Chapter One

Feast Days and Salerooms

Rome and Florence

The earliest Old Master exhibitions bearing any relationship to what is implied by that term today were organised in seventeenth-century Rome. Their primary purpose was ceremonial and, in this respect, they conformed to the age-old custom of hanging tapestries from the windows of palaces in order to celebrate a saint's day or the processional entry of some foreign embassy into the city -- for it was always appreciated (as it still is) that the public display of luxurious possessions is likely to draw attention to the wealth and nobility of their owners. None the less, the fact that paintings, rather than the far more obvious symbols of opulence used in earlier days, now began to be chosen more and more frequently for this purpose marks a significant milestone in the social history of art.

The pictures lent to these exhibitions by aristocratic or newly rich collectors were usually placed in the cloisters of churches belonging to confraternities or to foreign communities living in Rome who wished to celebrate the name day of their patron saints, and by the end of the century four regular exhibitions were held each year -- in March, July, August and December -- quite apart from a large number of occasional ones arranged for special events and more casual affairs spontaneously organised by a particular patron or artist. Young painters, and others recently arrived in Rome from abroad, were sometimes keen to take advantage of an opportunity to make a reputation for themselves and attract patronage, but in general more prominence was given to famous masters of the past, both because they would indicate the antiquity or wealth of the families lending them and because, during the second half of the seventeenth and the first years of the eighteenth centuries, when the exhibitions were at their peak, it was generally felt that modern art was no longer in as flourishing a state as it had been earlier in the century -- let alone during the lifetime of Raphael and his contemporaries. In 1668, for instance. it fell to the Rospigliosi (the family of the reigning Pope Clement IX) to organise a particularly splendid exhibition in and around the church of S. Giovanni Decollato, and they decided to exclude all contemporary work. This provoked the ambitious Salvator Rosa to organise a band of supporters to go around Rome to ask people, `Have you seen the Titian, the Correggio, the Paolo Veronese, the Parmigianino, the Carracci, Domenichino, Guido and Signor Salvatore? Signor Salvatore is not afraid of Titian, of Guido, of Guercino or anyone else.' The antagonism felt by Rosa for collectors eager to show off works by deceased artists at the expense of those who were living was later to be expressed with much greater bitterness by Hogarth and became particularly acute when Old Master exhibitions began to be established on a regular basis in early nineteenth-century England.

The size, contents and arrangement of the exhibitions in Rome varied from location to location and from year to year. We are best informed about those held annually on 10 and 11 December in the cloisters of S. Salvatore in Lauro, the church of the Marchigian community, for the purpose of celebrating the miraculous arrival in Loreto of the Holy House of Nazareth. The initiative for mounting these exhibitions almost certainly came from Queen Christina's favourite and art adviser, Cardinal Decio Azzolino, who was protector of the Marchigian community in Rome and titular head of their church. They took place over a period of nearly fifty years, during almost all of which their preparation was entrusted -- at first in part and then exclusively - to Giuseppe Ghezzi. Ghezzi, a talented painter, copyist and restorer born near Ascoli Piceno in the Marche, was also a collector (who owned Leonardo's `Codex Hammer' and who was much in demand as a valuer) and a reliable administrator who played a dominant role in most of the artistic institutions in the Rome of his day. It was in 1676, when he was aged forty-two, that he became involved with the S. Salvatore exhibitions, only a year after they had come into being, and from his surviving (but patchy) notes it is possible to get some impression both of the extent of his efficiency and also of the difficulties that he (like so many of his successors in a similar role during the next three centuries) had to face in trying to secure satisfactory loans.

