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The Guardian
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
‘Queer as a $3 bill': celebrating 100 years of LGBTQ+ art for Pride month
As curator Pietro Rigolo was combing through the Getty's archives in search of material for his new show, he came upon a strange sight – a $3 bill. 'I was in this section of the archive dealing with the Black Panther movement, the WPA, the gay rights movement and protest material related to HIV/Aids,' Rigolo told me during a video interview. 'In there, I found this little piece of ephemera that was this fictive $3 bill. This specific banknote bears the portraits of Harvey Milk and Bessie Smith.' According to Rigolo, the idea for the bill came from the phrase 'queer as a $3 bill', a once-pejorative remark that was claimed by the LGBTQ+ community as a rallying call and even term of endearment. Distributed during pride in 1981, the bill featured two gay icons: Milk, the first openly gay man elected to public office in California who was murdered in cold blood in 1978, eventually resulting in a city-wide riot. Smith was another queer icon, one of the most celebrated and beloved entertainers of the jazz age and known as the 'empress of the blues'. The bill is a fitting namesake for Rigolo's new show at the Getty Center, which showcases over 100 years of queer art, packing a powerful irreverence and defiance. Case in point, $3 Bill: Evidence of Queer Lives gets off to a engaging start with one of Cuban-American artist Félix González-Torres's candy piles. Named Untitled (Para Un Hombre en Uniforme), the 1991 work weighs about 220 pounds and features red, white and blue lollipops. Visitors are encouraged to take a lollipop. According to Rigolo, the weights of González-Torres's candy piles often refer to specific human beings, and the piles' dwindling nature makes a poignant metaphor for the withering away of so many LGBTQ+ people who fell ill during the Aids crisis of the 1980s and 1990s. Its themes draw in the debate over gays serving in the armed forces that was occurring in the 1990s, as well as its colors implicating the American, Cuban and Puerto Rican flags, all of great personal significance to González-Torres. 'The public is invited to take a candy, and it's up to the institution when to replenish the pile, so this pile gets smaller and smaller as the exhibition progresses,' Rigolo said. 'It's this beautiful metaphor for a body that is consumed and loses weight and gains weight again, this circle of illness, death and eventually rebirth. It also establishes this relationship with the visitors consuming the candy, so it's also this metaphor of the virus spreading.' Although Untitled (Para Un Hombre en Uniforme) is a loan from the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, most of the works in $3 Bill come from the archives of the Getty itself. The vast holdings of the Getty Research Institute include a library with nearly one million volumes, as well as major archives dedicated to Robert Mapplethorpe and Harmony Hammond, and records of Entendido, a magazine that ran from 1980-83 as the first publication by and for a gay readership in Venezuela. The exhibition starts in 1900, not long after the word 'homosexual' was first coined and brought into wider use, signaling a new era in defining queer lives versus straight ones. It is broken up into four periods – 1900 through Stonewall, the protest era of the 1970s, and Aids epidemic of the 1980s and then the 90s to present. 'It's much more colorful, bright and in your face than other Getty shows,' said Rigolo. 'The color scheme really makes clear the different times, different moods, and different areas you find yourself in – it's thanks to the great graphic design of Alan Konishi and Chaya Arabia.' One standout piece from the post-90s era is The Aids Chronicles, in which mostly female members of the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, a Los Angeles-based non-profit organization, collected every single front page from the New York Times from the 26 years from 1993 through 2019. They then painted each page with a deep red acrylic paint that looks like blood, sparing only headlines and stories that deal with the Aids epidemic. The result is a monumental work about erasure of the epidemic from the mainstream media, and one that remains relevant as the Times continues to contemporarily erase and spread misinformation about transgender lives. 'This is the first time that we have a chance to show material from the Institute of Cultural Inquiry, and The Aids Chronicles are placed right in the middle of the galleries,' said Rigolo. 'They're a total showstopper and a really, really interesting project.' Holdings from Hammond include the artist's magnificent and bewitching Hair Bags, which she made in the early 1970s, dedicating one to each member of her feminist consciousness-raising art group. Hammond actually used hair from the women in the group in the bags and intended them to remain as a set. These strange, groundbreaking pieces emerged out of a period in which the queer icon was experimenting more and more with making art bags, as well as moving closer to being out as a lesbian. 