Who are the three conversing figures shown in the Windsor Drawing, almost certainly a preparatory drawing for the Linder Gallery? The excerpt below from A Mysterious Masterpiece: The World of the Linder Gallery proposes a hypothesis: Read more…
Who are the three conversing figures shown in the Windsor Drawing, almost certainly a preparatory drawing for the Linder Gallery? The excerpt below from A Mysterious Masterpiece: The World of the Linder Gallery proposes a hypothesis: Read more…
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. Read more…
It is by no means clear whether the figure of Disegno in the Linder gallery is intended to be generic or a specific portrait. Michael John has suggested Kepler as a possible candidate – which is certainly plausible, although I have yet to be convinced of the similarity between known portraits of Kepler and the features of the Linder gallery figure, and (frustratingly) there is no evidence that either Oddi or Linder was especially interested in Kepler and his works. An alternative possibility is that the figure of Disegno is in fact modelled on Mutio Oddi’s first tutor in the visual arts, the famous painter Federico Barocci of Urbino. Barocci’s features, as depicted in his self-portrait of ca. 1600 are close to those of Disegno in the Linder gallery, if we imagine Barocci 20-30 years older (for the gallery was painted in the late 1620s). Barocci would have been an ideal model for Disegno – he was internationally renowned as a master of design and was the brother of the celebrated mathematical instrument maker, Simone Barocci, whose works Oddi distributed in Milan to patrons and friends – including Linder. In fact, as Ian Verstegen has shown in a recent article, Federico used his brother’s instruments (notably the reduction compass) in making his drawings and paintings. Thus, Barocci could be thought of as a figure for whom mathematics underpinned drawing, and the arts in general. Oddi – who was exiled from Urbino – was always eager to promote his homeland (indeed, he circulated Barocci drawings in Milan). What better way of doing this than by incorporating one of its greatest (but recently deceased) artists into the painting he helped to devise? Just a thought…
Tamara Schlesinger’s photographs of the conversation about the Linder Gallery, 12 December 2008, New York.
No matter where you are on the website, you can always access the version of the painting with commentary and rich zoom features by clicking the "show/hide painting" toggle above.
The conversation continues in A Mysterious Masterpiece. The World of the Linder Gallery, which contains an in-depth conversational study of the painting.
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