Patrick Bade
The Louvre, Part 1: The Italian Schools from Giotto to Tiepolo

Patrick Bade | The Louvre, Part 1: The Italian Schools from Giotto to Tiepolo | 07.07.24

Visuals displayed throughout the presentation.

- And good afternoon to everyone from my flat in Paris, as I think you can see. And over the next months, I’m planning to take you on a guided tour of the Louvre. I think one can confidently say that the Louvre is the world’s greatest museum, certainly the greatest in terms of size, in the quantity and the richness of its collection. It has apparently over half a million objects in the collection. And every year around 10 million people visit the Louvre. It’s more, likely to be more this year, I would think, with the Olympics taking place at the end of the month. So it’s an enormous, complex building. And from this image you see that there are four different entrances. When you next come to Paris. I would recommend entering from the one of the two entrances on the Rue de Rivoli, particularly the, through the Passage Richelieu. You are less likely to have to queue if you if you do that. But the main entrance is the famous pyramid designed by the Chinese American architect, I. M. Pei and built in the 1980s. It was very controversial at the time. There were people who loved it and people who hated it. People who thought this futuristic structure was quite inappropriate in the middle of a Baroque and Renaissance palace. It works brilliantly. What can you say? Oh, I seem to be missing a slide. That’s strange, nevermind. I wanted to show you the, that, what it looks like when you go into the pyramid. It’s a bit like going into a hotel, really.

So the collection, there are many, many, it is an enormous wealth of collections. It’s really like the British Museum, the National Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum all put together in one great museum. And I’m going to concentrate mainly on paintings ‘cause that’s what I know most about. But the, there are great, there, there’s, after the British Museum, probably the world’s most important collection of antiquities. And the single most famous object is the Venus de Milo, the, found on the island of Melos in 1821. Here she is. And one of the things I really want to do in this series of lectures is to show how important the Louvre has been for the history, the continuing history of art. Our artists have gone to the Louvre and looked at things and been inspired by them. On the right-hand side, you have the Delacroix “Liberty Leading the People”, which is clearly inspired by the Venus of Melos. Great collections of sculpture. There are only four marble sculptures by Michelangelo outside of Italy. There’s the Rondo, the Tondo in the Royal Academy. There’s the Bruges Madonna and these two sculptures of slaves that Michelangelo made for the tomb of Julius II. There’s also one of the world’s greatest collections of Islamic art and a wonderful new installation of those collections. I’m not going to go into those because it’s beautiful though I think the objects are, I don’t really know about them in sufficient depth. Also decorative arts, great collection of decorative arts.

I will be talking about decorative arts, but in the context of other Paris museums when I get to them. And one of the, when I do take people into the museum, the, usually the first thing I show them is the mediaeval Louvre. The, it was a palace or a fortress originally, constructed in the late 12th, early 13th century. And that was replaced in the Renaissance by a Renaissance palace and then Baroque and 19th century additions. And it was only when they were excavating for the I. M. Pei entrance that they discovered amazingly, the mediaeval Louvre exists up to a quite an important height of the original building. It had been buried since the 16th century. So it’s an immaculate condition, wonderfully crisp. And it’s just such a strange sensation to descend into the Middle Ages. It’s really like something out of a science fiction movie. But we will be, this first talk I’m taking you into the Pavillon Denon which houses the Italian paintings, and you go up this staircase. And at the top of the staircase is the famous “Winged Victory of Samothrace”.

This is one of the very rare supreme masterpieces of Hellenistic sculpture discovered in the 19th century. A fantastically powerful piece of sculpture with the way the material clings to the body underneath and creates this wonderful sensation of movement. So it’s a very dramatic entrance into the museum. And then when we get to the top, before we go into the paintings galleries, I usually take people into the Galerie d'Apollon, the Gallery of Apollo. This was made for Louis XIV in the late 17th century. And the original design was by Le Vau and Le Brun, the architect and designer that Louis XIV employed at Versailles. But it was left unfinished when Louis XIV died and completed in the 19th century and Delacroix again was commissioned to paint the ceiling paintings, which you see here. But it’s a very impressive room, and it’s worth taking a couple of minutes to look at the French crown jewels, which are displayed in this room. The French, original French crown jewels were, of course, all destroyed or dispersed at the time of the French Revolution.