Within a year or two of his official appointment as organiser of the exhibitions Ghezzi drew up guidelines for their installation, and he and his collaborators adhered to these throughout his period of office. Sufficient quantities of damask were to be hired or, whenever possible, borrowed in order to cover gaps in the existing decoration of the church, but it was important to apply this economically: it was, for instance, not necessary to make use of it to adorn side chapels or columns. Tapestries were needed to embellish the rough brick façade (of which only a part of the lower half had yet been clad in stone), and here, too, it was desirable to get hold of them from friends rather than be forced to hire them. Above all, it was essential to make sure that the rich damasks should not become frayed through excessive handling or be exposed to too much dust. Size would have to be a prime consideration when choosing pictures, and five or six very large ones would always have to be borrowed in order to produce a striking effect at the end of each of the principal corridors. Great care must be taken to prevent their being damaged, and appropriate sums were indicated for paying the porters, guards and soldiers who were to be stationed at the church day and night for the forty-eight hours or so during which the exhibition usually remained in place. These preliminary arrangements should be made a month before the opening ceremony so that the pictures could be collected on 3 or 4 December and be set up two days later.

As he gained experience Ghezzi realised how advisable it would be to approach potential benefactors with lists of desirable loans a full year before they were required, and he also noted the names of those of his colleagues on whose powers of persuasion he could most rely to ensure favourable answers to his requests. Although he soon discovered that a promise did not necessarily amount to a guarantee, many of the leading patrician families seem to have been eager to show off their valued possessions. Sometimes, however, they imposed strict conditions. Thus Prince Pie agreed to lend his `very famous' collection only if no pictures belonging to other proprietors were displayed alongside his. This difficulty was overcome by transferring a group of miscellaneous loans (which had, presumably, already been asked for) to the upper loggia of the cloisters. Seven years later Marchese Ruspoli, who sent 194 pictures, was also reluctant to share his glory with any rival, but he was then persuaded to allow twenty-three paintings belonging to Monsignor Olivieri to be included in the exhibition. Not all lenders were so amenable, and much ill feeling was caused when in 1716 Ghezzi refused -- understandably enough -- to displace large altarpieces by Guercino and Guido from their conspicuous positions in order to make way for pictures by Torelli and Benefial lent by Cardinal Paolucci.

The majority of pictures displayed were, naturally enough, of religious subjects -- but landscapes, genre and military scenes were also very well represented, and in 1717 one of the greatest benefactors of the exhibitions, the Falconieri family, even sent a group of erotic paintings -- Venus in Bed awaiting Mars by Annibale Carracci, Sleeping Venus gazed at by a Satyr (pl. 2) by Poussin and others of a similar nature, which were kept together in a section of their own called the `arsenale'.

Although contemporary works were displayed from time to time, artists of the first half of the seventeenth century dominated virtually all the exhibitions. Pictures attributed to great painters from preceding periods -- Holbein and Dürer, and (above all) the Venetian masters of the High Renaissance -- featured in significant quantities, but no artists earlier than Perugino and Pinturicchio seem to be recorded in Ghezzi's lists. Relatively few of the pictures exhibited can today be identified with total confidence, and even at the time many were almost certainly known to be copies, or at least studio versions, of celebrated masterpieces kept in churches or in outstanding, but unavailable collections. It is thus not easy to determine how much reliance can be placed -- or, indeed, was intended to be placed -- on Ghezzi's attributions, despite the fact that he enjoyed great fame as a connoisseur. It can in any case be assumed that (as was to be the case in virtually all subsequent exhibitions) it was the lender, and not the borrower, who determined under which name a picture should be shown. However, one feature of the exhibitions is so exceptional as to be very striking: none of the attributions can be dismissed as wholly fanciful -- there were, for instance, no portraits by Giorgione of Luther and Calvin of the kind that were being recorded in the collection of the grand duke of Tuscany in these very years.

