Notes taken while viewing the Old Masters in Dresden
All paintings pictured currently on display in Dresden.
Rosalba Carriera, portraits: pastel on paper. As always with pastel: incredible softness of texture. The hair of her portraits is cloudlike, powdered.
The white of the skin—mark of beauty in the 18th century; pale was aristocratic—shines from the grey void.
She seems to prefer blues for contrast: white hair, white skin, blue eyes, blue elements in the clothing, sometimes interspersed by floral reds—the quintessential Rosalban figure.
The women with suggestive expressions, but subtle; the salaciousness knows no social boundaries: countesses are portrayed just as courtisans are—Venetian tradition. There is, at times, almost no seperation between the lace of the clothing and the skin of the decolletage.
The men she paints seem frail, especially when compared to contemporary portraitists like Mengs, Rotari, or Liotard.
All her figures seem as if they are made of porcelain—the material of the epoch emulated by the artistic medium of the epoch, the pastel.
The porcelain-character makes Rosalba’s religious sujets seem limp, wrong.
What Tiepolo means for mythological painting of 18th-century Venice—and for the whole epoch, the Rococo—Rosalba means for the portrait in 18th-century Venice.
Canaletto for landscape and vedute, Tiepolo for mythology and history, Rosalba for the portrait, in particular for the physiognomy of the epoch, for its “self-view”. Porcelain-men. It makes sense that an epoch later characterized as “feminine” finds its greatest “physiognomist” in a woman.
Rosalba only left Venice twice: Once she went to Paris to get inducted into the French Academy, and once she travelled to Vienna to work for the court. Venice, Paris, Vienna—if one had seen those cities in the 18th century, that was more than enough. Sure, there is the Würzburg and the Madrid of Tiepolo, the Dresden and the Warsaw of the Saxon kings, patrons of Canaletto, but they are secondary as true centers.
Next to Frans Hals for the Dutch Golden Age, and Cranach and Holbein for the Reformation epoch, there may not be a general corpus of portraiture as representative of its epoch as Rosalba’s.
The great contradiction of the so-called “Baroque”—war, death, darkness, religious strictness on the one side, and light, movement, carnality on the other—is nowhere as visible as in Rubens. Rembrandt, Caravaggio, Velazquez all work primarily with the dark of their epoch, as do Reni, Cortona, Giordano. Bernini has the movement. But Rubens alone unites all the tendencies. That does not make him a greater painter, however.
Rubens at once can work with Rembrandtian severity, while also already pointing towards Tiepolo.
Rubens is, most of all, a master of the nude. Velazquez, in his Venus, only shows us the nude from behind, restrained. He doesn’t dare to exhibit true carnality, but in his restraint he maintains the subtlety, salaciousness, seductiveness of the Renaissance: Raffael’s Fornarina, the women of Titian, Bordone. Titian’s Venus, however, much more than Giorgione’s—whose Venus is entirely innocent—, already hints at the opening of his view as a painter towards Rubens’ carnality.
The open carnality of Rubens is entirely unerotic, most of the time.
The quintessential Rubens figure is constitutively “intoxicated”.
Interesting parallel between Rosalba’s portraits and Giorgione, some early Titian, some early Veronese: the roughness, or what appears as roughness, of the texture. Viewed from some distance, the roughness becomes a softness in all. The same effect can be seen in the better Vermeer paintings. Rosalba’s contemporaries, like Ricci, Tiepolo, Guardi—they all came more from the late Veronese, who is not “dusty” but “watery” in appearance, as is Tintoretto.
Giorgione’s Venus, despite the solidity of the composition, appears as if “breathed” onto the canvas.
Rosalba’s faces—some can be seen prefigured in Correggio, also in Titian’s Lady in White. There isn’t that much change in the idea of female beauty between the Renaissance and the Rococo, but the men in Renaissance portraiture are completely different from those of the 18th century.
The female face: mostly unchanged from Greek sculpture all the way until about 1800. Goethe drawing the same face Correggio and Rosalba painted, Angelika Kauffmann painted.
In its tendency to play with movement and light, Baroque painting often loses iconographic complexity. Painting moving towards a practice focussed on singular effects becomes very apparent with the followers of Caravaggio, the great perverter. The worse a painter’s craft, the more likely he is to try to focus on isolated effects, chief among them lighting.
The Venetian sin: flight into monumentality. It “liberates” from the scrutiny of details, frees space for colour—but it dilutes composition. Veronese is guilty of this often. It also makes some paintings phyiscally unviewable.
One wonders: In whom did the tradition of Florentine solidity live on?
From Michelangelo the Maniera, Mannerism is born; from that what we colloquially call the “Baroque”. But where is Florence after 1500? The last great quasi-Florentine: Raffael. The last proper Florentines in Quattrocento style: Lorenzo di Credi, Piero di Cosimo, I think.
Florentine solidity also means the fundamental architecturality of the Quattrocento. The importance of the background: architectural structures in the Quattrocento. Slowly displaced by landscape, especially in the Venetians and Romans (Claude’s lineage). Then, more and more, background vanishes altogether. In the baroque all becomes monochrome space, sky, void, insinuations.
But the question is: Has the decrease in background-complexity, a development that was supposed to liberate figural composition from Quattrocento rigidity, solidity, actually led to stronger figural compositions? Surely it led to more movement, bemotionedness, but that in itself does not make a stronger figure.
The figure, standing freely in space, unbound, floating is the ideal of the baroque in its true form. A Bernini sculpture achieved this better than any painting.
Guido Reni’s Christ is completely vulgar. The Italian baroque struggles with true religiosity in figurative expression. Everything is at once glossy and flat. Same is true for Rosalba, as mentioned.
Ribera’s figures are physically blinding. An excess of light in an excess of dark. There is no measure, no balance, only isolated effect.
Vermeer has, as noted, the same “blur”, the same “roughess that is a softness” as Giorgione. The “unsharpness” of the moment, despite all compositional staticity. Vermeer is, of all the recent “trend painters” (painters regarded highly now but not a century ago), certainly the most deserving of his current renown, next to Piero.
The great—but hidden?—tradition of dissolution in painting. Tiepolo is the last expression in it, the last instance in painting before “nothing”. Painting as an art that has—successfully—abolished itself in its attempt to move ever further away from Florentine solidity.
Just as we see the gradual dissolution of the Quattrocento form in painting, we see in Greek sculpture the move from Archaic rigidity to Hellenic “free figuration” by way of the classic sculpture of the Periclean age.
The 18th century was the Hellenism of the post-classical world.
