The Greats: Masterpieces from the National Galleries of Scotland

The Greats exhibition from Scotland sets the standard for how a blockbuster exhibition should be.

Tartan treasures

Art galleries today increasingly are run by managers and marketing people, a reflection of complex shifts in the way the function of the institution is perceived. On the one hand, galleries seem to have fallen unthinkingly into line with the growth imperative of contemporary business, while on the other hand the gallery building itself — quite apart from the art it houses — has become the object of a kind of cultural fetishisation: many a spectacular new museum is more impressive than the work it exhibits.

Art museums should be run by the people who know and care about their collections, which are the core of their mission. And at the Art Gallery of NSW, there is no one who knows more about the collection than Richard Beresford, senior curator of European art before 1900, who is leaving at the end of the year and who will be greatly missed.

The timing is more than a little ironic, since Beresford’s loan exhibition from the National Gallery of Scotland is the best the AGNSW has had for a very long time. It is also a model for the way that a so-called blockbuster exhibition should be conceived: not packed out with fillers in an attempt to overwhelm the viewer with sheer size, but concise and limited as far as pos­sible to works of a very high quality.

Rare window: The Scottish Greats come to the Art Gallery of NSW

Masterpieces from the National Galleries of Scotland

Recently, in discussing the Hermitage exhibition in Melbourne, I mentioned the understandable reluctance of museums to part with their most famous pieces. Exhibitions will often compensate for showing secondary works by the greatest artists by including unusually fine pictures by minor ones, with rather perverse consequences for our audiences: if you didn’t know any better, you might have concluded from the National Gallery of Victoria show that Francesco del Cairo was a more impressive painter than Titian.

In contrast to the pleasant but rather bland studio Titian in Melbourne, here we encounter a celebrated but, more important, strikingly beautiful picture: Venus arises from the sea, where she has just been born, as Hesiod recounts, from the miraculous metamorphosis of her father Uranus’s severed genitals: the goddess of love is thus the feminine inversion and embodiment of the sexual potency of her father.

The painting, with its distinctive motif of wringing out long tresses of golden hair, is inspired by ancient sculpture but entirely reimagined as a living female body, warm, tender and smoothly continuous. The pliant, curving stance is anchored by arms parallel to the picture plane and forming a square of horizontals and verticals. But the most absorbing thing about this picture is the goddess’s expression, as she glances at something or someone to her left — a first awakening of consciousness with a glimmer of incipient desire.

Next to this is an equally beautiful but entirely different vision of the feminine, Botticelli’s Virgin gravely adoring the sleeping Christ, painted 30 years before the Titian, in 1490, and in the limpid purity of tempera rather than the sensual fluency of oil. The subject may seem a familiar one, but it is not one of the canonical episodes of Christ’s life from the Gospels.

The inspiration of this painting is a much more recent source, from only a century before Botticelli’s time: the visions of St Bridget of Sweden, who had imagined the Nativity of Christ as a mystical event in which the Virgin is kneeling in prayer when the baby appears before her, having left her body as mysteriously as the Holy Spirit had entered it, without breaking her virginity.

It is not entirely inappropriate that this image of maternal love should hang so close to Titian’s picture of the goddess of sexual desire, for the Neoplatonic philosophy that influenced both artists stressed the twin aspects of love, one earthly and sensual, the other sublimated and spiritual; and there is even a subtly erotic note in the pale pink of the roses, always a feminine symbol, and the Virgin’s dress.

These are only the first two of a series of outstanding paintings, and already we have seen more than many blockbusters have to offer. Opposite there is a display of drawings also of such a high quality and diverse interest, in subject, style and media, that they will be discussed in a separate column in a couple of weeks.

Adam Elsheimer was a German painter resident in Rome, known for his tiny but highly refined pictures, often landscapes animated by the subtlest of light effects. Here we have what is by normal standards a very small work, but a large one within Elsheimer’s oeuvre: a martyrdom of St Stephen on silvered copper, surprisingly grand in its internal scale and in the number of figures the scene accommodates. The remarkable executioner on the right is inspired by the ancient statue of Marsyas, and as Beresford points out, other figures including the flying angel show that the artist had been looking at Caravaggio’s recently unveiled St Matthew paintings at San Luigi dei Francesi.

There are a couple of early works by great masters, both of which I had the opportunity to lecture on this year: one is Domenichino’s Adoration of the Shepherds, in which the Christ Child himself, without being obviously luminous, is in fact the source of a brilliant light cast on all around. One of the shepherds shields his eyes, while another weeps in gratitude at the vision.

