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Review Author(s): Walter Friedlaender Review by: Walter Friedlaender Source: The Art Bulletin, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Sep., 1947), pp. 214-215Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3047134Accessed: 18-04-2015 15:09 UTC

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214 THE ART BULLETIN

following a classical tradition, and lacks a certain piquant indi- viduality which characterizes the Theban school of Dyn. XI. In royal and private work of Dyn. XII we find the last direct influ- ence of Old Kingdom art until the conscientious imitation of SaYte revivalists. The art of the New Kingdom appears to have sprung from Theban sources and is indebted only indirectly to the Memphite school." In a footnote Dr. Smith exempts some of the reliefs of Sesostris I from his estimate of the royal work of Dynasty XII; he might also have mentioned the magnificent portraits of the Dynasty XII kings here, as he does not discuss the Middle Kingdom in his chapters on sculpture in the round.

Chapter xiii deals with the technical methods employed in reliefs and painting of the Old Kingdom. Following Mrs. Wil- liams, the author distinguishes seven steps in the decoration of the wall. The first six are described in detail; perhaps more might have been said of the seventh, the drawing of the final outline, on which we might quote Mrs. Davies (Ancient Egyp- tian Paintings, p. xxv): "The fine brushwork of the ancient Egyptians is astonishing when we consider the means at their disposal. . . . In a dry climate like Egypt the colour dries on the brush and clogs it almost before the work has begun. How the sustained lengths of even line in thick paint on an upright surface were accomplished is a mystery to the modern copyist." The second part of this chapter deals with the color conventions, and the last on the painting technique. Dr. Smith believes that, although "accidents of preservation have naturally affected sur- face details more than the body colours beneath, a careful ex- amination of well-preserved examples of painting leads one to believe that in the Old Kingdom the painter broke up his sur- faces, consistently producing an effect somewhat different from the large masses of flat colour that have generally been assumed to be characteristic of his work. In no case is there any observa- tion of the deepening of colour to suggest the shading of a rounded surface as has been observed in a few cases in the New Kingdom."

The next two chapters, which deal respectively with the mode of representation of the single figure and the representation of grouped figures, are especially interesting. The attitudes of the principal figure and of subsidiary figures are discussed in detail; the author sets himself to show that much variety made its way into traditional subjects, and that apparently symmetrical groups never imitate each other exactly. The last chapter, the sixteenth, is on the craftsmen who produced the sculpture and paintings. Mr. Smith is able to identify a few sculptors and painters by name, but believes that it is futile to "attempt to recognize the style of one man, even when it is probable that he played a prominent part in the decoration of two tombs." An appendix on the coloring of Old Kingdom hieroglyphs is followed by indices.

As is often the case, it is wise to go back to the Introduction after reading the book. Here Dr. Smith outlines what he aims to prove in the following pages and states his convictions about Egyptian art as a whole. One is tempted to question two rather general statements, both of which are repeated in the body of the text. The first is that "the narrative element is conspicu- ously absent from Egyptian art save in a few exceptions." To the present reviewer it seems that it is a very rare Egyptian pic- ture that does not tell a story. The first example of relief illus- trated (fig. 25) is an archaic palette that shows hunters who have rounded up a number of animals. One man lassoes an antelope. Another is in the act of shooting a lion that attacks a companion; a second lion, though mortally wounded, has escaped. This pic- ture informs us about everything that is happening at the hunt in a given moment of time. On the other hand, a wrestling scene of Dynasty XI at Beni Hasan shows the same two wrestlers in the two hundred and twenty positions they assumed during the course of a bout. The artist has told us the whole story, leav- ing nothing to our imaginations, just as the men who carved the great battle scenes of the New Kingdom show all the incidents

which lead up to the final victory. This is the sort of story-pic- ture that children like to look at and to paint: "Here is the man doing this, and here he is doing that."

As to the second point, although the style of the artist changed remarkably little during the long course of Egyptian history, it is scarcely true to say that "The development that we have to look for in Egyptian art is that of the technical perfec- tion of the sculptor and painter within certain boundaries laid down by convention." The great period of technical achieve- ment, as Dr. Smith shows, was the Old Kingdom. Once the artist had mastered his craft the tendency was toward the use of softer materials and more facile modes of representation. The development was in reality not a striving for perfection but essentially a degeneration. Nevertheless, it is doubtful if the reliefs of Amarna (or even the drawings on ostraca of Dynasties XVIII and XIX at Thebes) can be dismissed as "experiments of craftsmen who are less thoroughly trained than their fellows." These are, however, matters of opinion and minor points in a remarkably interesting summary.

This is one of the most important books on Egyptian civiliza- tion to have appeared in recent years; it is indispensable to the student of the history of art.

