Palazzo Strozzi ascolta

From
A mysterious masterpiece. The world of Linder Gallery
edited by Michael John Gorman
Mandragora, Florence 2009

Conversation recorded on 12 December 2008
in a private residence in NewYork in the presence of the original painting.

PARTICIPANTS:

JAMES M. BRADBURNE is a British-Canadian architect, designer and museum specialist who has designedWorld’s Fair pavilions, science centres, and international art exhibitions. Educated in Canada and England, he developed numerous exhibitions, research projects and symposia for UNESCO, national governments, private foundations and museums worldwide during the course of the past fifteen years. He is currently Director General of the Palazzo Strozzi Foundation,which is responsible for Florence’s largest temporary exhibition space, the Palazzo Strozzi.

RONALD H. CORDOVER is an entrepreneur and financial executive. He is presently Chairman and CEO of theRobert Allen Group, the leading US designer and marketer of decorative fabrics and furnishings to the interior design trade. He is an MIT educated scientist with a PhD in laser physics/electrical engineering. He and his wife
Barbara are also art collectors with broad interests including seventeenth-century Flemish art.

MICHAEL JOHN GORMAN is the Founding Director of the Science Gallery at Trinity College Dublin, and has worked extensively in Europe and the US on developing and curating exhibitions and festivals connecting science and art. He is the author of several books including Buckminster Fuller: Designing for Mobility (2005). He has been investigating the history of the Linder Gallery since 1998 and has written, with Alexander Marr, the first critical study of the painting,‘”Others see it yet otherwise”: disegno and pictura in a Flemish gallery interior’, The Burlington Magazine, no. 1247, 149 (February 2007), 85-91.

GORMAN: Well, here we are — sitting in front of a painting that was designed almost four hundred years ago as a puzzle. A painting designed to provoke a certain kind of conversation and a certain kind of deciphering. And it’s a remarkable painting. It depicts the interior of a picture gallery with a collection of paintings and an assortment of different kinds of sculpture, and also a very impressive selection of astronomical and mathematical instruments, a series of drawings and portrait medals, as well as a pair of figures who occupy a really important place in the foreground — an old man with a young woman reclining on his lap. Ron, what was it about this anonymous and previously unknown painting that drew you to it as a collector?

CORDOVER: The principal initial attraction was the extraordinary execution of the work. Its level of detail is really extraordinary. Its being on a copper substrate allows for that special character. Also the subject matter being treated is one that is so much a part of our personal history in science and the interaction between science and art…And the fact that this painting was unknown. At the time we acquired the painting there was no knowledge, at least published knowledge, of its provenance before the previous owner acquired it in the mid-twentieth century.
And it hadn’t been attributed. For a painting of this quality to not have been attributed seemed odd.

WESCHLER: How was it presented to you?

CORDOVER: It was the cover lot at a major auction in one of the New York auction houses—at Christie’s. And it was presented as an “important Flemish gallery painting”.

WESCHLER: Among the lot itself or in the auction were there other gallery paintings or Flemish paintings?

CORDOVER: It was the only gallery painting in their normal Old Master paintings sale. But the collector, Thomas Mellon Evans, was a collector of broad interests and had his collection posthumously redistributed through a series of sales that included important Impressionist and post-Impressionist objects. But this particular painting was fascinating because so little was known about it and yet it was such an obviously special object.

GORMAN: Do you think that your background in physics affected your engagement with the painting?

CORDOVER: Well, there’s no doubt about that because in the centre of the picture, thrust out so that you can’t miss the artist’s intent, is a wonderful summary of the body of knowledge about the movement of the planets around the Sun.

GORMAN: You said that when you got it there was very little known about the provenance. What have you learned since about the story of the painting?

CORDOVER: Well, we were fortunate that we knew where the owner had acquired the painting, and in the old archives of that art gallery we found a series of letters from the Rothschild family that defined the painting as a Jan Brueghel the Elder object in the Rothschild collection in Vienna. It was thrilling to make that discovery, but also quite disturbing, because we knew that much of the Vienna collection had been confiscated by the Nazis at the beginning of the war. Subsequent research in the Rothschild Archive in London has shown that this, along with five or six other objects, was granted an export license after the material was rescued by the Allies at the end of the war, and before the Austrian government took the remainder of the rescued Rothschild collection into the Austrian national museums.

GORMAN: Right. When the Nazis took the painting from the Rothschilds, they kept it in a salt mine in Salzkammergut where they stored a huge amount of the paintings they had taken from museums and private citizens. And in the Nazi inventory in the Rothschild Archive in London there’s a little red tick beside this picture. And the little red tick meant that this was intended by Hitler for the Führermuseum in Linz, which was Speer’s enormous museum project. So that was where it was intended to go except for the Allies coming and restoring it to the Rothschild family, from whence it made its way to the US. But now I’d like to go back into the world of the seventeenth century, the moment when this picture was created, and I’d like to turn to you, Pamela. What’s this picture saying about material culture and about how people collected objects in the seventeenth century?

SMITH: I think that if you look at the types of objects, there were three categories in the Hapsburg collections: scientifica, naturalia and artificialia. And that was fairly standard for collections at the time. The scientific instruments, the celestial globe and the surveying instruments — all of those kinds of instruments, even if we now think of them as the applied arts or the applied sciences — were scientifica. Then, in terms of naturalia, there are no naturalia there except the painted naturalia. So the flowers, mainly. But really that’s about it for naturalia.

GORMAN: Except the fruit in the top left.

WESCHLER: Paintings of fruit. Which are, by the way, paintings of paintings of fruit. Though, ontologically, they have the same status, paradoxically speaking.

SMITH: Exactly. Although it’s actually one of the recommendations stated in some books of painting in the seventeenth century. For example, Gerard de Lairesse, late seventeenth century, says that you should have paintings of flowers and fruits and animals in order to substitute for the real thing. So we have naturalia there in a sense, although it’s not as obvious as it would have been in an actual Kunstkammer.

MARR: And of course we have the natural world beyond the gallery.

GORMAN: Right, the garden. But what’s this picture saying about our desire to understand the natural world?

SMITH: Well… First of all I think one of the guiding keys is mathematics. I mean, that’s clear from the whole picture. I think the crucial point is this intersection between what we think of as science and art at the time. They were really seen as part of the same endeavour.

CORDOVER: I think that’s a critical observation. We have to see this with seventeenth-century eyes, not twenty-first-century eyes.

WESCHLER: It’s around now that they begin to delaminate from each other, and the way it continues to this day is in the way we talk about ‘Arts and Sciences’. A liberal education is Arts and Sciences. In fact things have descended to the point where nowadays, in newspapers, it’s Arts and Leisure. But in those days there was absolutely no difference between the two—Michelangelo is a scientist and an artist, and that’s the same thing. And it only begins to fall away around that time.

CORDOVER: Yes. Michael John made the observation that this painting is intended at least partially as a puzzle painting, in the sense that there are a lot of clues to deeper meanings, but there is also within this painting, especially on that centre table, a statement of cumulative knowledge about the real world. You know, it’s not a puzzle at all to assert observations about measuring.

GORMAN: I think that’s important. There’s a lot here about the collection of empirical data about the natural world, and particularly the positions and movements of the stars and planets.

CORDOVER: Which is why this painting was exciting for us. It’s because this, in our minds, was the first moment when pragmatic experimentation and observation of the real world began to joust with other philosophy, other reflection—even religious reflection—about what our universe really represents.

WESCHLER: Taking it one step further, I would also argue that this is the moment when art starts being art as opposed to being science. For all of your claims that the old man and the woman should be read principally iconographically — that they represent this or they represent that and so forth — there are times when a cigar is only a cigar, and there is something quite moving about that girl asleep on the lap of that old man—something crying out to be seen not just as a symbol, but as a relationship between two human beings. Thirty years from here you’ll be getting Vermeer with his insistence on the substantive presence of the sitter as a person and not as a genre and not as a symbol, not as a puzzle — not as anything other than a person.
And I think that’s already beginning to happen in a time like this.

GORMAN: Alex, where does this picture sit in the genre of pictures of galleries?

MARR: Well, it’s interesting in light of the point Ren made about this being a moment when art becomes art, because this genre of gallery interiors is precisely about that. It’s about the moment at which art appreciation becomes a recognized phenomenon, a recognized and accepted thing to do. This particular genre of pictures of collections emerged at exactly the same time that the “liefhebbers van schilderen” — the so called ‘lovers of painting’—were first admitted as a category of member to the Guild of St Luke, the artist’s guild in Antwerp. So it’s a recognition that art isn’t just about making. It’s about appreciating and evaluating and discussing.
And that’s really what this genre meant to be about. It’s showing images that cognoscenti could stand in front of discussing differences between style, differences between manner, differences between treatment of themes.