'She was very important not only as an artist, but also as a scholar and curator, particularly of lesbian art,' Rigolo said. The show also draws on the Getty's archives of the Johnson Publishing Company, which publishes major African American magazines such as Jet and Ebony. Issues in $3 Bill showcase pictures of Harlem drag balls from the 1940s and 1950s, treated with surprising dignity for the time. 'It's interesting how these events were covered in these magazines. The language they used would definitely not be considered PC by today's standards, but at the same time the tone seemed to be pretty open within certain boundaries.' One of the big successes about $3 Bill: Evidence of Queer Lives is that it's such a broadly encompassing show, offering the true diversity of the LBGTQ+ community. 'It's really a show that strives not only to present the accomplishments of our communities in the realm of art but also our presence and our significance in society overall,' said Rigolo. 'I'm really happy about how this show encompasses a very wide spectrum of sexualities and genders.' $3 Bill: Evidence of Queer Lives is on show at the Getty Center in Los Angeles until 28 September
Yahoo
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
This painting survived the Beirut explosion. Here's how conservators restored it
After a long-forgotten painting of Hercules and Omphale was punctured by glass and coated in debris during the 2020 explosion in Beirut, the monumental oil-on-canvas, painstakingly restored over more than three years, has gone on view at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. In the wake of the tragedy, the painting, dated to the 1630s, was finally properly attributed to the great Artemisia Gentileschi, the 17th-century Italian Baroque painter who has become one of the few female artists of her era to be recognized today. Having passed only between three private collections over four centuries, the 'Artemisia's Strong Women: Rescuing a Masterpiece' exhibition marks the first time the painting has ever been on public display. The canvas depicts the Greek mythological hero Hercules, who was enslaved by the Queen of Lydia, Omphale, and made to do tasks traditionally associated with women, such as weaving — in Gentileschi's composition he raises a spindle of wool — before they fall in love. Gentileschi often gave her mythological and Biblical female figures a striking sense of agency, such as her most widely known scene of the widow Judith violently beheading Assyrian general Holofernes. In the newly attributed painting, she toys with subverted gender roles as her lovelorn protagonists close the gap between them, their pearlescent skin adorned in sumptuous draped fabrics. For decades, 'Hercules and Omphale' hung in the Sursock Palace, a private and opulent mid-19th century townhouse owned by Beirut's Sursock family for five generations. The explosion in the Lebanese capital, which killed more than 200 people and injured thousands, caused devastation to the building and its owners, with the matriarch of the family, 98-year-old Yvonne Sursock Cochrane, eventually succumbing to her injuries. A receipt from the family showed that the painting entered the Sursock collection from an art dealer in Naples, where Gentileschi lived the later years of her life. At the time of the explosion, the artist's then-unknown masterpiece was hanging in front of a window, according to the Getty, which exploded through the canvas. The broken glass riddled it with holes and a wide, L-shaped tear through Hercules' knee. 'It was really severe. It's probably the worst damage I've ever seen,' said Ulrich Birkmaier, the Getty Museum's senior conservator of painting, in a phone call with CNN. Beyond the sudden violence to the painting and its frame, the artwork had already suffered flaking paint, cracks and cupping from humid conditions, Birkmaier said He added that Gentileschi's vision had been further marred by discolored varnish and overpainting from a previous restoration attempt centuries earlier. When Birkmaier saw it for the first time in Beirut, one year after the explosion, he gathered debris that had collected behind its surface in case the miniscule paint fragments clinging to the glass could be puzzled back together in Los Angeles. Though mended, cleaned, and carefully restored with analysis from X-rays and XRF mapping, the painting has been rehabilitated into its luminous and poetic intent, though, in Birkamaier's view, it will never look quite as it did. 'You'll always see some scars of the damage,' he said. If not for the explosion, 'Hercules and Omphale' may have continued to be an unidentified work, only considered a Gentileschi painting by a Lebanese art historian who had seen it decades earlier. In the early 1990s, Gregory Buchakjian was a graduate student at Sorbonne University in Paris and writing his thesis the Sursock collection. It was then that he made the connection between 'Hercules and Omphale' and another painting, 'Penitent Magdalene,' to Gentileschi, but he didn't pursue publishing his research more widely, according to the arts publication Hyperallergic. In an article for Apollo magazine in September 2020, Buchakjian attributed both paintings to the Italian artist, leading to wider acknowledgement of his research and consensus over her authorship. Over the course of her career, Gentileschi, the daughter of the Mannerist painter Orazio Gentileschi, was commissioned by top artistic patrons — the Medici family in Italy as well as monarchs Philip IV of Spain and Charles I of England — before being lost to history following her death in 1653. Some 60 paintings or more exist today, though a few have been contested as copies or collaborations. 