So the crown jewels we have here, they date from Napoleon onwards, Napoleon, Louis Philippe, Louis Napoleon. But they’re still pretty impressive, very amazing, blingy, spectacular jewels. So then we walk in through this corridor towards the Grande Galerie. And here it’s worth pausing for a moment to look up into the ceiling. You have the what it looks like as you come into the I. M. Pei glass pyramid. And as I said, it is a bit like entering an airport rather than a museum. So here again is the Venus de Milo. Yes, so the museum collections, cultures, antique art, Roman and Greek, very important. It’s also the most important collection in France of sculpture, as you can see here. And here are the Michelangelo “Slaves”, although they’re not actually in that sculpture section, and the Islamic and the decorative arts. And quite relatively recently, they have opened up the state rooms created for the Emperor Louis Napoleon in the 1850s and '60s. These used to house the Ministry of Finance. I can’t think that working in this kind of environment would encourage economy.

It’s certainly one of the most lavish interiors you could find anywhere. And here we are back in the mediaeval Louvre and on our way up to the painting galleries with the Italian paintings. And I said, I want you to, when you do this, to stop for a moment and look up into this ceiling, which is quite amazing. I mean, thousands of people walk through this corridor and almost nobody looks up into the ceiling. And this ceiling was created by the firm of Percier and Fontaine who were the great decorators and designers for Napoleon. And this is created in the Napoleonic period. If you have a little pair of opera glasses with you or binoculars, look up into the ceiling. It is amazing because you really have to do a double-take and look very carefully to see what is 3D and what is just very clever trompe-l'oeil 2D. Here is a closer detail. All these bronze reliefs, they’re not really bronze reliefs, they’re just painted onto the ceiling. Walking down this corridor, you can see on the left this very beautiful fresco, a 15th century fresco by Botticelli.

So it was actually painted onto a wall in a villa near to Florence, the Villa Lemmi outside of Florence. And presumably this was made to celebrate a wedding because it shows Venus and the Graces presenting gifts to a young bride. Now, the first really, really important Italian painting, I’m concentrating mainly on Italian paintings today, is this, “The Stigmatisation of St. Francis” by Giotto. So Giotto is a mediaeval artist. His dates are 1267 to 1337. But he’s, it’s, he’s really proto-Renaissance. He anticipates much of what is going to happen 100 later in the Renaissance. He is the artist who, according to Vasari, broke with the maniera greca, Greek manner, is Vasari’s term for the Byzantine style. Byzantine are like icons, very flat, very stylized. So Giotto really makes a big leap forward in an attempt to depict reality. So the figure, you can see, the figure of St. Francis is very volumetric. It really has weight and substance, and we all can, we can also see in this image that, particularly with the little pavilions, which is shown at an angle, an attempt to give an illusion of space, that you could actually walk into the picture space.

Now, this very important piece so few panel paintings survive by Giotto. In London, the National Gallery only have one little panel, predella panel, which may or may not be by him. This is pretty universally accepted as being by Giotto. It’s one of a number of very important paintings in the Italian collection that were looted in the Napoleonic period. And I will point those out as we come to them. But in fact, the French stole, there’s a nice phrase in German, to steal like ravens. They really stole like ravens in Italy. They stole everything that could be moved in Italy and they would’ve been able to keep it all if Napoleon had stayed on the island of Elba. Initially at the Conference of Vienna in 1813, the French were going to be allowed to keep their ill-gotten gains. And it was only when Napoleon came back and had to be defeated a second time at Waterloo that the Conference decided, no, no, the French had to give back the bulk of their ill-gotten gains. About 80% of the paintings they stole from Italy went back to Italy. Otherwise, the Uffizi and the Vatican would be denuded of a lot of their greatest masterpieces.

But in any case, some pretty important paintings stayed, mainly the big ones because it was just thought to be too difficult to get them back to Italy once again. So now the subject, stigmatisation of St. Francis. The story is that St. Francis went up onto a mountain and he fasted for 40 days, and then he developed stigmata, sympathetic wounds on his hands and feet. This is a very, he’s the first person, I think, the first that this occurred to. But since his time, it has actually become quite a frequent phenomenon amongst Catholic believers. Well, I’m sure there are plenty of doctors listening in who have theories about what causes stigmatisation, stigmata. The, I mean, there have been many, many investigations and some cases have proved to be fraudulent, but some clearly aren’t. So it’s really difficult to know exactly what is taking place with this phenomenon. So here you’ve got a closer view of, with the wounds come kind of floating Jesus in the sky and the floating wounds, the wounds with these sort of directional lines going to the feet and hands of St. Francis. Predella panels along the bottom.

