Caravaggio in America – Part 3

Here are the links to the first and second parts.

One of the first to see it in September 1972 after this process was Frederick Cummings (fig. 46), then assistant director of the Detroit Institute of Arts and a devoted lover of Italian Baroque art, who in 1965 had organized the great exhibition Art in Italy: 1600-1700 (fig. 47).[141] Although he had previously not been convinced of the painting’s authenticity in its “dirty and damaged” state, he now, as he later related, “was deeply struck by the superb quality and haunting beauty which had been revealed with the removal of decades of accumulated dirt and varnish.”[142] This positive view of the painting was also confirmed by Benedict Nicolson.[143] The sale of the painting was being handled by Hugh (later Sir Hugh) Leggatt (fig. 48) of the London gallery Leggatt Brothers, and one other museum had supposedly already reserved it. They did not take up their option, and so Detroit after “some anxious waiting”[144] received the next option, and the painting was sent there in December 1972 for examination by the museum’s board and potential patrons, as well as the conservation staff and the American Caravaggio scholars Ward Bissell, Richard Spear, and Donald Posner, who all accepted the painting while Alfred Moir believed it to be a copy.[145]

The scientific examination of the picture by the museum’s conservator, discovering the artist’s use of egg tempera in addition to the oil paint confirmed for Cummings the authenticity of the painting.[146] Early in January 1973 he thus wrote to Leggatt that “I believe I can give you a clear idea of our position by February 1…I have high hopes for a successful outcome, but it will take me a few more days to pull all the details together. The picture is superb.”[147] Later that month Cummings had a discussion with Señor Martín de Alzaga, who was acting as agent for the actual owner, his relative, Carlos Gómez de Alzaga of Paris. He then wrote to Leggatt to confirm that the Detroit Institute was “seriously interested in purchasing this picture,” but to “finalize certain scholarly and scientific” details, he felt it necessary to go to Rome to study Caravaggio’s contemporary Judith and Holofernes and so asked for an extension of the decision date until they could meet at the end of February in London.[148] The results of this study trip were satisfactory, and so on February 28^th Cummings met at Leggatt Brothers’s Gallery with Martín de Alzaga to work out the details. He wrote to him that same day confirming that he was authorized by the museum’s director to offer $1,100,000 for the painting and accepted the condition that it be referred to in the museum’s publications as “The Alzaga Caravaggio.” He added that the Board of Trustees would meet on March 13^th to ratify the purchase and then a check would be sent in care of Hugh Leggatt around March 19, 1973.[149]

In September of 1973, Cummings wrote to Denis Mahon to bring him up to date on the Caravaggio, which he found “so stimulating”. He reports that, “after considerable deliberation it was decided to reline the painting,” and after that job was completed, “it proved extremely beneficial…The result is rewarding since the overall paint surface now has what I can describe only as a more ‘healthy’ appearance.” And he adds, “Each of our staff is deeply impressed with the painting, and we all feel increasingly rewarded by it. It is truly a very great picture.”[150]

This altar painting was undoubtedly commissioned by the Spanish Viceroy in Naples, Don Juan Alonso Pimentel y Herrera, Conde de Benavente, who owned several Caravaggios, including, it is believed, the Madonna of the Rosary, which he sold, and is now in Vienna. He was devoted to the adulation of St. Andrew, whose shrine was in nearby Amalfi. The painting of St. Andrew, as Bellori informs us, he took with him back to Spain in 1610 and hung it in his palace in Valladolid where it is recorded as late as 1653.[160] lt then disappeared, apparently passing into an unidentified convent in Castilla, Spain and then a collection identified as A. Tores in Madrid. Next the painting entered the collection of José Manuel Arnaiz also in Madrid and was mentioned in 1973 as being there by the director of the Prado, Xavier de Salas, at a Caravaggio colloquium in Rome.[161] It was also exhibited that year in Seville with a catalogue entry by Alfonso Pérez Sánchez doubting the attribution.[162] The following year, however, Benedict Nicolson made the claim that it, rather than three known copies, was most likely the lost Caravaggio.[163]

