Art
Old Masters in Painting and Sculpture
MESSRS. AGNEW are at present showing at their galleries in Bond Street thirty-three paintings which formerly belonged to the Viennese collector, Stefan von Auspitz. Almost every European school is represented in this collection, and von Auspitz seems to have liad no more particular intention in' forming his collection than to bring together first-rate paintings of whatever kind they happened to be. In this he succeeded, for the pictures now on view, though they are not in general spectacular, are almost all of great interest and beauty.
The Italian Primitives are rather thinly represented by an elegant Crucifixion (20) of Jacopo di Cione and by a more massive painting of Angels Making Music (23) by the Maestro del Bambino Vispo. The glory of the exhibition is certainly the series of Quattro-cento works. From Florence there is Benozzo Gozzoli's Deposition (8), a curiously 'moving painting which does not, however, yield up its secret easily. , The composition is subtly saved from monotony by the stem of the cross which goes out of the top of the picture, and by the figure holding a wreath which forms an apex for the group. The school of Ferrara has supplied the much-damaged fresco of the Virgin and Child (29) by Cossa, and the exquisite St. Anthony Abbot (9) by Ercole Roberti. It is hard to estimate how good the former has been, but it is fairly clear that the figure of the Virgin was once very noble. The St. Anthony, a fragment of a predella of which other parts are known, shows perfectly Roberti's crisp treat. ment of drapery, though the head is a little weak. Vincenzo Foppa's romantic St. Sebastian (16) has a silvery tone en- livened with certain brighter passages in the background figures, and the whole colour scheme is so beautiful that we willingly forgive the weaknesses in drawing. One of the most puzzling pictures in the whole collection is the Portrait of a Blonde Woman (15), attributed in the catalogue to Palma Vecchio, though the weight of evidence seems at the moment to point rather to Cariani as its author. Its dry quality and chalky whites, so unlike the richness which we connect with Palma and artists of his kind, suggest at first that the painting has been stripped of its glazes, but this is an illusion, and really the artist, whoever he was, was deliberately experimenting in an unusual idiom. The handling is too sensitive for the paint- ing to be either unfinished or over-cleaned, and once we get used to its unexpected qualities it becomes evident that the picture is of the greatest merit. Late Italian painting is represented principally by two oval decorative paintings by Tiepolo (24 and 30).
The best of the early Flemish paintings is the Portrait of an Old Lady (33) by Memling, a marvel of sensitiveness and restraint. The Lucretia (4) attributed to Joos van Cleve, but very close to Lucas van Leyden, is superficially so ugly that it takes some time to see the incredible skill with which it is painted. There is only one French picture, St. Ambrosias (13), by that hazy artist Simon Marmion, whose artistic reputation is improved by the addition of this work to his oeuvre. Of the Dutch paintings the best is the Ruins of the Castle of Egmont (27), by Jacob Ruisdael, splendid as a whole but dully painted in many details. The portrait of Aloysius Gonzaga (5), by El Greco, is unworthy of that artist. Only the head is good, though even the contour of that appears to have been spoilt, and the left hand can hardly he by-El Greco at all. Mr. Sydney Rurney has just held, at his galleries in St. James's Place, a very remarkable exhibition of sculpture of all times and places. The object of the exhibition was to show that " sculpture is always the same'," and this theme was de- veloped by Mr. Leon Underwood in hid interesting but difficult preface to the catalogue. The objects shown covered almost all periods from the Palaeolithic to the present day,and came from all the four quarters of the globe, and every type was represented by an example of the highest order. The im- pression produced was therefore one of immense variety, but it was also certainly true that the spectator never seemed forced into any violent change of attitude as he moved among statues separated in 'their production by thousands of year+ and thousands of miles. Almost the only period unrepresented was the Baroque, and it would have been interesting to see whether it would have produced the same effect of belonging to the general tradition of sculpture. ANTHONY 131.UN T.
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