Immaculate conceptions on display at Prado’s Portrait of Spain

THIS remarkable exhibition has a great many fine works and even the secondary pieces are of considerable quality and interest.

The hunt of Atalanta and Meleager (1634–39) by Nicolas Poussin. From the exhibition Itali

THIS is quite a remarkable exhibition. We have become all too accustomed to blockbusters in which a few masterpieces are padded out with minor things, but here we discover something quite different: a great many very fine works and even the secondary pieces of considerable quality and interest. The exhibition is a credit to Tony Ellwood and to the generosity of the Prado: both seem to have learned the lessons of the earlier Prado exhibition, Portrait of Spain, in Brisbane in 2012.

Here the focus is on the Prado’s extensive holdings of Italian paintings and drawings of the Renaissance and baroque periods; and indeed the Spanish royal collections virtually began, as the catalogue acknowledges, with the monarchy’s commissions of paintings by Titian, the greatest painter of the mid-16th century and an artist regularly referred to as divine in his lifetime. Thereafter Raphael and other High Renaissance and mannerist painters were collected and contemporary acquisitions were made up until the end of the 18th century and the time of Tiepolo, with whom the exhibition concludes.

There is much that could be said about all of these masters or indeed any of the works in the exhibition, not only from an art-historical point of view but also from the perspective of a practitioner. What is perhaps most striking is the artifice, one may almost say the abstraction, of the way that drawing and painting are practised: on even a superficial glance, for example, one can see how differently Guercino draws in red chalk, in ink and wash, or in pen.

The making of the image, in other words, arises integrally out of the practice of the medium. In Guercino’s wash drawings, everything is conceived as patterns of light and shade; in the ink line drawings, the image arises out of dynamic scribbling; in a red chalk drawing there are no outlines, and contours are defined by the boundary of adjacent shadow. All of this makes us realise how very pedestrian our own ingrained way of looking has become: we think that we understand abstraction, but all too often picture the world as though slaves to the mechanical view of the camera.

I was looking at a 19th-century Last Supper in a church in Italy recently and realised that what was wrong was that the artist imagined he was looking at a scene literally before him. There is no such illusion in, for example, Correggio’s Noli me tangere ; although the artist seeks to produce a vivid impression of presence, he begins with picture-making, not with the fallacy of representing something that already exists. He starts with figures in the foreground, then he builds enchanting space around them.

Opposite is a Raphael Holy Family, again starting with entirely conventional elements but animating them in a way that is all the more effective when you realise the formal constraints of tradition: the Christ child grasps at John’s ribbon with the words ecce agnus dei , behold the lamb of God, not understanding their meaning. Mary looks down from above with serene resignation; Joseph’s face is shadowed and melancholy on the left. The picture appears to have been completed from Raphael’s design by his leading assistant, Giulio Romano, and perhaps significantly Christ’s thumb is on the letter G.

In contrast to the firm contours of this work, typical of what came to be called the Roman School, those of Titian are deliberately elusive, so that there is never a clear line demarcating figure and ground. There are enough of his pictures, too, to follow his style from the beautiful early Madonna with San Rocco and St Anthony of Padua, still showing the influence of his master Bellini and his fellow student Giorgione, to the late Religion Succoured by Spain, in which his palette becomes more muted and more harmonious, as he pursues the synthesis of colour and tone.

From a century later, an intriguing little picture by Livio Mehus combines a self-portrait with a putto painting a copy of Titian’s Death of St Peter Martyr (destroyed in a fire in the 19th century); the painter’s palette is displayed in the foreground, and we are invited to muse on the alchemy by which pigments are turned into the colours and animation of the world.

Caravaggio is not present in his own work — he is barely represented in the Prado — but his influence is conspicuous in the work of a number of imitators. One of the most original is Valentin de Boulogne, a Frenchman who lived in Rome and died there prematurely in 1631. Like all the Caravaggisti, he painted directly from models, which allows us to recognise many of them, like a cast of characters, from one picture to the next, and in some cases sort out the chronological sequence of works.

Here, for his picture of the martyrdom of St Lawrence, who was burned alive on a grill, he has chosen a solidly built young man for the nude that dominates the composition, while other figures are visibly portrait studies, and there is possibly a self-portrait in the shadows on the upper left. Next to this is a Raising of Lazarus by the technically accomplished but less imaginative Novelli, and viewers may be struck by a similarity in the gestures of the raised arm. Both are probably echoes of the unforgettable and dramatic attitude of Lazarus in Caravag­gio’s great painting of the subject in Messina.

