Cort’s and Floris’s Virtues

Revisiting an online exhibition of Mannerist engravings (previously mentioned here), I was struck by one particular series of eight prints depicting the Virtues. Elsewhere, I’ve oftenest seen Virtues collected in threes, fours, sevens or dozens, so perhaps this set is a composite, or is incomplete, or is intended in some way to correspond with the eight Beatitudes. Or maybe it’s just an idiosyncratic collection. They were the work of an Antwerp-based engraver called Cornelis Cort, who had produced them from original designs by the painter Frans Floris. A little more looking around led me to a better set of reproductions of all but one of these images, as presented at the University of Liège’s ‘Florilège’ site. Details from these images follow below: click on them to see them in full.

It is thought that this series was published in Antwerp in 1560, by Hieronymous Cock (who was also, as I’ve noted recently, Pieter Bruegel’s usual publisher). Each print presents us with a female personification of a particular virtue, accompanied by some kind of beast, fish, or fowl: a serpent coils around the feet of Intelligence; a large fish with decidedly canine features lies under Sobriety’s feet; a greyhound looks up to Memory; a falcon rests on the branch of a tree held by Concord; a lion lies under Magnanimity’s skirts; while Chastity holds on to a heron, and Perseverance grapples with a large fish, perhaps a salmon.

Frans Floris (1520-1570), more properly called Frans de Vriendt, was born into to an artistically-inclined Antwerp family. His father had been a stonecutter, and his brothers Cornelis, Jan and Jacques (or Jacob) all became artists too. Frans studied in Liège, and later travelled in Italy, before returining to Flanders ca. 1540. He established a busy workshop which turned out a large number of Italian-influenced ‘pictures for the country houses of Spanish nobles and the villas of Antwerp patricians.’ The wikipedia article on Floris (lifted from the 1911 Britannica) is all disapproval & disdain, and suggests that most of his output was decorative hack-work. Even so, some of his paintings, such as his panel The Fall of the Rebel Angels are none too shabby.

Cornelis Cort (1536-1578) was a Dutch-born engraver who studied under Hieronymous Cock in Antwerp. Like Floris, he travelled to Italy, and was greatly influenced by Italian painting. On his first visit to Venice, Titian hired him to produce engraved versions of several of his drawings. Cort later settled in Rome, where he collaborated with some of that city’s most eminent painters, among them Girolamo Muziano, Federico Zuccaro and Giulio Clovio. He also made engravings after Raphael’s paintings.

Such contrived pictorial allegories seem remote from the preoccupations of contemporary art, but there are at least two notable 20th-Century artists whose work has some affinity with images like these. A recent Guggenheim exhibition has juxtaposed a number of Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs with prints by Goltzius, Jan Harmensz, Jacob Matham, and others, although it is unclear from the exhibition’s promotional notes whether the likeness between them is due to influence, or accident.

And, Georg Baselitz has been collecting Mannerist prints since the mid ’60s, seeing in them a ‘kind of engraving that distanced itself completely from reproductive engraving, which didn’t respect its spatial layering, the space of the picture plane, but instead was almost ornamental, in an unconventional way—practically typographically ornamental.’

Lequeu

Jean-Jacques Lequeu’s name has come to be linked with those of Étienne-Louis Boullée and Claude-Nicolas Ledoux, at least since the publication of Emil Kaufmann’s 1933 book Von Ledoux bis Le Corbusier. The three were all architectural visionaries, who sketched fanciful and often extravagantly unconstructable buildings, and all were active at the advent of the French revolution. Unlike his two contemporaries, however, Lequeu (1757-1825) never belonged to the architectural establishment. He worked as a draughtsman at Rouen, and later, from 1779, in Paris, variously at the Cadastre (Land Registry), the Ecole Polytechnique, and the Interior Ministry.

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During these years he laboured on two substantial and elaborate treatises in manuscript: Architecture Civile and Nouvelle Méthode Appliquée aux Principes Élémentaires du Dessin: ‘New Method Applied to the Elementary Principles of Drawing.’ These, along with other sketches and documents were donated anonymously to the Bibliothèque Royale (now Nationale) in July 1825, a few months after their author’s death. This entire collection has been scanned & is available for on-line perusal at the Gallica website, from where I have lifted the present images.

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While some of Lequeu’s sketches resemble designs of Boullée’s, (as in the first of the images above, for example) it seems plausible that Lequeu envied and resented the older architect’s prestige. According to Kaufmann, between two leaves in Lequeu’s Architecture Civile, there was found an inflammatory pamphlet, dating from the revolution’s second year, which declaimed: ‘You Artists who demand Justice, Awake! A clique has been formed in the Jury of the Arts set up by the National Convention […] A kind of architectural lunatic, the seventy-year-old Boullée is at the centre of it and has arranged everything to his advantage […] and keep an eye on that humbug Ledoux and the smug charlatan Le Roy.’