The annual exhibitions at S. Salvatore in Lauro were greatly admired by successive popes and their retinues as well as by a wider public, and they did much to enhance the standing of those who contributed to them. However, unlike other exhibitions in Rome at which modern artists could -- and did -- establish their reputations, these ones seem to have made an impact far more through the general impression of splendour that they conveyed than through the beauty or rarity of any individual pictures to be seen in them. No catalogues were issued, and Ghezzi's guidelines contain no hint that loans were to be labelled in any way or that their arrangement should follow any logical sequence. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that only one case has come down to us of a visitor having commented on specific items. In 1704 Monsignor Filippo Maria Resta, the bishop of Alessandria, wrote to the `eruditissimo' Ghezzi of the very great delight and amazement with which he had been able to see again, among the eighteen paintings and drawings lent to the exhibition that year by the Spanish ambassador, two little pictures by Correggio which he already knew: a Pietà and a Martyrdom of St Placidus . He retailed their complicated history since they had been taken from Parma and told of the repeated consultations held with experts in half a dozen cities in order to establish their authenticity, and he claimed that this had now been confirmed beyond doubt. Resta's concentration on quality, attribution and provenance strikes a note that is as radically new as it is anomalous among surviving responses to early Old Master exhibitions, and it is a pity that we can no longer trace the two little `Correggios' that inspired it.

The example of Rome prompted the holding of art exhibitions in Florence under the auspices of the Accademia del Disegno, whose patron was the grand duke of Tuscany. Their purpose was to celebrate the feast day of their patron saint, St Luke, and they were installed partly in the chapel dedicated to the saint adjoining the cloisters of the church of SS. Annunziata and partly in the cloisters themselves. The first one to be recorded took place in 1674, but unfortunately almost nothing is known about its contents, although (as might be expected from the sponsoring organisation) much attention seems to have been paid to new work by young artists. Thereafter displays of this kind continued sporadically until in 1706 Grand Prince Ferdinand de' Medici, heir to the grand duchy, prompted what appears to constitute a landmark -- albeit an isolated landmark -- in the history of the Old Master exhibition. Far more space was devoted to `remarkable works by the most distinguished deceased artists' than to those by `the most illustrious now living', and (above all) the former seem to have been selected at least in part with the specific aim of changing the direction of modern art in the city. We know from other sources that the grand prince was keen to widen the horizons of contemporary painters in Florence and, through the nineteen loans from his own collection and from those of members of his entourage, he and the organisers evidently made a point of drawing attention to pictures by (or attributed to) Bassano, Titian and Veronese, as well as by Bolognese and Flemish masters. The Florentine tradition was not wholly neglected, as is shown by the inclusion of a few works by Fra Bartolommeo and Andrea del Sarto, of (more surprisingly) a bronze bas-relief by Donatello and of a group of waxes and bronzes by Giambologna. Indeed, because Florence -- unlike the Rome of Caravaggio, Annibale Carracci, Guido Reni, Lanfranco and Guercino -- had not experienced during the first half of the seventeenth century a famous revival of painting that had retained its prestige in later decades, the `deceased artists' to whom the city's rulers could look back with pride were to be found only in a more distant period. It is also significant that, among recent artists, the Neapolitan Luca Giordano was represented by twice as many works as was Carlo Dolci.

We know very much less about the planning of this exhibition than about the ones held in S. Salvatore in Lauro, but the available evidence strongly suggests that its aim was not so much to glorify the nobility, or even the grand prince himself, as to enable the public and, above all, artists to look carefully at pictures that would not otherwise have been generally accessible. This would hardly have been possible in the short-lived exhibitions held in Rome, and it is significant that the one patronised by Grand Prince Ferdinand remained open for several days', thus enabling citizens to make repeated visits. The real innovation, however, consisted in the publication of a catalogue combined with a guide which described the location of every picture and thus made it very simple to discover exactly what was to be seen as one walked through the exhibition.