CORDOVER: While I agree completely that this genre of painting—Flemish gallery painting—is precisely as you’ve described it, this work has such striking differences from essentially all the other Flemish gallery paintings that we’ve looked at because it doesn’t have cognoscenti within it and it isn’t principally about a particular collection of either art objects or other kinds of objects—musical instruments or artificialia or naturalia of any sort. It’s about knowledge.

MARR: I would agree with that, but I think this is essentially a hybrid. Yes, you’re quite right—there are no cognoscenti actually in the picture. I don’t think that that means that this isn’t an image that should be thought about in terms of cognoscenti and appreciation.

WESCHLER: This reminds me of David Hockney, who has recently taken to painting these landscapes which he calls his “figure paintings”. And if you say to him, “But where are the figures?” he replies, “You are the figure.” In the same way, in answer to the question of where are the cognoscenti—you are the cognoscenti.

MARR: And it is also about knowledge—but it’s about lots of different kinds of knowledge. I think there’s no doubt that knowledge of the cosmos and how the world fits together is a key theme. But I think that we shouldn’t forget that this is also about recognition of the styles of different painters. So I think it’s about—going back to arts and sciences and how they’re allmixed up—I think this is an image about different kinds of knowledge.

GORMAN: You could say the picture is a machine to produce cognoscenti.

SMITH: But mathematical knowledge predominates in the painting. I mean the mathematics of measurement…Don’t you think?

MARR: Well, yes and no. If we were to count up the number of mathematical objects and the number of art objects I think we’d probably find that the art objects outnumber the mathematical ones.

GORMAN: There’s a question of prominence though. The mathematical and astronomical instruments are especially emphasized…

WESCHLER: They’re actually pressed forward and lit up in a particular way.

MARR: It’s notable, isn’t it, if we agree—as I’m sure we can—that a key element of this painting is about mathematical knowledge, that the setting in which this is being presented is a gallery interior. Or maybe rather we should call it a study or a studio or a Kunstkammer—whatever we want to use. This is a room in which lots of different kinds of objects and individuals meet. Just like here.

CORDOVER: Well, I attribute that to the fact that the object itself is an extraordinary work of art that comes out of the studio of an important Northern European painting family that had, along with others, created a series of these kinds of objects. So that even though the fundamental idea for the theme of this painting is the assertion about the knowledge of the cosmos and the exploration of that knowledge, it’s put into the setting of this pure art form.

GORMAN: In the Brueghel–Rubens Five Senses series, surely linked to this picture, you have for example the Sense of Sight with a very different gallery space with dogs, parrots and monkeys, and there are many gallery interiors that have animals cavorting through the gallery, and it’s a very different kind of space from this picture. And then, I suppose, at the other end of the spectrum one has the later gallery interiors of people like David Teniers the Younger, who represented existing collections where you have no mathematical instruments, but you have people—and you have representations of real pictures. So where does this picture fit in that sequence?

MARR: Maybe it would be helpful just to give a very quick overview of the genre?

WESCHLER: Yes, so tell us the history of this genre. Where does it come from?

MARR: Well, the gallery interior is invented in the second decade of the seventeenth century. We’re not sure whether it was by the Francken studio or the Brueghel studio, but they’re amongst the earliest developers—key Antwerp cabinet painters. There are several broad categories of picture, all of which overlap so that the boundaries between them aren’t clear-cut. In essence you have what are called allegorical cabinets. Michael John referred to the famous Brueghel–Rubens’ Sense of Sight. That would be an example of a painting in which very obviously allegorical figures are inserted into a gallery setting for some kind of emblematic or narrative purpose.

GORMAN: Which this picture would also represent.

MARR: Right. Then you have so-called portraits of collections, which are images that seem to record, with varying degrees of faithfulness, actual collections that existed in the period. The best examples are the later ones from the 1650s by Teniers of Archduke Leopold Wilhelm’s famous collection, of which there are numerous examples.

WESCHLER: And why would that have been painted, by the way? Was that because when he went travelling he wanted to be able to show off his collection?

MARR: Most frequently they were meant as gifts. Partially they’re records. Some of the Teniers paintings were later engraved as a sort of a proto-catalogue. But often they were gifts.

CORDOVER: Also, to show off.

MARR: Yes.

WESCHLER: Is it like my having a picture of my daughter in my wallet so I canshow you?

MARR: It’s more that, if a prince is visiting a member of the aristocracy in a neighbouring state, he might bring this as a gift. Which is a nice present, but also displays the prince’s own magnificence. And in a sense it’s about fashioning himself as a great patron and connoisseur.

WESCHLER: Or as John Berger would have said, the upsurge of oil painting and the upsurge of property are simultaneous.

MARR: Yes, very much so. Then there is the other type of gallery interior which is neither a portrait of the collection nor is it very obviously allegorical. But it seems to show connoisseurs within a cabinet setting discussing various kinds of object. It will always include pictures. Almost always include statuary. Frequently it will include other kinds of artificialia such as medals, sometimes scientific instruments. Also, sometimes, naturalia. And it is frequently the case that gallery interiors are collaborative works, by many different painters, with the identification of the hands of the different authors being part of the pleasure of owning such a work.

CORDOVER: But the objects that are identifiable tend to be the scientific instruments and not the paintings.

MARR: Yes. The pictures within the pictures that you see in these genres are sometimes identifiable as existing pictures that we can see hanging in galleries today. Sometimes they’re not. But that was part of the fun — that these galleries included pastiches as well as real images.

WESCHLER: Oil is very good at portraying stuff you have, as opposed to fresco, which might be good at portraying God or the Crucifixion and things like that.

MARR: This is very much about consumerism, there’s no doubt about that. Antwerp is a great trading centre. It’s a massive centre of commerce and it has a large middle class. So that’s an important point to make about the evolution of this genre in that particular place at that particular time. It’s to do with trade and mercantile aspiration.

GORMAN: But Antwerp was falling into decay at this time though, as the Dutch were really taking off. Amsterdam was emerging as the new centre of commerce. After the Dutch blockaded the river Scheldt, Antwerp began more and more to focus on luxury goods including paintings and jewellery. Perhaps it’s more about commerce past than future.

WESCHLER: For all of the stuff you’re saying on the connoisseurship side of it, I do think that this particular genre is haunted by surfeit. There’s a ‘too-muchness’ to it. You would think that somebody who knew how to wield that mathematical stuff would know how to make a table that was in perspective with the rest of the objects, but this one conspicuously isn’t—it is conspicuously out of perspective. This allows me to have two ideas about what might be going on. One of them is that although the green table is effectively a circle, done like that it becomes an ellipse, which is itself a comment on Kepler.

GORMAN: Isn’t it an octagon?

WESCHLER: Well, yeah, it is an octagon, but it suggests a circle, though in fact, if you look at it closer, it inscribes an ellipse as opposed to a circle, so that’s one possibility. But the other thing that seems to me more interesting is it is suggesting a sort of Land of Cockaigne. Peter Bruegel the Elder famously does a painting in which there’s a table exactly like that, at an odd upturned angle, and the theme of that painting is precisely this too-muchness. I mention that because the contemporary painter Vincent Desiderio recently did a painting which he calls Cockaigne and which also conspicuously references the Bruegel. As in the Bruegel, Desiderio’s is a painting of after a feast, the feast is over, and scattered all about the floor are hundreds and hundreds of art books. Just too much…And there is that feeling
in this painting as well to me.

CORDOVER: There’s an extraordinary element in the observation about the table being out of perspective. It is a deliberate ‘error’, because the study drawing from which the painting obviously comes has that same table in perfect perspective. Making the table the centre of attraction is accomplished by placing the objects on it in ways that call attention to them, and by creating the odd perspective for further emphasis.

WESCHLER: It’s thrust in your lap and it’s about to fall into your lap.

SMITH: Yeah, but to me it highlights it and says this is the key to the painting. The Land of Cockaigne is fascinating. I never would have come up with that.

WESCHLER: I basically am to art history what Pluto is to the solar system. I’m not even sure whether I’m a planet.

SMITH: But has any work been done on whether there are any underdrawings?

GORMAN: Yes. There’s a very clear perspective underdrawing. We have some of the infrared studies here.

SMITH: Oh great. And so, does it show other objects? Because my thought is actually that there is far less copiousness in this picture than in other gallery interiors.

GORMAN: The Sense of Sight, for example.

SMITH: Yes. Exactly. There’s much less exotica, much less that is supposed to seduce the eye.

GORMAN: Less voluptuousness, really.

SMITH: Exactly. And the nude Campaspe is absent from the study drawing, and if there is this woman showing her leg there, she’s still very clothed. And she’s allegorical. She’s clearly allegorical.

CORDOVER: And she’s clearly Pictura. She’s got paintbrushes and a palette.

SMITH: So she’s no longer just a voluptuous nude. But, you know, it really strikes me just how little this contains of all of the sensory and sensual elements that you see in other gallery interiors.

