Cocktails with a Curator: Tiepolo's "Perseus and Andromeda"

Welcome to this episode of Cocktails with a Curator. Good evening, I am Xavier Salomon, the Deputy Director and Peter Jay Sharp Chief Curator at The Frick Collection. The work of art I'm talking about this evening is Giambattista Tiepolo's Perseus and Andromeda, a very small painting that Frick bought towards the end of his life. This is actually a very unusual work in The Frick Collection because Frick himself did not really acquire any works from the seventeenth and eighteenth century from Italy. We don't have any of the sort of great Baroque Italian pictures that American collectors really started acquiring much later in the twentieth century. The Tiepolo is really an exception, and it is likely that this was acquired, we don't really know, for decorative purposes. And that is to do with the decoration of the second floor of what we now know as The Frick Collection, of the house at 1 East 70th Street. Here you see the main corridor of the second floor as it appeared in the 1920s, with the Tiepolo on the left. These were the spaces decorated by Elsie de Wolff for the Frick family. This is close to Mrs. Frick's bedroom and next to the daughter's bedroom, of Mrs. Frick and some of the guest bedrooms. It is likely that the Tiepolo was seen at the time as a purely decorative work that could have been used for these spaces, more intimate spaces, family spaces, rather than the grand spaces downstairs. We're not entirely sure when the picture started being shown in the galleries on the first floor, but clearly it was never meant to be part of the suite of grand rooms on the first floor during Frick's lifetime. The painting now is at the entrance of the Frick in what would have been the entrance to the house, and it's still the entrance to the museum. You see it here near the staircase. And you can see how it is a very small, intimate picture. This is because this is actually a preparatory work by Tiepolo for a much larger work. Tiepolo is one of the greatest painters of the 18th century, definitely the greatest painter active in Venice, but also an artist who had an international career. He was born in Venice, and all of his first early works are in Venice and the Veneto. But he actually worked in a number of other places in northern Italy, and later in his life in Germany, especially in Wurzburg, and later in his life in Madrid, where he died. This is a sketch for a fresco created by Tiepolo. And here you see the Frick sketch on the left compared to the right with the photograph of the fresco, which was a fresco in Milan. And this is unfortunately a fresco that doesn't exist anymore. The palace where the fresco was still exists, but was very heavily damaged during the war. This was the first major commission of Tiepolo outside of the Veneto between 1730 and 1731. He is at work on a series of ceilings for the Archinto family palace in Milan. Because we're talking about Milan, I am drinking tonight a Milanese gin and tonic. This is a spin-off of a typical gin and tonic, where instead of just having the gin and the tonic, you mix equal parts of gin and Campari with tonic on the rocks. The frescoes that Tiepolo painted, with a number of other artists at the time, were destined for this palace, the Archinto Palace on Via Olmetto in the centre of Milan. This is the very ancient centre of the city of Milan, where the old imperial palace and the ruins of the old imperial palace were and are still to be found. And the Archintos were a family that went all the way back to the Middle Ages in Milan, a very prominent family intermarried with a number of other great families of the time. Here you see on the right the façade of the palace as it appeared in the eighteenth century. And this is the man who commissioned the frescoes from Tiepolo, Carlo Archinto, the head of the family, who very proudly wears his golden fleece around his neck. Milan at this time, in the first half of the eighteenth century, goes through a drastic change. Milan is, for most of the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, under Spanish rule, and only around this time it moves under Austrian rule, and it will remain an Austrian city all the way to the unification of Italy in the 1860s. Carlo Archinto, therefore, is born and grows up as a subject of the Spanish crown and lives a second part of his life and dies as a subject of the imperial Austrian court. So a big change happens during his lifetime. He is the one who commissions the refurbishment of the palace, of the interior of the palace, partly to do with the wedding in April of 1731 of his son, Filippo Archinto, the heir as the head of the family, to Giulia Borromeo, a member of another important aristocratic family in Milan. On the left you see the frontispiece to one of the books produced to celebrate this important marriage, and you see there, under the double-headed eagle of the