It was examined by a number of potential buyers. David Carritt wanted to take it on but lacked sufficient financial backing. Agnews, father and son, went to see it in Madrid, but passed on it, due to the problematic condition.[164] The painting was then legally, if, as Pérez Sánchez later wrote, “scandalously exported” in June 1974, from Spain,[165] to Geneva where it was cleaned and restored by Jan Dik in close consultation with Luigi Salerno and Denis Mahon.[166] Another English dealer, Leggatt Brothers, which had had a hand in the sale of the previously discussed Caravaggio, was willing to attempt the sale on behalf of its owner, Signor Arnaiz, who had joined a syndicate.[167]  According to press reports, it was on the market for some time, but its condition apparently deterred potential purchasers. As Art News reported:

Nearly forty years after Mahon’s assessment of this great picture, there was a burst of activity surrounding the painting which served to enhance its fame. Central to this was a major restoration (partly conducted in public and recorded in an interactive app) at the Cleveland Museum of Art in 2014-15 by the museum’s Conservator of Paintings, Dean Yoder. [178] The now-restored painting returned to public view in May 2016 as part of the museum’s centennial celebration. Then the following year for six weeks in November – December 2017 it was juxtaposed to the best of the known copies (fig. 52).[179] That same year the museum published a detailed study of the work by Professor Erin E. Benay, who noted that as a result of Sherman Lee’s determination, “The Cleveland Museum of Art’s Crucifixion of Saint Andrew played an important part in the collecting of Caravaggio in America and in the artist’s reception and critical fortunes in this country.”[180] And finally Professor Richard Spear was inspired by this restoration and special exhibition to publish a cover story article on the painting and the question of replicas in The Burlington Magazine. He found that “the Cleveland painting had the richly modulated expressive brushwork of Caravaggio’s late style.”[181]

Notes 157-181

The work depicts three figures at a gaming table playing cards—a young man holding his cards is duped by an older bearded man signaling to his partner, a younger cardsharp, who draws the ostensibly winning card from behind his back. The theoretical art historian Michael Fried, in the midst of his complex consideration of the “thematization of absorption in the Cardsharps,” provides a wonderful appreciation of Caravaggio’s achievement here writing:

This visually arresting painting had originally belonged to Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte and then passed to Cardinal Antonio Barberini and later, in the early 19^th century, it was in the Colonna-Sciarra collection in Rome. It was apparently sold by Prince Maffeo Sciarra and exported secretly from Italy to Paris in the 1890s. It has been suggested that the painting may have entered the collection of the noble de Gramont and Rothschild families and was supposedly offered to the National Gallery, London, which declined the purchase.[184] The painting then disappeared, but fortunately it had been recorded at that time in a black and white photograph by Braun. This was one of Caravaggio’s most popular and, as we have seen, most frequently copied paintings, and over the years several other versions had been claimed as the original.[185] It was the good fortune of the late French-American art dealer Jean-Pierre Selz to spot it in the home of a French couple who had no idea what they had.[186] According to Rosella Vodret, the location was Caen, and the work was then sent to Switzerland in 1986.[187] It was a challenge to prove that this was indeed the original,[188] so to do the archival work in Rome documenting the painting’s early history Selz employed H. Lee Bimm, the late American researcher living in Italy. The painting, yet uncleaned, was first offered to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but its curators were dubious and passed on it. Therefore, it was next offered to the burgeoning and rich Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, designed by Louis Kahn (fig. 54). Its enthusiastic director, Theodore (Ted) Pillsbury, was an expert on Italian art and was always trying to bolster his museum’s collection with works by major artists. As he later related, in a public lecture:

For this important occasion Pillsbury was accompanied by his deputy director, William Jordan, and John Brealey, the noted English conservator then working at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

As he continues his narrative:

Intense technical study of the canvas to establish its authenticity was immediately carried out in Fort Worth by the Kimbell’s conservator, Claire Barry. First it was determined that this painting was indeed identical to the Braun photograph. Then X-radiography confirmed its original dimensions, while examination under infrared revealed some pentimenti in the position of the stripes on the back of the young cheat’s vest. Most significantly Barry discovered that there was an incision in the fingernail of the young cheat in the hand holding the cards. Such incisions had been found to be a characteristic of Caravaggio’s method of working, and this one, although small, seemed to be a deliberate placement mark for the fingers. In addition, there were fine incisions done with a straight edge outlining the backgammon board and delineating the cards in the cheat’s proper right hand and those stacked on the dish on the table. All of this was highly positive evidence, but as Pillsbury determined:

