BSL Interpretation- Curator's Introduction to 'The Carracci Cartoons' - National Gallery

Hello everyone and a warm welcome from me as well. I'm very thrilled to be introducing the One Room exhibition to you today. I'm going to be talking for more or less an hour and I will read part of my manuscript just as you informed because I'm trying to, I will try to get as much across as I can about this beautiful exhibition that we have put on in Room 1 as part of the Hyman's exhibition programme and supported by the Capricorn Foundation. One of the reasons why we put it on at this specific time is because now with the wonder of art and the high renaissance galleries open again it ties in beautifully with Room 2 where we have more the Roman legacy of Michelangelo, the Florentine Bronzino at its height and Ducati as a sort of art historical consequence of it and I have to admit it's also or I personally like to think of it as a bit of a homage to an exhibition that was on display at the National Gallery. Some of you may remember in the mid-1990s the Carracci cartoons for the last time were exhibited together in a display that was dedicated to the conservation treatment of that of both cartoons which took several years and the scholarship that went along with it really sparked a new interest in the cartoons, the artists, the historic project, the fresco project that was associated with funding the gallery. I'm going to talk about all of these details as well and the Room 1 display which only shows the two cartoons on their own as well as the technical findings that help us to better understand how they were used and in what context they are to be placed. They present those two truly outstanding works on paper to have survived and that belong to the collection of the National Gallery, the cartoons that were made in preparation for one of the most significant artistic achievements on the thresholds toward early Baroque in Rome, the Farnese Gallery. Located in the Palazzo Farnese it represents a pivotal moment at the turn of the 17th century. It stands as a testament to the artistic genius of the Carracci brothers from Bologna, particularly Annibale and a sophisticated patronage of Cardinal Odoardo Farnese who likely commissioned it. The cartoons were presented to the National Gallery in 1837 by Lord Francis Edgerton and put on display the following year when the gallery opened its doors on Trafalgar Square. They are almost four meters wide and it is thus a special pleasure that we can show them again to our public given that for their sheer size and the material that is charcoal drawings on paper they are not often on display. They allow us to appreciate not only the remarkable capabilities of their creator but also the physical scope and physical effort behind the large frescoing project. They were conserved as I mentioned earlier in the early 90s and thereafter shown in a special exhibition for the last time together. Myths in the Making conveniently refers to three aspects of these works. One, the imaginative power of the artistic capability to give the visual form to abstract ideas and written poetry in this case on paper. Second, the physical aspect of drawing and employing them as working tools and we can see that on the surface. And three, third, the Carracci's own legacy in the 17th century. The Palazzo Farnese was commissioned by Alessandro Farnese later Pope Paul III in 1507 with construction continuing under various architects including Antonio da Sangallo the Younger, Michelangelo and Giacomo della Porta. Cardinal Odoardo Farnese, the great-grandson of Pope Paul III, became the primary resident of the palace after he had been made a cardinal at the age of only 18 and his father the Duke of Parma had died in 1593. Odoardo's artistic patronage reflects this education, religious devotion and desire to maintain the Farnese family's cultural prominence despite their declining political power at the time. Documentary evidence indicates that by 1595 Odoardo had invited Annibale and Agostino Carracci from Bologna to Rome. That year Annibale began working on the private chamber of the cardinal, the Camerino, with the fresco cycle of allegorical figures and mythological scenes that celebrate the virtues of the Farnese family, culminating in an image of Hercules on the crossroads in the centre of the vault. Shortly thereafter Annibale's activity in Rome turned towards the gallery project. The gallery's commission likely dates to 1597. We have very few documents that actually help us to pinpoint specific moments in the history of its creation. After Annibale had completed the Camerino, we think, primary documentary sources include payment records from the Farnese archive related to scaffolding, sculpture movements, things like this and then when Annibale finished the project, the payment, correspondence between the cardinal and his agents and mentions, and that's probably the most important source, in early biographies. The planning involved transforming a rectangular hall approximately 20 by 17 meters with a vaulted ceiling in the piano nobile of the palace and interestingly in room one, which is not 20 meters wide but 10 meters wide, it has almost the same extension as the Farnese gallery and it has a vaulted ceiling so when you step into room one, look at the preparatory cartoons and look up, you could almost imagine where and how the painted frescoes would have been placed in the gallery itself. The space, the gallery in the Farnese palace, was intended as a passageway connecting the public reception rooms with the cardinal's private apartments, functioning as both a display space for the Farnese sculpture collection or part of it and is also a testament to the family's cultural sophistication. Initial conceptual drawings made by Annibale show an evolution from more traditional quadri reportati, that is the images that