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Democratic shift in all its glory in WA gallery's Princely Treasures

PRINCELY Treasures is a mixed exhibition of painting, sculpture, applied arts and costumes at the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth.

Princely Treasures
Princely Treasures
TheAustralian

AS foreshadowed last week, Princely Treasures is the second in the series of international loan exhibitions initiated by Stefano Carboni, director of the Art Gallery of Western Australia in Perth, and follows last year's show from the Peggy Guggenheim Museum in Venice.

It's a mixed exhibition of painting, sculpture, applied arts and costumes, and readers may be excused for feeling a touch of reticence because the applied arts element, in such cases, can seem like padding, and wherever costumes and fashion are involved intellectual rigour tends to evaporate.

On this occasion, however, it is enough to open the catalogue to be converted. The entries by specialists from the V&A are so well written that they can convince you of the interest of a waistcoat, which, you discover, turned into a way of distinguishing yourself when the plain and democratic English dark woollen suit replaced the elaborate courtly costumes of the ancien regime at the end of the 18th century.

Well over two centuries later, we still wear dark woollen suits, whose cut has evolved but remarkably slowly in comparison with the rate of change in other aspects of our world.

Equally interesting is the article on the cane, also an English fashion and part of the same democratic and progressive culture in which it became a substitute for the sword, formerly worn by the aristocracy as a sign of rank. The example in the exhibition belonged to George III, who set an example by carrying a cane himself except on the most formal court occasions.

All of this casts an interesting additional light on the case of general George Gordon, who struck fear into the Chinese during the Taiping Rebellion by leading his men into battle unarmed, carrying only a cane.

One of the most unexpectedly intriguing displays is a shaving set, including mirror, razors, scissors and a comb, all carried in a beautifully made wooden caddy inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

As the catalogue explains, gentlemen began to use such private sets because of the risk of infection from dirty razors in a barber's shop. It would be interesting to know more about this, including the relevant medical history: the modern idea of germs - originally the metaphorical seeds of disease - originated with Girolamo Fracastoro, the first to describe the new plague of syphilis in the 16th century, and this was presumably one of the infections feared from the barber's shop in the days before modern disinfectants. Owning your own shaving kit meant you could be shaved by your valet at home or in the course of your travels.

Eventually gentlemen began to realise the advantages of doing it themselves, and as the catalogue points out, a book with the wonderful title of La Pogonotomie, ou l'art d'apprendre a se raser soi-meme (Pogonotomy, or the art of shaving yourself), by Jean-Jacques Perret, was published in 1770 to encourage this practice; for those who are curious, the book is available today in facsimile on Google Books.

As these examples show, the real point of these displays, especially when seen in the light of their explications in the catalogue, is that each turns out to be the tip of an iceberg of social history. But the items are also thoughtfully selected, often complementary in the story they tell and of outstanding quality.

The exhibition has been made possible because the galleries in which they usually reside are being renovated, so that a selection of items has been put together as a touring exhibition, which has come to Perth after a period in South Korea and will continue on to Oklahoma in the US. It is for this reason, too, that the show includes some substantial works of art, including some important portrait busts.

The most beautiful of these is without doubt Bernini's bust of Thomas Baker, even though it was probably executed in whole or in part by an assistant. A half-century ago, there was a lively debate in the pages of the scholarly Burlington Magazine between two of the most important experts of the time, Rudolf Wittkower, from Columbia University, and John Pope-Hennessy, later director of the V&A, concerning the extent to which the actual carving could be attributed to the greatest of baroque sculptors.

It was something of an anomaly, in the first place, that Bernini, then at the height of his fame, should have agreed to do the portrait of a relatively unimportant sitter; his usual subjects were rulers and princes of the church. In fact Pope Urban VIII had commissioned him to carve a portrait of Charles I of England as a gift, and Baker most likely came to Rome bringing a triple portrait by Vandyke as a guide for the proposed sculpture (which was later destroyed in the Whitehall Palace fire of 1698).

Fascinated by the vivid lifelikeness of Bernini's work, however, it seems that Baker, who was extremely wealthy, offered a very considerable sum to have his own portrait done as well - the contemporary sources recall how he pursued Bernini relentlessly until he finally got his way. Bernini executed the modello of the portrait in clay, but before he could begin to carve it in marble the pope intervened and forbade him to complete it; he did not want his gift to Charles I devalued by the simultaneous arrival in England of another bust by Bernini, and probably a superior one, as it would have been executed from life.

