A selection of views by Didier Barra.(Apologies for forgetting to note the titles before returning the book to the library.)<\/em><\/p>\nThen, they are more or less forgotten, until Andr\u00e9 Breton, looking for foundations on which to build Surrealism, and undoubtedly driven by a desire to flourish something obscure in order to raise a few eyebrows in the art world – extolling the virtues of artists wholly forgotten always obliges your detractors to clam up for a moment – exhumed Mons\u00f9 Desiderio.<\/p>\n
This said, circumstances did not help. A good number of their works are or were in private collections;\u00a0 a large number of fakes are in circulation, and a portion of their work has been misattributed to others, as others\u2019 work has been atributed to them. Outside, of course, their art itself, unless artists leave words of their own, there are two major sources for tracking them down when they disappear: purchase receipts and inventories. In many cases, a payment for the purchase of a painting would be made through a bank, and the artist would then sign a bank receipt when he picked up the money. Inventories, generally done on the death of an owner of artists\u2019 works, are even more precious, since they may provide quite a detailed itemization and description of each painting. In the case of Mons\u00f9, all the ambiguity of attributing work is revealed – inscriptions for the two painters varied considerably:\u00a0 Mons\u00f9 de Napoles, Mons\u00f9 di Nom\u00e9, Mons\u00f9 Francesco, Mons\u00f9\u00a0 Francesco di Lorena,\u00a0 or Mons\u00f9 lorenese. Didier Barra signed his name Desiderius, and de Nom\u00e9 appears as either Francoys or Francisco, the last name as Nom\u00e9, Nomme or Nomm\u00e9e, often (but not always) preceded by De, Di or Did. Many collectors in Naples and elsewhere in Italy mention acquiring works by Mons\u00f9, and constitute a tantalizingly imperfect image of their careers. but beyond that\u2026<\/p>\n
Their lives raise more questions than they provide answers. How to explain their enduring Mannerist approach, in the face of Baroque spreading out from Rome in the first decades of the 17th century? How long did their partnership last? What was their real influence on other painters of their period – Palumbo, Belisario or Corenzio, to name a few. Why Naples? The last question, thankfully, is more easily answered.<\/p>\n
Naples in the 1600\u2019s was the best and worst place to live in Europe. Vesuvius erupted in 1631, an eruption equalling in violence the one that destroyed Pompeii and Herculaneum. Micco Spadario\u2019s \u201cEruption of Vesuvius in 1631\u201d gives some idea of the agitation during the event, with processions led by the church, carrying an effigy of patron saint Gennario as a sign of pennance. Two major earthquakes struck the region, first in 1660 and again in 1685. The Masianello revolt shook the city from 1647 to 1649. The Black Death came back for an encore in 1656. Between May and August, half the city\u2019s population of 300,000 had died or fled. (Spadaro also survived – and painted – the outbreak: \u201cThe plague in Naples on the Piazza Mercatello\u201d is a horrifying vision of apocalypse.) On the good side, the Spanish were leaving. The defeat of the Armada (1588) and Spain\u2019s prolonged and calamitous wars with France, England and the Netherlands and of course the Thirty Years War (disastrous defeat at the hands of the young Duke of Enghien at the battle of Rocroy in 1643) meant that Spain\u2019s attention was elsewhere, though Naples remained a Spanish vice-realm until 1660, when the Austrian Hapsburgs took over from the Spanish Hapsburgs. Beforehand, though, the Spaniards had fortified the port and modernized the city. At the dawn of the 17th century, the \u201cGolden Age\u201d of Naples, it was the second-largest city in Europe, second only to Paris. The city thrived, public theatres and opera houses went up,\u00a0 private villas and estates flourished. It was the place to be. It was the centre of the Italian art market, with dozens of foreign artists: Art Mitjens, Wenzel Cobergher, Cornelis de Smet and Jan Breughel being amongst the most famous.<\/p>\n
Metz, out of interest, was and remains a much more modest city. From the 9th-century capital of Lotharingia (which sounds like something out of the Lord of the Rings, as Lorrain sounds rather like something that might be spoken in Edoras) it became part of the Holy Roman Empire (which, as one historian has put it, was not Holy, not Roman, and not an Empire) and then free city under the rule of its burghers, it finally became French in the late 1500\u2019s at the conclusion of the Peace of Westphalia. An imposing citadel was constructed in the late 1550\u2019s, further fortified by Vauban in the mid 1600\u2019s, when France was busy acquiring the Alsace. In the 17th century, it would not have counted more than 20,000 inhabitants.<\/p>\n
