Alessandro the second greatest
David Ekserdjian
ALESSANDRO ALGARDI by Jennifer Montagu
(Yale, f65)
It is Algardi's tragedy to be regarded as the poor man's Bernini. Their names may not be as inextricably linked — or as well-known — as those of Swan and Edgar or Laurel and Hardy, but the former is almost invariably discussed in terms of the latter. In 1645 John Evelyn wrote that 'for sculptors and architects Cavalier Bernini and Algordi [sic] were in greatest esteeme', while in 1651 Richard Symonds recorded that he was told Algardi 'far excells Berni- no [sic] in statuary', but few would have agreed at the time, and posterity has firmly assigned Algardi the role of the hind quarters in their particular pantomime horse. Such double-acts seem more com- mon in the history of art than of music or literature, and being the more forgettable half is not exactly an enviable fate. Jennifer Montagu is untroubled by the fact that her hero is the second greatest sculptor of baroque Italy, and the supreme achieve- ment of her oustanding monograph is arguably that it illuminates and celebrates Algardi's very considerable genius without worrying about his unsurprising failure to be Bernini. And although one may suspect that Dr Montagu is not over-fond of Bernini the man (at one point his scheming is described as `nauseating'), Bernini the artist is neither ignored nor under-valued. For, as well as being unusually erudite, perceptive, and sensitive, Dr Montagu is that rarest of birds, a scholar whose intel-
lectual honesty is never in doubt.
Alessandro Algardi was born in Bologna in 1598. In painting it was the heyday of the Carracci, but the local school of sculpture, where Algardi learnt his craft, was both provincial and uninspired, its only legacy to him being an initial preference for modelling over carving. By 1625, after a brief spell in Mantua, he had reached Rome, and was to remain there until his death in 1654. In spite of good contacts with the powerful resident mafia of Bolog- nese artists and patrons, he was a slow starter, and spent his first decade in Rome on such modest tasks as the restoration of antique statues. Only with the Magdalen of 1634, a small bronze that crowns a reliqu- ary urn, was his talent finally revealed. It is his first masterpiece, and the combination of richness and restraint is already entirely characteristic.
Then suddenly, after ten lean years, and for no evident reason, Algardi found him- self enormously in demand. He was en- trusted with three major commissions, all very different, which were to occupy him for most of the next decade. They range from the simple majesty of the Tomb of Leo XI in a side-aisle of St Peter's, to the elegant drama of the Decollation of St Paul for the high altar of San Paolo in Bologna, and the ecstatic devotion of the St Philip Neri in the sacristy of the Chiesa Nuova. Algardi was at work on all these projects simultaneously, with the consequence that their variety is not susceptible of chronolo- gical explanation. A linear view of style only ever reveals part of the truth, and in an exemplary account of Algardi's success in responding to a daunting triple chal- lenge, Dr Montagu instead subtly demons- trates the importance of such factors as the subject, patron, material, and location in determining the final appearance of the work of art.
Even greater triumphs were to follow, most notably the bronze of Innocent X for the Palazzo dei Conservatori, the marble high altar of San Nicola da Tolentino, the stuccoes of the Villa Doria Pamphili, and Algardi's most famous work, the colossal marble relief of the Encounter of Leo the Great and Attila (a friend of mine's unwit- tingly irresistible translation of the Incon- tro di Attila con Leone Magno was 'Attila's Encounter with a Big Lion'). Algardi unscrupulously stole the Innocent commis- sion from his friend and rival, Mochi, and ended up with a knighthood for his pains. Dr Montagu's sympathetic treatment of the statue perhaps departs from the soft- hearted belief that the end justified the means, but Mochi was not so forgiving. He commented that he knew the cross (the insignia of Algardi's order of knighthood) to have been the punishment of thieves, but now they were glorying in it. The Nicholas of Tolentino group is no less brilliantly analysed, and when Dr Montagu admits, 'I have not been able to enter the altar niche to see whether the back of the marble is fully worked', it almost comes as a relief to discover that there is a limit to her omniscience. Best of all, however, is her consideration of the Leo, in which she traces the evolution from the early models to the finished relief, stressing Algardi's typical expansion of the composition to fill the available space, as well as the vital importance of every gesture to the mean- ing of the narrative.
All the public landmarks in Algardi's career are studied with consummate histor- ical and critical understanding, but the smaller works are also given their due. Dr Montagu brings out the reserve and real- ism of Algardi's portrait busts, among which are superb likenesses of those two horrors, Pope Innocent and his sister-in- law Olimpia Maidalchini, and also discus- ses his decorative bronzes. For her they are his most personal and original works.
The 'classical' Algardi has traditionally been seen as the necessary foil to the `baroque', Bernini. By refuting the idea of Algardi's classicism (a meaningless term in the context of his work, and one that has tended to become code for dull and bor- ing), Dr Montagu has utterly transformed our conception of a genuinely difficult artist. In architecture, the modern rehabi- litation of Borromini against Bernini was wholly predictable, given the former's combination of intense emotional power bordering on insanity with cool rational detachment, but Algardi's lyricism is far harder to bring to life. Happily, Jennifer Montagu is the complete art historian, and every page of these two impeccably and lavishly illustrated volumes, both the text and the catalogue, is written with learning and with love. The result is a deeply serious book, full of affection as well as of the intricacies of patronage and the com- plexities of dating and attribution, in which there is also room for wit. In a splendidly waspish aside, for instance, a German academic is attacked for taking evidence for his interpretation of the subject of a relief from Pastor's 19th-century History of the Popes, 'a source', as Dr Montagu puts it, 'unavailable to Algardi'. Under the circumstances disagreement is a risky busi- ness, but I will end with a quibble all the same: why are Mantegna's canvases of the Triumph of Caesar called cartoons?
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