This, it shows the dream of Pope Innocent III. He had a dream that St. Francis was holding up the church, holding up the Lateran church. And this led him to recognise the Franciscan order. And this is what we see in this little predella panel. Very interesting again, for you can see how bulky the figures of the monks look. You know, you really feel that if you tried to lift them, they would weigh something. And look up to the top here. And you can see really quite a sophisticated attempt at perspective. He didn’t have the full knowledge of mathematical perspective. That wasn’t actually developed till 100 years later by Brunelleschi in the early 15th century. But this is a pretty good stab at it if you look at the coffering in the ceiling. And that was a device that later Renaissance artists would very often use as well, to give you a sense of recession into space. And there’s this wonderful predella panel of the famous story of Francis preaching to the birds.

Here we see beautifully observed birds. I’m sure they’re all identifiable as particular species of birds. And we move on to another painting, which was looted from a convent in by Napoleon. And this is Fra Angelico, “The Coronation of the Virgin”. And so actually when you walk in to the first room with the Italian paintings, this is straight ahead of you. And it, for me, it’s always a wow moment. The colour is just so astonishing, really zingy, almost iridescent, bright, sweetie colours. It’s just amazing from a coloristic point of view. This of course is tempera and egg tempera. It tends to keep its bright colours rather more than oil paintings, which tend to darken with age. So Fra Angelico was a friar and he spent the most important part of his career in the Friary of San Marco in Florence, where he painted frescoes on the walls and a great altarpiece. And he was apparently a very religious man. And in the 1980s, he was beatified, which is I think the first stage on the way to canonization, to becoming a saint. You have to go through various hurdles and there have to be miracles that happen before you get the full monty of being a saint.

I’d like to show you this detail because he was, he’s working in the first half of the 15th century. This dates from the 1430s. So in the previous decade, you’ve got the revolutionary artist of Masaccio. No Masaccio in the Louvre, unfortunately. You can go to see Masaccio in London or Berlin, or obviously in Florence. So it’s Masaccio who’s the first artist to really systematically apply the rules of perspective and to give a much more convincing idea of spatial recession. But we can see that Fra Angelico’s picking up some of these ideas. Again, if you look at the floor, the tiled floor, tiled floor is always a big help in leading you into space. You can see that St. Catherine’s wheel is shown at an angle and not sideways on, and most fascinatingly I think are the kneeling saint in the foreground is she’s seen from behind. Earlier in Gothic art, you never see people from behind. You normally see them either frontally or in profile. And you can see her, she’s kneeling and her legs and feet, we can sense them underneath the drapery pointing out towards us. And this is also an altarpiece, which has a wonderful set of predella panels along the bottom, a bit like a kind of comic strip.

So this, these predella panels all show incidents from the lives of St. Francis and St. Dominic, St. Dominic who founded the Dominicans. So these are two saints who founded holy orders. And so this, I like this story. This is the miraculous, the story of the miraculous loaves. This was St. Dominic. He was in his monastery with a whole lot of monks and they had nothing to eat. And they were very desperate, they were starving. And they said, “What shall we do?” And he said, “Pray.” And they all go into a kind of trance. And then these angels turn up with a meal for them. It’s an early example of angelic home delivery. This is obviously miraculous healing that St. Dominic did. And once again, this is the story of the dream of Innocent III, Pope Innocent III of St. Francis holding up the church. Now, a contemporary of Fra Angelico, who is rather more radical in his attempts to create, recreate reality on a flat surface, was Paolo Uccello. Uccello means bird in Italian.

Vasari tells us he got the nickname Uccello 'cause he loved nature very much and he loved birds. And his most important surviving masterpiece is a series of three paintings depicting the Battle of San Romano between Florence and Sienna that took place in 1435. And the, these paintings, we don’t know the exact date, but these are probably about a decade or so later. And the three panels are separated now. There’s one that’s still in Florence, in the Uffizi. There’s one in London and there’s this one in Paris. And so the order is, it’s probably a progression because the battle took place over a whole day, over about eight hours from through the day with three same scenes over the day. The, so Uccello was another artist who was absolutely obsessed with perspective. You can actually see that most clearly in the London panel on the left, where you can see he creates a sense of recession because all the weapons that have fallen on the ground during the battle are either parallel to the picture surface or along diagonal lines leading towards a theoretical vanishing point.

