Baschenis at the Met.(Review)

"Who?" is a perfectly acceptable response to the news that an Evaristo Baschenis exhibition recently opened at the Metropolitan Museum. Until the early 1950s, this Northern Italian painter of still lifes was obscure to the point of being known only to specialists, and, despite rekindled interest in his work, the facts of his life remained largely untraced until recently. The great French art historian Charles Sterling, for many years Curator of Paintings at the Louvre, discussed Baschenis at some length in his pioneering book Still Life Painting from Antiquity to the Present Time (1952). "Outside of Rome," Sterling wrote, "it was precisely in the North, in the person of Evaristo Baschenis ... that Caravaggio found a follower of talent"--of such talent that Sterling called him the most original painter of still life in seventeenth-century Italy. He compared Baschenis favorably, too, with the Spanish bodegone painters, noting that like the Spaniards, the Italian painted "many kitchen pieces in which livid poultry and blood-stained meat glow with a certain pathos," yet Sterling chose to reproduce in his book not a kitchen piece, but one of the luminous compositions with musical instruments for which Baschenis was acclaimed in his lifetime.

In 1953, Baschenis's presence in the Milanese exhibition I pittori della realta in Lombardia ("Lombard realist painters") fostered an appreciation of this astonishing artist, but the present level of knowledge about his work dates mainly from the 1970s and 1980s; information about his life was pieced together only in the 1990s. (The Baschenis bibliography comprises slightly more than a hundred entries, from 1674 to the present; more than two-thirds of these and all of the really substantial items were published after 1970.) Careful sifting of archives has unearthed such revealing documents as an inventory of the artist's possessions made by the executors of his will and records of the auction of his belongings held after his death. Historians can now say with some certainty that Baschenis's father was a merchant, that he came from a family of artists, and that he was not only a painter, but also a priest, musician, and collector of musical instruments.

The fruit of these researches was the still definitive exhibition held in 1996 in Bergamo, the painter's native city, which seems to have at last established his importance as the inventor of the still life with musical instruments and as a provocative, surprising, and often first-rate painter. Now, happily for anyone in New York before the beginning of March 2001, a wonderful, small show, "The Still Lifes of Evaristo Baschenis: The Music of Silence,"(1) the first exhibition of the painter's work to be held outside of Italy, has been installed in the Metropolitan's Lehman wing. It's not to be missed, not only because of the excellence and drama of Baschenis's pictures, but also because most of them are never on public view. There are no works by Baschenis anywhere in the U.S., and the majority of those in Europe remain in private hands. At the exhibition's press preview, Keith Christiansen, Curator of the Department of European Paintings at the Met, a true insider in the world of seventeenth-century art, was exultant at seeing many pictures for the first time. Only the organizer of the show, Andrea Bayer, the department's assistant curator, had visited the collections in which Baschenis's paintings remain closeted--some of them since they were commissioned by the ancestors of their present owners--so Christiansen was in much the same position as the rest of us, and, like the rest of us, he was thrilled.

Despite the expansion of knowledge about Baschenis over the past half-century, Sterling's early discussion of the Bergamasque's work in relation to that of Baroque Italy's most innovative and arguably greatest painter, Caravaggio, remains both acute and apt. (Sterling was no casual observer of seventeenth-century painting, but an expert on the French Caravaggesque painter Georges de la Tour, and was co-curator of a crucial 1934 exhibition that reintroduced this then-little-known master to a larger audience.) Since Bergamo, where Baschenis spent his life, was an extreme western outpost of the Venetian state, we could expect Bergamasque artists to be influenced by their counterparts in La Serenissima, and we would not be disappointed. Yet Bergamo is far closer to Milan and Brescia than to Venice and is located not in the Veneto but in Lombardy, the native province also of Michelangelo Merisi, better known as Caravaggio, after his ancestral town near Milan. Whether or not this common regional heritage was what disposed Baschenis towards the work of his celebrated compatriot, for Sterling, Caravaggio was the younger painter's primary influence, the source of "the Caravaggesque rigor of forms in which the mind found its satisfactions" and of the sober, dramatic light that wrenches forms out of darkness--a light, Sterling emphasized, which was wholly realistic rather than symbolic or mystical. Most important, Sterling wrote,

 
   It must have been Caravaggio's compositions that opened his eyes to the 
   possibilities afforded by musical instruments to the painter bent on making 
   still life into an assemblage of fascinating forms. He elicted from viols 
   and lutes an admirable plastic music. Their fully rounded bodies, smooth or 
   grooved, their taut necks and curving scrolls all answer each other through 
   the half-light with echos of arabesques and silky gleams. It has been 
   wondered where Baschenis might have taken the idea of this subject.... It 
   is enough to glance at the lute and violin which Caravaggio crossed at the 
   feet of his Love Triumphant (formerly Berlin Museum) to be certain of 
   Baschenis's immediate source of inspiration. 

That Caravaggio's innovations exerted a powerful influence on painters of Baschenis's generation is a matter of art historical record; Caravaggio's notoriety and influence transcended national boundaries in the seventeenth century. That Baschenis--born in 1617, seven years after Caravaggio's death, he lived until 1677--travelled to Rome where he would have been able to see works by Caravaggio is now a matter of art historical fact. But, as Sterling also acknowledged, other precedents for Baschenis's subject matter existed a century earlier in Netherlandish paintings, a good many of which found their way to Italy, and even closer to home, in Italian intarsia decorations--trompe l'oeil shelves and cupboards loaded with books and musical instruments, armor and scientific equipment, rendered with cunning illusionism by fitting together pieces of different woods. (The Met has a stupendous example of one of these magical interiors, the Gubbio studiolo of Federico da Montefeltro.) Then, too, in the early part of Baschenis's life, Spain ruled Milan, which brought to the region, along with connections to the Netherlands and its art, another powerful tradition of naturalistic still life painting in the work of the bodegone artists.

The essays and entries in the exhibition's beautifully produced, informative catalogue discuss the effect of all of these elements on Baschenis's formation. Yet in the Lehman wing, it is Sterling's conception of the painter's aesthetic inheritance that is brought most vividly to life. The show begins with the New York version of Caravaggio's Lute Player (a second version is in the Hermitage), from a private collection, a seductive early image of a plump, androgynous, dark-eyed boy in an open white shirt. It's hard to imagine anyone more different from the austere, rather rigid individuals who punctuate some of Baschenis's pictures in the Lehman wing, but once we break free of the engaging gaze and elegant hands of Caravaggio's ambiguous boy to concentrate on the instrument he plays and the objects strewn across the table at which he sits, Sterling's thesis seems amply borne out. A violin and bow, a recorder, and a spinet, arranged with an open musical score, herald Baschenis's future motifs. The position of the lute, steeply angled away from us, shows Caravaggio's ability to render complicated forms in difficult perspective, and brilliant light emphasizes the warm wood of the instruments, each with its characteristic profile and mass, and the even warmer red of the rug that covers the table, while the pale flesh and paler shirt of the lutenist seem spot-lit against a boundless expanse of warm darkness--all of which announces the ways in which Baschenis will address his chosen subjects.