It was John Brealey who supervised this process,[192] but the actual cleaning was carried out by Gilles Panhard, and for the facing, lining removal, and relining he was assisted by Dorothy Mahon and Jim Coddington. During the course of scraping off the glue from the old lining, Panhard uncovered the remnants of an old wax seal on the verso of the original canvas. Yet another of John Brealey’s assistants, Gisela Helmkampf, recalled that a colleague of hers at the Capitoline Museum had previously sent her a tracing of the wax seal found during conservation on the verso of that museum’s Caravaggio The Fortune Teller. This she still had in an envelop on her work cart and when compared to the one on the Cardsharps, they were found to be the identical seals of the paintings’ first owner, Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte.[193] This laboratory discovery thus proved to be one of the most convincing arguments in favor of the painting’s authenticity.[194]

After this as Pillsbury related:

As mentioned previously, the painting was first displayed at the Metropolitan Museum where it had been restored and then it went to its new home in Texas, where it was put on public view the very same day as Ted Pillsbury’s insightful lecture (fig. 55), December 11, 1987.

Once again it was Sir Denis Mahon (knighted in 1986) who was invited to first publish a scholarly article on the painting in the January 1988 issue of The Burlington Magazine. He reported on his astonishment at seeing it first in the conservation department of the Metropolitan Museum in May of 1987, recognizing it as identical to the Braun photograph, and being convinced by the presence of the collector’s stamp, and the notable pentimenti. Mahon concluded that it was a very early work by Caravaggio and perhaps the very work which first attracted the attention of his patron, Cardinal del Monte.[196] Following Mahon’s article in The Burlington Magazine was an “Appendix” on the painting by the Met’s own distinguished Caravaggio expert, associate curator of European Paintings, Keith Christiansen, which in even greater detail reviewed the physical condition of the painting, and ended by stating that as the artist’s early biographer, Bellori, had suggested, “this picture marked the turning point in Caravaggio’s fortunes.”[197]

The Met’s online provenance listing provides the history of the painting which is recorded in Rome in 1613 as having been given to the painter Guido Reni.[199] It then passed to the Savelli family of Rome and Naples. After entering the Neapolitan art market following World War II, it was purchased in 1952 by the principe Vincenzo Imparato Caracciolo, a member of a long-established Neapolitan aristocratic family, and it was then inherited by his daughter, Elena Imparato Caracciolo of Naples and Milan. Since the famed art expert Roberto Longhi initially rejected it as a Caravaggio, in 1966 it was exported by her as a Manfredi to a bank in Lausanne, Switzerland.[200] There, it was acquired in 1970 by the restorer Jan Dik and the longtime American dealer Julius Weitzner, now resident in London. But when Longhi reversed his opinion, Weitzner had to negotiate with the Italian government, and the wily dealer, in order to obtain what he called “a sort of pardon”, had to exchange another work of art for the newly identified Caravaggio. He presented them with what he described as “a great Francesco Guardi 12 x 14 feet—already in Rome—and worth at least $500,000.” This “absolution,” as Weitzner called it, formally cleared the work for resale,[201] although for some Italian museum officials it still remains an “illegal export.”[202]

Weitzner had the painting taken to London where, as he wrote to his good friend, the collector Dr. Bob Jones, Jr, “it has been cleaned under the personal scrutiny of Denis Mahon. It is in fantastic state and a great work of art…and the price is $2,000,000.”[203] In a follow up letter the dealer confided to the collector, “I have not offered it yet for sale—frankly I don’t know how to begin. All the great experts tell me it is beyond price—and I should ask a big price—I am scared of these big sums—over a million pounds!” [204] Dr. Bob (as he was known), who as a token of his friendship with Weitzner had in his collection a flattering portrait of the dealer by the fashionable New York painter John Koch (fig. 57),[205] presciently replied that he did not think the sale of the painting would be “too big a problem—I think either the Metropolitan or Cleveland would give their eye teeth for it, and I am sure Norton Simon or Getty would go for it also.”[206] It did, however, take some time to find a buyer willing to meet the high price.

