Thursday, January 14, 2016

European paintings sold out of England by force in the 1650s

Titian
Nymph & Shepherd
ca. 1570-75
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

This very late and magical painting by Titian, now in Vienna, did not belong to Charles I of England. It belonged instead to one of the art-collecting courtiers within his orbit, and that explains how it came to be in London during the early 17th century. Because its owner was on the wrong side in the Civil War of the 1640s, the Nymph & Shepherd experienced the same traumatic dislocations as befell the king's pictures, dispersed among profiteers and flogged across Europe.

Leonardo's St. John the Baptist  as well as all the other pictures ranged below  did belong to Charles. Every one of them was seized and sold out of England after his execution.

Leonardo da Vinci
St John the Baptist
ca. 1513-16
Louvre

Guido Reni
Nessus Abducting Dejanira
ca. 1617-21
Louvre

Correggio
Allegory of Vice
ca. 1528-30
Louvre

Correggio
Allegory of Virtue
ca. 1528-30
Louvre

Caravaggio
The Death of the Virgin
ca. 1602
Louvre

The group of former English royal paintings now at the Louvre (those above among them) fell into the ready hands of Cardinal Mazarin, while the paintings now in Vienna (below) drifted, after various convolutions, into the orbit of Holy Roman Emperors.

Anthony van Dyck
Portrait of Nicolas Lanier
1632
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Domenico Fetti
Hero Mourning Leander
1621-22
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Domenico Fetti
Perseus Rescuing Andromeda
c. 1620-22
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna

Those in the last group were also sold out of England by Cromwell's people during the 1650s, eventually reaching separate, out-of-the-way destinations. This kind of cultural plunder never delivers the promised benefits and always brings a retributive curse with it, but nobody ever is able to remember those facts.

Peter Paul Rubens
Daniel in the Lions' Den
ca. 1614-16
National Gallery of Art (U.S.)

Titian
Pope Alexander VI presenting Jacopo Pesaro to St Peter
ca. 1513
Koninklijk Museum, Antwerp

Anthony van Dyck
Charles I and Queen Henrietta Maria
1632
Archbishop's Gallery, Kroměříž