WESCHLER: My masters in art were both literature professors. Edward Snow and Harry Berger. In his great book on Peter Bruegel the Elder, Inside Bruegel: The Play of Images in Children’s Games, in which he chronicles fifteen years spent looking at one painting, Snow makes the rather astonishing assertion that the only mind as capacious as Bruegel’s in the history of the world might be Shakespeare’s. Now, I don’t want to make such a sort of claim for this painting, but it is interesting that a painting can contain both extremes—in the way that a Shakespeare play can be about both overabundance and starvation. I think it’s T.S. Eliot who at one point has that line about history gives, but she gives “with such supple confusions that the giving famishes
the craving”. And I think it’s worth imagining how in this period, not only have art and science not yet fully delaminated, but neither have literature and art fully separated. This is a few years after Shakespeare, right? A mind like Shakespeare’s was capable — and you could assume that an audience would likewise be capable — of getting both starvation and overabundance, and I would think that you could look at paintings that way too. Such that a lot of these things that are paradoxical or puzzle like in this image are finally about human nature. About what it is to be human and to be filled with contradiction.

SMITH: And what humans can know.

WESCHLER: Do art historians read Edward Snow’s book on Bruegel? I think it’s one of the great books of all time and I really recommend it. It’s fifteen years of looking at one painting. And as with what I assume will be the case with this book, it has dozens, hundreds of details in it. At the time I read his book, I asked Snow, “But isn’t this a peculiarly anachronistic way of looking at a painting, since you can only talk about the painting this way when you can publish your analysis along with all these details, and they couldn’t have done that in the Old Days. Isn’t this just the way we look at things nowadays because we happen to have the technology to be able to take details, blow them up and so forth and so on.”And he blew up at me and he said, “On the contrary. Understand,” and he was talking about Bruegel the Elder at this point, “that this is probably one of the most brilliant men who ever lived. He is working on a single painting over let’s say six months, eight months, a year. He is having ideas about things he painted yesterday that he is now reconfiguring over here. This is a man much smarter than you or me and he’s having all these kinds of things going on, detailed thoughts about this particular location and how it balances against that and so forth. He’s containing multitudes. And he’s doing it for somebody who will eventually own the canvas and place it in his study or over his desk or something, in a time when he doesn’t have TV sets or posters or magazines. It is intended to be looked at for fifty years and every day have something new be seen in it. In fact, what is anachronistic is to come upon that painting in Vienna and spend ten minutes looking at it in a room crammed with twenty similar paintings. That’s not the way you’re supposed to look at it.”

CORDOVER: Earlier, we were discussing the complexities of this painting and the fact that there may be a number of hidden meanings, you know, a surfeit of big ideas to explore over a lifetime of viewing. It’s very clear that at the centre of the painting there is this oddly presented table, and in the most prominent place in the painting, thrust forward on the table, there is a drawing that is just shouting at you, ‘this is what I’m about’. That drawing illustrates the debate that was going on between scientists at the beginning of the seventeenth century, following Copernicus’ assertions in the middle of the sixteenth century that Ptolemy had it wrong placing the Earth at the centre of the solar system and the Sun and other planets revolving around the Earth. Copernicus, of course, placed the Sun at the centre. Finally there is a third suggestion here by Tycho Brahe, the astronomer to the Hapsburg emperor until the end of the sixteenth century. He asserted that there is another solution to cosmology that allows the Earth its prominence at the centre; but it requires a tortured mathematics that isn’t persuasive to anyone but perhaps those with a fundamentalist religious bias.

WESCHLER: So the order, by the way, historically is Ptolemy, Copernicus, and then Tycho Brahe comes after that?

CORDOVER: Correct.

WESCHLER: That reminds me of the phenomenon of how belief breaks down. I have a footnote in Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder where I talk about how my daughter believed in Santa Claus, then stopped believing in Santa Claus and then the following year had amore elaborate, more insanely baroque belief in Santa Claus than ever before. And if you think about it, that’s the same thing that happens with the Age of Marvel. In order to get to America in 1492, there had to be an incredible amount of positivist mathematical knowledge of the sky, the stars and the solar system. But then what was discovered in America was so weird as to sanction all sorts of belief in things that had previously been debunked. I mean, if narwhal tusks are
real, why couldn’t there be unicorn horns? And if parrot feathers were in fact all those weird colours, why couldn’t all those things that Marco Polo or Mandeville talked about be true? Such that after you had had this kind of positivist upsurge to be able to get to America, you had this kind of backslop of marvel. In the same way, maybe, you go from Ptolemaic nonsense to Copernicanism and then you have this backslop to Tycho Brahe.

GORMAN: I’d like to just step back from the detail a bit and look at the picture as a whole. First of all, the space—is there anything we can say about this architectural space? You’ve got this T-shaped floor plan, these windows, this closed door… Do we think this is a real or imaginary place?

CORDOVER: It’s hard to imagine that it could be completely real, because I don’t think you’d have openings to the outside putting at risk all of these fragile and wonderful works of art.

WESCHLER: And books.

GORMAN: Right, but is this meant to be a completely imaginary place, do we think? Or is it a mixture in some way?

MARR: Well, I would plump possibly for a mixture. The simple answer is that we don’t know, as we’ll see when we get into the details. But certainly gallery spaces similar to this, like this, existed, of this sort of scale with roughly this kind of arrangement. Frequently they did have vistas, admittedly not open and not on gardens, but you commonly have vistas out into the surrounding landscape. It’s part of the paragone, including the argument between art and nature that was so common at the time.

GORMAN: Well, let’s look at this landscape that we see through this open space over this balustrade. Is this a Flemish garden or an Italian garden?

SMITH: Or Roman, with the obelisk.

GORMAN: What is the obelisk there for?

WESCHLER: The obelisks start coming into Rome out of Egypt in many cases. Athanasius Kircher is describing them because he thinks he’s figured out how to decipher them.

MARR: It’s quite a common feature of Flemish architecture. Hans Vredeman de Vries, the famous Flemish painter who is also a designer of perspectival interiors like this, uses obelisks very frequently in around 1600. So it’s an antique motif which crops up in all sorts of places, it just means antiquity.

GORMAN: Or does it? Could it be a reference to astronomy? I mean, if one looks at Christoph Scheiner’s books you have the Rosa Ursina where he’s using obelisks almost as a solar observational instrument. So could the obelisk be an extension of the array of instruments?

MARR: Possibly, and it looks like a gnomon, which is the needle that casts the shadow in sundials. But it’s also just a common garden feature.

SMITH: But it also refers to the project of raising the obelisks, which would also be referring to the potential of machines and mathematics.

MARR: I don’t know. It’s such a common object—just like seeing a column in many ways.

CORDOVER: In looking at this garden, it has a very formal set of elements associated with it, with circular designs, plantings, and yet in the foreground and on the right side of the garden there is a wildness to it that evokes some of the great landscapes of Jan Brueghel.

WESCHLER: I agree with you. If you take your hand and cover that, you’re in Eden, you’re in Arcadia. It’s only there that you see the other.

SMITH: But you know what I find curious—there’s Rome in the further ground of the painting, there’s antiquity, with the arch, the entablature, the obelisk and the open air, and here in the foreground it’s Germany with the Linder arms. It looks like a kind of dialogue between Italy and Northern Europe, or Flanders.

CORDOVER: Just look at this. [He is holding a painting removed from the wall of an adjacent room.]

GORMAN: This is a Jan Brueghel the Elder landscape.

SMITH: Oh yeah, no question. Yeah. Wow.

WESCHLER: Not everyone can pull rank like this.

GORMAN: I always wonder, are the leaves done the same way in this?

CORDOVER: They are. They are. If you look closely at the singular way he’s painted the leaves…

SMITH: The only thing is the vine—the grapevine here.

GORMAN: What about the fountain? Now the fountain, if one looks at it very closely, actually has a putto on top of it playing the bagpipes with water spurting out of the bagpipes, and it’s extremely similar to a fountain in Prague—the singing fountain in front of the Belvedere, the building where Kepler and Tycho Brahe carried out their observations. Could that be perhaps a reference to Prague?

CORDOVER: Ursula Härting when she first looked at this painting immediately said that.

GORMAN: Really?

CORDOVER: Yes, she wanted to borrow the painting for a show on gardens, European gardens, and she immediately asserted that it looked like the Belvedere palace garden in Prague.

GORMAN: The fountain is ultimately a hydraulic mechanical instrument, or a machine, so again it is a tantalizing question in the painting whether things are specific or generic—someone could think of the fountain as also representing the mathematical and mechanical arts.

SMITH: As with the obelisk.

WESCHLER: Or being a token for the bounty of nature.

GORMAN: Can we come back indoors now? What is that shadowy object in the right background, James?

BRADBURNE: It is very shadowy indeed, but it is unambiguously a perpetuum mobile based on the design by the Dutch inventor Cornelis Drebbel.

GORMAN: What’s it doing in the painting?