NORA SCOTT

Metropolitan Museum of Art

Fragonard Drawings for Ariosto, with Essays by Elizabeth Mongan, Philip Hofer, and Jean Seznec. Published for the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and the Har- vard College Library, Cambridge, Mass., New York, Pan- theon Books, 1945. Pp. 80; 138 pls. $25.oo. "Che bella combinazione," an Italian enthusiast and art lover

would certainly have exclaimed, if he had heard that Honor6 Fragonard illustrated Ariosto's great poem, Orlando furioso. "What a rare combination," he would have said, "of subtle stroke, vaporous light, sensuous movement; and what mastery of the light-winged stanza, what inexhaustible imagination and variety of melody."

The bulk of these illustrations was, for about a quarter of a century, in this country, though scattered in different collec- tions. It is an unexpected chance for us that these one hundred and thirty-seven drawings are now brought together and pub- lished for the first time in a monumental edition.

How is it to be explained that the foremost master of the late Rococo, Fragonard, was attracted to an Italian poem writ- ten more than two centuries before? Philip Hofer, in his very illuminating study of the illustrated editions of Orlando, points out an interesting factor in the appreciation of this famous work. From 1516, the year of the first (still incomplete) edition, to the end of the Cinquecento, about two hundred editions of Orlando appeared. In the whole seventeenth century, only about forty are known. This decline of interest in Ariosto's poem has no direct connection with the Catholic reaction of the Counter- Reformation, as Mr. Hofer correctly emphasizes. On the other hand, it was certainly not a mere fashion that caused this change of taste. The change in the general feeling was much more deeply rooted. Stylistic matters reflect it. In the meantime, Tor- quato Tasso's great epic, Gerusalemme liberata, first appeared in I584.

W61fflin, in his Renaissance und Barock, tried to demonstrate that the rhythm of Ariosto's Orlando was a Renaissance rhythm, and that of Tasso's poem Baroque. Though this distinction seems to be perhaps a little too schematized, one has to agree that the short skipping verses, the light and witty vocabulary of Ariosto, correspond to some parts of High or Late Renaissance painting, say to Dosso Dossi, or Romanino, or even to Correg- gio's early frescoes in San Paolo. But the rolling sentences, and the sequence of weighty words in Tasso's stanzas agree perfectly with the seriousness and grandeur of many important Seicento paintings.

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BOOK REVIEWS 215

The content and texture of Gerusalemme liberata immedi- ately inspired the imaginations of artists, and held them through the whole seventeenth century. One of the most famous paint- ings by Annibale Carracci, probably before 16oo and described by Bellori, represented the scene of "Erminia and the Shepherd" from the seventh book. Nicolas Poussin painted and designed different scenes from Tasso's work (almost the whole "Rinaldo and Armida" story, the battle of Godefroy de Bouillon, etc.), but nothing from Orlando. Albani enthusiastically praised the "inventions" of the "gran Torquato Tasso." But still more emphatically he stressed the "grandeur of his heroic style" (grandezza dello stile heroico) with which, as he writes in a letter of July 1637, poets like Ariosto, or others of his time, were never concerned.

Ariosto's poem, however, was by no means forgotten. It found fervent defenders even at the apogee of Tasso's appreciation. We occasionally find, therefore, in the painting of the seven- teenth century, scenes taken from Orlando. Hofer mentions Guido Reni's sophisticated representation of Fiordispina Fall- ing in Love with/ Bradamanazte, with the maiden disguised as a cavalier. Still more attractive was the bucolic idyll, which Ariosto describes in imitation of the Homeric story of Paris and Oinone: the young lovers Angelica and Medoro carve their names in the bark of the tree. Guercino is mentioned as having done large paintings of this charming subject, like another Bolognese, Simone Cantarini. In France about 1630 Blanchard, the "French Titian," painted the Angelica and Medoro now in the Metropolitan Museum.

In general, only with the loosening of the academic Baroque style in painting was the interest of painters in Ariosto's fabu- lous poem revived. This revival begins in Italy in great style with Tiepolo's famous frescoes dated 1737 in the Villa Val- merana. A whole room is dedicated to Ariosto. In France, the interest in Ariosto starts only in the second half of the dixhui- tipme. Only then do we hear of a great number of new editions of Orlando. As Miss Elizabeth Mongan, in her informative in- troduction on "Fragonard the Draughtsman," cautiously, and rather convincingly, suggests: Fragonard's set of drawings for Ariosto, of which we have no date or indication of date what- ever, "must have been done late in the 1780's, before Fra- gonard's departure from Paris to the South." If we assume that this date is approximately correct, we have to realize a rather surprising phenomenon: these drawings dashed off with the lightest, and most sensitive touch possible, were created in the years immediately before the French Revolution, when pseudo- Classicism, or Neo-Poussinism had generally straightened the forms and condensed the structure of the compositions. They were done in a period when the stoical bent, deeply connected with French classical art of the grande maniere, had triumphed over the liberty (or libertinage) of form and thought, and was preparing to express the political and social conception of the Revolution and Classicism. In one word, it was the time of David.

