private treasures

Spiritual Riches abound in ‘Private Treasures’

By Nora Hamerman
Special to the HERALD
(From the Issue of 5/24/07)

A moving temporary exhibit of European drawings gleaned from an anonymous private American collection has just gone on view at the National Gallery of Art in Washington.
Titled “Private Treasures: Four Centuries of European Master Drawings,” it begins with a masterpiece by the Dominican friar and artist Fra Bartolommeo and culminates with a self-portrait by the German realist Kathe Kollwitz.
The exhibit is free and open to the public seven days a week through September 16.
As curator Andrew Robison stressed, the collector acquired drawings of all kinds, from portraits to landscape to still life, but she has a passion for spiritual themes. Thus, the grouping of some 112 drawings is rich in Bible scenes, saints, the Virgin Mary and Eucharistic imagery.
One jewel of the collection is a polished drawing of the dead Christ by the Florentine artist Bronzino, a disciple of Michelangelo. A study from a living model, the drawing sensitively evokes the true body of the Savior at a time when the doctrine of transubstantiation was being debated all over Europe. Altarpieces closely modeled on such a figure of Christ — where the body is depicted as “real presence” near the chalice and paten — underscored for communicants the hidden truth of the sacrament.
An apt theme in these closing weeks of the liturgical Easter season is a “Trinity” by Pietro da Cortona, the leading painter of the Roman high-Baroque period. It served as the basis for a bronze relief sculpture over the high altar at the church of Santa Maria della Pace in Rome.
The show also has one example of the religious drawings of Gian Domenico Tiepolo (1727-1804), a major decorative painter who lived through the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. This is “The Madonna and Child Appearing to St. Philip Neri.” Domenico, as he is often called to set him apart from his celebrated father Gianbattista Tiepolo, made over 250 drawings in pen, brush and ink on hand-made paper. Each piece measured about 18-by-15 inches, and depicted scenes from the New Testament and lives of saints. These independent, finished works were not models for paintings or engravings, and are the work of the artist’s old age after he had enjoyed a successful career as a painter of large-scale frescos, and retired in comfort on the family property near Venice.
St. Philip Neri (1515-95), whose feast day is May 26, is one of the most charismatic saints of the turbulent 16th century, a close friend of St. Ignatius Loyola and a paragon of humility. Although dedicated to the Lord’s work from his youth, only after much urging did he become a priest because he considered himself unworthy. He founded the Oratorians, a lay society of preachers that ministered to all of society from beggars to bankers.
Domenico’s drawing, a pen and brown ink completed in the 1780s, represented the crowning event of St. Philip Neri’s life. In May 1594, the Blessed Virgin appeared to him when he was in agony and cured him of his pain. Although this composition echoes many altarpieces of this popular subject, the artist added a distinctive touch of humor as well as grace.
One of the angels flanking the Virgin and Child seems to have gotten caught in the drapery and barely gets his head out, while several “headless” baby angels thrash their legs over the frail old saint’s head. In the background, a priest turns his back and walks away and a hound, Domenico’s signature motif, walks off at the right, cut off by the frame in an almost photographic crop that the artist used to suggest time and space outside the story — and to show that certain figures were literally, as well as figuratively, beyond the bounds of the miraculous.
The humor fits the subject as St. Philip Neri was notorious for his practical jokes. The presence of youthful witnesses, in this case the young acolyte behind St. Philip Neri, is also typical of these drawings. Domenico’s brother was a priest of the Order of the Somaschi, who cared for orphan boys, and perhaps he included many boys in order to draw them into the mysteries of the faith.