'She was very, very famous during her day, but all but forgotten in the centuries after, which is true for many Baroque painters, but for women, of course, particularly,' Birkmaier said. Rediscovered in the 20th century and amplified by the 1970s feminist movement, Gentileschi's resurgence helped pave the way for researching and foregrounding female artists of the past. Still, there are too few technical studies of her work, according to Davide Gasparotto, senior curator of paintings at the Getty Museum, compared to her male counterparts. The Getty's report provides insight into her techniques and materials and how she revised the composition over time, such as altering the position of Hercules' head and gaze to strengthen the emotional charge, which is 'very much Artemisia,' Gasparotto said. 'We are gradually building better knowledge of her way of painting, but I think we need more, especially because she's a painter that changes quite a lot in terms of stylistic development over the course of her career,' he explained. 'She's an artist who looks a lot at what is going on around her, and she absorbs (it).' Gentileschi trained with her father, but was also influenced by her Baroque peers and predecessors, such as Caravaggio and Guercino. She traveled widely in Europe, trained in Venetian techniques and adopted other skills from Naples, where she took up residency later in life and set up a workshop. Her time in Naples in the 1630s has been considered 'less interesting' by scholars, Gasparotto said, but he disagrees — and can now cite 'Hercules and Omphale' as further proof. 'Her paintings grow in size. They are monumental paintings, ambitious compositions, multi-figure compositions,' Gasparotto said. He believes Hercules in this work is her most accomplished male figure — 'especially for a painter who couldn't study male nudes after a living model, because being a woman, she wasn't allowed to do that.' When the glass tore through Gentileschi's painting, it missed many of the painting's focal points, though part of Hercules' nose and eye suffered damage. That was the trickiest area to reconstruct, Birkmaier said, but he was able to see Gentileschi's earlier draft of Hercules' head in the X-ray to aid in reconstruction. He called in help from a friend: Federico Castelluccio, the Italian American actor best known for his role as Furio in 'The Sopranos,' who is also a painter and collector of Baroque art (and who once discovered a $10 million Guercino painting). (The TV series aired on HBO, which shares Warner Bros. Discovery as a parent company with CNN.) 'He assisted me with another conservation treatment years ago. And so he painted the head of Hercules for me and suggested what the eye that was missing there should look like,' Birkmaier recalled. 'And so I based my reconstruction on that, and it was very helpful.' Restoring an old work doesn't mean making it like new, but maintaining the 'decay from time' that occurs with a 400-year-old painting, Birkmaier said. As he and other specialists gradually worked on the painting, it began to reveal itself. 'You have this painting in pieces, and all you see is the damage and the discolored varnish and the old restoration and the big holes, and then little by little, as you work on it… the image emerges again,' he recalled. 'It's a really interesting process of discovery. I wanted to do her justice.' Some of the identifying features of Gentileschi's work seen in 'Hercules and Omphale' include her renderings of fabrics and jewelry and the subtle gestures she repeats across canvases. 'It's very poetic the way she turns, she turns (Omphale's) head, this upright gaze,' Birkmaier said, explaining that many of her female figures mimic that tilt. 'In the other paintings that we have on loan from her, it's the same exact (position).' It can be seen, too, in 'Susanna and the Elders,' from 1638-40, another recent discovery of Gentileschi's that is in the UK's Royal Collection Trust, painted during her time at the court of Charles I with her father. In 2023, it was identified after a century in storage, deteriorating and misattributed to the 'French School,' according to Artnet. Another rediscovered Gentileschi work, a portrait of David with the head of Goliath, will headline a Sotheby's auction in July. 'There's definitely a lot of room for discovery,' Gasparotto said, though he cautioned that attribution is not always clear-cut considering her workshop is still not fully understood, and she tended to work in conjunction with landscape artists later in life. 'I don't know how many will emerge from museum storages,' he said. 'But within the market, within private collections, there might be other paintings by her that will emerge in the upcoming years.'
