The Eye

An Insider's Memoir of Masterpieces, Money, and the Magnetism of Art

Philippe Costamagna, Frank Wynne

• Publisher: New Vessel Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781939931702
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Art & Business

"Lifting the veil on the shadowy world of art insiders, Costamagna delivers an entertaining reflection on the dealers, devotees, and decision makers." — Town & Country Magazine It's a rare and secret profession, comprising a few dozen people around the world equipped with a mysterious mixture of knowledge and innate sensibility. Summoned to Swiss bank vaults, Fifth Avenue apartments and Tokyo storerooms, they are entrusted by collectors, dealers and museums to decide if a coveted picture is real or fake and to determine if it was painted by Leonardo da Vinci or Raphael. The Eye brings to light the rarified world of connoisseurs devoted to the authentication and discovery of Old Master art works. This is an art adventure story and a memoir all in one, written by a leading expert on the Renaissance whose métier is a high-stakes detective game involving massive amounts of money and frenetic activity in the service of the art market and scholarship alike. It's also an eloquent argument for the enduring value of visual creativity, told with passion, brilliance and surprising candor. "[A] rollicking and erudite tour of the art world... Costamagna's candor and well-earned hubris make for an entertaining foray into the high-stakes art world." — Publishers Weekly "As thrilling as a police novel." — La Croix "An insider's look at the dramatic world of attributing and dating art... This art world Sherlock Holmes travels the globe... Delightful." — Introspective Magazine "One comes away feeling somewhat re-sensitized to beauty and somewhat nostalgic for an era when museums weren't the selfie-stick madhouses they are today." — The Washington Post

• ONE •

The Miraculous Bronzino

We talk about a person having an eye for something. I would like to talk about the fascinating and little-known profession of being an “Eye.” The term might sound curious and surprising, but it would be impossible to explain in other terms what certain art historians do on a daily basis. If what we might call the “traditional” art historian—like the musicologist or the literary historian—is content to draw on a rich library and a vast image bank, the task of what I call the “Eye” is to establish the authorship of paintings by sight alone. His task is to see. To do so, it is crucial that he have direct contact with each work of art. Traditional art historians, musicologists, and literary historians construct complex hypotheses and conduct extensive research in order to expound their theories in books. The Eye, on the other hand, relies on dramatic coups de théâtre. His task, in short, consists of proposing a name. Every day, he is presented with unknown works of art. All too often, they are disappointing. But sometimes he is struck by something extraordinary, something as clear and irrefutable as it is unexpected.

He is an “Eye” in the same way that someone might be a “Nose” in the perfume industry. Noses identify scents and formulate perfumes. Eyes in the art world discover paintings and establish authorship at a glance. But there the comparison ends. If the great Noses are creators, artists sometimes capable of moments of genius, neither Eyes nor art historians generally can be considered to be creators. Eyes observe, and this observation triggers a process of memory that allows them to see. The process is not a form of genius but an acutely refined sense of analysis, an ability to break down the painting one is looking at into a collection of distinctive traits found in the diverse works of an artist.

It is this skill that enables the Eye to make discoveries. Unlike discoveries in mathematics, chemistry, or physics—those of Newton or Einstein for example, which are the product of the genius of an individual—the discoveries made by the Eye have more in common with that of Christopher Columbus. No genius was required. Merely a spirit of adventure and a happy accident, the result of a wager that he could find a new shipping route between Europe and India. The Eye is a miniature Christopher Columbus who roves the world of art, alert to any surprises. But whereas Christopher Columbus did not know what he had stumbled upon, the Eye on the other hand knows immediately. Like an explorer rediscovering Atlantis and knowing it can be nothing else. When an Eye is confronted with a work whose authorship he alone can identify, we say he has made a discovery. The more important the artist, the more important the discovery; and should the work in question be a masterpiece, executed by one of the greatest painters in history yet overlooked for centuries, we might even say a “great discovery.”

For an Eye, discoveries of this kind are very rare. He may search tenaciously for something, often without success, and then, without intending to, make unexpected discoveries. I confess that I have made at least one such discovery, completely by chance. It happened in October 2005, in the company of an Italian friend, Carlo Falciani, a specialist in sixteenth-century Italian painting like myself. We had been invited to Provence by an art collector in order to consider a painting that, though interesting, did not turn out to be the work we had hoped, and as so often is the case, the collector was left disappointed; in return, however, we made a discovery that would prove crucial to the history of art.

