At the Minneapolis Institute of Art, n exhibition of paintings, drawings and sculpture from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence features work by Sandro Botticelli, his immediate precursors, and followers. The show hits the sweet spot in terms of scope and size: it's large enough to be satisfying and informative but not so expansive as to exhaust visitors. You can look at each object and read accompanying (and helpful) wall labels in about an hour's time. The exhibition displays classical Roman-era statuary (1st century BC replicas of Greek works) that correlate to the themes and postures of the figures painted by Botticelli and his associates. This aspect of the show is interesting but, in my estimation, the connection between the paintings and the sculptures is, often, remote -- nonetheless, the Roman sculpture (some of it battered but much in mint condition) provides the viewer with a sense of the classical ambience in Florence, a whiff of the air breathed by Botticelli and others when they made the works in the show (generally between about 1450 and 1480). The statues show us what the renaissance artists imagined as beautiful and how they worked within that tradition.
I counted five paintings by Botticelli in the show. There are probably a total of about 20 to 25 paintings on display. The Botticelli works are strange, with odd details and, sometimes, peculiar deficiencies, idiosyncrasies of perspective or proportion that are hard to interpret: are these anomalies simply mistakes or are they intended to be expressive? One of the iconic works in the show is Botticelli's painting of the maiden Pallas with a hirsute centaur. Pallas is implacable with an inexpressive, if perfectly symmetrical face; her indifferent angelic features contrast with her voluptuous body, scarcely concealed by a diaphanous fabric marked with a floral pattern. The garment leaves nothing to the imagination and seems similar to the translucent drapery wrapped around figures in Botticelli's famous "Primavera". The maiden has seized the hair on the centaur's head and has twisted the creature's neck into a weirdly contorted posture. The centaur is obviously distressed and his face depicts anguish that is ambiguously either physical (discomfort at having his hair pulled) or spiritual or both. There's a luminous blue-grey landscape bathed in moisture and the figures stand on a tapestried meadow with flowers and spring-like coiled grass that looks like an embroidered carpet. (This sort of floral medieval carpeting under the feet of the figures is ubiquitous in the show.) The centaur's head is too large and seems half detached from his muscular body -- the effect is that someone has collaged a head onto the painting that doesn't exactly fit with the rest of the image. Is this unnatural treatment of the centaur's head intended to highlight graphically some point or is it just a mistake in the way the painting was produced? It's impossible to tell decide this question. Similar issues arise with Botticelli's painting of the Virgin Mary introducing Jesus to an infant John the Baptist. Again the heads seem too large and the baby Jesus, painted to prefigure his deposition from the cross, wriggles down to embrace the stolid little John the Baptist, twisting into a python-like posture that is completely unnatural and implausible. Presumably, the effect arises because Botticelli wants to conflate Jesus' infancy with his death and the twisting child is both a squirming infant and a mangled corpse. But in visual terms, the painting, although sumptuous and brilliant, is a little grotesque. (In other pictures, Botticelli and his compatriots have not figured out how to represent a prone infant -- their solution is to give the child a contrapossta posture but have him float, seeming unsupported over the hay of the manger.) My favorite Botticelli in the show is a small painting of St. Augustine laboring over his writing. The Saint is ensconced in a sort of gloomy barrel-shaped vault and seated at a desk. The perspective on the desk is botched. The supports for the desk are seemingly behind the plane of the Saint's knees and it seems improbable that an actual writing table in this form could possible remain upright. Again, the effect is to push the Saint forward so that he stands out in statuesque three dimensions but the impression on the viewer is disquieting. Some serpentine twists of paper, rejected drafts, lie on the floor in front of the writing desk -- this is a charming, but, again, somewhat disquieting detail. A curtain to the right side of the painting dangles down, a purely gratuitous if effectively designed bit of drapery -- the underside of the grey-blue drapery is salmon-pink, providing an eerie, flame-like highlight of color to the otherwise muted tones of the picture. In the last of the four galleries, a large nativity scene shows all of the rich and famous grandees in Florence, chief among them a flock of Medici princes, saluting the infant Christ. The picture is either intentionally or unintentionally comic: the Florentine male elite portrayed so fulsomely in the picture are unambiguously haughty, even arrogant, heads thrown back and chests expanded and they are dressed in their most elaborate regalia. But this solemn crowd of dignitaries has come to kneel one by one to Christ, painted here as a rather chubby and aggressive-looking infant. Botticelli, apparently, poses here as well in a self-portrait -- he looks out of the painting in an insinuating manner, as if pleased with the contrast he has made between the well-dressed conclave and the occasion of kneeling before a rather mundane-looking infant. Botticelli is handsome, with a commanding ironic expression -- he will look like someone you know quite well, but whose name you can't quite place.