And the other thing which would’ve been absolutely amazing to people, like sort of audiences would’ve reacted as they do today to amazing special effects in a movie, was the, is the foreshortening. And the fact that you, horses, I think these are the first backsides of horses depicted from the back in Western art. And here again is the, a detail of the Paris panel with horses pointing their backsides towards you. Now that we, this, that is a separate room that we’ve just been through that has early Renaissance paintings. And after we pass through it, we arrive at the Grande Galerie. This is the biggest room in the Louvre. And the room was created around 1600 for King Henry of Navarre, King Henri IV, and was in a Renaissance style. And it was originally even longer. It was about 1,500 feet long. It’s now about 950 feet long. And this room contains most of the most important paintings, Italian paintings in the Louvre collection. This is what it looked, there, I didn’t mention before that the Louvre, of course, it was a royal palace. It was a fortress, a palace. And it was only after the Revolution in 1793 that it was turned into a museum. And the museum initially contained the confiscated royal collection and paintings that had been taken from churches. And this is what it looked like soon after its opening as a museum. And this is a fantasy of what it might look like after an apocalyptic future by the 18th century artist, Hubert Robert. And this is what it looked like in the 19th century.

As I said, the Louvre has been enormously important in the history of Western art. From the moment that it was open to the public, the artists could come here to study, to make copies. All the really great artists of the 19th century, Delacroix, Ingres, Degas, Manet, they all came here to study the Old Masters and to learn from them by copying them. Here we have a top left is a crucifixion by Andrea Mantegna, another great 15th century Italian artist originally from which city is he from? In northern Italy, anyway, he goes to Mantua and he becomes a court artist in Mantua in 1560 up until his death in, so sorry, 1460 up until his death in 1506. And bottom right, we have a copy of the Mantegna that was made by Degas, and I’m showing you a detail here. Mantegna had the reputation of being a very learned artist. He could read Latin. And so Renaissance, as I’m sure you know, means rebirth. And it’s a rebirth of classical culture. And like many people at this time, he’s obsessed by reviving classical culture.

So he’s going round measuring buildings and copying details from classical buildings, studying coins and metals and studying people. Everybody’s digging everywhere in Italy in the 15th and early 16th century. And they’re finding sculptures and sculptural reliefs and so on. And his paintings have a very, very sculptural quality. This, of course, is his imagination, his idea of what Jerusalem looks like. And he’d never been to Jerusalem, I’m sure he’d never met anybody who’d been to Jerusalem. But he will have studied all the available sources to recreate Jerusalem as best he could. The, so there’s a particularly good collection of Mantegnas in the Louvre, several very important works. This is the martyrdom of St. Sebastian. It’s a very popular subject in Western art. He was a Roman soldier who was martyred for converting to Christianity. I think there are various reasons why this subject is so popular. One is it’s an excuse to paint a beautiful male body because according to legend, he was very beautiful and a lot of paintings of Saint Sebastian, not this one particularly, I would say, can have a very homoerotic element and also an element of sadomasochism, you know, with the saint often rolling his eyes with ecstasy and being pierced with arrows.

I think here that I don’t sense an enormous sense of homoeroticism here, but I think he, it’s more a cerebral attempt to create ideal beauty as found in classical sculpture. Now, the paintings I’ve shown you up to this point have all been in tempera, well this is still tempera, but they’ve all been on panel. So Mantegna is one of the first artists to often prefer to paint on canvas or sometimes on linen rather than on panel. So on the right-hand side, you can see his attempts to, 'cause he knows that Jesus lived during the Roman Empire, so he’s using his knowledge of Roman architecture here. And a wonderful observation on the left-hand side of a fig tree. This is also by Mantegna. It’s a later work, “Parnassus”. So it’s a classical subject. And this was painted for Isabella d'Este, the Duchess of Mantua. She was a famous patron, but a notoriously difficult one to please. And she created, she had created for her a studiolo. A studiolo is not quite sure exactly how to translate it. It’s a studio decorated with classical paintings. And they were very de rigueur, very fashionable in the early Renaissance. And every Renaissance prince wanted to have one. And they were really in competition with one another.

And so all the panels from Isabella’s studiolo landed up in the Louvre. This is a reconstruction of how scholars think that the paintings were displayed in Isabella’s studiolo. Mantegna died in 1506 and Isabella rooted around for other artists to complete the scheme. She pestered Leonardo da Vinci, he wasn’t having it. And Titian as well. One artist that, who did create a panel for her was Perugino. This is not really one of his best works, unsurprisingly, when you read the correspondence. 'Cause she was very hands-on, very interfering, very bossy, sending him sketches of the composition she wanted, very, very fussy, who she was obviously a difficult person to please. Here’s another painting from the series by the artist Lorenzo Costa. But undoubtedly the masterpiece from the series is the last one that Mantegna painted for her. This shows Minerva, goddess of wisdom, driving out the Vices from the Garden of Virtue. And it’s a wonderfully strange painting.

