Paolo Veronese: The Petrobelli Altarpiece
Blanton Museum of Art
Combine a mystery and a masterpiece and what do you have? You have “Paolo Veronese: The Petrobelli Altarpiece,” a small, perfectly focused exhibition recently at the Blanton Museum of Art at the University of Texas at Austin. The show--which has also been seen at the Dulwich Picture Gallery in London and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa--comes with a backstory engaging enough to make museum-goers pay close attention.
In the 1560s, already in command of his genius for opulent decorative effects, Veronese painted a vast altarpiece for a Franciscan church in the town of Lendinara, not far from Venice. Two centuries later, after the convent with which the church was associated was suppressed, the altarpiece was acquired by an art dealer, and he cut it into pieces and sold them off one by one--“just like meat in a butcher’s shop,” as the Scottish artist Gavin Hamilton observed at the time. Only now, after decades of work resolving the relationship of fragments in London, Edinburgh, and Ottawa, plus the recent discovery of a fourth fragment in Austin, can we see what Veronese had in mind. No matter that several pieces are still missing and are unlikely to be recovered: the Petrobelli Altarpiece, some fifteen feet high, turns out to be an astonishingly powerful meditation on themes of mortality and immortality. Veronese brings a luxuriant gravitas to his representations of saints and sinners alike. The canvas, for all its bold public appeal, has undercurrents of haunted, dusky reverie.
Mounted in one of New York’s major museums, “Paolo Veronese: The Petrobelli Altarpiece” would be hailed as exactly the kind of brilliant, concise exhibition we need in these recessionary times. In Austin, the exhibition was embraced by a loyal audience that has come to expect world-class scholarly work from the curators at the Blanton. When I was last in Austin, a little over a year ago, the museum was host to a show unlike “The Petrobelli Altarpiece” in every respect except its sky-high quality. This was “Reimagining Space: The Park Place Gallery Group in 1960s New York,” organized by Linda Dalrymple Henderson, an art historian at the University of Texas. Henderson brought unexpected shadings to our understanding of New York in the 1960s by focusing on a group of artists--among them Mark di Suvero, Robert Grosvenor, and David Novros--who were re-imagining the old Abstract Expressionist swagger in terms of their own increasingly hard-edged, conceptual, and technologically oriented sensibilities. And two years before that, Jonathan Bober, the curator of European art at the Blanton who is responsible for bringing the Veronese show to Austin, organized a retrospective of the sixteenth-century Italian painter Luca Cambiaso. He is best known today for his geometricized drawings of the human figure, which have long had a cult following among painters, who see their sharply angled forms as a prefiguration of Cubism. In his paintings, Cambiaso’s mingling of analytical rigor and poetic fantasy occasionally brings to mind the uncanniness of Uccello. The Blanton was the only American venue for this unprecedented event.
“Paolo Veronese: The Petrobelli Altarpiece,” “Reimagining Space: The Park Place Gallery Group,” and the Luca Cambiaso retrospective epitomize a kind of offbeat, imaginative programming that is at risk in our museums even in the best of times, and is most certainly at risk today. There are perfectly good reasons why museum administrators prefer brand-name events. Monet--or, for that matter, Warhol--has a proven track record when it comes to bringing in a reluctant public. And if you seek sponsors for a Monet show, you won’t have to cope with the blank looks with which the name Cambiaso will be received. Innovative curators such as Bober and Henderson are fighting an uphill battle, no question about it.
Ned Rifkin, the new director of the Blanton, arrives at a museum where there is surely a desire to enlarge the audience for art in Austin. This is an altogether honorable objective. For the Blanton, which has in recent years considerably expanded its operations, fund-raising is perhaps more of a priority now than ever. One has only to consider the museum’s ambitious new building complex, which opened in stages between 2006 and 2008. There are civilized, invitingly proportioned galleries for the museum’s permanent collection, with strengths in mid-twentieth-century American painting, in modern Latin American art, and in late Renaissance, Baroque, and Rococo painting, drawing, and printmaking. There is also an unfortunate tendency toward gigantism in these interiors, beginning with a sky-high atrium and formal staircase that a visitor cannot help finding simultaneously overbearing and bland. Behind such overblown public spaces--you see them in new museums all over the world--there is the assumption that if you build it big, big crowds will come. The truth is that the people who do come end up feeling small.
But what is the Blanton to do in these straitened times? A few months ago the National Endowment for the Arts released a rather bleak “Survey of Public Participation in the Arts,” indicating that although museums were faring better than other cultural institutions, attendance at art museums and galleries was down to 22.7 percent of the adult population in 2008, from a high of 26.7 percent in 1992. Frankly, I think there can be too much anxiety about that missing 4 percent. We are not selling Pepsi here. We are selling the experience of Veronese. Anybody running an arts organization must attend to the bottom line: we can all agree about that. What I would like to hear from more museum directors is an insistence that in a country as wealthy as this one--and this is still a rich country, recession or no recession--museums have an obligation to present the finest work in the most uncompromising way, because in the long run that is how you sustain a culture.
So far as I can see, that kind of old-fashioned thinking has powered some of the most exciting exhibitions at the Blanton, exhibitions in which the best art historical scholarship, closely linked to the academic values of the university, flows seamlessly into the dazzling showmanship that any museum needs to attract the public. And many of these exhibitions are supported by important catalogues, contributions to culture that museum patrons ought to be proud to leave out on the coffee table long after the show has closed. Is “Paolo Veronese: The Petrobelli Altarpiece” a life-changing show? Of course not. But it is a powerful example of a medium-sized museum building on its strengths and coming up with something truly substantial.
For decades there had been a mystery as to what precisely was at the center of the Petrobelli Altarpiece, because the large fragments in London, Edinburgh, and Ottawa came only from the top and the left and right sides of the canvas. The conservation of figure groups in London and Ottawa had revealed fragments of a missing figure, apparently the Archangel Michael, a sword in his right hand, a scale for weighing souls in his left, his feet firmly planted on the sprawling and defeated figure of Satan. But what that figure of Saint Michael looked like was anybody’s guess, until Xavier Salomon--a curator at the Dulwich in London who co-organized the show with conservator Stephen Gritt--remembered seeing a head of an angel by Veronese on a visit to the Blanton, and the mystery was solved. Art historians love this kind of whodunit. So does the general public. All you need are a few bankable movie stars and some ecclesiastical-satanic twists and you would have a Dan Brown–style Hollywood hit.
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