Vermeer’s Christ in the House of Mary and Martha is also an early work, before the more familiar contemporary interiors with their fascinatingly close observation of humble things and disconcerting spatial effects. The story was a popular one in art in the later 16th and 17th centuries and contrasts the practical life, represented by Martha, with the spiritual devotion of Mary Magdalene.

It is common for Martha to be represented as scolding her sister for idleness, but Vermeer has deliberately avoided a motif that inevitably makes her look mean-minded and inferior to Mary. Instead, she is shown as quietly understanding Christ’s explanation of the path Mary has chosen. At the same time it is she who has made and places on the table, in the centre of the composition, the bread of the Eucharist: Mary may represent the mystical life, but Martha makes possible the manifestation of the divine in the material world.

All of these works repay a far longer and slower process of looking than audiences today are used to; they are not about gimmicky design or simplistic messages but demand our engagement and invite us to bring them to life with our own imagination.

Even art-historical explanations can short circuit the process, as in the case of Rembrandt’s A Woman in Bed, which some scholars associate with the story of Tobias.

This feels a bit of a stretch, however, where there are so few iconographical cues and where the subject is not a particularly common one. It is probably more helpful here to suspend the scriptural interpretation and concentrate on what we actually see, which is a woman drawing aside the curtain of her bed to look out. The more we commune with the figure and her expression, the less plausible it seems to reduce her expression to one of desire or anxiety or distress: she seems to be looking inward as much as out at what is before her eyes, and we are above all contemplating the fathomless quality of another’s inner life.

Equally imponderable is Velazquez’s Old WomanCooking Eggs, an early masterpiece from his years in Seville. It was painted in 1618, when the artist was, almost incredibly, only 19, and is full of examples of his prodigious ability to see, and see into the world.

Who would have thought the shrivelled roots of a Spanish onion could become a thing of beauty and mystery? It is as though any part of the natural world, if carefully attended to, could become a way into the understanding of the whole.

If there is a sign of relative immaturity in this work, it is in a certain lack of co-ordination of all the parts, which we can sense in the odd disconnection of the woman and the boy and in inconsistencies in the perspective rendering of the still-life objects, curiously anticipating the same inconsistency later found in the still lifes of Cezanne, and which in his case speak of an unwillingness to subordinate his particular acts of perception to the more abstract, conceptual matrix of perspective.

Velazquez was immeasurably more gifted than Cezanne — the latter was a great artist despite his lack of facility — but this irregularity shows that his instinct was concrete rather than abstract, and the collection of still-life objects reveals his joy in rendering matter, texture and colour, whether in a brass mortar and pestle, a white glazed bowl or the milky veils of egg white poaching in water.

And the interest of these objects does not consist in a photorealist rendering, for they are nothing like that. They are all clearly made of paint, of pigments; the artifice is patent even as the illusion is compelling.

They remind us that one of the great pleasures of painting is in its dual nature, as simultaneously a thing of paint and the semblance of something in the world: it is this translation of one into the other that embodies the aesthetic understanding of art.

And these are only a few of the paintings that will repay patient and repeated visits. There is a fascinating allegory by El Greco, and a remarkable early van Dyck, where again we can see the emergence of genius with a few still awkward passages, an extraordinary portrait by Frans Hals, and another, effectively a self-portrait, by Jan Lievens; and a portrait in an interior by Gerrit Dou. From the 18th century there is an exquisite little Watteau, including the artist’s self-portrait. Greuze, Ramsay, Raeburn are all represented by masterpieces and there are memorable portraits by Degas and by Sargent.

In landscape, there are fine pictures from Pissarro to Church, including a beautiful view of a road leading straight into a forest by Corot, and the magnificent Vale of Dedham by Constable, which surveys the country in which he was born and where his parents were buried, as well as paying tribute to some of the artists he most admired.

The exhibition concludes with a late Cezanne, based on a powerful dialogue between vertical and diagonal forms, and with Monet’s Poplars on the Epte, whose luminosity dominates the room. And yet of course, like everything in painting, it is an act of artifice. The light was not something that could be copied in any simple sense: it was only by building up hues and tones with consummate mastery and in precisely calibrated sequences that mere whiteness could be made to shimmer with light.

The Greats: Masterpieces from the National Galleries of Scotland

Part one: the paintings

Art Gallery of NSW, Sydney. Until February 14