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Lequeu had tried submitting his work for exhibition in the Salons, but was consistently rejected. He later tried to sell his work by post, by way of advertisements in Paris journals, but these efforts too, it seems, were largely unsuccessful. He retired in 1815, whereupon he apparently placed an advertisement which included (in English) the following: ‘I shall now fly the company of men from whom he has received nothing but injustice and ingratitude: I shall go, and I defy the others.’ Other writings of his also hint at a querulous, prickly temperament in their author.

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Besides his architectural œuvre, Lequeu also produced a number of striking ‘physiognomical’ studies, such as those below, and numerous pornographic Figures Lascives: examples here. He admitted that he had been reprimanded for drawing such figures while at work… Sexual preoccupations often crop up, more-or-less hidden, in his architectural drawings too. Perhaps most unexpected of all, though, are the peculiar self-portraits that Lequeu made of himself as a woman…

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There is a monograph about Lequeu, subtitled an Architectural Enigma, by one Philippe Duboy, which has the virtue of presenting hundreds of the images from the Lequeu collection (albeit all but a few of them in black & white). Alas, I wouldn’t recommend this volume, as, while Duboy does not omit to present what little is known about Lequeu’s life, he does this confusingly, and uses his discussion of Lequeu’s work as a pretext for a tiresome & pretentious farrago about Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Roussel & Le Corbusier, among others.

The images above are all details, click on them to see them somewhat enlarged, and in full.

How Green was my Valley

This time last week I was on my way to the town where I grew up: a place called Rhymney (pronounced ‘RUM-knee’), which can be found up at the wrong end of one of the South Wales valleys. I lived there or thereabouts until I was eighteen, and again for a while after I graduated from university, but couldn’t find a job. The last time I’d been there was for Christmas ’01…

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I was only in the UK for three days, & had over-ambitiously hoped to combine family get-togethers with attending a conference (at this place). I’d also wanted to get a whole lot of shopping done: I ended up skipping the second day of the conference in favour of a trip to a supermarket (to stock up on British cheese, sausages, bacon, etc., which I would smuggle back to Scandinavia), and a couple of hours in Bryn-Bach park. The valley was green indeed, and the sun shone brightly, making it feel like an altogether different place than the one I remember. In my recollections of Rhymney there are nearly always grey skies, and rain.

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Rushed as it all was, I am still grateful that I got the chance to stay at my mother’s recently-renovated house, that I got to see her dog for the first time; that I got to see my grandmother again; that I saw my Dad & his new dog, & that I met up with my sister & my nieces & my brother-in-law & my aunt & my cousin & her younger son, who I hadn’t met before either… I meant to take more pictures than I did, but left it too late except for a few hastily-captured snaps like those above. Note that the first picture above isn’t mine: it’s a detail from a panoramic view of the Rhymney valley a few miles south of where I was staying: I found it here. Click on the details above to see the images in full.

Maschere della Commedia

I appear to have found my way on to the mailing list of a Venetian artist named Daniele Scarpa Kos. His latest mail announced an exhibition entitled Maschere della Sistema, maschere della Commedia, which, I’ve just realised, I’m rather too late in mentioning, as it ran at the Spazio Ponte delle Latte in Venice from May 25th-30th. His mail was accompanied by an image which fits in nicely with the decor of this page: two details from it follow below—click on them to see the full picture.

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This picture reminded me of a page I’d bookmarked a couple of months ago, which is about a series of images, in the form, I guess, of collectable prints or cards, which are on the theme of Pulcinella. One of these (shown below) was by Luigi Serafini, whose more extensive work on the same subject, La Pulcinellopedia Piccola, I have mentioned before.

This, in turn, prompted me to search more generally for images of Pulcinella and his fellow Commedia dell’Arte cast-members. Among the pictures this turned up were some ink & wash sketches by Giandomenico Tiepolo (1727-1804), son of the better-known Giambattista Tiepolo. The younger Tiepolo apparently followed Pulcinella’s misadventures over the course of about a hundred drawings. Details from two of these (found here & here respectively) follow below.

