The English Appreciation of Italian DecorationAuthor(s): John HarrisSource: The Burlington Magazine, Vol. 118, No. 877 (Apr., 1976), pp. 232-233Published by: The Burlington Magazine Publications Ltd.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/878383 .

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OBITUARY

together he would come back to the hotel for breakfast, after having visited at least half a dozen churches.

The readers of THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE may be interested to have some indication of the parts David Crawford played in the various committees of which he was chairman. His first

chairmanship was that of the National Gallery. It took place at a difficult period, when the staff was openly hostile to the director, and I cannot exaggerate the sympathy and understanding which he showed to both sides in this conflict. He was an ideal chair- man, not only just and reasonable, but with a knowledge of art

history very unusual in a trustee. A subsequent director may have found this quality embarrassing: at all events he achieved the distinction of being the only man who was ever on bad terms with David Crawford. Prejudice and obstinacy brought out in David a vein of combativeness, and his chairmanship of the National Gallery became the only unhappy episode in his public life. His

chairmanship of the National Gallery of Scotland, on the other hand, was an undiluted pleasure to him. With the help of the National Art-Collections Fund he was able to purchase a series of masterpieces - Velazquez's Old Woman Frying Eggs, Claude's Landscape with Apollo, Gerard David's Legends of St Nicholas, Reynolds's Ladies Waldegrave that enhanced what must surely be the richest small public collection in the world. The meetings of the Trustees were certainly the most harmonious and productive of any such occasions that I can recall. Of his chairmanship of the Scottish National Library and the Friends of the National Library I cannot speak from first-hand experience. But I am sure that there his expertise was more than ever valuable. He had inherited one of the greatest private libraries in England and, although a

part of it had been sold by his father, he still had an amazing collection of early printed books, as well as many remarkable collections of documents. His grandfather had indulged the fancy that he would read the classics only in their first printed version, and there they all were. This library was his chief delight, and he would sit in it till late into the night pulling out and reading incunabula.

The British Museum was the only great institution in the field of the arts of which he was not chairman, fortunately for him, as fifteen years ago it was a most disheartening position. But for over

thirty years he was probably the most influential trustee. His wide

range of knowledge was invaluable, and he took great pains to know all the keepers personally and to visit their departments. The Museum was then (and to some extent still is) an aggregation of separate departments which had no contact with each other, and David Crawford must have been the only man who was familiar with them all. At board meetings he always urged the

keepers' point of view, and was particularly keen that the present trend towards popularisation should not in any way prejudice the Museum's traditional role as a centre of scholarship.

The National Art-Collections Fund seemed to be one of his less exacting chairmanships, until the dreadful day when the Royal Academy decided to sell Leonardo da Vinci's cartoon of the Virgin and St Anne. The sum to be raised, 800,000ooo, was far beyond the resources of the Fund or of such willing benefactors as the Pilgrim Trust, and in those days money did not gush so freely from the Government. Crawford therefore inaugurated a public appeal, and ran it himself. He borrowed a room in the National Gallery, and there, with a few devoted helpers, he sat day and night receiving contributions and writing appeals for more. It was a heroic work, and in the end the cartoon was secured, but it damaged his health, and in some respects he never regained his full vigour.

The chairmanship that made the greatest demands on his time and energy was the National Trust. It involved the most complex problems and, of course, the largest sums of money. David Crawford spent much of his time visiting National Trust proper-

ties, weighing up all the complicated arguments for and against accepting the offers of land and houses that constantly poured in. It was in many ways a thankless task, involving complaints from owners and the public in almost equal measure.

During all this time Crawford lived in his home in Fifeshire, and most of his self-imposed tasks involved travelling by train from Edinburgh to London. He had no secretary in Scotland, and all his letters were written in his own hand, which naturally became rather difficult to read. This continual round of work and travel gradually exhausted him, and in May, 1969, on one of his

night journeys to London, his train was derailed and he was

considerably shaken. Although he appeared to recover, and con- tinued to discharge his responsibilities with unabated vigour and

enthusiasm, I have always believed that this accident was the

beginning of a decline in his health, which took a serious turn about two years ago. He literally killed himself by overwork, for no reward except for the love and admiration of countless friends.

KENNETH CLARK

Letters A Lost Plaquette by Vittore Gambello SIR, May I ask you for space to put a question to your readers which perhaps one of them might be able to answer? For some time I have been pursuing a problem, without result and hope that I can solicit help through your pages.