CNN
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- CNN
This painting survived the Beirut explosion. Here's how conservators restored it
After a long-forgotten painting of Hercules and Omphale was punctured by glass and coated in debris during the 2020 explosion in Beirut, the monumental oil-on-canvas, painstakingly restored over more than three years, has gone on view at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. In the wake of the tragedy, the painting, dated to the 1630s, was finally properly attributed to the great Artemisia Gentileschi, the 17th-century Italian Baroque painter who has become one of the few female artists of her era to be recognized today. Having passed only between three private collections over four centuries, the 'Artemisia's Strong Women: Rescuing a Masterpiece'exhibition marks the first time the painting has ever been on public display. The canvas depicts the Greek mythological hero Hercules, who was enslaved by the Queen of Lydia, Omphale, and made to do tasks traditionally associated with women, such as weaving — in Gentileschi's composition he raises a spindle of wool — before they fall in love. Gentileschi often gave her mythological and Biblical female figures a striking sense of agency, such as her most widely known scene of the widow Judith violently beheading Assyrian general Holofernes. In the newly attributed painting, she toys with subverted gender roles as her lovelorn protagonists close the gap between them, their pearlescent skin adorned in sumptuous draped fabrics. For decades, 'Hercules and Omphale' hung in the Sursock Palace, a private and opulent mid-19th century townhouse owned by Beirut's Sursock family for five generations. The explosion in the Lebanese capital, which killed more than 200 people and injured thousands, caused devastation to the building and its owners, with the matriarch of the family, 98-year-old Yvonne Sursock Cochrane, eventually succumbing to her injuries. A receipt from the family showed that the painting entered the Sursock collection from an art dealer in Naples, where Gentileschi lived the later years of her life. At the time of the explosion, the artist's then-unknown masterpiece was hanging in front of a window, according to the Getty, which exploded through the canvas. The broken glass riddled it with holes and a wide, L-shaped tear through Hercules' knee. 'It was really severe. It's probably the worst damage I've ever seen,' said Ulrich Birkmaier, the Getty Museum's senior conservator of painting, in a phone call with CNN. Beyond the sudden violence to the painting and its frame, the artwork had already suffered flaking paint, cracks and cupping from humid conditions, Birkmaier said He added that Gentileschi's vision had been further marred by discolored varnish and overpainting from a previous restoration attempt centuries earlier. When Birkmaier saw it for the first time in Beirut, one year after the explosion, he gathered debris that had collected behind its surface in case the miniscule paint fragments clinging to the glass could be puzzled back together in Los Angeles. Though mended, cleaned, and carefully restored with analysis from X-rays and XRF mapping, the painting has been rehabilitated into its luminous and poetic intent, though, in Birkamaier's view, it will never look quite as it did. 'You'll always see some scars of the damage,' he said. If not for the explosion, 'Hercules and Omphale' may have continued to be an unidentified work, only considered a Gentileschi painting by a Lebanese art historian who had seen it decades earlier. In the early 1990s, Gregory Buchakjian was a graduate student at Sorbonne University in Paris and writing his thesis the Sursock collection. It was then that he made the connection between 'Hercules and Omphale' and another painting, 'Penitent Magdalene,' to Gentileschi, but he didn't pursue publishing his research more widely, according to the arts publication Hyperallergic. In an article for Apollo magazine in September 2020, Buchakjian attributed both paintings to the Italian artist, leading to wider acknowledgement of his research and consensus over her authorship. Over the course of her career, Gentileschi, the daughter of the Mannerist painter Orazio Gentileschi, was commissioned by top artistic patrons — the Medici family in Italy as well as monarchs Philip IV of Spain and Charles I of England — before being lost to history following her death in 1653. Some 60 paintings or more exist today, though a few have been contested as copies or collaborations. 