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One more intriguing set of Commedia-themed images I discovered this morning were those by Maurice Sand (1823-89, son of ‘George’). In 1862, he published a book on the subject of the Commedia entitled Masques et bouffons, which included twenty-five watercolours of its characters. I picked out two of these (found on this page) to reproduce here:

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Pelēcis

Georgs Pelēcis is a Latvian composer and musicologist. He studied in Moscow under Aram Khachaturian, and is currently a professor at the Latvian Academy of music. His work is notable for its clarity, and its apparently naÏve simplicity, which can seem to teeter alarmingly between the banal and the sublime. It’s a determinedly happy music, which abounds in straightforward consonance, and shows the joint influences of early music and of contemporary minimalism. Pelēcis has composed dozens of works, but only a relatively small number of these have been recorded. The pianist Alexei Lubimov has included pieces by Pelēcis on two of his CD releases: his New Year’s Music for solo piano, and his Concertino Bianco for piano and orchestra. The former piece was the first of this composer’s work that I heard, and I must admit I still haven’t warmed to it. The Concertino, however, is a favourite of mine (for an mp3 of the opening movement, click here). Anyone tempted to follow my recommendation should note, however, that at least one reviewer has recoiled from what he felt was a ‘diabetes-inducing sugariness’ in its second movement, while another likened listening to a work composed for the ‘white notes’ only (hence bianco), to ‘watching someone avoiding the cracks in the sidewalk.’

Another champion of Pelēcis’s music is his fellow Latvian, the virtuoso violinist Gidon Kremer. At least three of the releases by Kremer’s ensemble have included compositions by Pelēcis: including Nevertheless, a lengthy, meditative, and occasionally beautiful concerto for violin, piano and strings, and the briefer, breezier Meeting With a Friend. This latter piece is a musical reconstruction of a day Pelēcis spent in Moscow with Vladimir Martynov. Pelēcis and Martynov have been friends and correspondents for many years, and out of their correspondence, a musical collaboration took shape, one that was eventually recorded in 2002, and issued on CD (on the Russian Long Arms label) the following year. For an mp3 of one of Pelēcis’s contributions to this recording, click here: I love this particular piece, even while it sporadically puts me in mind of a lounge-pianist attempting to recall the theme to some ’80s TV show… All of which brings me of the point of this entry, which is to introduce some extracts from the liner notes to this CD, wherein one of Pelēcis’s letters: the one, it seems, that initiated this musical exchange, is reproduced. In the letter, he describes an inspirational dream…

…And what I was especially planning to write about happened in a bus on the way to Salacgriva. I could possibly call it a revelation […] At any rate, for me this vision had turned out to be most impressive. Albeit being an entirely musical one. The express bus drove smoothly along the highway. The weather outside of the window was very cloudy. I slumbered along, but was entirely sober. There was music sounding out from the radio, which all of a sudden started to arouse in me an unspeakable delight. In this condition I fell asleep, whereas before I was trying to understand the acoustical-psychological reasons for such a wondrous effect of the sounds from the radio on me. And all of a sudden I had a dream that I was in a large and majestic cathedral, most probably an Orthodox Christian one, although the setting and the interior was hardly a traditional one. Along with me there was a very large number of Muscovites there—our common acquaintances.

You and I were sitting. A few other people were sitting as well. Occasionally, some groups of people moved slowly and ceremoniously. As for me, I was completely and ecstatically benumbed. The only thing which was reality, and what captivated me completely was the music. It was a wonderful and endless flow of the most varied inward qualities, in which nothing was repeated, whereas outwardly it was a smooth beautiful sound without fluctuations in the level of the mood. You will, most probably, smile, and it would be difficult to provide this music with serious commentaries, but it went on in the most varied types of genres and stylistic trends. It had features of, alternately, rock-music, early music, a certain Tukhmanov and “even worse types.” However, everything followed up, one idea after another, in such a wonderful way, and each musical section contained such a great deal of spiritual-artistic power as well lightness, that it seemed that the problem of the everyday type of music (surrounding us) being “low” or “down-to-earth” simply did not exist. But one thing I remembered very well was that there were no sounds or no trace of aesthetics of modernism or the avant-garde present.

[…] now I could say that it confuses and embarrasses me more than inspires me. It is because now I know that it is possible to attain a similar type of inner freedom as the type that was available to the ancient peoples, but existing at the level of our entire auditory experience. And it could unreservedly pour out into an endless stream of sound, without any repetitions or “thematic development.” But its most important modus (the technical modus) had already eluded my comprehension. I only remember its spiritual-artistic modus—continuously evoking happiness, love and tenderness. But how did such heterogeneity combine in such an unquestionable homogeneity—I had no idea. How was such a natural and desirable eternity attained? What transformation did the sound material receive, so that each sound would penetrate so deeply into the soul?… A few days ago, in the evening, having made use of my loneliness, I sat down at the piano and within the time-frame of 10 or 20 minutes, wrote a short piece. At first, I was not too involved in it, while now, I am frequently playing it and singing it to myself. There is a certain type of Schumannesque vein in it, which it is pleasant to touch upon. I did not find any irresistible intonations here, of course, but I still would like to share it with you. Apparently, there would be no sense to play it at any of the official composers’ forums. Would anybody have any use for it at all, the way it is? Maybe you don't have any use for it either, but I will still send it to you. You could think of it, simply, as a “greeting from Riga.” Write to me, whenever you have the time or are in the mood! / Gosha / 3 December, 1984 / (translated by Ant Rovner).