At the time when the Ariosto series was done, Fragonard was a man in his middle fifties. The drawings show Fragonard in full- est possession of his artistic imagination and expression. But he was also at the end of his artistic career. His whole world had fallen to pieces, the world of Louis XV, of the great financiers, of the rich amateurs and art lovers, like Abb6 le Non, or Ber- geret, the world of trips to Italy and luxury editions. It is quite probable, as Miss Mongan thinks, that the drawings we have here before us were only the beginning of such a luxury edi- tion that Fragonard had planned. It would have been by far the richest and most wonderfully illustrated edition of Ariosto's poem. But the time for such purely artistic enterprises was gone for the present.

In a sense, therefore, Fragonard was retardataire when he made these fantastic drawings. There are, certainly, elements in his style that are retrospective toward the Rubenists of the

seventeenth century. But in the choice of his topic, Fragonard was not really out of his time. The Neo-Poussinesque and stoical trend, if dominant in pre-Revolutionary art, was not by any means the only style.

Currents of a quite different nature, which one can call, and which have been called Pre'romantique, came first from Eng- land, and later from Germany, especially Switzerland. The newly awakened interest in mediaeval chivalrous subjects be- longed in this atmosphere. In England about the middle of the century, Bishop Percy collected ballads of this kind, and pub- lished them in his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry. In France, the Comte de Tressa wrote in about the 'seventies his Histoire de Huon de Bordeux or de Rolanid amoureux. In Ger- many, Wieland composed a satirical-heroic poem, Oberon, which in direct allusion to Ariosto begins: "Noch einmal sattelt mir den Hyppogryphen zum ritt ins alte romantische Land."

The interest of Fragonard in Ariosto's Orlando furioso con- formed therefore to the general interest of the international public in chivalrous scenes and in heroic Romanticism. Fra- gonard was of course well informed about the personality of Ariosto, the house-poet of the Estes, through his sojourn, in his early Roman days, in the Villa d'Este. Fragonard's portrait of Ariosto in Besangon is a kind of satirical "inspiration du poete," and does not show much respect for his person. Fra- gonard's main interest was attracted by the heroic and miracu- lous stories of the chansozs de geste of mediaeval chivalry. Among these drawings, therefore, we do not find the scenes that Tiepolo chose, not Angelica and Medoro, but rather scenes of combat and miracles.

It was not an easy task to identify each of the drawings with the corresponding stanza in Ariosto's poem. Mr. Jean Seznec has done this for us in a meticulous and sensitive fashion. As a whole, the publisher and the editors have given us a truly repre- sentative, illustrative, and erudite work.

WALTER FRIEDLAENDER

New York University

KLAUS BERGER, Ge'ricault: Drawings and Watercolors. New York, H. Bittner, 1946. Pp. 34; 53 ill. on 52 plates. $I2.oo. If Mr. Berger undertook this work in the conviction that his

subject has been neglected by the critical world and that "... G6ricault still waits in obscurity for public recognition," his own compilation of a list of eighteen exhibitions since 1924 and of a bibliography of no less than six books and eighteen "important articles" should have disabused him. That it did not is shown by the fact that, after a discussion of all this mate- rial and a summary of the reasons for the "increasing respect" for G6ricault, he can still refer to him as "the forgotten artist" (p. 8).

The reader remains impressed by the bibliographical record. The first book appeared in I846, twenty-two years after the artist's death; the second, Charles Climent's basic Gericault, itude biographique et critique, avec le catalogue raisonne de l'oeuvre duz maitre, went to three editions between 1867 and 1879; and further books appeared 1885, 190o5, 1926, and 1927. Never forgotten, Gericault has obviously long aroused interest outside the "clique" or "cult" of which the author speaks.

The contradiction to this theory of obscurity presented by the fame of his masterpiece, The Raft of the Medusa, vexes Mr. Berger not a little. He devotes considerable thought to mini- mizing the importance of this huge canvas (produced, he says, "at a premature moment"). In hasty agreement with G6ricault's romantic lament: "if I could have made just five pictures- but I have made nothing, absolutely nothing," the author says (p. 8): "We must resign ourselves to the fact that Gericault was destined to bring to completion no monumental work (in the strictest sense of that word). His life was interrupted at the

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Article Contentsp. 214p. 215

Issue Table of ContentsArt Bulletin, Vol. 29, No. 3 (Sep., 1947), pp. 149-224Front MatterThe Parallelism of Giotto's Paduan Frescoes [pp. 149-154]Bernini's Elephant and Obelisk [pp. 155-182]Oriental Forms in American Architecture 1800-1870 [pp. 183-193]NotesThe Venus of the Ca d'Oro and the Origin of the Chief Types of the Venus at the Mirror from the Workshop of Titian [pp. 195-196]A Bibliography of Seventeenth-Century Writings on the Pictorial Arts in English [pp. 196-207]Madame Jean Antoine Houdon [pp. 207-212]

Book ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 213-214]Review: untitled [pp. 214-215]Review: untitled [pp. 215-217]Review: untitled [pp. 217-222]

Letters to the Editor [pp. 222-223]List of Books Received [p. 224]Back Matter