As for our two gentlemen from Metz, what a shame they never set up two easels face to face and painted each others\u2019 portraits, or drew up an inventory of their paintings, or gratified us with a diary or two.<\/p>\n
While Barra is a precursor of the \u201cvedutisti\u201d, or \u201cpainters of views\u201d. (Canaletto is the best example in Italy, making Venice a captial of the genre, though of course Vermeer pursued a similar route in the Netherlands.)\u00a0 To make it a little more complicated, \u201cveduti\u201d has sub-genres: \u201cveduta esatta\u201d or extremely detailed and accurate depictions of the landscape and of its monuments, and \u201cvedute ideate\u201d or \u201cveduta di fantasia\u201d, idealised lanscapes strewn with ruins and overgrown with allegory. The latter is also know as \u201ccapriccio\u201d, though the two terms don\u2019t quite overlap. the style of Fran\u00e7ois de Nom\u00e9 is firmly rooted in the \u201ccapriccio\u201d, a genre that would carry on doing for centuries under the able brushes of artists like Giovanni Paolo Pannini and Joseph Gandy.<\/p>\n
Art History is a curious exercise, full of paradoxes. Art History lauds the exceptional artist, but only if he (never she; women are always treated as a negligible quantity by mainstream art historians) leaves a legacy, a school, a movement or followers. Art History prefers order, cause and effect, influence and confluence, it has little patience with eccentrics, especially those who ungraciously disappear for centuries. (Conversely, occult historians privilege secret brotherhoods, cryptical interpretations, da Vinci codes and the like; they could not care less about the art itself, only the meaning the are able to inject.) Hence my interest in Mons\u00f9 Desiderio, who did not start a school or a movement, who left no easily identifiable followers or provided something easily qualified as novel in art history. (Art History is also enamoured of \u201cfirsts\u201d, tending to present itself contempocentrically, so to speak, as if all Art worthy of a capital A was a slow improvement towards our century.)<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve always had a soft spot for eccentrics and misfits, and Mons\u00f9 Desiderio (the singular is used for convenience, referring principally to Fan\u00e7ois de Nom\u00e9, also to reflect the fact that he was only discovered to be plural quite recently) is a perfect candidate. Also, he proposes a vision which is wholly his own. The elimination of natural light in favour of what amounts to a form of artificial, or non-light, is unique. Many scenes give no indication of being lit by a sun, the backgrounds are often dark, like the wings of a stage, or in some great cavern whose ceiling is beyond reach in the gloom. The human drama – often violent, either by action or sentiment, is an alibi, not even providing focus, but nevertheless offering a notion of scale, though the scale itself is out of proportion with the humans present. These structures are not inhabited by humans, they offer no protection, no more comfort that a stage set. While Mons\u00f9\u2018s treatment of perspective is conventional, the structures are empty of humanity, and curiously disposed, as if they are set pieces, crowded together but not part of a whole, as if they had been trundled out of storage and jimmied together as best they fit, like some sinister Vegas strip or an amusement park not so amusing at all, with the same uncomfortable copy-paste feel. Detail, and accumulation of detail, but no unity or continuity, they are the visual dystopias, painted a century and a half before J.S. Mill even coined the word, three centuries before Orwell\u2019s 1984. They are oddly prophetic, and it is easy to see why Breton was in Mons\u00f9 Desiderio the precursor to Surrealism.<\/p>\n
Another unique aspect to the work of Mons\u00f9 Desiderio is his snapshot suspension of time. He depicts collapsing structures, columns buckling in mid-air, caught with the clarity of a high-speed shutter. I don\u2019t know of any other artist of the period who so lucidly predicts the day when images will be snatched out of an instant. Clearly prophetic.<\/p>\n
Even de Mons\u00f9\u2018s humans are often intriguingly lacking in humanity: many of the figures in his allegorical scenes are given the same visual treatment as the statues amongst which they wander or flee, requiring a second close look to distinguish between lifelike and living, establishing an ambiguity between metaphor and action which is wholly out of place in his day and truly close to what we would consider \u201cmodern\u201d..<\/p>\n
Alas, it is not enough to make them part of Art History. More\u2019s the pity. They are well worth getting to know.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\u00a0<\/em><\/em><\/p>\n
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