Here is Minerva, full of extraordinary images of, see this tree metamorphosing into a person or the other way around, and these amazing representation of the Vices. Now this painting I think is one of the most loved portraits in the Louvre. It’s by Domenico Ghirlandaio. He’s also late 15th century Florentine painter. Nobody knows who the subject of this painting is. It seems to be an old man with his grandson. And it’s a, I think people love this painting because I know how many people here listening to me tonight will love their grandchildren. And it is just such a touching representation of the love between a grandfather and his grandson. And interesting, again, from a medical point of view, that he’s suffering from a condition called rhinophyma, which you can see has deformed his nose. Ah, now how about this one? This is, it’s quite a small portrait by Antonello da Messina and wow, it’s such an arresting picture, isn’t it? He could have stepped straight out of “The Godfather”. He looks so mafioso. Well, Antonello da Messina, as his name suggests, came from Sicily. And, but in, according to Vasari in Naples, he encountered a Flemish artist who taught him the techniques of oil painting.

So he’s the first major artist in Italy to practise oil painting, which has a number of advantages over tempera. Oil can be transparent and it can be built up in layers. And also it’s slow drying so you can work more slowly and you can get much finer detail and much finer gradations of light and shade. So this, and the other thing he’s picked up, of course, from Flemish painting is the bust length, three quarter view format that was unknown in Italy before Antonello. Most portraits in Italy up to that time were either in profile, inspired by coins and medals, or frontal. Now we’ll take a little detour. We’re walking down the Grande Galerie and we’ll see an opening on the right-hand side and we’ll see a huge mob of people. And in the distance on the other side of the room, we see Leonardo da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa”. I think there are probably thousands, tens of thousands of people who will go to the Louvre just to see this picture and to take a selfie standing in front of it. It’s very, very difficult to get near it to, and it, of course it’s behind bulletproof glass and all that kind of thing. So the Louvre has the world’s most important collection of paintings by Leonardo da Vinci. Didn’t paint, there aren’t many that he completed.

I think there are only about 13 oil paintings by Leonardo that are universally accepted. Four of them are in the Louvre, plus a couple of paintings that may have come out of his studio. And the main reason for this is that Leonardo spent the end of his life in France. He was invited by King Francis I. And the inset image you see here is a painting by Ingres illustrating the story told by Vasari that Francis I valued Leonardo so much that he held him in his arms on his deathbed. So here is the “Mona Lisa”, we’re getting a little bit closer to her. Why is this the most famous painting in the world? Well, the, it’s, that’s a relatively recent phenomenon. I mean, she, in the 19th century, she was always already becoming quite famous. Walter Pater famously described her as a diver in deep seas. And she came to be seen as a mysterious sort of femme fatale. The endless theories inspired, she’s, there are so many weird and wonderful theories inspired by this painting. So there are people who think that it’s actually a self-portrait of Leonardo himself in drag, but nobody really knows for sure who she is.

Different theories about her identity. I think her fame really took off worldwide in 1911 when an Italian guy stole her from the Louvre and she was missing for some time. In the photograph you see here, shows the “Mona Lisa” recovered and returned to the Louvre. Now the diver in deep seas, no, she’s very bluey green, not much colour, but early descriptions of the picture emphasised that she had a very rosy complexion. So the Louvre has a very conservative policy for cleaning pictures. So nobody’s dared to clean the “Mona Lisa”. She’s under many, many layers of very dirty varnish. If they ever have the courage to clean her, she might land up looking like this. This is an early copy of the “Mona Lisa”, which might suggest what the colours originally looked like. Also, a lot of discussion about the background, this very strange and mysterious background of the picture, which is part of its fascination, I think. And just recently in the last few months, an Italian art historian has claimed to identify the particular place of this section of the background from the bridge. And that it’s actually a bridge that was in a place on the north coast of Lake Como.

So as I said, Leonardo da Vinci only painted, or no, he painted more, but there are only about 13 paintings that survive and most of those are unfinished. So it’s another great mystery about Leonardo is that there are two finished versions of this picture, “The Madonna of the Rocks”, which was painted for a monastery in Milan in the 1580s. The, we know that he didn’t deliver the painting for a very long time, or it was commissioned in the 1580, 1480s, 1480s. And then eventually he completed it and delivered it to the church in Milan. So the London version of the “Madonna of the Rocks”, which you see on the right-hand side, is the one that was in that church, in that monastery in Milan. So the logical conclusion from that would be that it’s the first version and the Louvre version is the replica. But every art historian agrees on stylistic grounds that it’s the other way round, that the Louvre version is the original version. It represents an earlier phase of Leonardo’s style. And it’s also the better of the two versions, the one that’s more completely by him. The one in London may have elements that are painted by assistants. So the other thing which is strange here is that Leonardo, he developed chiaroscuro, which is, means light and shade.

