(soft piano music) - Good evening. Thank you for joining us tonight for this 50th episode of
"Cocktails with a Curator." It's really kind of an
anniversary "Cocktails," so in keeping with this
landmarking nature, I decided to talk to you about one of the most
prized objects at the Frick: this unbelievably beautiful
Carrara marble "Bust of a Woman" by Francesco Laurana. Francesco is usually considered to be an Italian sculptor, but, as many of you may know, Italy didn't become a
state until the 1860s. Before then, the Italian
peninsula was made up of many small states, usually
at war with each other. But there was this idea that,
because of a shared heritage, a shared language, to an extent, there was one nation, Italy. But the borders of this
nation actually extended beyond the borders of modern-day Italy. And we see that Francesco Laurana, actually his real name
was Frane Vranjanin. Vranjanin means "from Vrana." Vrana was this town close to Zadar, in modern-day Croatia. And hence the name Francesco de la Vrana. Because U and V were not distinct letters in fifteenth-century Italian, he soon came to be known
as Francesco de Laurana. And now we call him Francesco Laurana. Anyway, the area where Francesco was born, which was then under Venetian control, was historically and is
historically known as Dalmatia. So tonight I decided to pair this episode with a cocktail, frankly a very strong one, known as a Dalmatian. It's made of just vodka, grapefruit juice, and sugar and black pepper syrup. So, cheers!
(ice clinks) We know nothing about
Francesco before 1453, when we find him at work in Naples on this fascinating
project of a marble arch for the Castel Nuovo, the "New Castle," with a number of other sculptors. And another crucially important work by Laurana is this Madonna, this Virgin and Child in Noto, in Sicily, which is signed by him and dated 1471. Here we find the same attitude in the carving of the face that we find in a handful of
very powerful female busts of the fifteenth century. Three of them you see here. The Frick example is on the left, and it's paired with another bust, which was formerly in Berlin,
that you see in the middle, and another one in
Washington, on the right. So, some have speculated that at least one or two of
these must be fakes, must be nineteenth-century forgeries. And that's basically
impossible for the Frick bust, which is always assumed to be original, because it was found in the
early eighteenth century in the port of Marseille,
in the south of France, and was then believed to be
an antique bust of Agrippina. And it was published as
such as early as in 1801, and you see the illustration
of that publication here. The bust remained in France
until it was acquired in 1914 by the art dealer Duveen. We have encountered him many times during these episodes of "Cocktails." And Duveen bought it from
Princesse Suzanne d'Orange, who was the Marchioness of Mailly-Nesle. And here you see the princess's château, where the bust was kept until 1914. Two years later, in 1916, Frick bought it and it has
stayed at the Frick ever since. As to the Washington
bust, it was compared, so to speak, in the flesh once with the Frick original some years ago, while the Frick bust was undergoing some conservation treatment. And you see it was halfway
through a cleaning process here. But despite the very close
analyses that were done, experts could not reach
a unanimous verdict as to the originality
of the Washington bust. So it's very, very complex
to understand that. The bust in Berlin, which you see here in a fantastic picture by the
photographer Clarence Kennedy, was destroyed during World War II. And it was destroyed during
the bombing of Berlin. And you see images of
post-war Berlin here, also in color, to just give a sense of the extent of the dramatic destructions that the city underwent during the last years of war. The bust in Berlin was broken
in two during the bombing. And the head remained in Berlin, while the rest of the bust was taken by the Russians to Moscow. And the two pieces have
never since been reunited, also because of the Cold
War, obviously, and all that, but recently curators in
Moscow and Berlin decided to restore the missing half, each to restore the missing
half of their piece, sort of duplicating the original work. Actually the scars of history
here are still visible. You can still recognize what's
original and what's not, what's in gesso and what's in marble. But there is an attempt to move on, while acknowledging the
horrors of the past. It is obviously a very
controversial decision, and some of you may disagree with it, but I think it certainly shows courage and it really illustrates the challenges that you can sometimes face as a curator of an Old Masters collection. And that's really why I wanted
to include this line here, because sometimes we may think that art, especially the Old Masters, exist in some sort of a vacuum. But they are actually there for us not just to contemplate and love, but actually one of the
most beautiful aspects of working with objects as old as these is that really they come
with a long history. And art history is not
just about the creation of these works. It's also about the tortuous way which has brought them to us
here for us to look at today. And it's always a wonderful
way of looking back at art history and our mistakes, to look at art which has
suffered such as this. Anyway, judging from
the remains of the bust and the old photographs,
there is really no reason to believe that this
wonderful bust was a fake. Some have said that the motifs in the base could not be carved by a
fifteenth-century sculptor. But that's nonsense, because you can find them
all over the arch in Naples, which I've shown you before,
where Laurana worked. So we've seen that these
three busts are probably busts of the same person, and
probably they are all original. The fact that there are so many suggests that this was a very,
very important woman. And given that Laurana
mostly worked in Sicily and only later in his life moved to Southern France to work, it's usually assumed that this must be a woman
belonging to the dynasty of the southern Aragonese kings of Naples. But honestly, the fact that
the bust was found in Marseille and the fact that we know that Laurana worked in Southern France, it really suggests that this is, in fact, a French lady. But that hypothesis has never really been
considered by scholars. So normally, the bust is identified either with the wife of
King Alfonso II of Naples, Ippolita Maria Sforza,
with Milanese origins. And you see her here in these
two manuscript illuminations, and you see that she's wearing
kind of a similar headwear and there are some
superficial similarities, but it's very hard to say. Or sometimes it's identified
with her daughter, with Ippolita's daughter, Isabella d'Aragona, who
married her own cousin, Gian Galeazzo Sforza. So she went back to Milan,
where her mother came from, and became the Duchess of Milan. So you see here Milanese portraits of her, one in the Charterhouse
