Florence, Italy – Cradle of the Renaissance and Rebirth of Humanism – III: New York City and Middle America

Uffizi Gallery - Florence.

The Reluctant Stepdaughter spent her last semester in college in Florence, Italy, where her school has a campus.  We joined her for spring break and discovered a gem of a city.  The Uffizi museum gave us a crash course in renaissance art and the instrumental role that Florence, and the Medici family played in it.  Since coming back to the United States, I have managed to check the story told there in some of our own great museums.  I have spent time in the galleries of paintings that, truth be told, it has been my habit to sprint through on my way to the good stuff.  I have long been a fan of Rembrandt – and almost every museum seems to have at least one Rembrandt.  But I am also a fan of the impressionists – I am nearly in heaven in the Chicago Institute of Art and MOMA – heck, in MOMA I don’t have to race through those rooms, they don’t exist!

But since Florence, I have taken the time to linger in the rooms that I normally race through.  I have looked for the Middle Ages and early renaissance paintings and sculpture.  I have been curious about the emergence of the person – how we have developed from iconic representations to the intimate, warm, psychologically rich depictions of people that Rembrandt still epitomizes for me.  So, in Philadelphia, New York City, Chicago, Detroit, Toledo and Cincinnati, as I have gone to conferences, picked up other children at college and visited friends and family this summer, I have stopped into the local museum and lingered in the rooms I once rushed through.

Florence plays a prominent role in each of those rooms.  The collections vary – there are a surprising number of Botticellis  sprinkled through the Northeast and Midwest – and there are the precursors – different artists in each place, but it is possible to pick up bits of the narrative that the Uffizi tells so well.  No place, of those I have visited, does this better than the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.  And it was a good thing that we decided to linger there – the Rembrandts and the impressionist rooms were being restored – and by the time we finished lingering we were done with the exhibit!  Oh, the rest had been moved to a special exhibits section, but they weren’t where they belonged!

Memling 1470

The New York narrative mirrored, but deepened the Italian narrative about the emergence of art.  In Florence, you really would think that Florentines had invented art and the rest of the world discovered it from them.  In all of the museums, you see more works from other Italian cities and hear about developments there – especially Venice – that the Florentines play down.  But what the Met points out is the really intriguing interaction between Florence and Northern Europe.  The Dutch and Germans – even in the cold northern climes – were having a similar emergence of new, richer, bolder art.  They were starting to “get” how perspective worked, though it was the Italians that schooled the Germans and Dutch in this area, but the Germans and Dutch had a better sense, earlier on, of portraiture, and the Italians learned more than a little about how to represent the human on the canvas from them. 

Memling 1470

The most wonderful example of this at the Met is a pair of paintings by Hans Memling.  They are of a married couple – and the man is, get this, the northern representative of the Medici bank!  The two were painted on either side of a central panel – looking at the panel – demonstrating their piety – but also, with the jewels and clothing particularly of the wife – demonstrating their wealth.  Painted in about 1470, these two portraits would certainly have traveled home to Venice to be admired by the Medici and by the artists who worked for them.  “Why can’t you paint a portrait like that of me?” they might have asked.  And the Italians seem to have set to work to do just that.  

Botticelli 1480

Unfortunately I don’t have good before and after pictures, but the Botticelli, a depiction of the resurrected Christ, from the Detroit Institute of Art, is painted 10 years after the Memling (in 1480).  While the Memlings may or may not have been seen by Botticelli, you can see that there are similarities – the hands of all three people are remarkably rendered.  And the face of Christ is an interesting portrait, but it has neither the quality of depth of the Memlings nor does it give the person being seen room to exist in his or her own space.  Admittedly this is a religious painting, so may be intentionally using some of the existing means of depicting religious figures, but there is still an aura of iconography around him, a sense of the person as cartoon, not as a fully realized and psychologically three dimensional person. 

Rembrandt circa 1650

The point here, and the Met makes it remarkably well, is not that the Northerners or the Southerners were superior to each other, but that each profited by the trade with the other.  The north gained the tools to accurately depict depth on a two dimensional surface.  The south gained an entrance into a world that would allow later artists – Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo (both of whom painted in the very early 1500s) and then later artists – Titian and Caravaggio – to engage with subjects – to present the subjectivity of those subjects in much richer and deeper tones.  Ultimately, Rembrandt himself, but up in the north, would render Christ – as seen as the Philadelphia Museum of Art – as a psychologically rich person – not just an icon who has suffered and is now forgiving with an other-worldly grace, but as a person, alive and full of personality.

