-mentioned hardly anything of their bronzes is to be found in Roman treasuries and churches. In the Cinquecento, however, Rome became a centre of the goldsmiths' art and the most famous masters, with great workshops, came together there - such men as Santo di Saba,^2 Benvenuto Cellini,^3 Guglielmo della Porta, Bastiano Torregiani da Bologna, Taddeo Landini,^4 Nanno Fiorentino and Antonio Gentili da Faenza.^5 Most of the works of these goldsmiths have been lost; others are still waiting to be attributed to one or the other of them. Only a few pieces have in fact been identified. The difficulty of attributing anonymous works of art to particular masters becomes greater when we consider their practice of working on the models or designs of others. We know, for instance, that Michelangelo^6 made designs for craftsmen. The case of Antonio Gentili da Faenza is highly significant. He had no hesitation in copying a model by Guglielmo della Porta,^7 and boasted also that he had in his studio 'many casts and models by many worthy men, by Michelangelo and others'. This method and the eclecticism which results from it render it extremely difficult even for the expert to distinguish names and personalities.

Antonio Gentili da Faenza, one of the most famous goldsmiths of his time, is almost unknown to-day. Only a few of his works are familiar to us, such as the two candlesticks with the cross (dated 1581) in the Treasury of St Peter's,^8 the table cutlery from the Sangiorgi Collection in Rome^9 now in the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and a fountain at Ronciglione.^10 But we know also from Baglione^11 that he was 'a worthy artificer of goldplate, who worked for great princes, and fashioned two metal torchbearers that burn day and night in front of the most Holy Sacrament, worked with many bizarre adornments, graceful to the highest degree; with little figures, animals, and diverse decorations, extraordinarily noble and delightful to see; and that he made many designs, especially for graceful fountains'. Other documents tell us that in 1578 Gentili made a silver and rock-crystal reliquary for the Company of Jesus,^12 a cross very similar to that in St Peter's (finished in 1581) for the Certosa of San Martino in Naples^13 (a drawing of this work by Pietro Saia was once kept in the old Treasury in Naples but has disappeared), a silver reliquary for the skull of St Petronilla which stood on the Saint's altar in St Peter's and of which a drawing has been preserved, and a silver Deposition of Christ done from a model of Guglielmo della Porta.^14 From 1584 Gentili worked as an assayer at the Papal Mint. When he died on October 29, 1609 in Rome, he was buried in the Church of St Biagio near his own house in Via Giulia.

The objects mentioned above seem all to have been lost. The cross in Naples, the reliquary for the Jesuit fathers and most probably also the reliquary of St Petronilla are all untraceable. But at least the latter reliquary is reproduced in Grimaldi's drawing now in the Vatican Library^15 and although it gives only a faint idea of the original it is very valuable because it establishes the fact that in making the reliquary Gentili followed the traditional forms of the Renaissance, a prototype of these forms being found in the reliquary in St Peter's for the head of St Lucia, worked by a Tuscan master. Grimaldi informs us that Gentili's reliquary was made under Gregory XIII (1572-83). We have no more precise date and it appears to have been destroyed when so many precious objects belonging to the Basilica were melted down in 1789.^16 Gentili's candlesticks with the cross were saved from a similar disastrous fate only by chance.

A cross by Gentili and the drawing made of it in Naples have also disappeared;^17 but we know that it closely resembled the one in Rome. This is a great loss because the master had worked at it for about fourteen years.
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^1 MUENTZ: École française à Athene et à Rome, IV [1878, 1882]; Revue archéologique [1878].

^2 S. ROSA DE ANGELIS: Boll. di studi storici ed arch. di Tivoli, I [1919], p.153.

^3 E. PLON: Benvenuto Cellini, Paris [1883], p. 280.

^4 A. VENTURI: Storia, Vol. x, 3, p. 874; SOBOTKA: Jahrbuch der Preusz. Kunstslgn. XXXIII, p. 752.

^5 A. BERTOLOTTI: Artisti Lombardi a Roma; THIEME-BECKER: Künstler-lexikon, XIII, p. 712.

^6 H. THODE: Michelangelo.

^7 R. ERCULEI: L'esposizione di arte sacra in Orvieto [1898], p. 19.

^8 KRIS: Dedalo, IX, p. 97.

^9 SANGIORGI: Boll. d'Arte, XXVI [1932], p. 220; Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum [1947], P. 252.

^10 C. RICCI: Storia dell'Architettura in Italia, III, p. 85.

^11 BAGLIONE: Vite, Rome [1733], p. 109.

^12 ERCULEI: p. 20.

^13 CELANO: Notizie del Bello di Napoli, IV.

^14 R. Tesoreria Segreta [1578-79], p. 55; BERTOLOTTI: II, p. 120.

^15 Catalogus Sacrarum Reliquiarum Almæ Vaticanæ [1617]; Arch. Capital, H.2, f. 31, n.32.

^16 CASCIOLI: Bessarione [1912], p. 305.

^17 My thanks are due to my friend Sergio Ortolani for this information.

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