BRADBURNE: That is a good question. When Drebbel first presented one to King James I/VI in London in 1608, it was considered a wonder of the first order, with its water roiling ceaselessly in the glass tube surrounding a central globe. Despite the darkness, the perpetuum mobile is painted with the same incredible attention to detail as the instruments in the foreground—you can even make out the outline of the clock dial in its centre and the globe on top that showed the phases of the Moon.

GORMAN: How did it work?

BRADBURNE: Exactly how it worked is still a matter of some conjecture, as not a single example has come down to us. However, as early as 1612, one of Galileo’s contacts in Brussels, Daniele Antonini,made a working model of the instrument and conjectured that the motion of the water was due to changes in air temperature. It seems that the instrument was a thermoscope, and worked due to a combination of changing temperature and changing atmospheric pressure. On account of the device Drebbel is often considered as one of the inventors of the thermometer.

GORMAN: Why is it near the window?

BRADBURNE: There are several possibilities for the placement of the perpetuum mobile near the window. In practical terms, as it worked in part due to temperature changes, it may have worked better where the sun could shine on it. The sun could also be used to reset the clockwork in the device. Symbolically, it may be related to the fountain in the garden seen outside the window, which seems indeed to be based on the famous ‘singing fountain ‘outside the Belvedere in Prague, where Kepler and Brahe were known to have made observations. It may be placed in the shadows as it was not considered a real scientific instrument, but a wonder, a throwback to a questionable Rosicrucian past. Or it may just be a coincidence. The Windsor
drawing also shows a spherical object in a similar position.

GORMAN: Was Drebbel also linked to Prague?

BRADBURNE: Rudolf ’s Prague was a known centre for all sorts of mystical and proto-scientific speculation, and Drebbel was invited to Prague by Rudolf II in 1610 to explain the workings of the perpetuum mobile to him in person. We know Drebbel stayed in Prague until shortly after Rudolf ’s death in 1612, after which he quite possibly made his way to the court of Rudolf ’s brother Albrecht in Antwerp, where this
painting was probably made.

GORMAN: What makes you think Drebbel was connected to Antwerp?

BRADBURNE: Well, there is no documentary evidence that Drebbel worked in Antwerp. However, there are a number of unambiguous depictions of Drebbel’s perpetuum mobile by the Antwerp artists Frans Francken II, Willem van Haecht, Hendrik Staben, Cornelis de Baellieur and Adriaen van Stalbemt, all painted in the 1620s and ’30s.Although the cabinet painting genre was extremely popular at the time, it does not seem the perpetuum mobile was featured indiscriminately as a studio prop. And where there is a perpetuum mobile, it is likely that Drebbel was not far away.

GORMAN: How does it relate to the rest of the picture?

BRADBURNE: Drebbel’s perpetuum mobile oddly only occurs in gallery interiors that have to do with either Albrecht and Isabella or Rubens. This is probably not just a coincidence. Albrecht is known to have had an interest in the perpetuum mobile as early as 1612, as Antonini presented him with the model he described to Galileo. It is said that Drebbel made the Archduke a perpetuum mobile in 1615, for which Drebbel received a microscope in return, which while possible, seems unlikely, given that Drebbel himself is credited with the invention of the double convex microscope as early as 1609.The perpetuum mobile features in a painting of Archduchess Isabella alone in her study in 1627, in mourning after the death of Albrecht, so clearly the instrument was associated with the archducal couple. Rubens too was associated with the perpetuum mobile, as it was to Rubens that Peeress turned when he wanted a copy made in 1624—we know from his letters that Rubens knew Drebbel personally.

GORMAN: Right, but what can we say about these paintings on the walls? Here we have nymphs and satyrs in the style of Hendrik van Balen, we also have this abundance which comes back to the theme of the cornucopia, the copiousness…You have all of these fruits, you have the mischievous satyrs—why is this picture here?

SMITH: It’s a comment about nature and art as we have talked about, obviously. We have many manifestations of nature in each of the examples: the copiousness of nature, the generative properties of nature, the dangerous properties of nature, the ephemeral qualities in this wonderful still life here on the right side of the painting. This is an incredible still life.

GORMAN: Well, we have a number of landscapes, we have some still life, and we also have certain symmetries between left and right if one looks at the paintings. You have a flower painting on each side.

WESCHLER: You also have these two landscapes flanking that landscape.

GORMAN: Right.

WESCHLER: Once again that paradox. Two of them, in fact four of them are ‘paintings’, and one of them is ‘nature’.

GORMAN: Then we have the Triumph of Bacchus here, with drunken Silenus and Bacchus being carried off, celebrating the fruits of the earth. Then we have the Triumph of Neptune and Amphitrite, parading the fruits of the sea. So there seems to be an interesting dialogue of juxtaposition going on.

WESCHLER: So how would you describe the relationship between the Nymphs and Satyrs on the left and the painting on the right?

GORMAN: OK, on the left we have pagan lasciviousness and bounty, and then on the right we have Belshazzar’s Feast with all kinds of goodies and wonderful food, peacock pie and all sorts of riches, but he’s suddenly seen the writing on the wall saying, “You have been weighed in the balance and found wanting”. And so he’s looking up, King Belshazzar, and he’s actually looking out of the picture, he’s looking up at the writing, which is very interesting, a stern admonition to excess. Are there any thoughts about whether these paintings actually existed? These could simply be meant as paintings in the style of various celebrated artists of the time.

WESCHLER: They could be the paintings he owns.

GORMAN: Are they real or imagined paintings?

MARR: It’s a big question. The fact is that no paintings survive that seem to match the paintings in the picture, but that doesn’t mean that they didn’t once exist.

WESCHLER: The building could have burned down.

CORDOVER: Collections have been lost.

GORMAN: I believe there are compelling reasons to believe that they are not existing pictures.

CORDOVER: I agree with that.

GORMAN: This is the drawing I discovered in the Royal Collection of Windsor Castle when I first began investigating this picture. It’s a drawing which was attributed to Frans Francken II ,but that’s almost certainly an incorrect attribution. And it’s a drawing that clearly has a lot to do with this painting. I mean, interestingly the space is not identical, but it’s very similar. It doesn’t have the same vaulted ceiling, it has a door on the left side rather than a window. It has the balustrade, the slightly recessed cupboard. But there are clearly very strong similarities. The scale is different; you can see that the people are slightly smaller relative to the room.

WESCHLER: Now your theory is that this came before that. A counter-theory could be that this is an actual space and this is what one guy did with it and this is what someone else did with it.

GORMAN: Well, why is it different if it’s an actual space? Why do you change the ceiling? Why do you put a door in here?

CORDOVER: But the painting is an extraordinary intellectual effort and the drawing is a much quicker study. Below the painting there is an underdrawing which mimics the perspective of the drawing…

GORMAN: If you look you can see that there are really quick sketches of some of the paintings on the wall and if you look at them really closely you can see that there is somebody reaching up to a tree and that there is somebody reaching down. But the arrangement, the composition is slightly different. It’s not identical. So here you have somebody reaching up with the right arm and here you have somebody reaching up with the left arm. So it’s clearly the same thought with slightly different composition. With Belshazzar’s Feast you can see here there’s somebody holding the peacock pie bringing it to someone sitting down and here the peacock pie is already on the table. So they’re clearly not copies of existing paintings.

SMITH: That’s fascinating.

GORMAN: They’re compositional sketches that are then being transformed in the final versions. If you were going to copy a picture you wouldn’t do it like that.

CORDOVER: The differences are interesting. You know, one of the pictures that is very prominently placed is the Apelles and Campaspe.

GORMAN: Yeah.

CORDOVER: And that doesn’t appear to be the same picture.

WESCHLER: And here they have the Picasso. [laughter]

SMITH: See, I can imagine an artist bringing this drawing to Peter Linder and Peter Linder saying, well, let’s think about the paintings. And then he says, but you know, I want my wall. I want my instruments and my globe and so on.

GORMAN: Well, I think we can come back to the causal link between the two because I think it’s a really interesting question…But just in terms of the Apelles and Campaspe, that’s a really interesting picture as well because you have Apelles, the most famous painter of classical antiquity, painting Campaspe, themistress of Alexander the Great, and painting her so well that Alexander actually gave him the mistress as a reward
for the quality of the painting.

SMITH: So where is its opposite?

GORMAN: I believe that its opposite is in the lunette above the balustrade looking out onto the garden. With Apelles we have the ultimate accolade of painting turned into flesh, and the ideal relationship between patron and artist, but up here we have an extraordinary thing—these people with donkeys’ heads smashing works of
arts and musical instruments and globes, in a vivid rendition of iconoclasm.

MARR: There’s something rather odd about that lunette. The image of assheadedvmen destroying art objects is a fairly common one in gallery interiors, showing ignorance destroying the arts and sciences. But here, and this is absolutely unique as far as I know, we don’t only have ass-headed men—we have an ass-headed man in the centre, but the others are actual men.