are placed like illusions almost into the vaulted ceiling, framed panel-like compositions, to the more innovative illusionistic framework that was ultimately executed. I'm still only talking about the ceiling, not necessarily about the painted walls that we see in this look into the interior of the gallery, that is a pre-restoration photo. It was about 10 years ago that the entire cycle was restored and looks indeed splendid today. An important factor was the intellectual sphere in which the program was conceived. The Farnese family's art collection was already renowned at the time, featuring paintings, books, gems, but also ancient sculptures that would play a crucial role in inspiring the gallery's decoration. The formation of the Farnese collection was largely driven by Fulvio Orsini, who served as a librarian and antiquarian to the Farnese family for decades, most notably under the Cardinal Alessandro, who enlarged the collection significantly. Orsini's vast humanistic knowledge and familiarity with classical sources is sometimes believed to have been instrumental in developing the iconographic program of the gallery. While it is also known that he played an important role in devising the iconographic program of the Camerino, his involvement in the final stages, the final design of the gallery, is less secure, because also one should mention that he died in 1600, that is just after the work in the gallery had begun. Annibale's early studies for the ceiling design show that after the architectural framework was developed, the positioning of the individual scenes was far from resolved, and in the center of the drawing that's kept in the Louvre, you see a part of the composition of the Triumph of Bacchus, which in the final version of the painted ceiling actually occupies the center. So whether that observation gives greater independence to the artistic consideration of the Carracci themselves remains an open question. Orsini's own collection of antiquities, books and manuscripts, and especially drawings, was displayed in the Farnese Palace. It informed the intellectual underpinnings of the collection, yet it seems that under the patronage of Cardinal Odoado, the focus shifted from a more antiquarian interest in the study of works of art as specimen, toward a more aesthetic appreciation of classical forms as an artistic ideal. Orsini's death in 1600 turned the execution of the project, during the execution of the project, may explain certain shifts in the program as work progressed. To give you a little bit of an introduction to what we see on the ceiling itself, it depicts the loves of the lives of the gods, inspired by Ovid's Metamorphoses. The ceiling is organized across central panels, framed as if they were paintings suspended from the wall, major narratives such as Polyphemus and Galatea to the left, the triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne in the center, and another variant of Polyphemus and Galatea on the right. Then we have the lateral scenes, secondary mythological episodes, the two frescoes which we see prepared in the cartoons here at the National Gallery, at the top, Cephalus and Aurora, and at the bottom, the marine sea Theasos. I will talk about the identification of the subject a little bit later. And all of this is completed with ignudi, so to say, nude figures that are placed along or framing these illusionistic images, paintings, decorative elements, that bridge the gap between the painted and the architectural space, as well as herms and medallions that add additional classical references. The theme has been interpreted in its Neoplatonic reading as a battle between earthly and divine love, according to Plato's concept of the soul. The thought had been introduced by the first description, which was published by Giovanni Pietro Billori in first 1657, accompanying a series of engravings that showed images depicted in the gallery, and then later adapted in his more popular Lives of Painters in 1672. He interpreted the putti in the four corners of the ceiling as depicting different forms of love, the wrestling between divine and earthly love, the extinction of impure desire to console emotion with reason and to uplift the soul, and the cordial union of eros and anti-eros, an image of mutual love. Along these lines, the central scenes were then understood as representing divine reward for fidelity in the central image of Bacchus and Ariadne, Pan offering wool to Diana left to it as humility before divine power, Polythenus serenading Galathea, for example, on the right as a depiction of unrequited love that would be mirrored in Aurora and Cephalus as well, and Jupiter and Juno as representing the celestial marriage. Together with the cardinal virtues that we find along the walls which were painted in the teens of the 17th century and are not part of the first campaign that only concentrated on the ceiling, and when Agostino was long gone and died in 1602 but had already left Rome in 1600 to go and work for the Duke of Parma, the program was understood to synthesize mythology with counter-reformation interpretation, and that's in the idea of the lore who describes them and interprets them, a delicate balance reflecting Odoado's position as a religious leader and humanist patron. It is tied in with the question whether the concept for the ceiling was begun in preparation of the planned wedding of Odoado's older brother Ranuccio, Duke of Parma, to Brandini, celebrated in 1600 or not, and we know that the negotiations for the marriage took several years. Again, there's no definitive proof that that was the reason for commissioning them, and we know that in the gallery itself it was a place where music was played and musical instruments were displayed, so the function is we're not entirely sure of it, but it may be tied with the wedding of the Duke of Parma. The gallery's technical