EL GRECO AND HIS PATRONS. THREE MAJOR PROJECTS by Richard G. MannReview by: CECIL GOULDJournal of the Royal Society of Arts, Vol. 134, No. 5364 (NOVEMBER 1986), pp. 844-846Published by: Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and CommerceStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41374256 .

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS NOTES ON BOOKS became a familiar figure walking (with his umbrella) from the Strand to the Company's meeting-place at the Royal Exchange. In 1739 Thomas Coram had opened the Foundling

Hospital. The year 1756 saw Hanway's election as a governor of the Hospital followed by his founding of the Marine Society, which furthered its cause. The Society in turn, he recorded, 'prepared the way for taking care of friendless and abandoned girls' in the Magdalen Hospital for the Reception of Penitent Pro- stitutes, of which in 1758 he was a co-founder. To this refuge, conducted with delicacy, kindness and strict propriety, King George III subscribed and in 1765 his consort, Queen Charlotte, became its first Patroness. The Magdalen honoured its bicentenary in 1958, when Queen Elizabeth the Queen Mother was Patron: then, having undertaken 'fatal association with the state', closed its doors. The Foundling Hospital is to-day represented by the Thomas Coram Foundation for Children. Professor Taylor draws an interesting parallel

between Hanway and Charles Dickens. Hanway's literary style even approached Dickens's when in 1779 he championed anew the boys who cried "Weep! 'weep!' in the streets: the climbing boys apprenticed to chimney-sweepers and 'blasted with chilling cold; wet to the skin . . . sores bleeding, or with limbs contracted'. He himself saw no ameliora- tion - but half a century later 'Glass's Machinery' began to replace climbing boys in King George IV's palaces.* Children, animals, slaves, sufferers from venereal

disease, and other groups all came within Hanway's range of tireless compassion and practical policy. Early rising, prayer, work, walking, cleanliness, wholesome food: such was the principle he preached and practised. When in 1762 he was appointed a 'Commissioner for Victualling His Majesty's Navy', which sometimes took him back to Portsmouth, he studied the seaman's diet and advocated beer, which 'cheers, invigorates and nourishes', a thick vegetable soup prepared to his own recipe, and wholewheat bread. A pleasant social life completed his personal ideal. He died unmarried on 5th September 1786, having

'managed his own death' with Christian composure, and was followed towards his resting-place in the crypt of St Mary's Church, Hanwell, west of London, by a cortège that included twenty-five Marine Society boys. To-day British Rail passengers to and from Portsmouth see, by daylight and softly illumined in darkness, The Marine Society, not only a local landmark adjacent to Waterloo Station but a landmark in British social history. OLWEN HEDLEY * Lord Chamberlain's Records, Public Record Office: LC.1/43 (184, 190, 193), 1829. 844

EL GRECO AND HIS PATRONS. THREE MAJOR PROJECTS By Richard G. Mann. Cambridge , University Press, 1986. £35 The present book inaugurates a series called 'Cambridge Studies in the History of Art'. Both of the editors, Francis Haskell and Nicholas Penny, are cur- rently employed at Oxford and the author of the book in New York. The series is 'aimed primarily at profes- sional art historians, their students and scholars in related subjects'. The book is stated to be a revision of the author's doctoral thesis of 1982, and it is a point greatly in its favour that it is very much more readable than some others of its kind. The three projects in question are Greco's work for Santo Domingo el Antiguo at Toledo, for the Seminary of the Incarnation at Madrid and for the the Hospital of St John the Baptist at Toledo. The author's aim is, in effect, to attempt to estimate the influence of the respective patrons, through a study of what is known of their life and views, on the resulting works of art. Such an approach is capable of being fruitful in the

study of the work of many Old Masters, since the sub- ject of the painting was normally chosen by the patron and not by the artist. But El Greco is peculiarly resis- tant to the treatment; for, with the possible exception of Perugino, he was more in the habit of repeating his designs than any other Old Master. At a relatively early stage in his career he evolved his versions of the stan- dard repertory - Annunciation, Nativity, Baptism, Crucifixion, Resurrection, Assumption, etc. - which he developed and repeated over and over again for dif- ferent patrons. It follows that what the patron was get- ting on most of these occasions was something which had been evolved in another context. The design could be modified in detail but was not fundamentally changed. To this generic objection to interpreting pictures by

Greco in the light of the views of the patron is added, in the present case, another. None of the three com- posite projects under discussion remains intact. In the case of the second and third there is not even a record of the original arrangement, while the pedigrees of most of the existing pictures which have been thought to have come from them do not extend back that far. It can hardly be denied that the foundations of the pre- sent book are somewhat precarious. For the earliest of the three undertakings, the com-

posite high altar and two lateral altars for Santo Domingo el Antiguo, Greco's first work in Spain and the one which brought him to Toledo from Rome, the author is on the least shaky ground, since three of the components are still in position and there is no doubt about the provenance of the others which are now dis- persed. And at this stage of his career Greco was not yet in a position to repeat his own designs to any serious extent, since he was still in the process of evolving