Possibly the best painting in the exhibit is a tondo showing the Virgin Mary with Jesus attended by a ethereally beautiful angels with lustrous wings. This painting is by someone named Frenieso Botticini and it is very beautiful -- particularly admirable are the details of small wren-like songbirds prancing around the edges of a glamorous-looking enclosed garden (the garden walls are entwined with roses); two handsome lizards adorn one of the paving stones and the angels have blank expressions that can be interpreted either as a sort of disinterest or, perhaps, as being preternaturally smug. It's a glorious picture and more competently made than the Botticelli's in the show. (The pert songbirds rhyme with a Roman cinerary urn replete with garlands and ram's heads -- some little birds are pecking for seeds or insects along the bottom of alabaster box.) Next to Laocoon-like sculpture of satyrs entangled with vipers, there's a small painting of a young man shown in two respective postures -- first, he encounters a serpent and, then, we see him writing on the tapestried grass with the serpent wrapped around his body. A banner of letters provides the moral, something about having an enemy in the family being worse than an attack by vipers. The picture has a lovely, smoky blur about it -- an example of the impressionistic sfumato effect that characterizes some of Leonardo da Vinci's works. There's a big lush nude, a life-size image of Venus, not by Botticelli in the first gallery. The lighting in that gallery creates blinding highlights on the upper surfaces of the pictures and so the nude's features (and the face of Pallas in the painting with centaur) are sometimes illegible because of they way the pictures are hung. (The paintings have a smooth, enamel cloissone-like surface -- you can't see any trace of brushwork.) Some smaller objects are noteworthy -- there's a charcoal sketch of angel's face that Swinburne believed to be the most beautiful portrait in the world (it's elegantly ethereal and perfect to the point of being hard to see -- no one has ever seen a face so wonderful in the real world so the effect is a little alienating.) There's an etching of Botticelli's sinuous designs for an edition of Dante's Divine Comedy -- again a cool, almost mathematical rendering of lurid material that completely softens the effect of Dante's invective and grotesque description. Because Virgil is shown in the image, the curators have included a funny woodcut showing medieval legends of Virgil as a sorcerer. A courtesan has lured Virgil to her rooms by lifting him from the street in a wicker basket. To punish Virgil for some slight, she left him suspended in mid-air to be gawked-at by onlookers. (He seems to be sitting in an aerial bathtub.) Virgil responded by magically putting out all the fires in Rome and, then, leaving a single burning ember in the woman's vagina -- in the the picture, a dozen people with long rods are lighting their tips from the unfortunate woman's crotch. To remind us that this is happening in Rome the unknown artist has put the Colosseum in the center of the woodcut with little figures peeping out of its colonnade. (I saw the show on Wednesday morning using a timed ticket to enter at 11:30 -- each of the four galleries had about a dozen or so people looking at the art; this was manageable -- when a spot in front of one art object opened, I took that place and so could comfortably examine each thing in the show. In any event, it's better than the Uffizi in Florence -- I recall that place as horrifyingly crowded, hot, and uncomfortable.)
Also on display is a large exhibit of landscapes by Teo Nguyen, a suite of pictures called the "Vietnam Peace Project". These are greyish acrylics, some with delicate calligraphic grass painted as blonde strokes in the foreground. Many of the pictures show locations of famous atrocities that occurred during the war, however, stripped of the presence of soldiers or suffering peasants. One street scene shows the place where a South Vietnamese general shot a Communist infiltrator to death -- we see the crossroads, the buildings, but the figures that made the place briefly famous are no longer in evidence. Several landscapes show ominous-looking roads but without people. The most disturbing of these pictures shows an asphalt highway under a lowering sky with signs to the right of the road -- this is the lane over which Kim Phuc fled as a little girl with half of her skin burned-off by a napalm strike, one of the iconic images of the war. These pictures are a little foggy and look like some of Gerhardt Richter's paintings imitating snapshots (or his sequence of pictures on the killings of the Baader-Meinhof gang members) -- the pictures are better than they look and the show is worth studying. However, you walk into Nguyen's exhibit after touring the Botticelli exhibit and the contrast between the colorful Renaissance paintings, and, particularly, the last gallery, with its beautifully individualized portraits is problematic and the Vietnamese artist's subtle images don't really register -- you can't really see Nguyen's big canvases after looking hard at the enameled and colorful surfaces of the Florentine renaissance pictures.
There's a show of photographs by Marcia Resnick. These are interesting and, also, better than they look. The pictures show various downtown New York celebrities in the early seventies -- for instance, Susan Sontag and John Belushi. There's an amusing series of Rueckenfiguren (figures shot from the back) surveying various southwestern landscapes -- the picture series called "See" registers as a series of buttocks. German engravings made during the time of Duerer are on display. Some pretty rare images by Israhel von Meckanem are on display including a funny print of an unhappy married couple and a completely bizarre image of two "wild men" in shaggy armor jousting -- the one wild knight has beets on his helmet; the other displays leeks. Among the Native American objects, there's "belt cup" made from exquisitely carved wood -- the thing is what the name implies: it's a wooden cup that you wear on your belt, The handle of the cup is carved as a gorgeous volute or scroll like the top of a fiddle and there's a plump little beaver whittled into the convex curve of the cup. This Huron-made object from about 1830 is wholly charming.
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