innovations were indeed revolutionary. It integrates a quadratura, the illusionistic architecture, with figural compositions. It's a brilliant coloristic achievement that balances bright primary colors and subtle transitions, and as a fresco it's designed to be seen from afar with the new technical imaging that the colleagues in Italy have done of the frescoes in detail. You see how one can even appreciate more how supreme the execution is, and it's all over a very harmonious integration of multiple narrative scenes in this unified architectural framework, which is new at a time in Rome. The frescoes represent a deliberate synthesis of artistic traditions that were admired by the biographers of the Carracci as well. It's what's always referred to as Venetian color in northern Italian naturalism, as one would see it in the work of Titian, Veronese and Correggio, and Bolognese academic practice, because before the Carracci came to Rome, they already had established a school of painting in their hometown in Bologna, where drawing after life models, for example, was cultivated. Although one has to say that the study of antiquity was maybe one of the key elements that transformed the Carracci's art in Rome, when they came to Rome. And the Roman design and monumental compositions that we see in works by Michelangelo and Raphael, that the Carracci could study in the eternal city, and it led to the transformation of their own visual style. Coming back to what we, so much for the historic context, coming back to the two works that we actually show in the exhibition, the two large cartoons, Cephalus on the left, Cephalus carried off by Aurora, that is Cephalus, the beautiful young hunter, immortal, with whom the goddess of dawn, Aurora, falls in love, and her aged husband Tithonus, on the right hand side, sleeping, was once a former prince of Tras, granted immortality, but not immortal youth, so to say, so he ages for all eternity, not knowing, not really realizing what is happening. And the goddess is lifting the young hunter onto her chariot to carry him off. That's a story that in Ovid, Cephalus recounts himself. On the right hand side, a scene that is a little bit less difficult to pinpoint or connect to a specific story that we would find, for example, in Ovid, we do see a young woman on the back of the sea triton, who carries her off through the waves, surrounded by nereids, that are the nymphs of the sea, minor goddesses, and preceded by a triton who's blowing his horn. Funnily, Bellori, who described the entire cycle from within the gallery, which means looking up and identifying the scenes, points out this wonderful detail on the right hand side that the triton, who blows his conch, must be so loud that the little putter we see in the far right actually has to cover his ears. And that's one of these fantastic imaginative tricks that artists use to bring their pictures, that are silent stories, alive in the moment, or in the act of capturing a moment that is so fleeting that it almost, via association, makes us bring these scenes to life. And the scene can't really be identified conclusively, or hasn't been identified conclusively, with a specific classical myth. Bellori himself says in his first account it's either Venus, it's either Galathea or Venus, and then rectifying it in 72 to saying this is Galathea. It can't really be, if we look very closely at the sources, and it has been recognized by scholars already, so it's not really a new observation. Other suggestions have been put forward, Scilla and Glaucus, for example, although there's never a moment where Glaucus actually gets the hold of Scilla. Titus and Peleus, whereas Peleus is immortal and not really depicted in the form, there's no visual tradition that would depict him in the form of a sea god. And one idea that has been put forward by scholars in more recent years, and it started with Charles Dempsey who made a brilliant analysis of the iconography of the ceiling, is that it's actually Venus. Venus, born from the sea, very often shown in triumphant arrivals surrounded by sea gods and sea goddesses. And if this is the case, if this is indeed Venus, there is an account, a fourth century account, by Claudian. It's a poem written for the wedding of a former imperial wedding that describes Venus arriving to preside over the wedding on the back of a tritone. And that's one other idea that could be associated with this image. Given its placement in the gallery itself, that is an image that sits above the door that would allow access entry to the palace, whereas the cephalus and aurora is placed above the wall with the scenery, sorry, with the windows that face the garden side. It's maybe something to consider, and the triumph of Venus is another possibility for reading this image. But where do you, so that's so much to the aspect of making written poetry, written words, turning poetry into visual form, which is what the Caracci do here, but it doesn't come from anywhere. It's not, it's not, they do make use of the things that they see in Rome, and this is even more astonishing what they, the visual references that they consciously incorporate in their works. The youthful figure of Cephalus, for example, is clearly inspired by Michelangelo's design of monumental reclining lutes. For example, as the Aedem that we see in the Sistine Chapel, but also there is a notable presence of Michelangelo's designs beyond what the Caracci could have seen, for example, in drawings or copies after Sistine Chapel, in the Farnese collection itself. The cartoon of Venus and Cupid on the right hand side, which is today in Naples, where most part of the Farnese gallery, sorry, the Farnese collection is kept today, was in the collection of Fulvio Zini, and we know from inventories that it was framed and hung in the rooms of the palace. So that is another object, Michelangelo, the