The previous day, we had visited the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nice, where Carlo’s wife, also an art historian, wanted to study a number of paintings. The Villa Kotchoubey, which houses the museum, is one of the last vestiges of the Côte d’Azur whose dying echoes and fading light are captured in Tender is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald, the Côte d’Azur where the cream of European society came to sojourn before the Great War. At the moment when, all around, apartment blocks began to replace the sprawling grounds of the great nineteenth-century mansions, the city bought this villa from a Russian aristocratic family and transformed it into a museum. Here and there between the facades, it is possible to glimpse a sliver of the blue Mediterranean. Not far from the international airport, perched high in the hills of the city, it is one of the last remnants of the Belle Époque. The ground floor comprises a great hall with a gleaming granite floor bounded by marble columns and flanked by a monumental staircase and a covered courtyard.

Heading toward the great staterooms, one first passes through a long gallery whose walls are lined with fin-de-siècle paintings in keeping with the ambiance of the villa. Society portraits and oriental scenes, including The Harem Servant Girl by Paul-Désiré Trouillebert, plunge the visitor into the atmosphere of the period. At the far end of the gallery, the room is lit by a vast window. The sun, a frequent visitor to the bay of Nice, was high in the sky that morning, its rays piercing the panes at a steep angle. I remember we were chatting about this and that as we cast an inattentive glance over the collection, perhaps about the painting we planned to see the following day, when our eyes were drawn to a painting of Christ that hung at the far end of the hallway, a beam of sunlight falling upon the feet, glistening on nails that had a porcelain texture that to me was unmistakable. “Do you see what I see?” asked Carlo. Conversation gave way to a stunned silence. We were seeing the same thing. A providential ray of sunlight had revealed Bronzino’s Christ on the Cross, painted by the artist for the Panciatichi family in Florence circa 1540, a work long since lost and vainly sought by connoisseurs of Florentine art of the period.

It is quite a large painting. At five feet tall and three feet wide, it resembles an altarpiece. It depicts Christ crucified in perfect pallor and realism. The right leg, into whose foot a nail is embedded, is turned slightly inward. The prominent cheekbones, the hollow cheeks, the deep bags under the eyes are testament to a long ordeal. Even the slightest detail of the musculature is visible. The pastel pink loincloth intended to hide the Christ’s nakedness, with its realistic folds, has fallen slightly to reveal narrow hips in which it is possible to make out the bones. Beneath the head, tilted slightly to the right, the reddish-blond hair spills in tight, perfectly defined curls onto shoulders of alabaster. The painter has gone so far as to indicate, with light brush strokes, the grain in the wood of the cross.

As our eyes moved up the body, led by the distinctive rendering of the toenails, and without exchanging a word, we could both hear the echoing words of his first biographer, Giorgio Vasari, an artist himself and contemporary of Bronzino: “For Bartolomeo Panciatichi, he painted a picture of the Crucifixion, which is executed with great study and care, insomuch that it is clearly evident that he copied it from a real dead body fixed on a cross.” The scene is framed against an alcove of gray stone, the pietra serena, or “serene stone,” typical of the material used in the construction of religious buildings and important civil monuments in Florence. A thin trickle of blood runs from the feet down the wood and soaks into the stone niche.

It was an indescribable moment. From Vasari’s account of the painting, we might imagine a masterpiece. Knowing that as he painted it Bronzino had worked from an actual body, we might imagine it was a work of realism. But never could we have imagined a work so simple. We were convinced we were standing before Bronzino’s masterpiece, and we were surprised. Bronzino’s reputation is that of a court painter, one who excelled in the depiction of wealth and the tactile rendering of fabrics. He is known first and foremost for an artificial style of painting, one underpinned by complex codes, whose riches are accessible only to initiates. His religious paintings often leave the viewer cold, while his portraits and the allegorical scenes drawn from mythology are bewitching. In this case, on the other hand, the painting spoke for itself. Had we not known from Giorgio Vasari that the artist had painted a Christ based on an actual corpse, we would have found it difficult to imagine him undertaking such a subject. How to make sense of a purportedly lightweight artist painting a Christ that invites pious contemplation, a work suffused with realism and spirituality, a work of death and suffering? Doubtless we needed to appreciate that life at court did not exclude profundity and a sense of the sacred.