Effectively, it means putting black in shadows. And his later paintings tend to be much darker and less colour, less brightly coloured than the early paintings. But looking at these two images, of course the London one looks brighter. And the reason for that is that National Gallery in London has a notoriously reckless approach to cleaning. And there are many art historians have criticised the National Gallery for over-cleaning pictures. The Louvre have, as I said, have a more conservative approach to cleaning. I do hope that I can live long enough to see this painting cleaned because I suspect that again, you can see under the many layers of varnish, there are going to be very glowing colours, blues, greens, yellows, reds. Here’s the whole thing. This is a rather enhanced, exaggerated picture, photo of the picture on the left, that brings out some of the colours. And on the right, again, is an early copy which has been cleaned and may show what the colours originally looked like. The only painting by Leonardo that the Louvre have dared to clean, and that was in time for the Leonardo commemoration of 2017, commemorating his death in 1517.

This is the Madonna with St. Anne, an unfinished painting, and left is what it looked like before the cleaning and right is what it looks like now. Again, very, very controversial with some, it’s a dangerous thing to do because you, yes, you take off the dirty varnish, but you, artists often added glazes. Glazes are transparent layers of colour. And the risk is if you take the varnish off, you can take the glazes off as well. This is the last completed painting by Leonardo, the St. John the Baptist. A very mysterious picture and mysterious because it’s also perverse. What can you say? John The Baptist is normally depicted as a kind of rough type, unkempt and very masculine. Whereas the Leonardo is very androgynous. It could almost be a young woman. This is also, this is studio of Leonardo, a Bacchus. And again, a very odd relationship between the St. John who’s one of the most austere Christian saints, and the god of wine and drunkenness, Bacchus. They look like they had the same model. And there is this very, very lovely portrait known as “La Belle Ferronniere”. But the identity, again, much disputed. Many theories over the years, recently suggested it might be Isabella, no, Beatrice d'Este, who was the wife of Lucovico il Moro, the Duke of Milan. Onto Raphael.

So, we’ve touched on two of the three great geniuses of the High Renaissance, Michelangelo and Leonardo. And the third genius was Raphael. I think these days, his reputation, a little eclipsed by the other two. But for a very long time, he was actually the most admired of the three. And this was one of the most admired of his paintings, one of the most famous paintings in the world. It’s called “La Belle Jardiniere”. It’s painted in Raphael’s Florentine phase. Raphael was like a sponge. He could absorb all sorts of influences, initially his master, Perugino. Then he goes to Florence and he absorbs the influence of Leonardo da Vinci, which we can see here. And he’s adapted, adapted this format of the pyramidal triangular composition for the mother and Jesus and St. John the Baptist. He’s taken that from Leonardo da Vinci. But he’s sweeter and that was part of the appeal, of course. She’s a kind of yummy mummy. And this became so loved throughout the world, particularly the Catholic world, as an image of maternal love. And it’s fascinated later artists, some who of course who rather, this is a Delacroix that’s actually in the museum in Lille. And this is an image of infanticide.

It’s a Medea murdering her babies. So there is something incredibly perverse really about basing the image on the Raphael “Belle Jardiniere”, which he’s clearly done. And of course this is even more naughty. This is Max Ernst, the young Virgin spanking the infant Jesus. And we have two wonderful portraits. Raphael, he’s sort of, however marvellous he is, I think he’s quite difficult for modern people to really love. That he, it’s too beautiful, it’s too pretty, too perfect, but you have to give it to him. He is the most wonderful portraitist. And this is his portrait of Baldassare Castiglione. He was at the court of Urbino, where Raphael grew up, and his great contribution to Western culture was his book, “The Book of the Courtesan”, del Cortegiano. And this is a really, a manual for polite behaviour. It’s often said that the whole public school image where you are meant to look, everything’s meant to look easy. You should never, you should excel, do everything perfectly, do everything wonderfully, but you’ve got to do it in a rather sort of languid, easy way, not in a show off way. It’s all got to look easy. And that has, the European aristocracy has taken this book, particularly I would say the British aristocracy, as and used and model themselves on his ideas.