In the catalogue of the Museo Cospiano in Bologna of 1677 a

plaquette is described: Sacrifizio con nove figure humane intorno ad uno

altare, in cui arde la fiamma. Havvi intorno alcune vittime, delle quali si distingue un irco in piedi, e un maiale, cui mostra di gettar nelle fiamme dell'altare una di quelle figure. La sottoscrizione palesa l'artefice, dicendo OP. VICTORIS CAMELIO.1

The signature corresponds to those of Vittore Gambello's medals and of his two bronze reliefs from the tomb of his brother Briamonte in Venice. But a plaquette such as that described in

1677 apparently has never been seen since, judging from the

complete silence of the literature.2 A search for a possible replica without signature, has not yielded any result. Gambello, one would suspect, looked for inspiration for such a subject to classical

reliefs; an examination of sources such as Montfaucon and

Reinach, however, has not turned up a prototype. The elements of the scene are found singly on a jetton signed by Gambello,3 but the complete scene still eludes us.

Gambello himself is an elusive artist. Therefore any new information which might add to his portrait, would be welcome. One hates to think that Marchese Cospi's plaquette should be lost for good. If these lines should succeed in bringing it or a

replica of it to light it would be a great gain. ULRICH MIDDELDORF

1 LORENZO LEGATI: Museo Cospiniano . . ., Bologna [1677], p.453. 2 A. VENTURI: Gallerie nazionali italiane II [1896], p.54, in passing hints at

a relief representing a sacrifice, without mentioning a signature or giving a location. Perhaps he had in mind the jetton mentioned below.

SHILL: Corpus 447- R. wEISS, in Rinascimento europeo e Rinascimento veneziano, (Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venezia) Florence [19671, P.336.

The English Appreciation of Italian Decoration SIR, May I add a cautionary rider to Dr Terry Friedman's article on 'The English Appreciation of Italian Decoration' in

your December 1975 issue, lest some of your readers be tempted into associating two ofJohn Talman's designs with the temporary decorations in Rome. In the case of the 'Design for a Room' (his

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CORRESPONDENCE

Fig.86) Dr Friedman does not tell us that this is a design for the hall in one of John Talman's projects for a Trianon at Hampton Court and has been conclusively published as such as long ago as

1960 in the journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. It is for a hall 30 feet square and belongs to a set of designs including plans and elevations. It cannot be accurately dated, but is

unlikely to have been made after 1702 when John's father William was ousted from the Royal Works.

The second design (his Fig.87), also a 'Design for a Room' is

definitely for a permanent setting. Even if Dr Friedman 'only tentatively' associates this with the 1 711 entertainment, he can

surely go no further because the decorative vocabulary is idio-

syncratically John Talman's own, drawing as he does upon a vast array of eclectic sources including Marot and Le Pautre. I would suggest that this drawing is for a very particular and

personal setting, perhaps even John or William Talman's own 'Cabinet'. The decorative assemblage is consciously designed around specific objects, including a bas-relief by Edward Pierce

5 feet 6 inches long and busts, statuettes and bronzes etc. This

type of ambience is what might be expected of the Talmans, who are known, for example, to have owned 73 items of sculpture.

In this same context, could I also refer to Dr Friedman's

passing mention (note 37) of John de Bodt's design for Went- worth Castle. The links with the Talmans are closer than Dr Friedman imagines. I published this drawing in Architectural

Review, July 1961 (Bodt and Stainborough), and pointed out that Bodt had been in England in 1698 and suggested that he had access to Talman's drawings. Even in the Talmans' lifetime the Wentworth drawing was inscribed W. T. del. et inv.

JOHN HARRIS

The Literature of Art

A New Book on La Tour BY RICHARD E. SPEAR

ONE searches in vain for a parallel to Georges de La Tour. Not only because his style is so personal, but because no artist had the success of La Tour within his' own lifetime, was virtually unmentioned in any contemporary literature, exerted so little influence on the history of art, vanished completely out of sight for nearly three centuries, and then came back with such ven-

geance - all while relatively few original works survive and so little is known about the man and his artistic making. The histori-

ography of La Tour's rediscovery is too familiar to recite here; it should suffice to recall that since Voss's pioneering article of

1914-15, more than a dozen books and scores of articles have

appeared, all in search of the real Georges de La Tour. About

twenty original paintings were known in 1948 when Pariset pub- lished his monumental and still indispensable study. Today, most scholars would neatly double that number and recognize another twenty or so compositions as being after lost originals. If we take pride in the astonishing fact that La Tour exists for us

only because of art history, and if we find satisfaction in the con- siderable growth of the accepted euvre, it nonetheless must be stressed that few if any artists of La Tour's talent and current fame remain so enigmatic. Benedict Nicolson's and Christopher Wright's new monograph*, one of the best products in the wave

of La Tour literature that has been flooding forth from all corners of the globe since the great Orangerie exhibilion of

1972, admirably addresses itself to some of the principal La Tour issues.