GORMAN: It’s clearly a reference to iconoclasm. There was the great iconoclasm of 1566 in Antwerp—long before this picture was made, but nonetheless a traumatic moment for Antwerp artists. But it’s also interesting the way it’s been painted. It’s monochrome. It’s almost as if it’s been painted over. Almost as if the iconoclasts themselves have been effaced from the picture.

MARR: Yet we should also say that grisaille painting of that manner is standard decoration for rooms of this period. So it fits in entirely with this sort of architecture.

WESCHLER: The other thing you would say is not that they have been painted over, but they are in shadow. You’ve got two different worlds, and in one you have light overbrimming and in the other you have darkness and gloom.

GORMAN: And there’s also the sense that this is on the boundary of the gallery. It’s not really part of the collection. It’s breaking the rules of the game—this is how not to consume art or how not to behave in a gallery. And the funny thing is these pictures don’t exist independently of gallery paintings. They only exist in these kinds of pictures. Nobody has a picture of iconoclasm as a collection object.

MARR: Which is odd, isn’t it. I’ve often wondered why. It’s such an obvious subject.

WESCHLER: This is what it reminds me of—it’s closest to Goya later on, that kind of violence, you’ll get it later.

MARR: I have a theory that the Apelles painting is important because the artist and his patron were friends, as much as they were patron and client. And that’s crucial to our understanding of how the Linder Gallery came about. It was a result not of the sort of aggressive patronage that we’re used to with some Renaissance figures, but of friendly patronage between equals. That was, in a sense, one the main points of the Apelles and Alexander story, that Apelles the humble painter was sufficiently equal with Alexander that he could be given his mistress.

GORMAN: If we look over here we have Perseus with the Head of Medusa with Pegasus in the background. So this is a story about optics, a story about mirrors, a story about using a shield to mirror Medusa’s petrifying gaze. Then I think there may be another reference to optics here—in Belshazzar’s Feast we have projection. We have the projection of these mysterious letters on the wall, and it’s perhaps fanciful, but it seems to me that we have a figure here who could be manipulating a mirror to project the letters onto the wall as seen by Belshazzar.

WESCHLER: Imagine why I find that interesting!

GORMAN: Well, this is the technique used by Athanasius Kircher in the seventeenth century to project letters, as published in his Great Art of Light and Shadow.

WESCHLER: Of course.

GORMAN: Mirror writing. Rembrandt’s painting of Belshazzar’s feast also shows an example of this, a clear case of mirror writing with a finger.

SMITH: But it’s not even a mirror. It’s part of a banquet silver display.

GORMAN: It’s a metal platter.

SMITH: Right, exactly.

GORMAN: Which could be used as a mirror.

SMITH: Oh yes, I know, but, it’s wonderful because this is the kind of display that any noble banquet would have included. The display of gold and silver objects.

WESCHLER: One last thing. It’s conspicuously in exactly the same relationship in that picture as is this down here.

GORMAN: Well, yes, and then we have a mirror in the painting.

WESCHLER: In the exact same location.

MARR: It does seem to me that it’s a bit of a stretch because the platter in question is not smooth, it’s chafed and has raised decorations. You would really struggle to get any kind of legible reflection.

WESCHLER: But look at his expression—that is a character if ever I saw one. He’s up to something.

GORMAN: Let’s look at the other paintings. We have the Holy Family with St John the Baptist in a flower garland. And the detail of the flower garland is absolutely extraordinary. It’s very hard to imagine that anybody but Jan Brueghel the Elder painted those flowers.

SMITH: Yeah, it seems like his signature. It just stands out of the painting so much, similar to the table.

GORMAN: This looks like a collaboration between Hendrick van Balen painting the figures and Jan Brueghel the Elder painting the flowers.

WESCHLER: But I would make the point about the lack of Christianity in this painting, or the paganism overwhelming the Christianity—what you look at here are the flowers. They just come so much to the fore compared to the Holy Family…

GORMAN: This was a kind of picture that was created at the behest of Cardinal Borromeo of Milan. It was his favourite kind of painting. Devotional painting.
But it’s a new kind of devotional painting, I suppose, the Virgin and Child in a garland. It’s outside of the ecclesiastical environment. It’s a new kind of private collector’s version of the devotional painting.
WESCHLER: In other words, I guess I’m just suggesting that we are on our way toward the secularization of Christian imagery.

GORMAN: Then we have these rather smaller pictures. It seems like we’ve got a portrait of Albrecht Durer, what could be Jan van Eyck, and what could possibly be Lucas van Leyden. Why are these here?

SMITH: This is referring to the Northern tradition of painting. Not just a tradition of painting, but a way of seeing the world—a new way of seeing the world — and a new way of understanding the world and making knowledge about the world. And this was a recognized genealogy of painters from Carel van Mander’s writings. Jan Brueghel the Elder is in that same genealogy. Any patron who wants to make reference not just to Rome—to antiquity—but also to the North is also going to have this genealogy of, well, painters/scientists. I want to say scientist, but it’s totally anachronistic.

WESCHLER: OK, but look at this: two small paintings, and above, small landscape, small landscape, and above them flower, flower. That’s why I want to make an argument that the floweriness of this is overwhelming the Christianity.

GORMAN: Well, I think there is definitely a secular–sacred dialogue going on. I think one can also see it in the landscapes, and if you look very closely at this landscape, it’s actually Tobias and the Archangel. I can’t quite make out the fish, but it’s definitely Tobias and the Archangel. If you look very closely. Then you have secular landscapes on the other side.

WESCHLER: What have you been drinking? I’ll have some of what he’s having.

SMITH: There’s one thing in what you say about the sacred–secular dialogue which is of course that this incredibly loving portrait of flowers became something that was bought in the Dutch Republic, where the art was not in churches, but in people’s homes in great quantities. So you can say something about the use of paintings and of images in churches which was very much on people’s minds at that time,I would think.

WESCHLER: But by the way, isn’t it kind of striking how in a house that has shall we say—conservatively—thirty paintings on the wall, there’s not a single one of a Crucifixion?

MARR: But the images we’re seeing here are the sort of devotional images that we’d see in a bed chamber. It would be very common for you to have your Crucifixion or your penitent Mary Magdalene, the sort of images that we think of as being more fervent in that regard, in a separate space.

WESCHLER: I just keep coming back to the fact that Galileo is about to go on trial, this is in the very midst of the Counter-Reformation, all kinds of stuff is going on. That’s all about to happen, and you’ve got all the tools here, and it’s conspicuous that there’s none of that here.

MARR: There is the issue of relevance.

CORDOVER: But there is, there is relevance. That’s not fair, because he was having problems from 1615, 1616 on. And this was clearly done after that, even though it’s prior to the 1633 trial.

MARR: I think no one expected —

WESCHLER: The Spanish Inquisition.

MARR: No one expected it to end the way it did. Most people thought it was a little spat which would end quietly.

GORMAN: What about the sculpture in the room? If we start on the left, we have possibly Pan. Then a shadowy figure of Apollo, and then we have Minerva, and possibly Amor. And then again over on this side there seems to be a symmetry. We have Bacchus and Ceres. There’s a sense of the fruits of the earth balancing the fruits
of the mind, perhaps. You have wisdom and love.

MARR: Sculptures are often used allegorically in gallery interiors. So I think we should be alert to the possibility that these, like the other objects, play some kind of meaning. I think that you’re right to point to abundance and abundances of different kinds.

WESCHLER: As you’ve been doing this, the old joke about the turtles all the way down keeps on thrumming through my head. You know the story? The king can’t sleep at night. He calls the wise man and he says, “I can’t sleep. The Earth is falling through the heavens, what could possibly be keeping it up?”And the wise man tells him not to worry, the globe is on the back of a giant. But then the king can’t sleep the next night: what’s holding up the giant? He’s on the back of an elephant. And so forth across successive nights—don’t worry, the elephant’s on the back of an eagle. The eagle’s on the back of a walrus. The walrus is on the back of a turtle. And after that, don’t worry, it’s turtles all the way down. So, similarly, in terms of the ‘what is this?’, ‘what is this?’, ‘what is this?’, I want to make a critical point. There’s a quality of et cetera here, of conspicuous et cetera. You get the idea that every one of these is saturated with meaning, blah, blah, blah, etchant that’s part of the meaning of the picture itself.

SMITH: Allusion and understanding the allusions is what connoisseurship is all about in this setting.

GORMAN: So what about the central octagonal table? On it we have this large Arsenius astrolabe, and then a celestial globe showing the constellations. This instrument appears to be a Galilean compass with an alidade, and then we have these lenses. You know, we were just looking at the picture with a magnifying glass and you have this array of lenses and magnifying glasses…

SMITH: You’re supposed to pick them right up.