'She was very, very famous during her day, but all but forgotten in the centuries after, which is true for many Baroque painters, but for women, of course, particularly,' Birkmaier said. Rediscovered in the 20th century and amplified by the 1970s feminist movement, Gentileschi's resurgence helped pave the way for researching and foregrounding female artists of the past. Still, there are too few technical studies of her work, according to Davide Gasparotto, senior curator of paintings at the Getty Museum, compared to her male counterparts. The Getty's report provides insight into her techniques and materials and how she revised the composition over time, such as altering the position of Hercules' head and gaze to strengthen the emotional charge, which is 'very much Artemisia,' Gasparotto said. 'We are gradually building better knowledge of her way of painting, but I think we need more, especially because she's a painter that changes quite a lot in terms of stylistic development over the course of her career,' he explained. 'She's an artist who looks a lot at what is going on around her, and she absorbs (it).' Gentileschi trained with her father, but was also influenced by her Baroque peers and predecessors, such as Caravaggio and Guercino. She traveled widely in Europe, trained in Venetian techniques and adopted other skills from Naples, where she took up residency later in life and set up a workshop. Her time in Naples in the 1630s has been considered 'less interesting' by scholars, Gasparotto said, but he disagrees — and can now cite 'Hercules and Omphale' as further proof. 'Her paintings grow in size. They are monumental paintings, ambitious compositions, multi-figure compositions,' Gasparotto said. He believes Hercules in this work is her most accomplished male figure — 'especially for a painter who couldn't study male nudes after a living model, because being a woman, she wasn't allowed to do that.' When the glass tore through Gentileschi's painting, it missed many of the painting's focal points, though part of Hercules' nose and eye suffered damage. That was the trickiest area to reconstruct, Birkmaier said, but he was able to see Gentileschi's earlier draft of Hercules' head in the X-ray to aid in reconstruction. He called in help from a friend: Federico Castelluccio, the Italian American actor best known for his role as Furio in 'The Sopranos,' who is also a painter and collector of Baroque art (and who once discovered a $10 million Guercino painting). (The TV series aired on HBO, which shares Warner Bros. Discovery as a parent company with CNN.) 'He assisted me with another conservation treatment years ago. And so he painted the head of Hercules for me and suggested what the eye that was missing there should look like,' Birkmaier recalled. 'And so I based my reconstruction on that, and it was very helpful.' Restoring an old work doesn't mean making it like new, but maintaining the 'decay from time' that occurs with a 400-year-old painting, Birkmaier said. As he and other specialists gradually worked on the painting, it began to reveal itself. 'You have this painting in pieces, and all you see is the damage and the discolored varnish and the old restoration and the big holes, and then little by little, as you work on it… the image emerges again,' he recalled. 'It's a really interesting process of discovery. I wanted to do her justice.' Some of the identifying features of Gentileschi's work seen in 'Hercules and Omphale' include her renderings of fabrics and jewelry and the subtle gestures she repeats across canvases. 'It's very poetic the way she turns, she turns (Omphale's) head, this upright gaze,' Birkmaier said, explaining that many of her female figures mimic that tilt. 'In the other paintings that we have on loan from her, it's the same exact (position).' It can be seen, too, in 'Susanna and the Elders,' from 1638-40, another recent discovery of Gentileschi's that is in the UK's Royal Collection Trust, painted during her time at the court of Charles I with her father. In 2023, it was identified after a century in storage, deteriorating and misattributed to the 'French School,' according to Artnet. Another rediscovered Gentileschi work, a portrait of David with the head of Goliath, will headline a Sotheby's auction in July. 'There's definitely a lot of room for discovery,' Gasparotto said, though he cautioned that attribution is not always clear-cut considering her workshop is still not fully understood, and she tended to work in conjunction with landscape artists later in life. 'I don't know how many will emerge from museum storages,' he said. 'But within the market, within private collections, there might be other paintings by her that will emerge in the upcoming years.'