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NOVEMBER 1986 them from bits and pieces he had observed in Italy. The central element - the Assunta- of the main retable is now at Chicago. In the case of the lateral altars an evident reflection of the patron's wishes was the inclusion of St Jerome in the Nativity and of St Ildefonsus in the Resurrection. But this was specified in the contract and both pictures might have looked better without these foreign bodies. Mr Mann says that the candle held by St Jerome 'would suggest that he [Greco] conceived the Vulgate as an offering to God and also represents the prayers which he makes on behalf of the Dean'. I confess I do not fully follow this and find it easier to assume that the candle has a function in lighting the figure of St Jerome. Mr Mann thinks that St Jerome is a portrait of the patron, but though the idea is reasonable I can see no resemblance between this elderly bald man and the youthful Don Diego de Castilla whose portrait Mr Mann repro- duces. With Greco's work for the Seminary of the Incarna-

tion the serious difficulties begin, since there is no authentic information concerning what were the sub- jects of the altarpieces, nor even how many of them there were. And the church no longer exists. There is, however, a reasonable probability that the Annuncia- tion now at Villanueva y Geltrú (near Barcelona) and the Baptism (now in the Prado) came from the Seminary. These two pictures are of about the same height. The Baptism is the narrower, and is virtually the same width and height as the Nativity now at Bucharest whose provenance is unknown. It would therefore be reasonable to think that these two may have flanked the Annunciation. A Crucifixion, now in the Prado, but likewise of unknown provenance, is of similar dimensions to the Annunciation and could have been situated above it at the summit of the retable, perhaps flanked (though the author does not think so) by the Pentecost and Resurrection (both in the Prado) which are of the same size as each other, both with arched tops and fairly evidently a pair. Mr Mann sees the guiding influence on this pic-

torial programme in the mystical writings of the Blessed Alonso de Orozco, the founder of the Semi- nary. He goes into the life and teaching of this holy man in great and absorbing detail, but when it comes to the crucial point of relating the doctrine to the ex- isting paintings he is inclined, as he is elsewhere, to push too hard. In the Annunciation, for example, he says 'El Greco explicitly illustrated Alonso 's descrip- tion of the Archangel's reaction to Mary's acceptance of her role as the Mother of Christ. According to Alonso, Gabriel crossed his arms in front of his chest . . . The representation of the Archangel in this at- titude, rather than in the conventional pose ... in which his arm is extended toward the Virgin, clearly establishes that the moment of Christ's conception is shown.' That may well be the case; but what Mr Mann does not tell us is that there was already an alter-

NOTES ON BOOKS native pictorial tradition exemplified by painters who had not had the benefit of the Blessed Alonso's teach- ing, but who had also depicted the angel of the Annun- ciation with his arms crossed on his chest. Titian, for example, followed it in his great altarpiece for S. Salvatore in Venice, which, since it is datable to the 1 560s, would have been a great novelty when Greco was in Venice and a picture which he could not help knowing. Similarly, in the Crucifixion, Mr Mann equates the fact that Christ's right foot is nailed above the left - and not vice versa - with another passage in Alonso's writings, but does not tell us that this too had been common in sixteenth-century Venice. On the other hand, Mr Mann scores in linking the highly unusual inclusion of the Burning Bush in the painting of the Annunciation with Alonso's assertion that it miraculously appeared in Mary's room at this precise moment. The third project - for the Hospital of St John the

Baptist outside Toledo - has the advantage over its predecessor in that the building for which it was inten- ded still exists, but in every other respect the impon- derables are even more hair-rising. Though a contract of 1608 relates to three altars commissioned from El Greco it only concerns the design and execution of the architectural elements and sculpture, and does not even mention the existence of paintings, let alone specify their subjects. But an inventory of Greco's estate after his death in 1614 has an entry in respect of 'paintings started for the hospital' and there is an altar- piece of the Baptism, mainly attributable to Greco, actually in existence in the building. This picture is virtually a replica of the one in the Prado which is thought to have come from the Seminary of the Incar- nation at Madrid. The most conspicuous difference is that God the Father turns towards the left and directs his blessing towards an angel, rather than facing straight ahead as he does in the Prado picture. Accor- ding to Mr Mann this means that 'God did not res- pond directly to the Baptism and acted only through the appointed intermediaries'. The fact that in 1635 a different painter, Félix Casteló, was commissioned to paint an Annunciation and an Apocalyptic Vision (as well as a Baptism) for the same building has led to the assumption that paintings of these subjects were those which Greco 'started,' and thence to the indentifica- tion of them with an Annunciation now in the Banco Urquijo in Madrid and the Apocalyptic Vision now in New York. The Annunciation repeats the design of the one at Villanueva y Geltrú, with the omission of the Burning Bush and with differences in the angel's gesture and in the glory overhead. The verdict on Mr Mann's book is therefore that his

conclusions, for the most part, cannot be seen as more than provisional, and some reserve must also be re- corded regarding the efficacy and application of the method. The amount of light that can be shed on works of art by a study of the patron, though such

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JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF ARTS NOTES ON BOOKS

study has its own fascination, is variable, and, on the whole, probably less extensive than its protagonists would have us believe. Just as previous attempts to discover a consistent relationship between art and politics have foundered, so the more recent attention given to patronage is likely to lead to the conclusion that there is no pattern linking art and society to which it is not possible to find an exception.