Then this, I love this portrait. It’s so strange, slightly sinister, actually. The man on the left is generally believed to be a self-portrait of Raphael. And traditionally because the man on the right is holding a sword, it’s known as “Self-Portrait With Fencing Master”. But I don’t know if there’s any direct evidence for that. And so the, we move on from the High Renaissance to the Mannerist period. And this is Bronzino, who was a court artist in Tuscany when Florence became, the Medici family who starts off of course as bankers and wool merchants, and then they become Grand Dukes of Tuscany, which they rule until the 18th century. And that court, again, was a model. Other courts, French, English and so on, modelled themselves on the court of the Medici in Tuscany. And I’m, I like to say that there are two types of portraitists, the ones who give you the reality, the truth, and the ones who give you the beautiful. And Bronzino definitely belongs to the latter. Everybody painted by Bronzino is incredibly beautiful. They all have long necks. They all have beautiful, long, tapering fingers. They’re all elegant. Who knows, maybe this young man really was that beautiful, but it certainly is a very graceful and beautiful portrait by Bronzino.

Correggio, a quite a difficult artist to classify 'cause he comes after the High Renaissance. He’s contemporary with the Mannerists, but he’s not a Mannerist. He’s quite, quite different. And he’s away from the main centres 'cause he’s working in Parma. I look forward to my trip to Parma in October every year for the Verdi Festival. Parma is the place to go to see the paintings of Correggio. It’s the place to go for the best Italian food. And it’s a wonderful combination, really, Verdi, pasta and Correggio, and the sensual delights. The he is, he’s such a sexy artist. This is a very, very sexy picture. It’s a mythological subject. He takes the sfumato of Leonardo. And so there’s this wonderful, and he develops it. So there’s wonderful sensuous softness to his painting that looks forward actually to the Baroque and even the Rococo. So this is a mythological subject. We are not absolutely sure. Sometimes the title is “Venus, Cupid and the Satyr”, but it could be the subject of Jupiter and Antiope. Jupiter had this clever ability to transform himself into an animal or whatever. And he transformed himself into a Satyr in order to seduce Antiope. Another very, very, very famous, very contested, very mysterious painting.

This is the “Concert Champetre” which always used to be attributed to Giorgione. I remember the shock in, it must have been as far back as the 1980s, of taking a group of people to the Louvre and saying, “Oh, let’s go and see the Giorgione,” and I arrived and underneath it, the label said, “Le Titian”, it’s been reattributed to Titian. It’s still, I think, contested. And it’s possible that it was started by Giorgione, who died very early and that it was actually finished by Titian, or it may be completely by Titian but very much in the manner of Giorgione. But a very mysterious picture. What’s going on here? Is the, there seems to be some kind of narrative or some kind of meaning, of music is the food of love. So there’s certainly love in the air, but who’s loving whom? And certainly the two young men seem to be slightly more interested in each other than they are in these sumptuous, nude women right beside them. Now, this is a painting endlessly copied and very influential. There’s a detail. And of course one of the key paintings of early modernism, the “Déjeuner sur l'herbe” by Manet, rejected from the salon in 1863, the idea of this painting of the two nude women and the two dressed men in a park-like landscape was taken from Giorgione.

Titian. This is a fairly early painting by Titian and by this time, he’s really developed early. I say early, he was so long lived. Some traditional accounts say that he lived to be 104. That’s partly 'cause he seems to have exaggerated his own age. He he lived certainly until his late 80s. This is a picture painted around 1520 of an aristocratic young man. We’re not sure of the identity. The names of Adorno or Gonzaga, two great aristocratic families, have both been put forward for this young man. He’s so alive, more alive really than any earlier portraits. And that’s, I think due to Titian’s painterly qualities, the, again, it’s a sort of element of blurring, sfumato, that makes him look like he’s breathing and alive. And I love the detail of that elegant hand clutching the glove. This obviously had a big impact on van Dyck, who was greatly influenced by, this is a van Dyck detail of a painting that’s in the National Gallery in London, clearly inspired by this painting of Titian. Francois I, the king who brought Leonardo to France. This is painted in 1539.

In fact, Titian never met Francis I. And it’s been, he, you can see he’s shown in profile and it’s been suggested that the painting was based on a medal by Benvenuto Cellini that you see on the right-hand side. Francis I was, he’s also known in France as the king big nose. And he, I suppose as the King of France, everybody told him from the day he was born, “Oh, your majesty, your nose is so magnificent.” Well, he obviously thought it was because you nearly, he’s nearly always turning sideways to show off his nose in all his portraits. Now I’m only about halfway through this lecture. I may have to ask Wendy if I can extend this series 'cause it’s, there’s so much more I’d like to tell you. But I think I’ll probably have to finish for this evening with this painting, another loot, piece of loot, stolen from the Church of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice. And this is by Veronese. Picture, it shows the feast in the house of, feast in the house of Cana. That’s from the New Testament and the wine runs out and Jesus has this wonderful ability to turn water into wine.