Before his death, Valentin was considered, together with another young Frenchman, Nicolas Poussin, one of the two most promising new painters in Rome, and Poussin, who died in Rome in 1665, lived to be one of the most important and even revered artists of his day, in Rome and in Paris. Here there is a still youthful work, commissioned as part of a large and apparently very loosely defined history of Rome for the palace of the Buen Retiro, near the present site of the Prado.

Poussin’s subject, indeed, has nothing to do with Rome: it represents the beginning of the Calydonian boar hunt, when Meleager and Atalanta — the runner of the Atalanta and Hippomenes story — set off with a party of horsemen. They will slay the boar, and Meleager’s gift of the animal’s head to Atalanta — seen on the right of the composition — will indirectly lead to his own death.

The hounds in this paintings, and probably the horses too, were painted by a specialist animal painter — as in Le Brun’s Calydonian Boar Hunt in the Louvre — and one can clearly see, for example, that Poussin painted the figure on the left straining to hold on to the dog’s collar before the animal was added.

Such collaborations were not unusual, and it is likely that some at least of the figures in the landscapes of Claude Lorrain — a friend of Poussin and fellow resident in Rome — were also executed by an assistant. Here Claude’s Santa Paola Romana embarking for the Holy Land (1639-40), a beautiful port scape suffused with soft golden light, was also and with rather more justification part of the history of Rome commission.

Among other painters of the time, one who is well-represented in the exhibition is Ribera, a Spaniard resident in Naples, whose contribution to the history of Rome is a strangely stiff picture of two women gladiators. More impressive as a painting is his picture of a blind man, one of the Neapolitan beggars he liked to use as models, feeling the features of a classical bust.

The painting is identified as an allegory of the sense of touch, but it also refers to the paragone, the art-theoretical debate over the respective merits of painting and sculpture. The partisans of sculpture claimed that their art reproduced the substantial, three-dimensional reality of bodies, while painting only rendered a flat illusion of the world. But the coloured picture on the table alludes to the reply that sculptures are white and colourless, while painting conveys the hues of life itself.

Ribera’s picture, in which the blind man can understand the features of the sculpture by touch but get nothing from the painting, ostensibly argues the case for sculpture, while his own vivid image of the blind man’s face simultaneously sustains the claims of painting. This is a complex picture whose intellectual conceits would have added, for a contemporary connoisseur, to the pleasures of its virtuoso execution.

Another fine work from the early 17th century is Guercino’s Susanna and the Elders (1617), a strong early picture from just before the important years in Rome (1621-23), in which he made such bold use of light and shadow. Here, Guercino’s use of chiaroscuro is dramatic, the figure of the girl almost supernaturally illuminated in a still and peaceful nocturne.

The story, from the Book of Daniel, was one of the few biblical subjects that called for a female nude whose sensual appeal, moreover, needs to be emphasised because she is the object of the voyeuristic gaze of the two old men who spy on her. There is a formal conceit in this picture too, for the attitude of Susanna alludes both to the famous Crouching Venus and to a small ancient relief, supposedly of a new bride being prepared for bed and thus known as the Nova nupta, which later served, with the same narrative connotations in mind, as the model for Rembrandt’s Bathsheba in the Louvre.

Another contemporary painter in Rome, Simon Vouet, borrowed the Nova nupta’s pose for his painting of Lot and his daughters, which comes from Genesis itself and tells how Lot is seduced by his own daughters after the destruction of the city of Sodom and the loss of Lot’s wife and the girl’s husbands. The version of the story that appears in the exhibition, though, is much more troubling than Vouet’s rather theatrical interpretation of the story. It is by Francesco Furini, a relatively unfamiliar figure, a Florentine who was the author of several rather darkly sensual paintings.

In Furini’s composition, all three figures are standing, recalling Pontormo’s Visitation (1528). Lot, behind, is drinking from a cup and his eyes seem to be blurring as he begins to lose his grip on the moral reality of what is happening to him, weakening and succumbing to the seductive women, in a moral configuration that makes one think of the Victorian obsession with fatal seductresses such as the Sirens or Circe.

At the opposite pole of femininity, the exhibition ends, as already mentioned, with the Immaculate Conception of Tiepolo, perhaps the last great Italian artist. Miraculously combining solidity of form, virtuoso fluidity of execution, an icon-like background of muted gold and a classical harmony and strength in the Virgin’s features, he produces, in the sceptical age of the Enlightenment, a masterpiece of religious art to which even the unbeliever must pay homage.

Italian Masterpieces from Spain’s Royal Court, Museo del Prado

National Gallery of Victoria to August 31