Three conversing figures, detail from Windsor drawing

Gorman: I suppose a fundamental question remains: what is the relationship between this drawing and this painting? Because the drawing, I think, clearly is before the painting. You know, these are sketches and so on, 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 self portrait 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 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 a more 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…

Allegorical figures, detail from Linder Gallery

GORMAN: So 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 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

excerpt from A Mysterious Masterpiece: The World of the Linder Gallery (Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi/Alias, 2009)