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Marianne's Picks
Marianne Berardi | Director, European Art
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One of the great joys of working in the auction world is discovering remarkable artists you've never known about before. Through a marvelous characterization in gouache of an astronomer in the present auction, I first met the art of Mattia Bortoloni, in his day a celebrated 18th-century frescoist from Northern Italy. The strongly intuitive feeling he had for his medium results in an image that seems part painting and part drawing; sometimes line, sometimes plane; sometimes sharp, sometimes as fuzzy as cotton. The effect is as exciting as it is idiosyncratic. Even more, his ability to work with such delicious economy makes it easy to imagine why Bortoloini was just as sought-after as the Tiepolos, who today are so much better known. My regret is that I didn't know about Bortoloni back in
June when I was prowling around the Veneto with my fellow art maniac pal Janell. In addition to our pilgrimages to numerous Palladian villas and Venetian palazzi, and the vast decorated ducal complexes in Mantua (hello Mantegna and Giulio Romano), we could have made a point of visiting Bortoloni's majestic fresco in Piombino Dese. Ah well. Next time!
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My response to this view of Venice by Rafael Senet y Perez is a purely visceral one. Unlike the other Venetian scenes in the present auction, this composition adopts a vantage point that is very low, practically at the level of a gondola or vaporetto. As a result, the viewer feels less like an omniscient observer than someone inside a boat, gliding along the surface of the canal, wide swaths of water all around. There's a wonderful feeling of immersion. The sensation of living on and with the constant movement of water is the secret of Venice's legendary seductiveness.
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Jan Molenaer's painting of young people playing cards by candlelight is one of my favorite works in the auction because the artist artfully compressed so much activity into such an intimate image with remarkable harmony and clarity. Two girls and two boys are gathered around a wooden table in a tight room lit only by a small lamp. The one bright flame illuminates everything—their hands, faces, the cards, a slate on the table used to keep score, a pipe, brazier with glowing coals and a tankard. Outside the puddle of light, Molenaer allows his figures to cast tall looming shadows on the wall. I really admire Molenaer's economy: he allows the brown tone of the panel to serve as middle tone, against which he adds primary colors to describe the clothing in the foregrounded figures. The
two figures at the rear of the composition are painted almost entirely in monochrome since they are to read as receding into the distance. The artist delights in picking out the sparkling highlights, particularly where the candlelight strikes noses, lips, cheeks and chins of the main figures. A particularly beautiful passage is the undulating blue highlight on the top of the boy's sleeve at the left.
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Peyton's Picks
Peyton Lambert | Associate Specialist & Cataloguer, Fine and Decorative Arts
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Readers, I'll tell you a secret: I love when exceptional paintings come across my desk with very little history. Truly! It's sick. But it means that the game is afoot, the chase is on, release the hounds, I'm hunting for information! Research is one of the best parts of my job, and it's especially exciting to face a significant painting like this one by Claude-Joseph Vernet, because I know it has a past, that it has been somewhere with someone important. Uncovering that past, reuniting information and object, is so rewarding. In this case, we discovered that The grand cascade at Tivoli was commissioned as one in a pair. Its sister belongs to the Louvre and resides at the Musée Calvet in Vernet's hometown of Avignon.
The present work enjoyed a whirlwind of activity early on, in its adolescence, if you will. I strongly encourage you to read the full essay on HA.com, which goes into more detail, but to summarize, this painting lived in Paris during one of the most tumultuous periods of French history, and graced the walls of aristocrats, ambassadors, art dealers, and bankers, surviving the French Revolution, where so many other objects and people did not.
This painting migrated from Paris to Cherbourg, then to London, Austria, Monaco, and London again, before finding itself here in Dallas, where it has lived in the Brinker collection since 1985. What's more, based on its presentation today, at two hundred and seventy-one years old, it's clear to me that this work has been well cared for its entire life. The remarkable details and exceptional use of color that define Vernet's mastery of his craft are still richly intact; I have to think the artist would be proud to see it now.
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What does this mid-18th century painting have in common with the Amazon series The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power? No, really! Longtime readers of my Picks already know, it's the horses. Both sources in this unlikely pairing feature demonstrations of some of the most difficult equestrian maneuvers known to man (and elf?). The foreground of Charles Parrocel's Battle scene between the Christians and the Turks is dominated by a fantastically Rubenesque palomino charger, its form borrowed heavily from Peter Paul Rubens' St George and the Dragon. But the real razzle dazzle lies beyond, where members of the cavalry enact motions from the haute école
, or "high school" of dressage, a complex equestrian discipline in which a horse performs unnatural movements based on nearly imperceptible cues from his rider.
Although they were primarily used as training exercises for the development of both horse and rider, there remains a popular belief that, despite their considerable impracticalities, the maneuvers of the haute école were designed for actual use on the battlefield, and both Parrocel and Amazon offer a peek into that alternate world.
In Parrocel's universe, a white horse in the distance, near eye-level, holds a levade. It's a familiar pose, remarkably popular in Baroque equestrian portraiture: horse raises his front end off the ground in a controlled rear, crouching on his hind legs. Demanding considerable athleticism from the horse, the levade theoretically lifts the rider back and away from danger, providing a more advantageous position from which to attack those on foot.
In the pantheon of movements performed in the haute école, the levade is standard fare, while the most advanced are the "airs above the ground," and among them, the capriole is king. In the capriole, the horse jumps straight up into the air and kicks out with his back legs before landing, all four feet at once, on the spot he leapt from. Usually, the airs above the ground are performed in a formal setting like the Spanish Riding School in Vienna, but a certain curiosity, if a little morbid, may remain. In a hypothetical battlefield scenario, this move will get you out of a tight spot; as the rider, you're briefly lifted above and away from immediate danger, with an escape route cleared at the rear for when you land. Enter: The Rings of Power
. With a real horse and rider, some green screen, and the magic of CGI, the theoretical is brought to life, and it is destructive. In the seventh episode of season two, an elven horseman and his mount deliver a lethal capriole to the noggin of a particularly unfortunate computer-generated orc, sending him and a slew of others flying completely out of the frame. Don't try this at home, kids.
I'm so tickled at this horsey crossover from such an unlikely place, and even more so that across a gap of nearly 250 years, Charles Parrocel and Amazon are in agreement: real-world impracticalities aside, elaborate horsemanship is dramatic, cool, and boy, does it add some style.
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