There are five broad problems concerning La Tour: who was the historical person? what were the sources of La Tour's art? what is the chronology of his oeuvre? what is the iconography of his

images? which are the authentic works? Nicolson clearly accepts the challenge of chronology as the overriding problem in La Tour studies. His introductory essay touches upon iconographic questions and deals with problems of authenticity and artistic

sources, but there is no doubt in the reader's mind that estab-

lishing a chronological sequence is Nicolson's guiding purpose. An appendix summarizes in English the many relevant docu- ments from Nancy and Luneville. It and the entire weuvre cata-

logue are Christopher Wright's share of the book. While it will be necessary for scholars to refer to the French transcriptions of the documents in the 1972 Orangerie catalogue, one must credit

Wright with having verified a great quantity of the original material himself, the results of which were utilized by Rosenberg- Thuillier' in 1972. Even so, the monograph under review here corrects and especially completes many archival references given in the Orangerie catalogue.

In order to dispense with further description of the book and concentrate instead on the historical problems it raises, let me note at the outset that the monochromatic reproductions gener- ally are very good, and except for a too-yellow frontispiece of a detail of the Fortune Teller, the colour plates are excellent. The black-and-white illustrations consist of 88 full-page reproductions of original works (or details thereof) and 130 smaller comparative figures. An appendix outlines Etienne de La Tour's life. Sensibly, the bibliography is selected (the 1972 exhibition catalogue has an exhaustive bibliography and is readily available), and there are indices of names and collections. In all, it is a well-made

book, handsome, and reasonably easy to use.

Expectedly, nothing new of importance emerges from the book about La Tour's life. Nicolson's first chapter, 'Biography, Eclipse and Rediscovery,' surveys the sorry state of ignorance we find ourselves in, whether in regard to La Tour's education or travels. Such issues are inextricably tied to the crucial problem of La Tour's artistic sources, and here Nicolson asserts that 'one statement can be firmly made... nothing in his first known works makes a visit either to the Netherlands or Italy . . . before 1620 obligatory or even probable...' (p.2). But among others, Pariset, Sterling, Ottani Cavina, and Rosenberg-Thuillier have

argued for an early Italian sojourn, although Blunt2 clearly sides with Nicolson. Those two English scholars see Netherland- ish sources as more decisive in La Tour's formation, a point of view recently stressed by Grossmann3 and Zolotov4 as well. The issue is much too complex to summarize here, for it not only is the question of did La Tour travel, but when: before 1616?

early in the '20's? around 1629? just before late 1639? And where: to Italy? the Low Countries? Paris? No documents and scarcely- admissible circumstantial evidence shed light on these questions, which makes one wish for a larger dose of caution in Nicolson's

* George de La Tour. By Benedict Nicolson and Christopher Wright. vi + 234 pp. + 218 black-and-white ills. and 24 colour plates. (Phaidon Press, Oxford), ?2o. Within a few weeks of publication, the book went out of print, a sure sign of its merits. It now is available in a new French edition: Georges de La Tour, transl. by Mine Racoux Rogier, Arcade, Brussels, 1976.

1 'Rosenberg-Thuillier' is used in this review to refer to the Orangerie exhibition catalogue of 1972; 'Rosenberg' refers to PIERRE ROSENBERG and FRAN9OIS MACE'

DE L'EPINAY: Georges de la Tour: Vie et Oeuvre, Fribourg [1973]; and 'Thuillier' refers to JACQUES THUILLIER: L'opera completa di Georges de La Tour, Milan [19731- ('Rosenberg and Thuillier' hence refers to the authors' separate books.) 2 ANTHONY BLUNT: 'Georges de La Tour at the Orangerie,' THE BURLINGTON

MAGAZINE, CXIV [1972], pp.516-26. 3 F. GROSSMANN: 'Some observations on Georges de La Tour and the Nether- landish Tradition,' THE BURLINGTON MAGAZINE, CXV [I973], PP.576-83. 4 YOURI ZOLOTOV: 'Georges de La Tour et le Caravagisme neerlandais,' Revue de

1'Art, No.26 [19741], PP.57-63.

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