GORMAN: And with them you could examine these portrait medals, which are extremely precisely depicted. They’re so accurately painted that every single one of them is an identifiable portrait medal. So we have Albrecht Dürer, Michelangelo Buonarroti. We have Girolamo Cardano.

WESCHLER: Who’s almost falling off the table?

GORMAN: That’s Michelangelo. He’s very central.

MARR: Yeah. That’s a nice idea of Michelangelo on his way off the table.

GORMAN: We have Bramante, Cardano and Alciati. And then one that’s very difficult to decipher.

WESCHLER: So what are the books?

GORMAN: We have three books on this table which have titles that can just about be read. One of them is the Rudolphine Tables published by Kepler in 1627.One of them is the Harmony of the World also by Kepler, published in 1619.And then the uppermost book, which only a couple of weeks ago with the help of Paolo Galluzzi in Florence we discovered is actually John Napier’s Logarithms of 1618, which were used very extensively by Kepler in doing the mathematics of the Rudolphine tables. So there’s a very strong Kepler connection.

WESCHLER: But on top of everything is that weird drawing. What’s that about?

GORMAN: It’s actually an engraving of the martyrdom of St Catherine, by the Master MZ.

WESCHLER: So why is that there?

GORMAN: Well, St Catherine of Alexandria, St Catherine of the wheel, she was—they tried to kill her, to crush her on the wheel. But the wheel broke. So then they decapitated her and that worked.

CORDOVER: But before they did, she found herself at odds with the secular rulers, because she believed in Jesus Christ. And in order to make her recant her view, learned men were sent to her to persuade her that she had the wrong point of view. And she converted them to be believers, and that persistent point of view eventually led to her martyrdom.

WESCHLER: So why is this here?

CORDOVER: I think it’s a warning. This picture is a warning to those who have unconventional views to beware.

WESCHLER: Or it’s the opposite. That when people came to convince Galileo and so forth that he was wrong, he convinced them that they were wrong.

CORDOVER: Kepler’s mother’s name was Catherine and she was tried as a witch, so I think there may be some connection.

MARR: She was also the patron saint of certain mechanical artists.

GORMAN: And then we have the diagram of the world systems that we mentioned before. You have the Ptolemaic system on the left-hand side and the Copernican system with the Sun in the centre on the right. And underneath them you have the system of Tycho Brahe, with the planets going around the Sun and then the Sun itself going around the Earth. But then you have this cryptic Latin phrase: aly et alia vident, ‘Different people see it differently’. Or perhaps ‘Others see it yet otherwise’ — which could itself be a reference to Kepler. But it’s an extraordinary line. It’s a line which is saying that different opinions are possible about the universe.

WESCHLER: It’s the place that a caption would be in a cartoon. It’s the caption of the picture.

GORMAN: So what do you think about the phrase aly et alia vident, Alex?

MARR: I completely agree with you that it’s an exhortation. It points to the fact that there can be different interpretations. It doesn’t necessarily condone different interpretations.

GORMAN: Right. Different people see it differently.

WESCHLER: And they better watch out.

SMITH: We really need to know the precise date and what’s going on at this time. Because we’re talking a lot about Galileo, but what really is going on?

GORMAN: Some of the books can help with the dates. The fact that the Rudolphine Tables, which were published in 1627, are there suggests that the picture was probably finished post 1627.

CORDOVER: But I would take issue with you about that, as Kepler was in the process of publishing Tabulae Rudolphinae for more than a decade before he finally got the money to do so, so it could very well have been well before 1627.

GORMAN: It really depends on what level of knowledge of Kepler one can expect on the part of the artist.

WESCHLER: One other point to make about dates is that we don’t have CNN. So that something happens on a particular date doesn’t mean that they hear about it in Antwerp.

GORMAN: Right. Partly hidden behind the three cosmic systems you have a horoscope, a geniture, showing the relationship between astrology and astronomy.

WESCHLER: Remembering that Newton had yet to come, and there is that fantastic phrase of John Maynard Keynes in his biography of Newton…Where John Maynard Keynes in the middle of the Depression, when we want him to be working on the Depression, takes six months off and goes and looks in Cambridge at all of Newton’s notes, at the million pages—I am not making up that number—the million pages that preceded the Principia Mathematica and it is all over-the-top astrology and alchemy. And he says, “We have to realize Newton was not the first of the Moderns but the last of the Sumerians”. This stuff bleeds, one into the other.

GORMAN: Kepler and Tycho Brahe were deeply involved in astrology.

SMITH: Yes, as was Cardano, so every astronomer that is being referred to there is making genitures.

GORMAN: The Rudolphine Tables were received as a great practical tool for astrologers. But what is going on with this drawing book over here?

MARR: Well, it is a common feature of gallery interiors. You often find open drawing books. Sometimes the images are identifiable, sometimes, as in this case, they are not.

WESCHLER: A drawing book means that it is a book that an artist was using to put drawings in?

MARR: No, it is like an album that a collector has into which he pastes drawings.

WESCHLER: It is almost as if the page on the left is blank and he is going to paste the picture of St Catherine onto that page.

MARR: It’s curious. That’s a nice idea.

GORMAN: What about the instrument that is under the drawing book—what do we know about that?

SMITH: This is an instrument that an artist would have used to construct a perspective drawing, and you can in fact see that there is a perspective drawing on it of a colonnade. This kind of instrument was definitely used by a Nuremberg instrument - maker and artist—an extremely well-known artist by the name of Wenzel Jamnitzer, a master goldsmith in Nuremberg.

GORMAN: Now I want to get on to something that is a critical feature of the picture. We have these two figures—an old man with a beard wearing a tabard and a young woman who is reclining on his lap. She has in her hands a pallet, paintbrushes, amaulstick and a sculptor’s mallet, and there is also a book beside her. On her head
she wears a laurel wreath and she has a sun pendant hanging around her neck. Who are these figures? What is their relationship?

WESCHLER: I want to make a strong case for this being a psychological portrait here, that it’s not only that this means this and this equals this. And that all this connoisseurship is useless in terms of an existential relationship between an old man and a woman, you know, it only gets you so far.

CORDOVER: That’s a very twenty-first-century interpretation.

WESCHLER: Well…Shakespeare would see it this way.

MARR: Shakespeare might have done, but Shakespeare was reasonably exceptional.

WESCHLER: Well, what I want to suggest is that Shakespeare is modern consciousness beginning to break out of all its contours and that’s thirty years before this. And again keep in mind that this is an artist who is spending his whole day, week after week, working on this, different thoughts are occurring to him and so forth. There isn’t just an x equals y. At different moments they had different feelings about things.

CORDOVER: But I think the problem is not your assertion that there is a multiplicity of meanings. Because I think that all of us would agree that this has characteristics of representing the arts and drawing and the sciences, and while it has a contemporary real feel to it, the real feel is not a psychological reality…

WESCHLER: Well, it’s inhabited.

CORDOVER: But I don’t think it’s about our twenty-first-century sensibility about existence, about male and female.

WESCHLER: About mortality?

SMITH: Well, youth and age.

WESCHLER: What it is to be that old.

CORDOVER: And about—perhaps about one kind of knowledge versus a different kind of knowledge.

GORMAN: I think there is a sense in which the two figures in the foreground occupy a different space. They’re bathed in a slightly different light. They’re not really there in the sense that the figures in the Windsor drawing actually are there, even though they’re smaller relative to the room.

SMITH: There is no question that the woman is Pictura. There is just no question.

GORMAN: She certainly is Pictura, or Painting, but maybe other things also. I mean, she’s a sculptor, she has a mallet, what is the significance of the book? I’m not completely sure…

SMITH: Maybe she is image-making. Pictura, after all, is not just about painting. We think of ‘to picture’ as painting, but obviously Pictura means image-making.

GORMAN: Yes. And also the visual image projected on the retina in Kepler’s description of the human eye. But the laurel wreath and the sun pendant, in Ripa’s iconology, are attributes of Virtue. So as well as being Pictura she is also Virtue, and Virtue resting on the male figure representing Design, or Disegno. Do we think she is alive? I originally thought she was dead…

WESCHLER: Her eyes are alive.

GORMAN: She is a little pale. [laughter]

SMITH: She is pale because she is an allegory. But look at her lips, at her nose and her cheeks. If she were dead she would be greenish grey.

GORMAN: The male figure is painted in the manner of a portrait, as well as being allegorical. And if he is a portrait, there is a strong facial resemblance with Johannes Kepler. And Kepler is clearly strongly referenced in the octagonal table. And I think that there is an interesting thing about Kepler as the superstar of mathematics and astronomy in the seventeenth century, and the physical embodiment of geometry, astronomy and all of the arts that are so strongly represented in the painting. There is a question as to whether he is intended to be a portrait or he may just be an allegorical figure. One suggestion is that he is Disegno—drawing and design.