cartoon from the 1530s, and that was copied numerous times in the 16th century, of where the Caracci could have come in contact with the visual models of the masters of the Renaissance. Another very important reference in all that has been remarked previously, but I think it's always good to show it and compare it visually to actually show the impact it had, the enigmatic scene of the woman, quite surely a goddess born of by the sea god, reveals Agostino's intimate knowledge of another possession of the Farnese family at the time, just across the Tiber, the Villa Farnesina. The decoration was commissioned by its first owner, Agostino Chigi, who commissioned Baldassare Peruzzi, Sebastiano del Piombo and Raphael to decorate rooms with lavish mythological sceneries. It houses one of Raphael's most famous frescoes, the Triumph of Galicia, created about 1511-12. It was the direct inspiration for Agostino's marine pterosaurs, and the pterosaurs is the marine equivalent to the barcantic retinue of Dionysus, for example. The villa was acquired by Cardinal Alessandro Farnese in 1577 and the Caracci would have had ample opportunity to study the decoration. The synthetic approach created what Bellori, the grand 17th century historiographer, would later call the perfect manor that transcended regional schools and established a new classical ideal. In continuation with Vasari's praise for Raphael, the Caracci, in the mid-17th century, were praised for uniting the strongest elements of different Italian schools in their manner of painting, and that is both of them had already died by that time. How much the Caracci designs were in depth to the models of Renaissance masters may be seen in the change that was introduced to the Triton in Agostino's design. Comparison with the executed fresco reveals marked differences, suggesting that while Agostino designed the scene, Annibale made modifications during the painting process of his brothers after his brother's departure from Rome, possibly in 1599 or 1600, that's at the latest, when he entered the services of the Duke of Parma. The Triton's wide-chested torsion towards the viewer that we see in the drawing with an outstretched arm has been changed to show a figure turning away, more akin to the designs in Raphael's fresco of the Triumph of Galicia. Annibale must have reworked Agostino's initial design as numerous drawings, or actually these two drawings, with the adjusted pose show, possibly after, again, Agostino had left Rome, but we're just speculating at this point. There's no evidence for an alteration visible in the cartoon, and it is likely that instead of creating a new true-to-size model for the ceiling, Annibale made these changes directly by painting on the plaster. The extensive preparatory drawings for the Farnese Gallery are a rich source for better understanding of the Gracchi's process in developing the program and the individual scenes. Their collections of these drawings at the British Museum, for example, in the Louvre, and in Florence at Uffizi, they reveal how it was primarily Annibale who was in charge of the overall design, and we, with the two cartoons, are at a very interesting crossroads as to opening the question how much Agostino was actually involved in the project. The technical analysis of the drawings also highlights changes in approach, particularly in the rendering of anatomical details and the handling of light and shadow. Key aspects visible in different groups of drawings associated with the project include these loose compositional studies exploring overall arrangements like these two, figure studies after antique sculptures and live models, studies for the overall architectural framework, and the cartoons for individual scenes and figures. In addition to the two surviving ones that we have at the National Gallery, there's a third one for the center image of the Triumph of Bacchus, a fragment of it, in Urbino. Particularly interesting are the early conceptual drawings that appear to integrate sculpture from the collection, the Farnese collection, into the architectural design, like the sheet in Paris that shows three Inudi in front of the niche that houses the Hercules Farnese, the one on the left-hand side. Annibale's interest in sculpture is well documented, and for those of you who may have had a chance to see the wonderful exhibition in Rome that was dedicated to the Farnese collection, some of these confrontations between sculpture and drawings actually could be seen in the exhibition, like the wonderful head of the Setaria and the group of Pan and Daphnis on the right, and they show that, or they may stand out, showing the Annibale's synthetic approach that enabled him to synthesize the idealized forms of antiquity with the observation of nature, creating a new visual language that would influence subsequent generations of artists. Agostino may have had a more analytical approach, frequently annotating his drawings with measurements and proportions, yet fewer drawings by Agostino have survived from his Roman period, or for that matter in general, less understood than his brother one could argue, and the National Gallery's cartoons offer unique insight into this process. The Farnese collection of ancient sculpture was among the most prestigious in Renaissance Rome. In 1600, it comprised over 300 statues. Key pieces include the Hercules Farnese, the Farnese bull, and numerous other Greek and Roman sculptures displayed throughout the palace, in its courtyard, and in its gardens. In the 1590s, sculpture movements in the Piano Nobile are tested in the archives, and it has been suggested that the Carracci may have had a hand in the selection of the 10 sculptures that were placed in the niches in the gallery. The sequence is attested by inventories drawn up in 1640 and 1642, and then again in these engravings made by Giovanni Valparte. Interestingly, most