Habsburgs, the coat of arms of the Archintos on the left and the Borromeos on the right. And on the right you see a detail from a photograph of another one of Tiepolo's frescoes in the palace where this allegorical figure of a wind, probably Zephyrus, is also holding in his hands the Archinto and the Borromeo coat of arms. So clearly, at least some of the frescoes by Tiepolo, produced around 1730-1731, were meant to celebrate this great wedding and this marriage that was going to represent the future of the Archinto family. Here is the palace on Violmito, a very somber façade from the exterior, dating back mostly to the seventeenth century in structure. So the reconstruction, really the decoration, was to do very much with the interior. The palace was heavily bombed by the Allied forces in August, the night between the thirteenth and fourteenth of August, 1943. Here you see this terrible photograph of the devastation of that bombing. Milan, in 1943, was very heavily bombed, and it's been calculated that about 65 percent of the artistic monuments, the historic monuments of the city, were either destroyed or very heavily damaged. The opera house, La Scala, was bombed. The Leonardo's Last Supper survived, almost by miracle. The whole space was bombed, just the wall of the Last Supper stood up because it had been defended and protected. A number of other historic palaces and churches were very heavily damaged. So here you see, effectively, the shell of the Archinto Palace. All of its interior was devastated. The façade and part of the exterior and some of the wall structures remained. Out of all the frescoes that Tiepolo produced for the Archinto Palace, and these were over a series of four ceilings that Tiepolo produced, and this is the only fragment that still survives. It's part of the architectural structure of one of these frescoes with a figure, which unfortunately is somewhat beheaded. This is a fairly large fragment of a very large fresco. The man at the center of the scene holds a piece of paper with the date 1731, presumably the completion of the frescoes, and this is now kept in storage at the Castello Sforzesco in Milan. The palace was reconstructed after the war in the 1950s, and its exterior today survives pretty much in the same shape as it would have been before the bombing, more or less. So here you see a comparison between a pre-war photograph on the left and the palace at Vialmito today. And once you walk in, this is the courtyard of the palace. The palace was sold by the Archinto family in the nineteenth century, went through a series of different ownerships, and it then belonged to a charitable institution, which still owns the palace today and was in charge of the reconstruction of the interiors of that palace. And it is now used as a school. You see the two courtyards, the first and the second, all the way out to the garden. And again, you see a view before the war and a view from today. As I said, Tiepolo painted a number of ceilings for the Archinto Palace, and the largest one was the triumph of the arts and sciences. All of these frescoes were unfortunately destroyed in the 1943 bombing, but fortunately we have very good pre-war photography of all of the frescoes, so we have a clear sense of what they looked like. And this is also helped by the survival of three sketches for three of these ceilings. And the Frick one, of course, is one of them. Only a couple of years ago, we, actually a year ago, in 2019, together with Andrea Tomizzoli and Denis Ton, we curated a show, the three of us at the Frick, bringing together all the surviving evidence about this lost cycle by Tiepolo. So we had the sketches, the drawings for it, the photography, all together under one roof for the very first time, bringing attention to this very important, unfortunately lost, cycle by Tiepolo. The sketches give us an idea of what the colors would have looked like. And so this is a grand allegorical ceiling with figures of sciences and arts. And it's worth reminding people that the Archinto Palace also had a very important library in it that was open to the public, and Carlo Archinto was particularly interested in sciences and the arts and was a very enlightened patron and someone who kept his library, one of the grandest private libraries in Milan, open to the public. The little sketch which came to the Frick for the exhibition is now in the Museo d'Arte Antica in Lisbon. And you see how there are some slight differences between the sketch and the finished ceiling, but it is pretty much the same scene. Another ceiling represented, instead, Phaeton asking Apollo to drive the Chariot of the Sun. And again, you see the sketch on the left, which is now at the Los Angeles County Museum, and on the right, a photo of the ceiling, of course, embedded the fresco in great sort of stucco work and further smaller scenes in grisaille by Tiepolo. As I said, the three sketches, the Triumph of the