IT’S A TENET OF THE received wisdom that museums are the cathedrals of our new era, however it is to be called. Who else, after all, can afford the prices? The Metropolitan Museum has just acquired its costliest work ever, at a price of between $45 and $50 million. And the awe-inspiring thing about the Met’s “Stroganoff Madonna and Child” is its price tag.
Not that the picture is without aesthetic merit or art-historical value. It is a Duccio, after all, and there are only a dozen or so others known to exist, and none likely to come on the market again. Painted circa 1300 in tempera and gold on a wood panel, the Stroganoff Madonna certainly looks venerable, as though in the home stretch of art’s long journey to dust. Its frame is crumbling, its gilt mottled, the Virgin’s visage faded to reveal the ground of cadaverous vedacchio. One expects all Siennese saints of a certain age to have green faces, but it’s hard to get over a modern bias for flesh tones.
None of these things detracts from the work’s value but, rather, underline its authenticity as an Italian Primitive of the best pedigree, as do the lady’s limp and noodlelike fingers and the entirely hypothetical anatomy of the infant Christ. One looks at it and thinks, “How very old.” But only a curator, like the Met’s Keith Christiansen, is likely to find it “incredibly beautiful” and “unbelievably moving.” So Christiansen is quoted in the New York Times‘s puff piece instructing us in how to regard this recent acquisition. The Met’s director, Philippe de Montebello, declares that it is “transfixing” and “a work of sublime beauty.”
The Stroganoff Madonna is a vivid lesson in how paintings can be like postage stamps and baseball trading cards: precious for their rarity more than for innate merit. And it is the fate of supremely rare paintings nowadays that they are destined for the best-funded museums, whose public mission it is to keep them safe and offer them to the public gaze, as tangible evidence of the community of Western Civilization. De Montebello would have been remiss in his duty as director if he had not snapped up the only Duccio the Met might ever have a chance to acquire. But sublimely beautiful? In the eyes of their beholder, “promising” would come closer to the mark. But then, I’ve never been one to linger in the Met’s room of Italian Primitives, where the Stroganoff Madonna now commands the respectful gaze of guards, visitors, and a gallery full of green-faced saints.
Without the occasion for skeptical appraisal presented by the Stroganoff Madonna, I am sure I would have been cowed into a dutiful, conventional reverence by the current miscellany of Renaissance masters at the Met, the banner of which reads in its entirety: “From Filippo Lippi to Piero della Francesca: Fra Carnevale and the Making of a Renaissance Master.” It is the last name on the list, alas, that points to the star of the show, which, like the man’s career, never manages to reach lift-off. If the name doesn’t register, don’t feel undereducated. For centuries Fra Carnevale seemed to have been valued more as a maker of enigmas than a fully certified Old Master.
The Barberini Panels are his defining work. Before two classical architectural caprichios are congregated groups of heavily robed women, shaking hands or looking about to no evident purpose. Scholars suppose that one panel represents the birth of the Virgin and speculate that the other shows her presentation at the Temple. Evidently neither was a joyful occasion, and feminists looking for ammunition for their downtrodden position in patriarchal culture need look no further.
However, the interest of the panels is not in its inscrutable little drama but in the two-stage sets where it takes place, with the architecture’s fussy anachronistic details (a mix of all known past cultures) and its precise, but unpersuasive, scheme of perspective. The literature that tries to account for the Barberini Panels is immense, and Keith Christiansen’s catalogue offers such a bounty of it, such a wealth of information as to provenances and attributions of all the works on view, that it can only be read when it is laid flat on a table. Even with sturdy support and great patience, I doubt that anyone is likely to try to read the catalog, anymore than anyone would try to read the federal budget. The catalogue is simply a required decorum at such an event. The sense one gains is that one has attended a convocation of some Old Masters of less than first rank–and not much in common except their conjoint ill luck in having worked in the 1440s just before the Renaissance kicked into high gear.
The two real stars of the show, Lippi, in whose studio Fra Carnevale worked in the late 1440s, and Piero della Francesca, who might have shaken hands with the younger painter, pretty much cast the others in the shade. Within a quarter-century the stars of Italian art would be of another magnitude altogether: Mantegna, Botticelli, Verrocchio, Pollaiuolo, Ghirlandaio . . . The spelling bee goes on, and the stars get even brighter. But what they all have in common is that their paintings can command one’s attention on their own. You don’t need an audio guide to tell you why you’re in the museum.
This is true of only a few B-list paintings in the Carnevale show, usually because of some anecdotal element in the painting. There are a pair of small panels by Domenico Veneziano that provoke such extracurricular curiosity. A buff Saint John is seen in the desert, stripping, and Saint Zenobius prepares to resurrect a bleeding child in front of his hysterical mother in a drolly ideal public square. The Barberini Panels’ gaucheness is nothing as compared with Fra Carnevale’s ambitious botch of a Crucifixion, with Christ’s Halloween mask of a head slumped on a torso of ideal anatomical regularity. Behind Christ is a sky and rocky landscape as purely notional as the Ptolemaic universe. Some of the anatomy, especially Christ’s lower legs, is excellent, but the whole thing simply doesn’t gel.
Another B-list painter, Giovanni da Camerino, is represented by another Crucifixion, this one a portable standard, or a double-sided painting designed to be carried on a pole in public processions. Out of its original, festal context it fares badly, with a host of painterly solecisms that rising craft standards would eliminate from the better workshops in the coming decades.
The problem that such also-ran Old Masters pose is what to do with all their productions. Their antiquity has made them precious, like the Stroganoff Madonna, but their sheer number relegates them to basements, annexes, and storerooms of the museums where they tend to wind up when their original owners, the decayed aristocracies and bankrupt mountain chapels, no longer have the cash to pay for their insurance. If one of them had its own nice apse in a hometown chapel, as is the case all about Europe, that would be nice. But en masse, and demanding some hours of one’s attention? You would do better studying Greek.
The de-accessioning of the snows of yesteryear has been going on since at least the 18th century, and reached its zenith in the Gilded Age when Bernard Berenson trawled Italy on behalf of American millionaires. The Met’s Duccio acquisition, and a show like the Carnevale exhibition, represent a kind of mopping-up operation–as if to say, “Berenson, look what you missed!” A saturation point has probably been reached for the amount of public attention that lesser masters of any era can be expected to generate.
In an odd way, the future of such art may lie in returning it to its origins as objects of veneration. The basements of the great museums can be hallowed ground, all the more to be revered for their air of quiet abandonment. London’s National Gallery has a marvelous dimly lighted crypt filled with a jumble sale of all art history’s John Does. That, and retired missile silos in Kansas, seem the best depository for the ever mounting surplusage of art that doesn’t quite make it.
Thomas M. Disch is a poet, novelist, and art critic.