WESCHLER: This is where I get off the train. Whether or not these have allegorical substrates, whether or not this is Kepler equals… This is design, this is drawing — no! This is a man that is a woman. Look at them. There is an intense interior life going on in that picture. Even if it is Kepler, it is at a particular moment of his life, with a particular cast of interior life going on. There is tons of material life going on with her. They are not simply x equals y…

GORMAN: That is true. They are not just ciphers.

WESCHLER: That’s a cipher. Even that thing there is a cipher. But these people are alive. They are the two things that are living in the room. The world that I am describing is cracking out from this painting. The world that you’re describing is embedded in the painting, it is a world of how things were, but there is a newer world coming, it is dawning, in the fact that her eyes are open and that she is thinking
something!

MARR: This is awful liberal Whiggism! It’s the march of progress towards a secular world…

WESCHLER: No! [laughter] I’m not saying it’s the march of progress, but I’m saying that there is something different going on here. At this point historically.

MARR: Yes, but is this painting about that, or is it speaking to an old world order that should be preserved?

WESCHLER: In a way it is like we are having a conversation about The Tempest. Is Prospero just x, y and z, or is Prospero in a complicated relationship with Miranda, and it shifts from one moment to the next in the play, and at one point he is just a symbol of that and at another point he is something else entirely, and then he is something else again, and I love that all of that is happening.

MARR: Yeah. I think that there is a lot happening. It is almost like a theatre reference in the composition.

GORMAN: I think that there is a visual pun going on here. And it is a bad Flemish pun which says that painting and sculpture ‘rest’ on design, drawing and measurement. Not only painting, but also virtue, because design also means purpose.

MARR: Moral purpose.

GORMAN: Right. So, for example, if you kill somebody, the deed can be virtuous or vicious depending on the design or intention that you harbour.

SMITH: What other representations of design or Disegno in human form do we have?

GORMAN: Here is another one with Disegno depicted as an old man. This is another Flemish gallery painting which has been attributed to Stalbemt.

SMITH: Oh, interesting. What year, do we know?

GORMAN: Oh, probably early 1620s…

CORDOVER: Before, I would say.

GORMAN: And there is a similarity with the figures. Pictura has wings here and Disegno is more clearly allegorical in this picture because he has a flaming head.

WESCHLER: That painting seems purely allegorical to me. But this painting is something more.

GORMAN: I feel that this is portraiture. The man is a new kind of portraiture.

WESCHLER: But there is also interior life in these pictures.

SMITH: Look, it is quite a similar room. Even the ceiling looks the same…

GORMAN: A little room here as well, with a vaulted ceiling and a tiny view out over the garden, with a little balustrade going down to the garden as well. So there are some quite interesting similarities. Some of these are real paintings in this picture. And here you’ve got your globe. But this is much more traditional—you’ve got your monkey and flowers and fruit and copiousness in the gallery.

MARR: And all of the painters that are painting in this genre—and there are only about six of them—are related to each other or knew each other or worked in each other’s studios.

GORMAN: This is a portrait of Kepler in the frontispiece of the Rudolphine Tables. Kepler, wearing a tabard, sitting with a similar cap.

SMITH: I have to say—I’m sorry, Alex, but it looks very similar.

MARR: I personally don’t think that this figure looks sufficiently like Kepler in the portraits. And there are lots of bearded old men who wore skullcaps.

GORMAN: Well,we have three books connected to Kepler on this central table. If you look at the whole frontispiece of the Rudolphine Tables, you have the Tychonic system at the top here and then Kepler hidden at the base.

MARR: I think that there is no doubt that there is a Keplerian influence in this painting, but we should also point out that Michael John and I don’t see eye to eye about the lettering of the books. There is the issue that the lettering on the spines of the books could have been added possibly at a later date. To my eyes, the lettering of the books and the spines is sufficiently different to the care and attention of lettering elsewhere in the picture, particularly cosmic systems, that even if it is clearer and it was intentional, it suggests that this isn’t quite as important as other elements of the painting. Because if it is of supreme importance, you will take greater care over it. The fact that so many parts of this picture are painted with such deftness, such exactitude, says to me: if this is all about Kepler, why, when it comes to the key thing that identifies Kepler, are you sloppy?

GORMAN: I’m not saying it’s all about Kepler. But if you wanted a person to embody mathematics, astrology, astronomy—all of the things that are so important to this picture—in the 1620s,who would it be? The imperial mathematician Kepler. He was the Einstein of the period, there is no question about it.

SMITH: Well, especially in the North, I would say.

WESCHLER: What do you make of Harold Bloom’s comment, with reference to this picture in a sense, that before Shakespeare there were no interior monologues — that people didn’t have them?

MARR: I would say that things can exist before you have a speech act to define them.

WESCHLER: But do you think that Shakespeare is evincing a different way of being in the world?

MARR: I think that Shakespeare is doing something rather different. I think that this one unusual example of a genre is not in any way in the same league and doesn’t point to the same broad humanistic concerns that characterize Shakespeare.

GORMAN: I disagree with you, Alex. I mean, I think that there is something extraordinary going on here, where you have something which is a positioning of the art of painting in relation to the philosophical and cosmic discussions of the time, with this extraordinary human figure in the centre, and very different from the way allegorical figures are done in other pictures, the ones we looked at. It’s powerful…

MARR: But Rubens uses portraits of friends as personification, so it’s not uncommon.

WESCHLER: My point, though, is that if I were going to continue the interpretation I began with at the beginning of all this, that this is at least partially all about surfeit and too-muchness, if you look at that face, there is a sense of—I don’t want to project too much, but I don’t want to leave it out—there is a sense of having lived a life of too-muchness, and at the end of it all there is a sense of quiet—

GORMAN: Melancholy, perhaps.

WESCHLER: Melancholy, a kind of hollowness, a kind of giving that has famished the craving…

CORDOVER: I think we are reading a lot into a centimetre and a half.

WESCHLER: Well, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

GORMAN: Let’s go on now to one picture that we haven’t discussed yet, which is this tiny little double portrait on the lower right-hand table showing two men — one of them is pointing at a drawing, and the other man is looking at the drawing, and in his left hand he’s holding a palette and in his right hand he appears to be holding a paintbrush. If one looks really closely, the drawing itself appears to be a perspective scheme for the whole room. It seems that we are looking at a portrait of a patron and the painter himself, painting the picture from a picture within the picture—this is an extraordinarily self-referential act. So there you see the perspective of the room itself. Who are these people? How can we identify them? Who is this patron and who is this painter? Alex, do you want to comment?

MARR: Sure. Michael John and I found out who these people were through a remarkable series of rapid exchanges

GORMAN: That’s right.

MARR: Feverishly over one night, when I discovered a letter in an archive I was working in which was written to a mathematician and architect called Muzio Oddi, an Italian, by one of his pupils, a man called Giovan Battista Caravaggio. In this letter, written in 1629, he talks about visiting the studio, the study, of their mutual friend, the Nuremberg merchant Peter Linder. Linder was then living in Milan, as was Caravaggio, and Caravaggio describes a painting that he sawin Linder’s cabinet which was hung with many pictures and beautiful instruments, and it contained within it a portrait medal of Muzio Oddi himself. And Caravaggio says, ‘Oh, I understand from Linder you were responsible for devising the composition of this picture.’

GORMAN: I had written a piece about the painting and had flung a draft up on the Internet, with all the information I had been able to piece together. Then one night I got an e-mail from Alex saying, ‘I found a letter which seems to describe this picture, but I am not sure if it is the same picture because it doesn’t mention the figures.’ I said, ‘That sounds very interesting. Tell me about the letter.’ So he said, ‘It is
from a man called Caravaggio and he is writing to the architect and mathematician Muzio Oddi, and he mentions that he’s seen the house of Linder and he describes the picture with all the instruments and so on. ‘And then suddenly it dawned on me that I had been looking at the coat of arms in the left-hand window and it appeared to be the arms of the Linder family, so immediately, when he mentioned Linder, it was clear that this was the painting. So we had a rapid flurry of e-mails and discovered that the man on the left-hand side of the double portrait appeared to be a German merchant called Peter Linder, the patron.

MARR: This double portrait and the mirror and the beam compass next to it relate to a portrait by another one of his pupils, the Milanese artist Daniele Crespi. Daniele Crespi was one of the most celebrated Milanese artists of the 1620s, he was a favorite of Cardinal Borromeo, the archbishop of Milan, who was also one of his patrons, and he painted this portrait, a double portrait, of Oddi teaching Peter Linder about the geometry of concave spherical mirrors. And in the Crespi double portrait we have the same mirror that we see in the bottom right-hand corner of the gallery interior and also the beam compass that rests next to it. And the composition of the double portrait in the gallery interior mimics that of Oddi and Linder, because Oddi and Linder are shown discussing a drawing. The drawing in the portrait of Oddi and Linder is in fact about the geometry of concave spherical mirrors. And in the gallery interior Oddi has been replaced by a painter and the diagram has been replaced by a perspective drawing of the room that we see in the gallery interior. So we know that there is a strong correlation between this image, painted in Milan in the 1620s, and this Flemish painting, the date of which must be around 1629 because that is when Caravaggio says he saw it in the house of Peter Linder. We have the coat of arms of Peter Linder in the top left-hand corner, and Linder is present in the gallery interior through his coat of arms and in his double portrait down here with the artist. Oddi, who, as Caravaggio tells us, was responsible in large measure for the design of the image, is present here in this portrait medal in the very centre of the table.

