Exhibitions

Renaissance Florence: The Art of the 1470s (National Gallery, till 16 January)

Golden decade

Martin Gayford

The past, notoriously, is another coun- try. But some parts are a good deal more foreign than others. I suspect one would fairly soon find one's feet in Impressionist Paris, say, or even Dr Johnson's London. In 15th-century Florence, however familiar though it may seem from innumer- able Tuscan holidays — they really did think and do some things very differently. It is part of the achievement of the excel- lent and intelligent exhibition Renaissance Florence: The Art of the 1470s at the National Gallery that it makes some of those differences clear.

Some oddities merely remind one that this was a long time ago. Painters, then, were members of the Guild of Doctors and Apothecaries — because their pigments were sold by druggists. One small cameo was worth 20 times more than the most valuable painting in the Medici collection. Others affect the way we look at the art, an art with which we have been obsessed for nearly two centuries.

This exhibition helps the visitor look through 15th-century eyes in two important ways. First, it restores the unity of the arts. Although a particular artist might spe- cialise in one art or another, to Renais- sance Italy, the arts were fundamental to

all departments of disegno — meaning drawing, or more generally design. A lead- ing artist might as easily find himself designing a carnival float or a candlestick

— a magnificent specimen of the latter by Verrocchio is on show — as painting an altarpiece or making a sculpture. Verrocchio and Antonio del Pollaiuolo — the leading artists in the 1470s and the heroes of this show — both produced an amazing variety of art. Pollaiuolo, starting off as a goldsmith, went on to produce sculpture in bronze, textile designs, paint- ings and one of the greatest Renaissance engravings, the 'Battle of Nude Men'. Ver- rocchio was equally versatile.

A drawback of our contemporary demar- cation between one art and another is that it breaks up this unity. Paintings go to Trafalgar Square, sculpture and knick- knacks to South Kensington, prints and drawings to the BM. But this exhibition puts it all back together.

Thus in the second room you can see the range of production of Verrocchio's studio, including that candlestick. There are also enormously beautiful terracotta sculptures, a full-scale masterpiece in the form of the 'Putto with a Dolphin' — represented by a cast — paintings and drawings. And the order of excellence among these works is not exactly what one might expect.

We tend to think of painting as top art, but in Verrocchio's workshop it looks like a low priority. The most beautiful of the exhibits are the drawings and small terra- cottas: a 'Sleeping Youth' that looks for- ward to the pastoral world of Giorgione

Judith', by Antonio del Pollaiuolo, Detroit Institute of Arts

and Titian, a couple of angels that show exactly what Verrocchio's prize pupil learned from the master, a design for a tomb in Pistoia which is verging on baroque in its complexity of fluttering angelic drapery.

The cast of the 'Putto with a Dolphin' lacks some of the amazing refinement of finish of the original. But it is possible — as it is not when looking at the original in the Palazzo Vecchio — to walk around it and see how from every angle it rearranges itself into a new, but always suave, compo- sition (there are also a couple of dubious Verrocchio-ish busts, among the few mis- takes in the selection).

In comparison, none of the paintings even the best, the National Gallery's 'Vir- gin and Child with Two Angels' — is up to much. None has the grace and power of the wonderful drawings by Verrocchio, espe- cially the female head from Christ Church. All of them look as if they were painted by several people, none of whom may have been Verrocchio himself.

Vasari relates that Verrocchio was a rest- less and busy man, always skipping from one project to another. It looks as though he threw out an idea or two for a painting, and left it to his team of assistants to knock it out. Among those assistants, the star was Leonardo da Vinci, who has been suggest- ed as the creator of various bits and pieces from the Verrocchio workshop, including the fish and dog in 'Tobias and the Angel'. Indeed, he must have been doing some- thing while he was working for Verrocchio, though there will probably never be com- plete agreement on exactly what.

At any rate, the exhibition makes clear how a workshop operated, turning out Ver- rocchio-designed products — rather as Emporio Armani produces branded this and that — even if the man himself had not done the actual painting, chiselling or mod- elling. You can also see, passing from one exhibit to another, what Leonardo got from his master. Beside a Leonardo sheet of capering infants is hung a similar study by Verrocchio (something of a putto specialist).

On the other hand, there were ideas that Leonardo, the most fascinating young artist who was formed in 1470s Florence, got from elsewhere. The rival Pollaiuolo work- shop — including Antonio and his younger brother Piero — had a good line in land- scape, unlike Verrocchio. There is an exhil- arating prospect of winding river and misty mountains behind the St Sebastian, patiently being stuck full of arrows in the Pollaiuolo brothers' altarpiece. A similar valley rolls away behind the Pollaiuolos' 'Hercules, Nessus and Deianeira'. And, hanging nearby, is one of Leonardo's early studies of elaborately fissured rocks, taking that interest in the natural world, and push- ing it — as he did everything — a little further.

The other Pollaiuolo speciality was sinewy naked men, a preoccupation shared by Leonardo both aesthetically and in other ways (he was embarrassed around this time by an anonymous accusation that he consorted with a notorious male prosti- tute). Again, looking at Pollaiuolo's 'Man Seen From Three Angles', one can see what Leonardo learnt from him, sniffy though he was about the older artist's grasp of anatomy.

Because 15th-century paintings are fre- quently too fragile to travel, most of the paintings on show are from the National Gallery. Even so, there are some exciting loans, including several Botticellis, espe- cially a grisly decapitated Holofernes from the Uffizi.

However, in comparison with the Pol- laiuolo and Verrocchio, Botticelli — much more of a household name — looks like a more limited and eccentric artist, a throw- back to curvilinear gothic draughtsman- ship. I can't get rid of the idea that many of his works were executed by Sir Edward Burne-Jones in a prior existence.

It is a sign of the quality of this exhibi- tion that it shakes your ideas up like that. From it Verrocchio and, to a lesser extent, Pollaiuolo emerge greater artists than one had realised before. The art of a complex, transitional decade comes into focus (as would have been hard to manage in a wider survey). That's the kind of insight any exhi- bition, not just one devoted to the 15th century should provide.