of the sculptures are, all of them are identified, most of them are in the Capodimonte, where again the Farnese gallery collection is kept. Two of them can be seen in the British Museum. For those of you who are interested in following these traces, they are placed into the gallery as physical objects, arranged in the gallery space itself, and they invite a parallel viewing of painting and sculpture, adding a sense of proportionality to the room and the ceiling design. And they are also, they must have served as visual models to the Carracci and their assistants, depicting or allowing them to study an aesthetic ideal that the artists try to emulate. And also they may have been, they may have served as an inspiration for the mythological themes depicted. The positioning of the actual sculptures beneath painted figures created a deliberate dialogue between ancient and contemporary art, at times static and dynamic forms. The integration highlights the Renaissance concept of the paragone, the comparison between different, rivalry between different art forms, and demonstrates how the Carracci positioned themselves as heirs to the classical tradition. Just as a side note, the play of the visual continuity in the Renaissance palace, filled with art, was also evident in the adjacent room that underwent changes during Odoardo's patronage. The Sala dei Philosophy, which was designed to house a series of antique busts of philosophers, and perhaps 16 marble busts, that Fulvio Rossini had acquired for the Cardinal from the Cesarini collection in 1593. But they were displayed together, and that's quite interesting, with a nude woman that turns around, quoted from the inventory, that is a woman who looks back. The marvellous Venus Callipigos, also from the Cesarini collection, on the left-hand side. Two crouching Venuses, and a painting after Michelangelo's Venus and Cupid, attributed to Willem van den Broek, and a Venus by Annibale Carracci. So these two crouching Venuses, and the left Venus, the crouching one, has an 18th century restoration, so the head is new, and you see parts of the little putto's arms are new. She must have looked differently in the 16th century, because we do know that the Farnese had their own sculptures and restorers that were normally there to complete the fragments that were found at the time, so they wouldn't have been there as fragments. It is quite bold to imagine that these highly erotic sculptures were displayed with the likenesses of some of the most eminent thinkers of Greek and Roman antiquity. Another reference that we can try to trace in Agostino's design, in the Carracci cartoons, may or may not be the Forza Belvedere, which was at the time, of course, in the papal collection, and not in the Farnese collection, but accessible to artists by Rome, probably one of the most inspiring fragments, and also one of the few sculptures that, at the time, wasn't completed to form a whole image again, but remained in its fragmentary state, and served as an inspiration for artists. Maybe a torsion of the body that inspired, that chose the specific perspective, because one could argue or question whether that is exactly what Agostino tried to formulate in the torsion of the Triton, which would explain, to a certain extent, those areas where the arms were invented, added on, so to say, where we also see a little bit of a struggle, let's say, with the foreshortening, as well as the sober look of the Triton that has been connected to the bust of Caracalla, which was in the Sala dei Imperatori, in the room of the emperors in the Palazzo Farnese, or maybe even the more sad, melancholic expression of the Farnese Hercules. The two crouching Venuses from the Philosopher's Room are echoed in the nymph's pose to the left, in the cartoon of the woman born of Pius C. God. While her muscular body is informed by the pose of the sculpture, possibly the Venus with Cupid, as suggested by the remnant of a hand on her back, her engaging gaze is entirely the work of a draftsman or a painter, and you can see that in the exhibition, actually, how Agostino developed the composition and develops the shape, and those areas where he goes in to intensify certain elements, certain aspects, such as the face of the nymph, in this case, or the figure seen in profile to the left, is always the moment where he adds a touch that is the touch of a painter, a draftsman. It's not nothing the sculpture, the antique sculpture, already at the time wouldn't have had a directed gaze, because polychromy is lost, and you very rarely can't really think of an example where you have drillings in the eyes to emulate pupils, which is what Benigni, then, for example, does. So the moment where he adds a directed gaze to the figure that's looking out at us is where the painterly approach supersedes, maybe, the antiquarian interest in shaping this body. They show, really, a fruitful intertwining of the study of antiquity and revitalization through the touch of a painter, versed in the observation of nature. In the exhibition, you will see all of these details, or the exhibition invites you to step closer and look at all of these details, and the draped cloth covering the loin and the nymph to the left was inserted to replace a different compositional element. It's maybe a putto, if we understand the hand as a remnant of a figure that once had been there, and would have been made by Agostino before the composition was then transferred onto the ceiling. Following these lines of models that we find in, or we can trace back to, antique sources, the nymph in profile, that's just a suggestion, to the left invites us to compare her statuesque pose to antique reliefs and sarcophagi. Again, two examples that are not in the Farnese Gallery collection, but were known in Rome in the 16th century. It is here that we find the possible visual roots of the