Orphan Celebrated

By ROBERT HUGHES

For years 18th century Italian painting has been one of art history's orphans: the general supposition was that after 1650, Italian art slid into provincial decadence. From this sad landscape, littered with insignificant talents fit only for doctoral theses or bourgeois mantels, a few fine painters emerged: Tiepolo, Canaletto, Guardi, a handful of others. Giovanni-Battista Tiepolo, in fact, seems in retrospect to have been the last Italian artist formed in the heroic mold. A protean figure of bewildering facility and adaptability, he was the link between high historical painting and rococo elegance, able to invest a pen drawing with as much tension and airy scale as a painted ceiling. But generally the 18th century seemed to be Anglo-French territory: Italy's long moment of cultural supremacy had gone, the locus of energy shifted.

Mercifully, events are never so pat, and in the past few years, more and more attention has been given to this phase of Italian art. The renewal of interest is magnificently recorded in "Painting in Italy in the Eighteenth Century: Rococo to Romanticism," a collection of 104 paintings by 81 artists, now at the Toledo Museum of Art. Concurrently, New York's Metropolitan Museum is mounting a large show of drawings by the same masters.

Taste Like Burrs. In Italy, the 18th century resisted generalization. Florentine painting had collapsed, never to revive, and activity was split among several centers: Rome, Venice, Turin, Bologna and Naples. There was no broad direction of style. The artists worked more and more outside Italy, pursuing foreign commissions and coming back with the seeds of foreign taste sticking to them like burrs. As a result, the range of the period was astonishing; it ran from Magnasco's turbid compositions of raggedy monks to the grandeur and sun-washed transparency of Tiepolo's Armida Abandoned by Rinaldo, from Pier-Leone Ghezzi's wry grotesqueries and exact social observation to the flaccid but competent imitations of French classical landscape turned out by such artists as Orizzonte. For the first time, Italian artists had to face the fact that they were not living in a paradise of cultural self-sufficiency; they depended, as their Renaissance and Baroque forebears had never needed to, on the outside market.

Trade, they learned, follows tourism. The English gentleman on his Grand Tour in 1740 had no postcards or camera to fix his memories of St. Peter's or the Grand Canal. An industry of vedutiste, view painters, sprang up to furnish him with souvenirs of Italy. They painted the place as object, its natives drained of social existence and reduced to clumps of tiny figures whose sole purpose was to give scale to vistas; a place of ruins, piazzas and ruffled silk water, of carnival and gondola, with domes rising like bubbles through the crystalline southern light. The most famous and proficient of them, Canaletto, won such popularity among English collectors that hardly any of his work stayed in Italy; his influence was such that even today one cannot look at Venice without invoking his eye. In some ways, Canaletto's impact on English taste was far greater than on Italian. What the foreign cognoscenti required of their "views" was bravura, sparkle, abundant detail--every palace window had to be right, for the patron might once have rented a suite behind one of those pink fac,ades. Canaletto's limpid perspectives and probing, fizzy line supplied it all, as did the work of Bernardo Bellotto, his nephew and imitator. Bellotto's View of the Tiber with the Castle of S. Angelo, Rome, 1742, is a superb example of tourist landscape transcending itself: ordered and cool, it is pervaded by a kind of sumptuous, mellow reticence.

Grand and Fast. Artists like Pannini and Piranesi specialized in composite views of ancient buildings, and these architectural fantasies, or capricci, enjoyed an immense vogue. One enterprising Irish dealer named Owen McSwinny commissioned teams of leading Bolognan and Venetian painters to produce huge pictures of "allegorical tombs" suitable for burying English dukes; he hoped to sell the originals to the lords in question and make more profit by publishing engravings of them. (McSwinny lost money on the scheme, but in the context of 18th century taste, it was not as harebrained as it sounds today.) It was, of course, desirable for the rich tourist to have his face painted while in Italy, and every major city from Venice to Naples had its squad of portraitists who could perform fast, grandly and--in effect--while you waited. Alessandro Longhi's Portrait of a Musician carries the grand manner to the point of resplendent caricature: the smug grin on the too-pink face, the soft hands protruding from a cascade of ruffles, the sweep and swag of blue velvet, gold embroidery and brown cello--the Sun King himself could not have been painted with more rhetorical amplitude than this anonymous dandy.

Perhaps the most successful Italian portraitist was Pompeo Batoni, whose Roman studio was besieged with clients. One of them, a Scots general, insisted on being painted in full tartan, brandishing a sword in front of the Colosseum. At best, Batoni could paint with ravishing grace, and such works as Painting, 1775, are allegories only in a nominal way: this muse was Batoni's pretext for celebrating the silky and luxurious femininity of the young women by whom, to the envy of other Roman painters, he was surrounded throughout his life.

But the special interest of Toledo's survey lies not so much in the familiar masters, the Tiepolos and Canalettos and Guardis, as in the painters who, though less popular today, could produce exquisitely resonant images that were not aimed at an overseas audience. Their similarity to some French paintings of the time is less a matter of influence than of the mutual ripeness of images in different countries. Thus Pastoral Idyll: The Dance of the Nymphs, painted by Bologna's Donato Creti, suggests Watteau--the lutanist, the rapt figures, the feathery blue distance, even the iridescent play of light on wrinkled satin combine in what seems for all the world a French invention, the fete champetre. But Creti never went to France, and there were no collectors of Watteau in Bologna, so it is impossible that he could have been directly influenced by his Parisian contemporary. On the other hand, Creti's image of an idealized country dance comes straight out of a tradition in Italian art that Watteau had seized on: the image of the earthly paradise, where souls are united in musical harmony with nature. But in Creti's painting, as with Watteau's, one knows that the apple was eaten long ago and that time will stop the dance.

In fact, next to Venice, it was Bologna (on the evidence of this show) that produced the most interesting Italian artists throughout the century. Giuseppe-Maria Crespi's The Lute Player represents a brilliant but unobtrusive link between the existing traditions of painting in his native Bologna and the Dutch genre painting. Of all the pictures in the show, this is the least rhetorical: a girl, her shadowed profile turned away in utter absorption, caresses a lute. The virtuoso play of Crespi's brush, between the flickering softness of her dress and the lute's smooth brown belly, creates an almost musical counterpoint of form and substance. Probably Crespi never saw a Rembrandt, but he manages to echo one of Rembrandt's peculiar achievements. He creates such an intense zone of stillness round a figure that it seems the artist is painting thought itself.

. Robert Hughes

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