of Pavia, close to Milan, and the other one in a drawing by Bernardino de' Conti, at the Uffizi. So soon Gian Galeazzo, Isabella's husband, was killed by his own
tutor, Ludovico il Moro, leading to a very unhappy and
unsafe widowhood for Isabella. She even used to sign her letters, "Isabella, unique in misfortune." Maybe it was kind of, she was a bit of a drama
queen maybe, but (laughs) anyway, it is true that she suffered quite a lot at the time. But she was soon rewarded,
because after the French invasion of Italy in 1499, aged about 30, she was granted the title of
Duchess of Bari, in Apulia, and she moved south and led
a splendid court life there for the rest of her life. Unfortunately, nobody has ever been able to identify the scenes
of the classicizing reliefs on the base, which may give us a clue as to the identity of
the woman, obviously. However, they seem to show scenes of female heroism against
male violence and male threat. Somehow a story befitting Isabella's. And unfortunately, again, we haven't yet found a
convincing explanation for the inscription, "DMS,"
on the base of the column, which you see in the
picture at the bottom. So if you have any ideas,
please submit them to us. Some have thought that busts such as these could be ideal portraits
of feminine beauty, and so they wouldn't describe
any actual existing woman. Frankly, I don't think that at this stage, before the rediscovery of
many antique female busts and the discussion also
around the competition between poetry and the visual arts for the representation of female beauty, I don't think that before all that, the idea, the notion
of an ideal female bust was culturally possible, let's say. But it is true, it is certainly true
that there is some kind of abstraction, idealization
here that is going on. You don't see any wrinkles
in this woman's face. You don't see any kind of defects. You don't really see
the flesh of her face. You only see perfectly
geometrical shapes somehow, which also makes this bust very modern. And that's one of the reasons why these busts were so much loved by twentieth-century artists, scholars, and architects, and art critics. However, I think that the similarity with the Virgin and Child in Noto and others that we used
to attribute the busts, we should actually look
at this relationship the other way around. And these are really
Madonna-like representations of real women, I think, that points to their virtue as women, obviously a notion of virtue that is aligned with Christian ideals. However, we also shouldn't forget that it was according to our later all-white Neoclassicism, obsessed with the whiteness of marble, that these works were stripped of their original polychromy. Luckily one of them, in Vienna, still retains its original colors, and it really gives us a sense of how much closer to life
these works would have been with colors on them. But what was a bust like this used for? That's the other question. What was the function of these works? Looking at the Frick bust from the side, we realize that the back is very flat and also this woman is sort
of tilting her head downwards, which probably means that this
bust was placed in a niche up high on a wall. And we do know the function of at least one of Laurana's busts, which was installed on
a funerary monument, which you see recorded here
in a very simple drawing. And this was the monument
of Eleanor of Aragon, who was the Countess Peralta
di Caltabellotta, in Sicily. And this monument was in the convent of Santa Maria del Bosco di Calatamauro, again in Sicily. And here really comes a little surprise and a detail not to ignore: Eleanor had died in 1405, so some 25 years before
Laurana was even born. So this really tells us that these busts could also be funerary. They could definitely be made after the end of the sitter's life. So really who knows who
the Frick bust may portray? It's really a one-million-dollar question. If we look at the
contextless, minimalist way in which the funerary bust of Eleanor is beautifully, and
lyrically almost, installed at Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo, by the Italian architect Carlo Scarpa, if we look at this we really realize it's so hard for curators to find a balance between a display which is contextual
and tries to make sense of these busts as historical products and the temptation to isolate them. Also because of how precious
they are and how rare they are and the way they invite
contemplation, really, almost religious contemplation. And here you see how
the bust was displayed at 1 East 70th Street. It used to be in the vestibule before the anteroom of the Boucher Room. So really a go-through space where it wasn't really paid much attention to it by the public, unfortunately. And it was usually facing the Vecchietta in the same space. So it wasn't completely isolated, but not too many people
paid attention to it, as I said. And it used to stand on this pedestal, which was inspired by similar examples in the Morgan Library in New York. Now, at Frick Madison, we tried to do something different. We had the Laurana bust flanked
by two other portrait busts, one of Beatrice of Aragon,
which is, again, by Laurana and is very seldom on display
at 1 East 70th Street. And if you think about it, it's amazing how the Frick
has two of just a handful of Laurana busts in the world. And on the other side, you
see the female bust, again, by Verrocchio, the Florentine sculpture, the master of Leonardo da Vinci, whose marble busts of women
are, again, exceedingly rare. So the two busts on the
sides came in the 1960s to the collection as a gift
of John D. Rockefeller Jr. And we've decided to show them with their gilded twentieth-century bases, which sort of nuanced the transition between these white marble
busts and the gilded panels of the early Italian
paintings in the next room. But it also reminds us,
these bases remind us that the materiality of these busts was originally much more
complex than it looks now. So you see that, also with
the carpets farther back, you see that a lot at Frick Madison is about material. We have a focus on
material at Frick Madison. And it's also funny, in a way, that these fifteenth-century
busts at the Frick, all the fifteenth-century
busts at the Frick, are busts of women and
they're all in marble and they are all from the
same decade, probably. So it really gives us a sense of the range of the
stylistic possibilities and the stylistic choices made by Italian artists at the time. But it also tells us about
the balance between naturalism and abstraction, where it
came to female portraiture. But when you realize that
just a few rooms down, all the sixteenth-century
busts that are on display are of male sitters and are in bronze, well, you start wondering
if that's just the case or if maybe materials
are somehow gendered. And you also wonder about the taste of the people who acquired these works. So do come to Frick Madison and really, let's ask together
new, different questions of the same objects. Thank you, and see you
soon for another episode. Goodbye!