enigmatic iconography. In the classical marine theosos, the celebratory retinue of sea gods, the intertwining of sea nymphs and sea gods, tritons, or in this case centaurs, is often associated with the birth of Venus, and we find that motif on antique sarcophagi, combining these different elements without necessarily allowing us to identify each figure on its own. While not necessarily identified by name, the visual repertoire is so strikingly similar that one may propose that the visual roots were found in the sarcophagi that celebrated birth, Venus, and rejuvenation on funerary monuments. These were visible in Roman collections at the time throughout the 16th century, while Agostino looked to put a clever twist on Raphael's Triumph of Galatea, without any doubt, putting her in, I would argue, the back of the central group and rotating her by 180 degrees. It's more or less the same pose, the figure that stucks out behind the woman born off by a sea god. The Renaissance master himself looked toward antique reliefs to develop his vision of classical mythology. The work on the ceiling began around 1597-98, we believe, and continued until approximately 1601-1602. The question of attribution has been contentious in scholarship. It has so far been based on a few documentary evidences we have that include payment records, contemporary accounts, and technical analysis, but it remains a question to explore, to put it that way. Modern scholarship consensus based on stylistic analysis and preparatory drawing proposes that Annibale was the principal designer and acknowledges Agostino's significant contribution to the intellectual program and execution of several stages, particularly those requiring complex allegorical content. Agostino's hand is most evident in the scenes of the woman born off by a sea god, the Ctesus, and Aurora Cephalus, and is in accordance with the attribution mentioned by Bellori in his description of the gallery. That's one of the key identifications that subsequent scholarship has always gone back to, that Bellori actually says these two scenes are by Agostino Carracci. The brothers' collaborative model, on the other hand, represented a continuation of their Bolognese workshop practice, though tensions ultimately led to Agostino's departure. The two cartoons attributed to Agostino, that are now on display in room one, provide valuable insight into both the techniques employed in the creation of the frescoes and the specific nature of Agostino's participation in this monumental project. As preparatory works, they represent some of the most significant surviving examples of the Carracci's workshop practice. They were owned by Thomas Lawrence, the director of the Royal Academy of Arts, before they reached England via another important historical figure, Jean-Baptiste Lebrun, the husband of Elisabeth Vigée Lebrun, who bought them in Modena in 1808. They were executed, and I think I mentioned that before, just to reiterate, in charcoal and white chalk on multiple sheets of paper joined together to form these large cartoons. The technical analysis that was carried out in the 90s, conducted during the conservation project, has revealed precise information about their creation and use, and I want to dedicate a bit of time to that, because it is quite extraordinary that we know how they were used, that they are preserved, and that's what the exhibition tries to focus, is zooming out from looking at them from afar, as representatives of the frescoes that we cannot show in the National Gallery, to stepping closer and zooming in and to seeing how exactly were they done, and how exactly were they used. The cartoon depicting Cephalus and Aurora was cut up to place the individual manageable sections directly onto the wet plaster to trace its context with a blunt stylus. So this step, with all of the preparatory drawings that are preserved, once the design is actually scaled up onto a cartoon, this is more a question, or you would think of it as a question, of a mechanical transfer. So you design a true-to-life model that you use to copy the composition onto the ceiling, and you imagine it would climb up onto a scaffold, then wet out the area that the painter would be able to finish in a day, and place a manageable sheet of paper onto that wetted area to trace it and then to paint it. You wouldn't be able to manipulate two by four meters large sheets of paper on a scaffold. So that is what we actually do see in the cartoon of Cephalus and Aurora, and we do see also where certain replacement papers, for example in the upper right corner, were added to fill in gaps, something that must have been lost during the use of these cartoons. The presence of pouncing marks, tiny perforations along contour lines, confirm that the cartoon of the woman worn off by a seagull, on the other hand, was copied onto another transfer cartoon to copy the composition onto the ceiling. That is, the physical evidence resolves long-standing debates about whether full-scale cartoons were employed, whether the Karachi relied primarily on smaller modeli and direct improvisation on the ceiling. That means there was a conscious effort made to preserve the design of this primary cartoon, copy it to create a tool that you could use for working itself. The close examination of Aurora and Cephalus cartoon is, I'm sorry, this is what I wanted to show you. These are the perforations that you see all along the contours in the cartoon of a woman worn off by a seagull, and it would have been used to powder through and essentially create a very rudimentary copy of that design on a sheet of paper of the same size that then would have been used. The conservation work on these cartoons has also shed light on the history of their use and reuse. They may have been stored in the workshop right after use, because especially the cut-up cartoon of Cephalus and Aurora