Although Florentine painting certainly responded to the stimulus provided by Venetian and Neapolitan art during the first decades of the eighteenth century and although the patronage of Grand Prince Ferdinand and of other enlightened collectors was undeniably important in this respect, it is difficult to estimate how much significance should be attributed to the exhibition of 1706. Despite the important innovations introduced for the occasion, it had only a few sequels, and these took place at most irregular intervals. Further ones along similar lines and with similar catalogues were held in I715, 1724, 1729, 1737 and 1767, but the custom did not take root as it had in Rome. Even in Rome, however, the age of the Old Master exhibition had almost drawn to a close by the middle of the eighteenth century, by which time its nature had undergone fundamental changes. Thus when in 1736 the organisers of the traditional exhibition at S. Giovanni Decollato followed the example of Florence by issuing a printed catalogue, they did so only in order to make clear that the pictures were for sale; and the same motive may have been behind the decision in 1750 of the Congregazione del Virtuosi (which, ever since the early seventeenth century, had been mounting annual exhibitions under the portico of the Pantheon to celebrate the feast-day of St Joseph) to publish an index of the old and the modern pictures exhibited in the exhibition mounted in the portico of S. Maria ad Martyres.

Paris

During the course of the eighteenth century Old Masters in churches and princely galleries in Rome and Florence, as in other major Italian cities, were more clearly identified by guide books and more easily accessible to travellers. This may help to explain the eclipse of the type of temporary exhibition that has been described. Meanwhile, however, another type of ephemeral display had become more important elsewhere: the showrooms of dealers and auctioneers provided temporary exhibitions of Old Masters equivalent to those in refurbished chapels and cloisters.

It was, for instance, probably at an auction in Amsterdam that on 9 April 1639 Rembrandt was able to see and make a drawing of Raphael's portrait of Baldassare Castiglione (pl. 3 ) before it was acquired by the great collector and agent of Richelieu, Alfonzo Lopez. And from the first years of the eighteenth century auction houses in London, Paris and elsewhere provided the easiest opportunities for looking at pictures (both genuine and, more often, copies) by celebrated Old Masters. In Paris especially the experience could be a rewarding one thanks to the excellence of many of the catalogues and to the fact that, as in London, the contents of a sale could usually be inspected for some days before the dispersal got under way. Countless quick but elegant and admirably informative sketches made in the margins of his sale catalogues by Gabriel de Saint-Aubin demonstrate that it was possible for a really determined artist to make records of the appearance of the more interesting pictures on view despite the inconvenience caused by the people of fashion who flocked to these occasions. None the less, although pictures were liable to be removed by clients without advance warning, it is almost certain that the more slow-moving (but uncatalogued) stock displayed in the premises of dealers could be examined with greater care -- as is shown in Watteau's sublime painting of the interior of Gersaint's shop, Au Grand Monarque, in which the pictures shown hanging on the walls are clearly intended to recall Old Masters, even if none of them records a specific example of one (pl. 4).

However, in 1782 and then in 1783 ceremony, pride of ownership and commerce which had hitherto, to varying degrees, been the principal motives for the occasional displays of Old Master paintings held in various European cities were, briefly and for the first time, replaced by what seems to have been a truly altruistic desire to honour those artists whose (carefully selected) works were put on view. The exhibitions concerned took place in Paris, and the man responsible for the many impressive innovations that characterised them, Mammès-Claude Pahin de La Blancherie, who had been born of a good provincial family at the end of 1752, was by then already well known in advanced literary circles in the capital. `Small, brown and rather ugly' in appearance, he embodied to an extreme degree that combination of idealism, vanity and obsequiousness which is, in all periods, not unusual (and may even be essential) for those who set out to reform the administration of the arts. He was much derided by some of his contemporaries -- especially those whose entrenched privileges were threatened by his proposed reforms -- but there does not appear to be any evidence for some recent claims that he was a charlatan aiming to make money for himself.