Bernini, on hearing this, is said to have partly defaced his clay model, whether out of anger or in deference to the pope's command. It is highly unlikely that he damaged the face or hair, and most probable that he did something to the costume. Unwilling, however, to waste the work he had done or lose the fee for the commission, it seems that he had the job finished by his senior assistant at the time, Andrea Bolgi, perhaps touching up the features before the final delivery of the work. This hypothesis, essentially that of Wittkower, accounts for the brilliance of the face and hair - though without quite the exquisite finish of entirely autograph works - compared with the rather stiffer body and costume, with the elaborate but fussy lace, which would have been Bolgi's invention.

In any case, it is a masterpiece of Berninesque design, and in fact one of the most important baroque works to have been shown in Australia. The face is framed by the abundant wavy hair, undercut to form deep lines of chiaroscuro around the features, while the slightly absent, melancholy expression is accentuated by the lock that casts the left eye into shadow.

Although they are not displayed together in the exhibition, there are two other busts that make an instructive comparison with Bernini. The first is after Algardi's bust of Pope Innocent X, who didn't like Bernini because he had been the great artist of his predecessor, Urban VIII; there is a famous story about his initial exclusion of Bernini as a candidate for the Fountain of the Four Rivers in Piazza Navona, and how Bernini finally secured the commission through a ruse.

Algardi's Innocent X is a fine portrait, lively and intense yet very self-contained, but it does not have the same quality of physical vitality with which Bernini endows his sitter. On the other hand, Honore Pelle's portrait of Charles II, somewhat later in the century, is like a rather provincial parody of Bernini's style. The draperies are carved in the most extravagantly three-dimensional way, even though the torso is remarkably and implausibly thin.

The mass of curls of the full-bottomed wig is again extraordinary, but mechanical and gratuitous compared with the sensitivity of Baker's luxuriant hair: his own, not a wig. Above all, the head, turned slightly aside for the sake of animation in Baker's case, is now twisted violently and incomprehensibly to the right, giving the monarch an odd, eccentric, somewhat deranged appearance.

The two busts of Elizabeth, queen of Bohemia and of Catherine the Great, while somewhat blander productions, are both interesting in their own right. The first is an example of what could be expected of a 17th-century artist of average ability outside the centre of sculpture in Rome. The second, from the 18th century, is an imitation of the suave but articulate style of Houdon, the French master, further softened to a point that feels almost disagreeably evasive in order to flatter the empress, who was no beauty.

More impressive than either of these is a 17th-century bust of the Virgin Mary in the Spanish polychrome style that was long overlooked or despised but recently rehabilitated as a subject of art-historical study in an important exhibition at the National Gallery in London, which I reviewed here early last year. Compared with the portrait busts we have discussed, this sculpture is at once generalised -- not the record of any particular features -- and hypnotically naturalistic in its reproduction of the effects of skin, hair, eyes and clothing.

Unlike works of high sculpture, which seek to capture the life of an individual through the mastery of artifice, these Spanish devotional carvings directly emulate the appearance of actual bodies in an effort to create a seamless illusion of reality - conjuring up the presence of sacred figures in the everyday world for their predominantly illiterate popular audience.

Some religious objects in the exhibition are also part of the same Counter-Reformation effort to impress the majesty and mystery of the faith on the mass of the population. A silver monstrance, for example, which was used to display the consecrated host, is adorned with a representation of the Last Supper, in which the place of Christ is taken by the host, while in the foreground Judas, holding the money bag that is his attribute, turns away from grace.

Other objects belong more to the decoration of princely and wealthy homes, from tapestries made for Louis XIV to a set of painted panels illustrating the birth and education of Achilles. And almost everything will reward closer inspection, from the early Descent from the Cross by Charles Le Brun, in which the features of the Roman officer are borrowed from the ancient bust of Caracalla, now in Naples but then in Rome where Le Brun was working at the time; to a cartapesta (papier-mache) relief portrait of the duke of Tuscany, in the background of which is a view of the Cathedral of Florence with Brunelleschi's dome and Giotto's campanile, but no facade, for the present one was built in the 19th century.

Princely Treasures: European Masterpieces 1600-1800 from the V&A.
Art Gallery of Western Australia, Perth, until January 9.

Christopher Allen

Christopher Allen has been The Australian's national art critic since 2008. He is an art historian and educator, teaching classical Greek and Latin. He has written an edited several books including Art in Australia and believes that the history of art in this country is often underestimated.

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