must have been assembled and kept right after it was used to transfer the composition. And the other one, probably with the intention to be kept as a reference model for the composition in the workshop, we do not know where they went immediately after they were used, and their probably first reference is in the mid-17th century in the collection of a drawings collector, possibly. They were lined very early on in their history, which tells us that they must have been put on display like a large frame drawing, essentially. This physical evidence may support the account in Bellori's lives that the cartoons were preserved as teaching tools for younger artists in the Carracci circle. The National Gallery cartoons provide compelling evidence for a more substantial and enduring contribution by Agostino to the Farnese Gallery that has sometimes been acknowledged. While Annibale rightfully receives credit for the overall achievement, the gallery was a collaboration with Agostino's refined classicism and intellectual approach, leaving its mark on what would become one of the most defining moments of Italian Baroque art, and we could even speculate as to why we do see two different modes of use in the cartoons. Is it because, for example, of timing, that you have a more and more slower approach that's more time-consuming, copying the main cartoon onto a second cartoon to transpose it onto the ceiling, while, as opposed to cutting it up and using it right away, may be a sign of time running out for the project, or the other way around, because the earlier fresco project that the Carracci carried out shows exactly that kind of use. It doesn't make any effort to preserve the cartoons. They are cut up and used for transfer, so it could also be the other way around. We don't really know. What about their legacy, though? Giovanni Bellori's description of the gallery and the lives represents the first comprehensive analysis of the work and has profoundly shaped subsequent interpretation. Bellori's access to individuals who had known the Carracci and his careful study of the gallery lent authority to his account, although it's by no means undisputed today. His interpretation emphasised the Carracci's return to classical ideals after what he viewed as the excesses of mannerism. The narrative proved extremely influential, establishing the gallery as a paradigm of reformed painting that assembles all of the essentially best qualities of Renaissance masters with direct observation of nature. Bellori's work was enormously influential and shaped to a certain extent the perception of Roman Baroque up until very recent times and all across the academic tradition. I just want to end this very dense talk, not to overstretch your patience with this, with an outlook. The gallery quickly became a required study site for artists visiting Rome and its influence on subsequent painters and sculptures for that matter was immediate and profound. Permission to copy the frescoes was highly sought after and the palace visitors' logs document numerous artists studying there in the decade after its completion. Rubens is not among them but we know from visual references only that Rubens was in Rome, that Rubens did study sculptures from the Farnese collection. There's all of the correspondence that's preserved by his hand. We don't know anything about what he did in Rome. The visual evidence however suggests that he was among the artists to study the Farnese palace, its sculptures and very likely the gallery as well. There is one drawing that today isn't really attributed to Rubens anymore, potentially retouched by him, which would copy a detail from the Farnese gallery itself. Again opening up to the question of the visual influence to the subsequent generation of painters and how not only the motifs but it's really a question of the visual language that's received and reinterpreted and also opening up the idea as to when we leave this lecture room and go back into the National Gallery and look at the beautiful redisplay, do we find elements, artists' thoughts that refer back to this idea of bringing poetry to life with a language that is in a way an idealized look at antiquity. Another example that is again a purely hypothetical comparison but I hope it shows you what I try to explain. That is this moment of the painter bringing breathing life into a sculpture, into a model that is stone, that has no directed gaze and we know that Rubens studied sculptures when he was in Italy. It's always believed that he looked at the Crouching Venus in the collection of the Dukes of Mantua, which is where he spent most of his time. The sculpture, by the way, you can see today in the British Museum because it was part of the Royal Collection. I think it ended under Charles I and so it may be that this is just two artists in a very similar time frame looking at very similar sculptural models and then thinking about what it is that the painter adds to bring them to life. I find them extremely comparable, the way that she looks out at us and engages us and combines this antique ideal, which is always understood as an ideal beauty as well, but combining it with a gaze that is so lively and so so animate in a way that one wonders about the comparability of the two of them and we know just a couple of other instances where on the left-hand side you see an example of what Thetis and Peleus look like according to Agostino Carracci in the Palazzo del Giardino, which is the palace of the Duke of Parma that Agostino goes to work on in late 1600 when he left Rome and his brother's project to work on this series, again in a drawing that is from the circle of Rubens possibly, seeing that there's not only an interest in copying the scenery but also developing a more profound understanding of how at a time classical mythology was brought back to life by a very specific visual language. That