The narrative at the Met goes on to mourn the loss of the connection between the two art worlds as Protestantism arose and then the reformation and there was a split between the north and south.  In Detroit, this was depicted in a different way.  Florence, but the other cities in Italy, were part of the Grand Tour that especially English nobles made – during the late renaissance and into the period of the reformation.  Italian painting, sculpture, and other art objects became something that the aristocrats travelling in Europe could bring home to adorn their homes.  It was kind of the travel slide show of the day.  Some of the stereotyped views of St. Mark’s Square in Venice would be examples of this.

While I have just made the case that the Memling paintings likely found their way to Florence and likely influenced the painters there, I think it important to distinguish between a lively trade not just of art but of artists that is necessary to sustain a fertile relationship (as an analyst I feel it incumbant upon me to say: intercourse is a necessary component of fertility).  Just as reading can help one engage in self-analysis, and such analysts as Karen Horney wrote books to help people who did not have access to analysts learn to think about themselves analytically, it is not the same thing to engage in self-analysis as it is to engage with another person in an analytic process.  It is neither as terrifying – this person may sees things I cannot see – nor as nurturing – this person can care for me in a way that I cannot care for myself.  A painting as a tutor is useful in some ways, but sterile in others.

 

There is a great deal of evidence that one of the tools of the classical painters was the camera obscura, which was essentially a pinhole camera that the painters would use to project an exact image of the person or object they were painting onto a screen so that they could sketch or paint that object.   Just seeing someone else’s painting is not going to help you invent the camera obscura yourself – much easier if they tell you about it.  Ironically, the emergence of actual cameras – and the impressionist revolt against studio work and photographic realism in favor of capturing the feel of what was being seen likely broke the chain of painters teaching their students about the camera obscura.

The practice of psychoanalysis, like that of painting, involves learning how to help bring someone to life (O.K. that sounds a bit dramatic – but it is also true.  It is not the analyst alone that does this – any more than an artist can paint things that are not wanted by the person who will buy the paintings – Van Gogh being the exception that proves the rule – though Gadsby maintains that this had to do with Vincent’s art being supported by his brother’s love of it – and him).   Psychoanalysis, like art, evolves across time.  I think that analysts today are more likely than those of a hundred years ago to be helpful to those they work with.  But those who pillory analysis frequently do that based on readings that are at least one hundred years old.  We analysts need to understand how our art developed.  To know what its roots are – but we also need to be learning from current masters – from people who have taken the early techniques and built on them.

Frankly, the last paragraph felt both like a reasonable conclusion and a left turn from what I set out to write.  I think that it is amazing that the development of the ability of artists to depict the three dimensional aspects of a figure’s psychology is documented at the major museums of our cities.  I thought I was going to end by noting that I think that the Metropolitan – next to the Uffizi – does the best job of doing this in the sample I have – with Toledo, Detroit, Chicago, and Cincinnati, in that order, presenting less well articulated versions of this emergence - and acknowledging that I have not sampled Washington, Boston, LA and many other cities.  But it is remarkable the care that we have taken to preserve this tremendous period of growth and change.  We went from two dimensional highly crafted work of cartoon art to three dimensional works in a short 100+ year period (see the post on the Uffizi to access Italian illustrations of that transformation), and within a few short years of that, we have Rembrandt’s likenesses.

Rembrandt 1660

In New York, we did visit my favorite Rembrandt, even though it was not hung in its usual spot.  It is a self-portrait – and Rembrandt produced more than 100 of these.  But this is truly magnificent. Like all of the art reproduced here, you really have to see this to believe it.  The eyes follow you around the room – a trick that many artists master – but this – like many of the best Rembrandts and a Velasquez portrait we also discovered at the Met – has a face that turns towards you as you walk around.  And the face changes expression – it is more open and cherubic from straight on – a bit sterner from the one side – and downright poignant – there is a sense of loss – perhaps in the painting, but certainly in the viewer – that Rembrandt is both here and not here – as you view him from the other side. 

Perhaps because it was hung in an unusual spot, this was the first time that I had noticed the changes wrought by a restoration.  I have seen this paintings a few times since that restoration, but had not noticed that taking off layers of varnish left it much less dark and murky – there is an openness to the representation that wasn’t there before.  Weirdly, I think I liked him more in the dark.  There is less gravitas in this more accurate version of the painting as it was painted.  I guess I prefer mystery - perhaps part of my deep, if ambivalent, attachment to the art of psychoanalysis.

Please, be in contact with the art that you love.  Allow it to contact you and learn more about it.  As you do, you, as I have, will learn more about what it means to become human.


Related posts:
Florence Italy: The Uffizi Gallery
Rome, Italy: The Sistine Chapel

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