It was only in 1976 (ten years before Weitzner’s death at age 90) that Herman Shickman and his assistant, Norman Leitman, first saw the painting in London and came to an agreement on its purchase. Following this, they had it sent to Switzerland for storage in the vaults under the Zurich airport.[207] Once Shickman had the issue of its export finally resolved, the painting was shown publicly for the first time in the 1982 exhibition of Neapolitan art held in London and Washington, D. C. (fig. 58) [208] Then he lent it to the Metropolitan Museum’s 1985 Age of Caravaggio exhibition, organized  by the museum’s curator, Keith Christiansen, who according to the New York Times had “had his eye on the painting for many years,”[209] and would publish it as “indubitably by Caravaggio.”[210] Shickman lent it  as “private collection.”[211] and in 1997, when Christiansen told Shickman “this is a picture I’d love to see in the Met one day…he responded that he’d like to see it here too.” Later in the dealer’s office, “he proposed that he make a gift of half the value of the picture.” To allay the diligent curator’s fears about the export issue, Shickman informed him, “That was already dealt with. I have the verdict of the case and he furnished the document for me.”[212] So, later that year after Christiansen had obtained “outside opinions on the value of the picture”[213], its acquisitions was approved at a price rumored to be ten million dollars, half the value would be purchased and half donated, at first anonymously, and then a few years later under the dealer’s name.[214]

The Denial of St. Peter, painted in what Christiansen in his most recent Caravaggio study identifies as the “spectral style of…the very last months of Caravaggio’s life,” [215] was prominently exhibited in the National Gallery of London’s 2005 exhibition Caravaggio: The Final Years. There it was described by Christiansen as a work in which “Caravaggio probes with unparalleled poignancy a dark world burdened by guilt and doom, suggesting to some scholars an intersection with his biography.”[216] In 2017, the Met was able to examine in greater detail this late manner of Caravaggio by placing its Denial of St. Peter alongside another darkly powerful work from the same period, The Martyrdom of St. Ursula, lent by a Neapolitan bank (fig. 59). As the museum’s press release announced this mini-exhibition titled Caravaggio’s Last Two Paintings “will offer a rare opportunity to see these pictures side by side and to examine the novelty of Caravaggio’s late style, in which the emphasis is less on the naturalistic depiction of the figures and more on their psychological presence.”[217] There was no catalogue for this exceptional event, but curator Christiansen did write several online articles for the Now at the Met series. In the first he commented on the importance of the hand gestures in the Met’s painting, notably the saint’s hands beating upon his breast to express “contrition, repentance, shame and reprehension.”[218] This powerful emotion was also he wrote, further emphasized by the “spotlight illuminating Peter’s face, enhancing the conflicted expression of angered denial and remorse.”[219] Likewise in the St. Ursula that depicts the saint’s “murder …in a fashion that astonished those who saw it, Caravaggio staged it in his perpetual night.”[220]

It is certainly fair to say that with the arrival of these authentic works by Caravaggio in America and the many publications and exhibitions they have helped inspire that the early gloom of Caravaggio’s reputation has forever been dispelled. When Professor Walter Friedlaender published his breakthrough Caravaggio Studies in 1955, he began his “Foreword” by writing, “In the past few years Caravaggio’s popularity with the public at large has increased astonishingly.”[222] And by the time of the updated Schocken edition of the book in 1969, the astonishment had grown as by then three authentic Caravaggios were now in America and included in Friedlaender’s catalogue raisonné.[223] So today the fact that seven of the artists approximately sixty-five paintings are now in American museums is even more astonishing. As we have seen, this process of acquisition was not easy and the result it provides, although it does not negate visits to Italy, or across Europe from Dublin and London to Potsdam and St. Petersburg, to see the remainder of the master’s oeuvre, is to give us the personal exposure to the artist that Friedlaender deemed so important—“a patient searching and understanding of every individual work… and the comprehension of the significance each work had for the community and for human feelings generally.”[224] We are fortunate that these seven works span the artist’s career from what Friedlaender called “the frivolous boys”[225] of his early genre paintings in Rome through to his later Neapolitan works with what another great art historian, Professor Sydney J. Freedberg, has described as the painter’s “ever deepening sense of the inwardness of feeling… in a new kind of religious art which makes its persons actual and its subject matter utterly contemporary.”[226]

notes 222-226

Acknowledgements