In contemporary works on art history, it has become a commonplace to say that we know little about the lives of the Old Masters. This is not quite the case with Agnolo Bronzino. He was born in Florence in 1503 and died in that same city in 1572. Giorgio Vasari, who devotes only a few short but precious lines to him, says that he trained with Jacopo Pontormo. We will later return to this artist who is particularly close to my heart. He was, according to Vasari, a very exacting master who never showed any of his canvases to the young men in his studio for fear of divulging the secrets of his technique. How far can we trust this harsh portrayal? In criticizing Pontormo’s approach, Vasari was perhaps attempting to disparage the schooling Bronzino received, one he doubtless wished he had received himself. Vasari was also a painter, one whose training had been chaotic and who, in his lifetime, could not lay claim to the status of his rival. Despite what he said about himself, Bronzino effortlessly assimilated every nuance of his master’s art—indeed, as Vasari is compelled to acknowledge, surpassing him when he took over work on the Basilica di San Lorenzo, left unfinished on the death of Pontormo. When Bronzino was not painting, he devoted his time to poetry, where he won a reputation for his teeming imagination, composing witty verses of which the celebrated “In Praise of Onions” (“In lode delle cipolle”) is among the most successful. He was a man of culture, who took part in the spiritual activities of the sophisticated city in which he was raised, and all evidence leads us to believe that he was homosexual.

The modern-day preconceptions we bring to our view of the sixteenth century made it very difficult to understand the painting. The Panciatichi family, for whom Bronzino painted it, were rich, powerful Florentine bankers, but they were also passionate advocates of a reform of the Catholic Church in accordance with Luther’s objections. The Christ, in its asceticism, perfectly illustrates this desire for a return to the fundamentals of the faith. To recognize him as the author of this painting, one had to imagine Bronzino as a courtier yet religious, homosexual yet devout, an artist yet conscious of political matters. This was a view of sixteenth-century Florence that Carlo and I shared. This painting, therefore, was the missing piece of a puzzle, whose pieces we had gradually assembled and which was now taking shape before our eyes.

A great discovery is rarely accepted without arguments from other art historians, champions of alternative theories, sometimes jealous, sometimes simply blind. In this case, having the attribution recognized did not prove difficult, and we were able to secure unanimous agreement. We quickly communicated news of our new attribution to the handful of other specialists on Bronzino, who accepted it with the same enthusiasm as we had. All of these specialists were Italian, British, or American. The small world of art history was abuzz with the news, from Los Angeles to Saint Petersburg, Australia to Scotland. But, unlike those who shared our area of research, some of the great minds in the field, who had only a generalist’s understanding of our period and our artist, found it more difficult to accept our proposal. To add to this, the painting, being part of a French collection, had been submitted to a number of important French curators, who now had to accept that they had misjudged it. In 1965, it was examined by Michel Laclotte, Sylvie Béguin, and Pierre Rosenberg, three of the greatest French art historians, all of them blessed with an exceptional eye. At the time, they were preparing a vast exhibition on sixteenth-century Europe and were reviewing all works in national collections. It was as though they had not even seen it.

This exhibition had been part of the general review of national heritage undertaken after the Second World War, intended to encourage the French public to rediscover great public collections. The crowning irony being that the cover of the exhibition catalogue featured Bronzino’s most famous painting, a detail from the Deposition of Christ in the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Besançon, which perfectly represented how Bronzino’s art was seen at the time, art in which saints both male and female are dressed in finery and theatrically arranged, in which the body of the Christ is muscular, glorious, idealized.

If these art historians did not give the Christ in Nice the attention it deserved it is because, by 1965, there was already an idea circulating that the painting did not date from the sixteenth century. In fact, in 1986, Gianni Papi, an Italian Eye whom I respect, considered reclassifying the painting and attributing it to Andrea Commodi, a seventeenth-century Florentine painter. It was typical of Commodi’s subjects, but Papi, in a monograph devoted to the artist, had carelessly relied on a blurred photograph in the picture library of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florenz. He could not take into account details that were crucial to a true understanding of the painting, such as the way in which the nails were drawn, something that had immediately struck us, nor that the supporting material was board made of thick poplar, which was not used after the late sixteenth century but was typical of the supporting materials used in Bronzino’s studio. An idle stroll can be so productive. Carlo and I were able to study the painting from every angle.