Arts and Sciences, Apollo and Phaeton, and Perseus and Andromeda from the Frick, were brought together in this exhibition in 2019. Our painting represents an allegorical, sorry, mythological scene from ancient mythology. This is a story told in Ovid and a number of other sources, and it's the story of Perseus and Andromeda. The Ethiopian princess Andromeda is chained to a rock because her mother has bragged that she is more beautiful than some of the sea nymphs, of the Nereids. And so, as a punishment, the gods ask for the daughter. They send a monster to plague the waters of Ethiopia, and this monster has to receive human sacrifices. And finally, the queen Cassiopeia and her husband decide to sacrifice their only daughter, Andromeda. Perseus is on the winged horse Pegasus, and he is flying back after having slain Medusa. And, of course, he falls in love with this beautiful woman chained to a rock. And he asks the parents for a hand in marriage if he manages to slay the monster. And so here you see the scene as, you know, Cassiopeia at the top is praying in front of the god Jupiter and below at the center is Perseus on Pegasus with the naked Andromeda, with her shackles and chains still attached to her wrists and ankles. And at the very bottom on the right, the sea monster is killed, and the water nymphs on the left are crying for the death of the monster. You can see just about in the sketch, but also in the photo of the fresco, that there are little stars around this. And, of course, that is because many of the figures in this painting, Cassiopeia, Perseus, Andromeda, Pegasus, were all names of constellations in the sky. So it's very appropriate that a ceiling in a palace effectively echoes the starry sky above it in the real world, in nature. Of course, it is particularly sad to think about the fact that this ceiling was reflecting so much the idea of the open sky, and at the same time it is destroyed from the sky. So it's bombs, incendiary bombs, that were thrown from flying planes that destroyed the interior of the palace. And here again you see on the left a shot from the interior of the Archinto Palace, where you see several different floors destroyed by the fire and the bombs. We don't know exactly where the fresco of Perseus and Andromeda was within the palace. Probably it was related to the rooms that were to be occupied by Filippo Archinto and Giulio Borromeo. The theme of, of course, this great hero rescuing this sort of princess is particularly appropriate, of course, for a marriage allegory and for a marriage iconography. It is worth pausing at this point and thinking about the destruction of monuments. And the exhibition took place, actually opened around the time when there was the fire at Notre Dame. And it is always worth pointing out how fragile monuments and works of art still are and how dangerous it can be for them to be left, effectively, and not guarded properly, and how they can very quickly disappear. Of course, the fire at Notre Dame, as dramatic as it was, did not destroy the church to the extent it could have and everything in it, even though it was obviously a very substantial damage. But the Archinto Palace is one of the many examples of great works of art that were lost in the last hundred years, not all of them through natural causes, some because of wars and because of human damage. So the exhibition was a very sobering exhibition in many ways. And as I say, it is always worth understanding how works of art are fragile, how monuments are fragile, and how we as curators, as human beings, as people in the art world and not in the art world, it is a big duty for us to make sure that these works are maintained for future generations. And, of course, as destruction still takes place in other areas of the world of great ancient monuments, it is worth thinking about and working hard to preserve these monuments and their histories. One of the most touching aspects of the destruction of Palazzo Archinto, for me, is the fact that within the general destruction of the palace, even though the shell, the architectural shell, survived, everything in it was destroyed. But the one thing that survived was actually a plant. And if you look at the very back of this photograph, over the terrace you see in the background, you see a flowering wisteria. This is supposedly the oldest wisteria in Milan. It is an incredibly monumental plant that covers most of this terrace. And actually, the wisteria survived the bombings and the fire. So there is a wonderful sense of hope, I think, in this idea. And even though the Tiepolo frescoes are unfortunately lost, they fortunately for us survived through these sketches and photographs, but the wisteria and nature is still there. So I hope you will all think of this complicated and tragic story next time you're at the Frick and next time you look at the Tiepolo. And I hope you're enjoying your Milanese gin and tonic. Cheers.