CNN
12-06-2025
- Entertainment
- CNN
This painting survived the Beirut explosion. Here's how conservators restored it
After a long-forgotten painting of Hercules and Omphale was punctured by glass and coated in debris during the 2020 explosion in Beirut, the monumental oil-on-canvas, painstakingly restored over more than three years, has gone on view at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. In the wake of the tragedy, the painting, dated to the 1630s, was finally properly attributed to the great Artemisia Gentileschi, the 17th-century Italian Baroque painter who has become one of the few female artists of her era to be recognized today. Having passed only between three private collections over four centuries, the 'Artemisia's Strong Women: Rescuing a Masterpiece'exhibition marks the first time the painting has ever been on public display. The canvas depicts the Greek mythological hero Hercules, who was enslaved by the Queen of Lydia, Omphale, and made to do tasks traditionally associated with women, such as weaving — in Gentileschi's composition he raises a spindle of wool — before they fall in love. Gentileschi often gave her mythological and Biblical female figures a striking sense of agency, such as her most widely known scene of the widow Judith violently beheading Assyrian general Holofernes. In the newly attributed painting, she toys with subverted gender roles as her lovelorn protagonists close the gap between them, their pearlescent skin adorned in sumptuous draped fabrics. For decades, 'Hercules and Omphale' hung in the Sursock Palace, a private and opulent mid-19th century townhouse owned by Beirut's Sursock family for five generations. The explosion in the Lebanese capital, which killed more than 200 people and injured thousands, caused devastation to the building and its owners, with the matriarch of the family, 98-year-old Yvonne Sursock Cochrane, eventually succumbing to her injuries. A receipt from the family showed that the painting entered the Sursock collection from an art dealer in Naples, where Gentileschi lived the later years of her life. At the time of the explosion, the artist's then-unknown masterpiece was hanging in front of a window, according to the Getty, which exploded through the canvas. The broken glass riddled it with holes and a wide, L-shaped tear through Hercules' knee. 'It was really severe. It's probably the worst damage I've ever seen,' said Ulrich Birkmaier, the Getty Museum's senior conservator of painting, in a phone call with CNN. Beyond the sudden violence to the painting and its frame, the artwork had already suffered flaking paint, cracks and cupping from humid conditions, Birkmaier said He added that Gentileschi's vision had been further marred by discolored varnish and overpainting from a previous restoration attempt centuries earlier. When Birkmaier saw it for the first time in Beirut, one year after the explosion, he gathered debris that had collected behind its surface in case the miniscule paint fragments clinging to the glass could be puzzled back together in Los Angeles. Though mended, cleaned, and carefully restored with analysis from X-rays and XRF mapping, the painting has been rehabilitated into its luminous and poetic intent, though, in Birkamaier's view, it will never look quite as it did. 'You'll always see some scars of the damage,' he said. If not for the explosion, 'Hercules and Omphale' may have continued to be an unidentified work, only considered a Gentileschi painting by a Lebanese art historian who had seen it decades earlier. In the early 1990s, Gregory Buchakjian was a graduate student at Sorbonne University in Paris and writing his thesis the Sursock collection. It was then that he made the connection between 'Hercules and Omphale' and another painting, 'Penitent Magdalene,' to Gentileschi, but he didn't pursue publishing his research more widely, according to the arts publication Hyperallergic. In an article for Apollo magazine in September 2020, Buchakjian attributed both paintings to the Italian artist, leading to wider acknowledgement of his research and consensus over her authorship. Over the course of her career, Gentileschi, the daughter of the Mannerist painter Orazio Gentileschi, was commissioned by top artistic patrons — the Medici family in Italy as well as monarchs Philip IV of Spain and Charles I of England — before being lost to history following her death in 1653. Some 60 paintings or more exist today, though a few have been contested as copies or collaborations. 'She was very, very famous during her day, but all but forgotten in the centuries after, which is true for many Baroque painters, but for women, of course, particularly,' Birkmaier said. Rediscovered in the 20th century and amplified by the 1970s feminist movement, Gentileschi's resurgence helped pave the way for researching and foregrounding female artists of the past. Still, there are too few technical studies of her work, according to Davide Gasparotto, senior curator of paintings at the Getty Museum, compared to her male counterparts. The Getty's report provides insight into her techniques and materials and how she revised the composition over time, such as altering the position of Hercules' head and gaze to strengthen the emotional charge, which is 'very much Artemisia,' Gasparotto said. 