"Veronese's Allegories: Virtue, Love & Exploration in Renaissance Venice.".(Exhibition notes)

"Veronese's Allegories: Virtue, Love & Exploration in Renaissance Venice" The Frick Collection, New York. April 11, 2006-July 16, 2006

Initiated over a decade ago by its former Director Samuel Sachs, and continued by his successor, Anne Poulet, the Frick Collection has sponsored a series of small, "focused" exhibitions that have added considerably to New York's cultural landscape. The pace of these undertakings has progressively increased as has their scope and ambition--limited only by the space available in the magnificent Carrere and Hastings-designed hotel particulier.

New Yorkers should be grateful that they are being offered such a steady stream of thoughtfully arranged and intelligently curated "memoranda" in the visual arts. As appropriate adjuncts to the Frick's permanent collections, these exhibits pertain principally to European painting, sculpture, and drawing, from the fifteenth through nineteenth centuries.

Currently arranged in the spacious central rotunda are five large canvasses by the great Venetian High Renaissance master Paolo Veronese (1528-1588). Two, The Choice Between Virtue and Vice and Wisdom and Strength, have been admired in the adjoining gallery since Henry Clay Frick purchased them in 1912. A third, Mars and Venus United by Love, has had a home steps away, at the Metropolitan Museum, for an equally long time. The remaining two, titled (somewhat ambiguously) Allegories of Navigation, are on loan from the Los Angeles County Museum. They have survived together as a pendant pair since they were painted, but emerged from relative obscurity only about thirty years ago.

The five Allegories are large and, grouped in such close proximity, create a vision of overpowering opulence. Anyone familiar with the Palazzo Ducale can easily imagine what heightened effect these lavish tapestries of color might have attained in their original settings of elaborately carved and gilded fret-work. They nonetheless resonate more than adequately in the chaste restraint of the Frick's Louis Seize gallery. Opulence, of course, is the one word inevitably recurring in descriptions of Paolo Veronese's art, virtually from Vasari onwards--an opulence as might be experienced in a lavish stage production, with costumes, settings, and casting all contributing to the experience. And who can resist grand theater so brilliantly conceived? Indeed, apart from a brief parenthesis of disfavor under the censorious, neo-classic gaze of Mengs and his contemporaries, the works of Veronese have commanded virtually uninterrupted acclaim since the sixteenth century. Even Ruskin showed a perceptive understanding of the great Venetian's art by drawing an unexpected comparison with none other than Rembrandt: multiple painterly values subsumed into one visual truth (the Dutchman) vs. one painterly technique at the service of multiple visual truths (the Venetian).

The thin but amply informative catalogue that accompanies the show was prepared by Xavier E Salomon, curatorial fellow at the Frick Collection. He is particularly attentive to the possible origins and subjects of the five canvasses, and to their subsequent histories. Such an analysis serves to justify-beyond the sheer visual spectacle that they offer--this gathering of diverse strands of Veronese's art.

The two Los Angeles Allegories of Navigation were clearly conceived as a pair and may well have been part of a larger decorative cycle. Their history prior to the later nineteenth century, however, remains unknown. By contrast, both the Frick paintings and their companion in the Metropolitan share a recorded provenance that begins in 1621. In that year, all three are mentioned in a posthumous inventory of the collection of one of the most erudite and splendid rulers of Renaissance Europe, Emperor Rudolph 11. As spoils of war they were removed to Sweden and, later in the seventeenth century, brought to Rome by the notoriously colorful and controversial Queen Christina of Sweden. Passing, after her death, to the family of her lover Azzolini, they were sold in 1721 to the Sun King's nephew (and later regent of France) Philippe d'Orleans. The ...