Finest pickings
Andrew Lambirth
Masterpieces from Dresden Royal Academy, until 8 June
List summer the city of Dresden was ooded by the River Elbe and many of the treasures of the State Art Collections had to be rapidly evacuated from underground storage. The BBC was the first foreign broadcaster to inform the rest of the world, and offers of help were immediately forthcoming, particularly from Britain. Some 4,000 artworks were saved, and disaster averted. The German misfortune is now turned to our benefit, for we currently have a splendid show at the Academy of some of Dresden's finest. Rather refreshingly, this is not in any way a didactic exhibition, just a chance to see some very good paintings.
At 58 items, this is the perfect size for an exhibition, particularly when the works on display are of such high quality. Entering the Sackler galleries, the first thing you see is the marble bust of Augustus the Strong, the Elector of Saxony who in 1697 became Augustus II of Poland, and inaugurated a golden age of art collecting in Dresden. Paul Heermann's bust depicts a tough, sensual man, capable of balancing the demands of government with a policy of raising the cultural profile of his court by judicious patronage and the wholesale purchase of fine paintings. His son, Augustus III, was to preside over the full flowering of 18thcentury Dresden, distinguished by a wealth of both civic and royal building, when the court became a magnet not merely for artists, but also for connoisseurs and collectors. For a period of some 60 years (1697-1763). Dresden was at the height of its glon . .t is the city in this incarnation which the Venetian Bernardo Bellotto so expertly and famously portrayed.
The first room of the exhibition juxtaposes a painting from an earlier age (and ethos), Johann Alexandre Thiele's pastoral view of Dresden, all vineyards and winding river, soft and sensitive, with Bellotto's far sharper 'Dresden from the Right Bank of the Elbe'. (This was painted between 1749 and 1753, Bellotto having been appointed court painter in 1748.) What a contrast in emotional impetus — the gentle Thiele and the thrusting Bellotto, whose paintings seem to have a kind of bright 'farmyard' exactitude — as if seen from the rooster's eye, and complete in every worm, This slightly frigid particularity is to be seen even more strongly when Bellotto is hung next to the paintings of his uncle Canaletto. (It's interesting that Bellotto called himself `Canaletto' outside Italy, though I can't imagine many people getting them muddled up, and commissioning the wrong one.) In Gallery Two, the main room of the show, where three Bellotto views are sandwiched between a pair of Canalettos along the gallery's main wall, the differences emerge clearly. Bellotto is cool and constrained in comparison to the far greater breadth of human warmth and imagination of Canaletto. In colour and tonality, Bellotto is literally cool and bluegreen, whereas Canaletto paints on a red ground to achieve his famous 'sunlit' look.
This main gallery is brimful of other treasures, including a marvellous and peculiar Holy Family by Mantegna, the Virgin and Child flanked by stony-faced Joseph and Elizabeth, with a youthful John the Baptist looking sinister at bottom right. Nearby hangs a Titian portrait of an unknown sitter, though the picture is surprisingly rich in clues as to his identity —namely a vast palm and a paintbox by the background window which gives on to an evocative passage of landscape painting. There's a dramatic Veronese
rection' and a ligh I-fill,_‘,1 .VRion of
St Anne by Tiepolo. Two of a series of the seven sacraments by Giuseppe Maria Crespi offer by contrast an interesting crepuscular realism. (They really are what you might call 'brown studies'.) Their unusual ordinariness is qualified by the dramatic lighting of beads and hands, and the strange ritual of apparently basting the baby preparatory to throwing it in the pot, which seems to constitute 'Baptism'.
Gallery Three showcases some of the most inspired hanging in this delightful exhibition, On the south wail is a grouping of French masters which neatly encapsulates a particularly rich period in French art history. Reading from the left we have Claude's 'Landscape with the Flight into Egypt', followed by Watteau's .Festival of Love', the trio completed by Poussin's 'Pan and Syrinx' — with their several interpretations of realism and classicism. Adjacent is a very different kind of picture: a modern-looking study by Louis de Silvestre of Christ on the Cross inspired by a cloud formation seen by the artist. The two Rubens paintings — an early 'Hero and Leander', rather harsher and less flowing in treatment than the mature 'Diana Returning from the Hunt' — hold the opposite wall with superb assurance as we move down the gallery to another revelatory piece of banging. Here is another trio: Velazquez's portrait of Juan Mateos and van Dyck's 'Portrait of a Man in Armour with a Red Scarf, brilliantly interrupted by Ribera's exceptionally powerful portrait of Diogenes hung between them. Elsewhere, a classic Adriaen van Utrecht still-life of dead birds and animals introduces a Murillo Madonna and another Velazquez. There are many fine things to see.
The final gallery takes us back in time to the earliest works on show — an exquisite miniature Elsheimer in oil on copper, a foursquare portrait of a man with a black cap, possibly by Barthel Beham, a compatriot and younger contemporary of Diirer (and looking far more modern than the Elder Cranach's portrait of Elector John the Constant of Saxony), and the iconic 'Adam and Eve' by Lucas Cranach the Younger. There's a fine flower painting by Mignon, three sexually suggestive Metsus, and a pair of preand post-hunt scenes by Wouwerman. (Although only one is numbered in the catalogue, both have been hung.) The magnificent DOrer portrait of Bernhard von Reesen shines like a beacon throughout the gallery, with a haunting dreamy Caspar David Friedrich landscape done nearly 300 years later hung next to it. The last pictures you see on leaving are Dahl's moonlit view of Dresden, and to its right a dark Ruisdael landscape much admired by Goethe. A breathtaking introduction to a city rightly renowned for its art. You begin to see why Dresden in the 18th century was christened the 'Florence of the Elbe'.
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