is, once one starts to look a little bit closer, surprisingly consistent, the influence on his later mythological works may be particularly evident. I mean it was one when you go back to the galleries and think of Tritons carrying sea nymphs on their back, this wonderful design for the birth of Venus, how a lot of the visual language adapted very freely and in a way very compellingly and then of course the other series that Rubens, towards the end of his life, created for Philip of Spain for a hunting lodge outside of Madrid. You can see that on display in the galleries in the Rubens room, how Rubens imagines Zeppelin and Aurora and their encounter, which seems way less forceful. In the background you have again Aurora's chariot drawn by two horses. It could also look at Poussin and his variation of the theme, which is also on display in room 29, I believe. The Caracci's approach to classical sculpture also established potentially a precedence for Gian Lorenzo Bernini, whose relationship with the Caracci's work was complex and profound. Bernini's biographer Baldinucci records that the sculptor considered Annibale the greatest painter who had appeared since ancient times. The young artists must have visited the Farnese Palace or must have been aware about the visual content that was developed in this workshop and in the gallery itself to study Annibale's transformation of classical sculpture into painted flesh. The visual comparison with this three-dimensional sketch on the right hand side, so that's a terracotta sketch that Bernini made in the 50s much later for a fountain, may to a certain extent reveal Bernini's interest in how the painter translates the painter being Agostino. The qualities of three-dimensional sculptural volume into two dimensions and conversely informed his own practice of infusing a sculpture with the painterly qualities of an animate surface that creates an almost trembling pulsating surface. Rudolf, and I'm gonna finish in a couple of moments, Rudolf Wittkower's brilliant analysis of Bernini's works demonstrated that the artist's innovation lay in his ability to combine multiple viewpoints into a single sculptural composition, creating works meant to be experienced in motion. One could argue that the visual transformation of the idealized stillness that's inherent to sculpture into dynamic narratives as seen in the work of the Carracci brothers in the Farnese gallery was one conceptual foundation of the revolutionary approach to three-dimensional form in early baroque sculpture. Recent scholarship has begun to more fully appreciate and articulate how the Carracci study of classical sculpture, as opposed to the study after the life model for which they were famed in Bologna, created not only a stylistic rift but a new theoretical framework that understood Roman antiquity not as a model only to be imitated with an antiquarian interest but reinterpreted it as a visual language to be spoken with eloquence. This perspective was essential for Bernini as well but also for Rubens who sought to challenge the ancients in executions not to escape their principles. And I'm only showing these examples to kind of animate your gaze when you look into early baroque art. The wonderful early Bernini Neptune and Triton, and here the comparison is the open-chested Triton as opposed to something that's curled up or closed off, is in the Victorian Orbit Museum and I can just invite you to go there and have a look for yourselves whether this is something worth thinking about or not. So to conclude, the Farnese Gallery represents I think a crucial moment in the development of the Carracci brothers and the formation of the early baroque style in Rome when multiple traditions converge to create something genuinely innovative. The cartoons at the National Gallery are truly extraordinary record of this moment and incredible objects to have survived. They capture not only an ideal but a process of creating it. Their significance lies not just in their aesthetic achievement but also in the insight they provide into the sophisticated working techniques used to create the illusion. And I can only invite you again go back up after the talk have a look at what you can see on the surface. They tell you a lot about how they were designed, how quickly, how rapidly they were drawn, but also how they were subsequently used to be used as working tools. The brothers' approach to sources of classical visual language and forms of expression extends far beyond the Farnese Gallery though by establishing a new relationship between the art of the ancients and direct observation what Bellori would later characterize as the idea of beauty derived from looking at nature but guided by the understanding and renewed appreciation of antiquity. This is part of the intellectual and artistic foundation that would play a key role in Italian art throughout the 17th century especially in Rome and continue to reverberate in the works of Domenichino, Guido Reni and Pietro da Cotona. Some of them worked in the second phase with Annibale in the Farnese Gallery. The Cardinal's patronage and Fulvio Orsini's intellectual guidance certainly created the conditions for this achievement demonstrating the importance of the erudite social context for this specific artistic innovation. It remains one of the most rewarding subjects to study in Rome, very difficult to access if you ever have the chance. It's today the site of the French Embassy. I think they have two or three guided visits per week if you are in Rome and have a chance to see it. I can only recommend it. Its synthesis of intellectual sophistication and visual rigor continues to captivate scholars and visitors alike, securing its place as one of the supreme achievements of early modern western painting. I thank you very much for your attention and hope you enjoyed the talk and the exhibition.