'We are gradually building better knowledge of her way of painting, but I think we need more, especially because she's a painter that changes quite a lot in terms of stylistic development over the course of her career,' he explained. 'She's an artist who looks a lot at what is going on around her, and she absorbs (it).' Gentileschi trained with her father, but was also influenced by her Baroque peers and predecessors, such as Caravaggio and Guercino. She traveled widely in Europe, trained in Venetian techniques and adopted other skills from Naples, where she took up residency later in life and set up a workshop. Her time in Naples in the 1630s has been considered 'less interesting' by scholars, Gasparotto said, but he disagrees — and can now cite 'Hercules and Omphale' as further proof. 'Her paintings grow in size. They are monumental paintings, ambitious compositions, multi-figure compositions,' Gasparotto said. He believes Hercules in this work is her most accomplished male figure — 'especially for a painter who couldn't study male nudes after a living model, because being a woman, she wasn't allowed to do that.' When the glass tore through Gentileschi's painting, it missed many of the painting's focal points, though part of Hercules' nose and eye suffered damage. That was the trickiest area to reconstruct, Birkmaier said, but he was able to see Gentileschi's earlier draft of Hercules' head in the X-ray to aid in reconstruction. He called in help from a friend: Federico Castelluccio, the Italian American actor best known for his role as Furio in 'The Sopranos,' who is also a painter and collector of Baroque art (and who once discovered a $10 million Guercino painting). (The TV series aired on HBO, which shares Warner Bros. Discovery as a parent company with CNN.) 'He assisted me with another conservation treatment years ago. And so he painted the head of Hercules for me and suggested what the eye that was missing there should look like,' Birkmaier recalled. 'And so I based my reconstruction on that, and it was very helpful.' Restoring an old work doesn't mean making it like new, but maintaining the 'decay from time' that occurs with a 400-year-old painting, Birkmaier said. As he and other specialists gradually worked on the painting, it began to reveal itself. 'You have this painting in pieces, and all you see is the damage and the discolored varnish and the old restoration and the big holes, and then little by little, as you work on it… the image emerges again,' he recalled. 'It's a really interesting process of discovery. I wanted to do her justice.' Some of the identifying features of Gentileschi's work seen in 'Hercules and Omphale' include her renderings of fabrics and jewelry and the subtle gestures she repeats across canvases. 'It's very poetic the way she turns, she turns (Omphale's) head, this upright gaze,' Birkmaier said, explaining that many of her female figures mimic that tilt. 'In the other paintings that we have on loan from her, it's the same exact (position).' It can be seen, too, in 'Susanna and the Elders,' from 1638-40, another recent discovery of Gentileschi's that is in the UK's Royal Collection Trust, painted during her time at the court of Charles I with her father. In 2023, it was identified after a century in storage, deteriorating and misattributed to the 'French School,' according to Artnet. Another rediscovered Gentileschi work, a portrait of David with the head of Goliath, will headline a Sotheby's auction in July. 'There's definitely a lot of room for discovery,' Gasparotto said, though he cautioned that attribution is not always clear-cut considering her workshop is still not fully understood, and she tended to work in conjunction with landscape artists later in life. 'I don't know how many will emerge from museum storages,' he said. 'But within the market, within private collections, there might be other paintings by her that will emerge in the upcoming years.'
New York Times
20-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
‘Book of Marvels' at the Morgan, Oddities From Cannibals to Giant Snails
If the past is a foreign country, as L.P. Hartley wrote, customs make it so. One is the late medieval period's belief in marvels: dragons, unicorns, underwater palaces, wells of water so hot they could melt steel. In reality, it was an age of travel. Europe was meeting Asia and the Middle East on the Silk Road, and Africa through the Mediterranean. Who believed these tales? Unanswerable. But the Morgan Library and Museum has a good go of this question in 'The Book of Marvels: A Medieval Guide to the Globe.' Spanning mainly 1200 to 1550, this exhibition, on view only through May 25, brings together about 20 books, manuscripts and maps (and one globe) that echo the visual language and wanderlust of the show's main attraction: two copies of the 'Livre des Merveilles du Monde,' or 'Book of Marvels of the World,' both from one anonymous author and illuminated in Angers, France. The book reads like an illustrated atlas to the creatures and phenomena rumored to occur worldwide, from neighboring French provinces to China. The 'Marvels' text is at least as old as 1428. Of four known copies, the two on view in this show are thought to have been produced simultaneously, around 1460. One is complete; it lives at the Morgan. The other, a partial copy, was recently acquired by the Getty Center in Los Angeles. (The exhibition premiered there last year with an all-Getty checklist.) Almost identical, both copies are also attributed to the same illuminator, or