An early visit to America had filled Pahin with horror at the cruelties of the slave trade, and on his return to France he devoted himself to the cause of emancipating the arts and sciences from the tyranny of tradition and to creating a meeting place where artists and scientists, from all over Europe and beyond, could congregate to discuss the issues that concerned them. He gave himself the somewhat high-flown title of agent général de la correspondance pour les sciences et les arts , but the prestige and success of his `Salon de la correspondance' fully justified his conceit. His project was endorsed by, among others, the Baron Grimm, Benjamin Franklin and Condorcet, and the numbers of distinguished men of all nationalities who were greeted by him soon rendered his own apartments too small for the gatherings, so that, within a few months of the salon's inauguration in April 1778, he was forced to move to a larger location. It was not until July 1781 that he settled -- for a final six years of activity -- in this third and largest quarters, the sumptuous Hôtel Villayer in the rue Saint-André des Arts. These moves, however, were not caused only by the problems of success. Pahin was faced with constant financial difficulties. In theory he was subsidised by forty ` protecteurs ', who each paid 4 louis a year, but although these supporters included some of the richest and most powerful men in France -- the comte d'Artois and the duc d'Orléans among them -- many of them seem to have needed frequent reminders when their subscriptions became due. Moreover, it was not only the rent and ceaseless hospitality that put pressure on Pahin. He was also responsible for editing a weekly journal, Nouvelles de la république des lettres , which first appeared in February 1779 and which, with a few brief interruptions, survived for nearly ten years. Although the Nouvelles covered developments in the sciences and medicine, in economics, industry and the law, as well as in music, letters and the arts, here it will be possible to concentrate only on the attention that it paid to painting -- even though fragmentation of this kind inevitably distorts the very nature of Pahin's ambitions, which were designed to be comprehensive.

Pahin's most daring step was his first. Early in 1777 the recently crowned Louis XVI had, at the request of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture, closed down the Académie de Saint-Luc, whose exhibitions had been much resented by the official body, even though they were by now held far too irregularly to be in any way competitive. In February 1779 the first issue of the Nouvelles de la république des lettres defiantly announced that the Salon de la correspondance would henceforth organise exhibitions of pictures by artists who did not belong to the Académie royale or that had been rejected by the official Salon, as well as of others that belonged to private collectors prepared to lend them for short periods. Lists of these pictures (among them a few Old Masters), and brief appreciations of their qualities, were published in each issue of the journal, and -- as is well known -- certain painters, such as Greuze, who resented the dictatorial attitude of the Academy and the two-year intervals it imposed between successive Salons, regularly exhibited under the more relaxed auspices of Pahin and his colleagues. Both French and foreign visitors frequently met in the Salon de la correspondance to discuss the pictures there, as well as the books in many different languages, mechanical objects of various kinds, scientific experiments and so on. The Academy strongly resented this rebuff to its authority, but Pahin was very skilled at winning support from the many royal and aristocratic members of his organisation, and the exhibitions were therefore tolerated (though certainly not encouraged) by the government.

In 1782, emboldened by his success, Pahin embarked on what (in retrospect) proved to have been a far more adventurous course, although he did so almost casually without at first appreciating the full implications of this new undertaking. In July he exhibited, among a smaller than usual number of works by contemporary artists, a large Hercules and Omphale by Noel Hallé, who had died in the previous year, but whose picture dated back to 1744, and also a modest selection of paintings by other deceased painters, all of whom belonged, or were related to the Hallé dynasty: a Holy Family by Daniel, Noel's grandfather, who had died in 1675; a Finding of Moses by Claude, his father, who had died in 1735; and one work each from three generations of the Restout family into which Noel's sister had married in 1729, giving birth three years later to the still-living Jean-Bertrand; and, finally, two sketches by the famous Jean Jouvenet (1644-1717), brother-in-law of Jean, the first of the Restout painters. Occasional pictures by members of the same families were added during the course of the next three or four weeks, and in succeeding issues of the Nouvelles de la république des lettres Pahin elucidated the relationship between them and claimed that by exhibiting their works he was paying `a well-deserved homage to these Masters of our School who, in their time, constituted what could be described as patrician families of the Arts, who laid the foundations for their descendants of the esteem of which they too have proved themselves worthy by inheriting their talents and their virtues'. Pahin's celebration of these talents and virtues must in turn have inspired his plan to organise, in the following year, the first large-scale exhibition to be devoted principally to the Old Masters. But before this came into being he had devised one more ground-breaking innovation whose consequences have been of almost equal significance: that of the retrospective exhibition confined to a single living artist and based entirely on works borrowed from private collections.