Some time later, I attended an attribution meeting at the Institut National d’Histoire de l’Art in Paris. Hardly had I stepped over the threshold than I saw two of the Eyes from 1965 walking toward me. Sylvie Béguin, my former teacher at the École du Louvre, slight, elegant as always, her blond hair pinned into a chignon, was walking arm in arm with Michel Laclotte, the founder of the Musée d’Orsay and first director of the Grand Louvre, the project to renovate and expand the Louvre under President François Mitterrand. I thought I saw an irritable expression flicker across the face of this man who first introduced me to Italian painting and for whom I have great admiration. With the ready wit and the haughtiness so characteristic of him, in an amused and affectionate tone that masked the stentorian voice that has intimidated so many people, he said, “You need to stop drinking, Philippe! You’re starting to see things, and you’re getting everybody all worked up with your ravings!”

At this point, Sylvie, her blue eyes glittering mischievously, in a trilling lilt that the art world still strives to emulate, replied, “You know, Michel, you have to learn to question certain judgments … Sometimes even the young can be right.”

“Oh, shut up, Sylvie, young people are insufferable.”

For his part, Pierre Rosenberg, Michel Laclotte’s successor as director of the Louvre and a familiar figure notable for the iconic scarf he perpetually wore, felt less concerned by the oversight, having devoted the greater part of his research to French seventeenth- and eighteenth-century painting, and having made a number of sensational discoveries. He was of Sylvie’s opinion—like her, he accepted that every Eye is attuned to its particular period and context, and cannot be reproached for failing to “see” a painting. A great work sleeps in the shadows; it comes before great minds who fail to notice, until some chance encounter brings it into the light, and thereafter it becomes impossible to consign it to the oblivion whence it has just emerged.

Not until 2010, when he attended the Bronzino exhibition at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, did Michel Laclotte change his mind. The palazzo, in the center of the city, is one of the great Renaissance palaces. A perfect embodiment of the cold bourgeoisie of bankers and merchants who governed the city in the fifteenth century, it casts a monumental shadow over the surrounding streets. The facade is built of rusticated stone, the interior comprises several vast, chilly halls with vaulted ceilings and contours accentuated by pietra serena. Here, the painting was exhibited in a space utterly in keeping with the spirit of its conception. It was hung so that the Nice Christ was the first painting seen by a viewer on entering the room devoted to the Panciatichis, and directly opposite the Madonna and Child (the Panciatichi Madonna) painted for the same family. Between these two paintings, on the right-hand wall, hung the twin portraits of the couple—now housed in the Uffizi in Florence in the same room as the Madonna.

I was intimately familiar with the couple to whom Bronzino dedicated his Christ. I had written a thesis on the subject of sixteenth-century Florentine portraits, and Bronzino’s portraits of Bartolomeo and Lucrezia Panciatichi had earned him a reputation as the greatest portraitist of the age. They are depicted as the epitome of triumphant mercantile bourgeoisie. Bartolomeo leans against the parapet of a loggia, facing the viewer, and—though he has his back turned to it—he dominates a cityscape that, although referring to no actual location, is clearly recognizable as a fantastical Florence from the architectural lines, the building materials, the pietra serena that adorns the architectonic elements such as masonry, corners, window frames, and pilasters. Robed in black, Bartolomeo at first seems austere, but his red, forked beard and the scarlet doublet one can glimpse beneath his coat temper this severity with a sense of life and suppressed passion. In his right hand, he holds a half-closed book, perhaps Baldassare Castiglione’s The Book of the Courtier, published in 1528. This is certainly hinted at by Bronzino’s pairing of this intellectual object with the sword Bartolomeo wears on his left—paper and steel being considered the quintessential attributes of the perfect courtier. He is depicted as a man of letters, and also of action, as attested by the vigilant black dog crouched beneath his left arm—a sym...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• 1 The Miraculous Bronzino
• 2 How I Became an Eye
• 3 The History of Eyes
• 4 Our Holy Trinity: Berenson, Longhi and Zeri
• 5 Restored Paintings and Outright Forgeries
• 6 Speaking of Painting
• 7 Black Chalk, Red Chalk, Quill, Highlights
• 8 Enigmas and Investigations
• 9 An Angel and Other Discoveries
• 10 Risky Business
• 11 The Lives of an Eye
• 12 I Admit I Was Wrong
• Acknowledgements