group: the so-called Master of the Geneva Boccaccio. At the center of the Morgan show, the Getty 'Marvels' lies open to the section on Traponee, or Sri Lanka. At right, hunters chase a giant snail up a hill, their spears tall and sharp. At left, a man and wife make their home in one snail's hollowed-out shell. Displayed beside it, the Morgan's version shows Arabia. There, two hunters slice open an asp to extract the precious stones it keeps in its belly. Other hunters, shimmying up a stand of trees, dismantle nests that birds have built with the coveted cinnamon twig. The 'Marvels' illuminators worked in a soft and fluffy style that the Getty's Larisa Grollemond calls 'colored-grisaille.' What keeps you looking is arrangement. The Arabia scene, in particular, is laid out on a boxed X, with the objects of interest — belly, nest, a phoenix, some dragons — falling at the visual intersection points. 'Menu pictures' are what the show's curators (three from the Getty and one, Joshua O'Driscoll, from the Morgan) call this indexical way of illustrating the text. The original buyer of these luxury 'Marvels' — one is thought to have been Duke René of Anjou (1409-80) — would have enjoyed a scavenger hunt between its dutiful visual paragraphs and its swoopy French bastarda script, uncertain as to which describes which. The Morgan show obeys a similar logic. If you walk the gallery, the maps that have been hung on the wall, and the printed and illuminated manuscripts under glass from the Morgan's collection, amplify the myths and visual strategies enshrined in the 'Marvels.' For instance, the 'Abridged Divine Histories' illuminated in Amiens, France, circa 1300, has a pair of conjoined twins against a background of gold leaf. Hans Rüst's interpretive map of the world, circa 1480, is quite detailed in Africa and Asia, though populated by cannibals and other human oddities rendered large, in a graphic language similar to those tourist maps of the United States where a lobster dominates Maine and an ear of corn Kansas. Marvels seem to have occupied a special compartment of belief: like miracles, except earthly. Scholars upheld the distinction, like Gervase of Tilbury, who in the 13th century deemed 'things marvels which are beyond our comprehension, even though they are natural,' and included fairylike beings in his study of English folklore. In the biblical account of Exodus, God revealed himself to Moses through the burning bush, but the Provençal giants and headless Ethiopians of the 'Book of Marvels'? You can doubt those without fearing damnation. The medieval world was big enough for both kinds of oddity, judging by these books' treatment of Christianity. The conjoined twins appear across the page from an illustration of the baptism of Constantine, the Roman emperor who was probably more responsible than any other monarch for the spread of the Bible. Elsewhere the godly and earthly seem to collide through implication. In an illuminated German 'History of Alexander the Great,' also circa 1460, the Greeks meet a group of Indian Brahmins who are comfortably nude in the presence of newcomers. Their nonchalance recalls nothing so much as Adam and Eve, apple tree and all. Most of these items are illuminated by hand. But several were printed with movable type. The rise of early printed books, or incunables, show an industrial efficiency that happened to dovetail with the European arrival in the Americas and Martin Luther's rebuke of the pope. The timeline had me thinking: Perhaps this intrigue with marvels in a God-given world encouraged a certain anxiety for proof. The Morgan's stellar selection impresses least when it attempts to prove the ways in which medieval marvels explain modern racism. In the catalog and wall text, curators argue that marvels enabled the racial 'othering' of foreign cultures, which in turn stoked a desire to dominate them and the things they treasured. Christopher Columbus brought annotated copies of Marco Polo, the most fantastical and widely read of all marvelists, across the Atlantic to seize the New World. Volumes by both Italians appear in the show. But the appetite for marvels was reciprocal. Of three Middle Eastern books here on display, the secret star of the show is a copy of Nizami's Persian poem 'The Quintet' from around 1550. The illuminator Siyavush Beg depicts a backdrop of stone and plant life that is astonishing in its painterly looseness and control of transparent pigments. Maple leaves explode from the text block like fireworks. Again the scene is from the Alexander the Great myth: the discovery of a fountain of youth. But this time with turbans and a distinctive, almost Mughal flatness. More than cinnamon traveled the Silk Road. By focusing on the potential harm done in part by exotic mythologies, this exhibition leaves us with less answerable but also less explored questions about the past. Such as: How did dominant religions absorb newer legends? And how did these tales shape the medieval reader — or more often, listener — back home? To the scholar Norbert Ohler, for instance, marvels kept people humble by asserting the authority of ancient authors rather than feeble eyewitnesses. However it worked, that past is vanishing the TikTok age, a stack of pressed linen with layers of scenery as vigilant as Siyavush Beg's feels as exotic as the Cinnamologus bird must once have seemed to the courtiers of Burgundy. Both are marvelous. One was real.