Joseph Vernet had long been one of the most admired painters in France, indeed in Europe. By now, however, he was sixty-nine years old, and it was some twenty years since he had completed his most celebrated achievements, the fifteen Ports de France painted for Louis XV. It is true that he was still an extremely accomplished artist who could produce pictures of the highest quality; but the works that were commissioned from him -- often in the most specific detail -- tended to be more and more repetitive as regards both composition and subject matter -- such as contrasting pairs of calm seas and storms, sunrises and sunsets, men fishing and women bathing. Moreover, with rare exceptions (among them, admittedly, the heirs to the thrones of Spain and Russia), his patrons were no longer as cosmopolitan or of the same exalted social rank as they had been in earlier years. From 1777 onwards his two most assiduous patrons (both of whom also became his friends) were a rich Protestant banker, Jean Girardot de Marigny, and a silk merchant called M. Paupe, who operated from his shop, Au Cordon Bleu.

From the collections of these, and of other admirers of Vernet (all of whom were named in the catalogue published for the occasion), forty-nine pictures and a handful of drawings were borrowed for Pahin's exhibition in the Salon de la correspondance. The exhibition was inaugurated by the king's brother, the comte d'Artois, who himself lent four pictures from his apartments in Versailles. But despite these extraordinary honours and the poetic eulogies that were allegedly written, and perhaps published, it attracted almost no attention from the press -- or even from the artist himself. He failed to put in an appearance at the exhibition, as he had been invited to do, and thus caused some embarrassment to Pahin who had to explain that his absence was a consequence of his modesty; he did not refer to the exhibition even in his private diaries. Vernet's apparent disdain for a tribute the like of which had never yet been paid to an artist is inexplicable, and it is to a writer employed by Pahin that the historian of exhibitions is forced to turn in order to convey some impression -- biased, exaggerated and historically inaccurate though it may be -- of the real, extraordinary, significance of the exhibition of 1783:

The unique, perhaps unparalleled, spectacle that has been made available in the headquarters of the Correspondance for the benefit of art lovers is an event that will long remain engraved in their memories. The history of painting will retain in its annals this truly precious event to accord it all the consideration that is its due. Since the sorrowful day when it was ordained in Rome that the superb picture of the Transfiguration painted by the divine Raphael would be exhibited in order to move the public and quicken their awareness of the loss of that great man, there has been nothing that can be compared or even contrasted with that exhibition other than the spectacle that you have made it possible for us to enjoy.

Within a few weeks, however, Pahin had embarked on a yet more remarkable step. On 14 May 1783 he announced in the Nouvelles de la république des lettres that the exhibitions that he had organised in honour of the Restout and Hallé families, and subsequently of Vernet, had constituted no more than the prelude to a monument that he had been intending to erect to the glory of the French school as a whole. The success of these exhibitions and the readiness of owners to lend works in their possession had now convinced him of the desirability of carrying out this project, vast though it was. Preparations were far advanced, although the catalogue was not yet ready. In the event he never seems to have produced a catalogue -- as that word would be understood today -- for the exhibition that opened a week later and remained on view for about three months (though the `prophane vulgaire' was admitted to this Temple of the Arts only on specified days). Instead, after many delays, he published a list of 197 pictures, divided into three groups -- those by `Peintres anciens', arranged in approximately chronological order (109), and those by `peintres vivants', both académiciens (62) and non académiciens et non agrées (26), belonging to the French school `from Jean Cousin, in 1500, including everything up to 1783'. Brief biographical introductions were provided for all the dead masters and for many of the living ones, and the names of the owners of the pictures exhibited were also given. However, what distinguishes Pahin's catalogue from its present-day counterparts is that he included in it artists whose works he wished to display but had not yet been able to borrow, and he indicated these by adding an asterisk to their names. This was designed (evidently with some success) to encourage collectors to lend relevant examples, and as a result the contents of the exhibition changed during the period of its duration, and this in turn makes it impossible to describe it with any precision.

(Continues...)