GORMAN: Which turned out to be the trickiest portrait medal to read in the picture.

CORDOVER: Yes, but the painting could easily have been done in the early 1620s although this letter was later. The only thing keeping this painting from being identifiable in the early 1620s is the issue of the Rudolphine Tables being published later, but we know that it was effectively completed ten years before.

GORMAN: The extraordinary thing is that this is a collaboration, an intellectual collaboration between at least three people. We have Linder, who is obviously deeply involved as the patron in this project; we have Muzio Oddi as the mathematical instructor, and this is presumably some sort of lesson on the geometry of the burning mirror. And that is how we know that this is a concave mirror.

SMITH: And what is the date of this double portrait?

MARR: Mid-1620s.

GORMAN: So Linder is one of the richest people in Milan in the 1620s.

MARR: Muzio Oddi is basically the lynchpin. Oddi is Cardinal Borromeo’s client, Oddi is the teacher of Linder and also of Borromeo’s art agent, Ercole Bianchi. Bianchi is the man who travels between Antwerp and Milan for Cardinal Borromeo, bringing commissions, giving instructions to artists, including Jan Brueghel the Elder. So we’ve got this peculiar situation whereby we have a patron and his intellectual advisor in a sense—it’s like the relationship between Borghini, Vasari and Cosimo de’ Medici—in Milan,devising this picture which is being painted by—we presume, it’s not certain—an artist either in or from Antwerp.

GORMAN: And the interesting thing is that Jan Brueghel the Younger was in Milan in the 1620s.

MARR: And stayed at Bianchi’s house.

GORMAN: And Bianchi is connected to Oddi, so it is very likely that there was a to and fro between Milan and Antwerp at the time through the various commissions that Borromeo was requesting from the Brueghel workshop, and it is also quite likely that Jan Brueghel the Younger played some role in this. It definitely links the picture to the Brueghel studio.

MARR: And Jan Brueghel the Elder said in a letter to Bianchi towards the end of his life that he had been planning a painting that depicted painting, sculpture and architecture, which of course is what this figure depicts. Now we don’t know whether there is any causal connection, but this is clearly an idea that circulated within the Brueghel studio and was know to be out there.

GORMAN: I suppose a fundamental question remains: what is the relationship between the Windsor drawing and this painting? Because the drawing, I think, clearly is before the painting, and it’s clearly very closely related to the picture—it doesn’t seem to be a completely independent work. But the drawing, as you can see, is more conventional—it has the same octagonal table, it has the globe, but it has the more conventional picture of three connoisseurs conversing around a table, it has a dog… It is more in the traditional genre of gallery interiors.

CORDOVER: And I would argue that two of those cognoscenti are easily identifiable.

MARR: Yes.

CORDOVER: I think that the figure on the right is almost identical to a selfportrait by Peter Paul Rubens.

MARR: Yes, I would say that.

CORDOVER: And the figure on the left I think is also identifiable—

GORMAN: As Peter Linder?

MARR: Yes, I think it is Peter Linder.

CORDOVER: Do you think so?

GORMAN: Yes. And I also have a guess about who the figure in the middle is.

CORDOVER: That’s extraordinary.

GORMAN: I saw it this afternoon. I think it’s Van Dyck, who was working in the Rubens studio from 1618 to 1620.

CORDOVER: Now that you’ve said it, it conjures up that portrait of Van Dyck with wild hair that does look just like this.

GORMAN: But if it is Van Dyck, think about the drawing—I think the drawing is memorializing a visit. Perhaps Linder went to Antwerp for business between 1618 and 1620, and this was a visit where he met Rubens and Van Dyck, and this is where the idea of him commissioning a gallery painting originated, and then this drawing was developed, possibly brought by Jan Brueghel the Younger to Milan. Then Linder and Oddi developed amore complex version of the composition and brought in the allegory, the deep mathematical content and the Kepler connection and so on, and then that led to the painting. It’s just an idea.

CORDOVER: Van Dyck went to Milan with Jan Brueghel the Younger, his close friend, in 1622.

WESCHLER: The painting is painted in Antwerp or in Milan?

GORMAN: The painting could have been painted in theory in either, but it was definitely painted by an Antwerp painter and they didn’t tend to stick around in Milan for long enough to do much, so it seems more likely that it was painted in Antwerp but commissioned perhaps on the basis of a visit to Milan.

WESCHLER: How could they have worked from Milan? There are the Alps in between.

SMITH: They did, though. Even Peter Brueghel.

MARR: It was very common, and we know this from the Brueghel correspondence, for a picture to be started in Antwerp, sent to Milan for approval, then sent back with a request for corrections, alterations, so we probably got a bit of copper shuttling backwards and forwards between Milan and Antwerp.

GORMAN: There are known examples of paintings that did shuttle back and forth in different states of completion. But there are still a lot of open questions around who created this picture…Was it just the work of one artist or was there more than one hand? Was it just that one figure with the goatee and the receding hairline in the double portrait, or was he just the person who completed the picture? I think it is fair to say that we are only at the beginning of understanding what’s going on here.

CORDOVER: I want to ask Alex: who do you think painted the picture?

MARR: I think whoever painted the figure was whoever painted the rest of the picture, and there is no way that it was Van Dyck.

GORMAN: And who do you think it was? That’s a very evasive statement.

MARR: I can say who it was not. There are very few people who painted gallery interiors who were active at this date. All of them, with the exception of Jan Brueghel, are ruled out on the basis of quality. Jan Brueghel is ruled out because he was dead.

SMITH: But what if the titles of the books were just added later?

CORDOVER: He’s not dead if it was done in 1622 to 1624.

MARR: Yes, but there are elements of the painting that must have been done after that.

CORDOVER: There are only two elements, and the 1622–4 presence of each of them is easily explained. The Rudolphine Tables were known for ten years—they were finished well before the book was published. It didn’t need to be published in order for it to be there, number one. And the medal of Oddi, if this is as we all agree a conception of Oddi—how better to sign his work than to put a medal of his next to the medals portraying these great scientists and artists of the past? When I look very closely at this medal, it is slightly different from the 1627 one you’ve shown me.

GORMAN: It is always possible that these things were put in earlier, but I think you need a compelling reason to believe this, given that there are two elements of the picture that appear to be from 1627.Why would you add those things later? Why would you add the Rudolphine Tables, either add them after the painting was complete
or include them before the book was published?

CORDOVER: I think they were included before the book was published; they are at the heart of the cosmology that is being described. ‘Others may see it other ways.’ It is a clarion call about the way the solar system works. The fact that the book was not yet published does not prevent me from thinking that it was well known—especially to Oddi. You asked, “What’s the plausible reason for it to be completed prior to 1627?”My answer is quality.

MARR: Yes. There is no doubt in my mind that this is a work of exceptional quality. For me — you know, we have been backwards and forwards on this many, many times — for me, stylistically, it is closest to the Cognoscenti painting in the National Gallery in London in terms of palette and manner.

CORDOVER: Agreed.

MARR: And I think that work and this work, while they share similarities to Brueghel’s manner—I would say whoever painted this spent time in Brueghel’s studio. Stylistically, it is just sufficiently dissimilar to suggest that we shouldn’t attribute it to Jan Brueghel the Elder. It is certainly not Jan Brueghel the Younger, it’s way too good.

GORMAN: Though parts of it could be Jan Brueghel the Younger. He was in the right place at the right time.

MARR: Parts of it could be—I mean, if there were some additions. The clumsy lettering, for example, that could be. So we shouldn’t leave out the possibility that there were a few later additions. But we’ve got two works of exceptional quality, both of which are by painters from the Brueghel milieu who are currently unidentified. There are oodles of unattributed paintings around the world—that is not a barrier at all.

GORMAN: I think it is the same principal artist who created both the Windsor drawing and the painting.

MARR: The hand in the Windsor drawing is totally different to the preparatory drawing for the London picture. That doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but it is worth noting. And it is also worth noting that these drawings circulated very freely between the studios, so whoever drew this—while I think that it is probably likely
that it was the person who painted the Linder Gallery—might not have been involved in the development of the drawing into a painting at all.

GORMAN: I think it is compelling because of the sketches.

CORDOVER: I agree.

MARR: Yep. I agree, but let’s just keep it open as a possibility. I am not saying that it is, but it’s possible. It is possible that this is a drawing by a different artist to whoever painted this.

WESCHLER: You know what I think? I think different people see it different ways.