He’d be a very welcome guest I think at most parties. And in the Bible the host says, or the guests say, “Isn’t it amazing that the best wine was saved for last?” Because normally it’s a feast, you serve the best wine first and later on when people are drunk, they don’t mind whether wine is good or not. But you could say that Veronese was history’s greatest painter of parties. That’s what he really liked to do. There’s a very festive quality to this picture. He got really carried away with these New Testament subjects, often bringing in dancing girls and dwarves and all sorts of stuff. And so this little group here of musicians, I mean Christ looks a bit glum in this picture. He doesn’t look like He’s having the best time, but everybody else is having a wonderful time. And we’ve got these musicians and they are traditionally believed to be portraits of the famous artists of Venice, with Titian on the right-hand side with the cello-like instrument. And Veronese himself playing the viola de gamba. He’s the one in white. That’s meant to be a self-portrait of Veronese. And the last detail I’m going to show you 'cause I just love it, the dogs, as well as doing wonderful parties, he, Veronese clearly loved and understood dogs. Look out for the dogs in his paintings and they’re so convincing.

Right, well I really will have to stop and I’m, it was probably just far too ambitious to think I could get through so much material.

Q&A and Comments

Q: What’s the air conditioning like in Paris? A: It’s not that, it’s been very cool. I don’t have air conditioning in my flat and I haven’t needed it actually 'cause it’s been quite cool.

Q: Louvre, what is the derivation of the name Louvre? A: I don’t know. I’ll have to look that up.

Thank you, Karen.

Q: Why before Giotto did artists not paint space? A: I think it’s, they weren’t interested in that. That’s, you know, the, if you’re painting an icon, it’s your, it’s a symbolic representation. That’s, it’s not, I don’t think artists had that and 'cause they’d had it in the ancient world, but they lost it I think partly due to Christianity, which, you know, Christianity, which is very dismissive, really, of material reality. And what it may be, it even comes ultimately, that attitude probably comes ultimately from Judaism.

I don’t, request from various governments. I’m not in favour of everything going back to where they came from. I think it’s a very, very bad idea. And I should think Italy has quite enough stuff to look after and they probably don’t want the contents of the Louvre. Thank you, Madeline. What do I think on, yeah, on the whole, I think the Pei, the I. M. Pei entrance. It, I don’t object to the glass pyramid. I think I don’t, I think it, I don’t think it spoils the architecture of the Louvre. As I said, sometimes when I go into that entrance and you’ve got thousands and thousands of people milling around, you sort of think, oh my God, I went out of here. But I think it works. So I’m by and large, I give a qualified thumbs up to the I. M. Pei Louvre.

Q: Could I please, please spell the names of the painted panels? A: Predella, it’s P-R-E-D-E-L-L-A.

Why did the Louvre have, yes. Well I think it’s the Louvre had it because of the French Revolution. It wasn’t hundreds of years. The Louvre opened in 1793 and the National Gallery opened in 1824. What’s special about the National Gallery is that it’s not a former royal collection 'cause the Queen still has a collection. The Prado is the Spanish Royal Collection. The Kunsthistorisches Museum is based on the Habsburg collection, the Alte Pinakothek is the former collection of the, of Bavaria and so on. The National Gallery’s collection, of course, is based on that of a businessman, a banker called Angerstein who might be Jewish, which is quite interesting.

What, Jonathan, I’m not sure what you are asking about Botticelli apart that they have that one. Actually no, they also have a portrait by Botticelli as well as the fresco that I showed you. At the moment, yes, you do have to buy tickets. Normally you can get, you can buy a year’s pass, you can buy a special pass and I have a journalist pass. So, and that normally lets you into the Louvre without having to book online. But at the moment, because of the Olympics, everybody has to book online. Let me see, I’ve got lost. Thank you all for your very, very nice comments. Oh, Rita, I knew I could depend on you. She says she’s, it comes from the Latin lupara, meaning wolf due to the presence of wolves in the area in previous centuries. And the alternative theory is that it’s a misunderstanding of the old French word, meaning tower. That’s very interesting, thank you.

Oh, lucky Gloria, who was allowed, I have a wonderful story about a very, very kind and amazingly, what can I say? Unconventional guard who let me see something special at the Louvre, but I’m going to have to save that for another occasion. Where are the pictures of the Isabella desk? They’re all in the Louvre. I showed them to you all. Thank you very much indeed. So I’m afraid I have to finish. I’ll do some negotiations and see if I can, I think I’ve got enough material to do another full lecture for what I was hoping to talk about today.

So thank you all very much indeed. Bye-bye, till next week.