CECIL GOULD

ROGER DE PILE'S THEORY OF ART By Thomas Puttfarken New Haven & London , Yale University Press , 1985. £14.95 One of the more encouraging developments in the study of the visual arts over the last two decades has been the increasing interest in art theory, and in this the University of Essex has had an important rôle. To Michael Podro's excellent Critical Historians of Art , which dealt with the German critical tradition from its origins in Kant to Panofsky, is now added Thomas Puttfarken's book on de Piles, which, going beyond its title, provides a perceptive over-view of French art- theory in the late seventeenth and eighteenth cen- turies, with glances forward to David and Delacroix. It is lucidly if rather soberly written and altogether welcome. In the popular mind de Piles is associated with what

now appears as a faintly dotty system of alloting brownie points for merit to the different qualities in works of art, and I was once approached by a helpful Professor of Statistics who wanted to know if their computerization would be useful! To this aspect of de Piles, Professor Puttfarken pays little attention, addressing himself rather to the core of his thinking and the evolution of his ideas. His central chapters, Tainting as a Visual Art' and 'The Unity of the Object' deal with de Piles' essentially novel concep- tion of 'l'unité d'objet' as consisting in a visual experi- ence which is unique to painting. It gives l theoretical place in art criticism to what we would now describe as formal values, such as had not, in Professor Putt- farken's view, existed before. It is in this that the chief originality of de Piles and his relevance for modern thinking about the visual arts lies. In this respect the thought of de Piles anticipates, as

the author several times suggests, that of Delacroix and is in contrast to that of Félibien and the Academy. Of particular interest is a discussion of Poussin 's theory of modes, which the author believes to have been misunderstood. The usual view - Blunt and Bialostocki are cited - is that Poussin and his com- mentators were referring, through the musical analogy, to a kind of visual unity conveyed by the composition itself. Puttfarken sees this as a post-de Piles gloss to be

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found only as late as 1721 in the interpretation of Poussin's ideas by Antoine Coypel. Félibien himself, in discussing the modes, refers only to a commonality in the expressive behaviour of the figures and it is in this 'unity of subject' rather than in any abstract quality in the composition as a whole that the modal unity lies. I do not myself think that this limited interpretation

can easily be placed on Poussin's own discussion of the matter in the letter to Chantelou of 24th November 1647, which arose precisely from his desire to explain to a slightly discontented patron why some of his pic- tures were conceived in one way and some in another, and certainly does not seem to confine the matter to the behaviour of the actors alone. What it does serve to show (although this is not, I think, exactly the author's intention) is how limited, for all its consistency, the art theory of the Academy was and how practice tran- scended it. It is indeed the great merit of de Piles that, by intro-

ducing new concepts of formal order, he brought theory closer to practice, and his chief virtue as a critic that he constantly modified his theories in direct con- tact with works of art, placing responsiveness to the individual object above consistency. Rightly in my view he did not regard geometric perspective highly as an instrument for achieving pictorial illusion, and Professor Puttfarken's discussion of his attempt to relate Rubens' compositional device of a highly focused centre with a blurring of the peripheral forms to the realities of foveal vision is, as applied to the Rape of the Sabines in the National Gallery, one of the most in- teresting things in the book. What indeed is inspiring and continuously relevant

in de Piles' developing ideas, as here reconstructed, is his heroic attempt to relate the central purposes of painting to visual experience itself. 'In what ways', Puttfarken sees de Piles as asking, 'does disposition (the overall visual effect) make us value the things pro- vided by invention?' This remains the thousand- dollar question in art criticism and this reminder of an attempt to answer it at the turn of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is timely at a moment when the discussion of art is once again, as at the time of the Academy, excessively inclined to depend on literary models. Of course, de Piles' answers in his final works, the

Cours and the Abrégé de la Vie des Peintres, are not complete or even consistent. But his idea of grace - it is possible in de Piles' thinking for a battlepiece to be graceful - and of enthusiasm - the means by which the painter's passion is through the act of painting itself communicated to his subject - place style where it belongs, at the centre of art criticism as of art history. Such ideas are as pertinent to-day as when they were first written. In this neat presentation of de Piles' theories Professor Puttfarken has produced not only a useful piece of history but a tract for the times.

JOHN STEER

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