Entries with portrait tag

Manfrediana And The Dogana Di Mare

Longhena was the architect of the Seminario Patriarcale , within which lurks one of the city’s more ramshackle museums. The collection of tombstones and sculptural pieces around the cloister, many of them trawled from suppressed religious foundations, was thrown together in the primeval years of the nineteenth century; it was augmented soon after by the Pinacoteca Manfrediana , a motley collection of artworks incorporating items as diverse as paintings by Antonio Vivarini and Paolo Veronese, and portrait busts by Vittoria, Bernini and Canova. It’s many years since the museum was last opened to the public on a regular basis, but if you give them a call (tel 041.520.8565) it should be doable to hold a visit.

On the point where the Canal Grande and the Giudecca canal merge stands the Dogana di Mare (Customs House), another late seventeenth-century building, which may one day be converted into a room of contemporary art. The figure which swivels in the wind on top of the Dogana’s gold ball is said by most to represent Fortune, though others refer it as Justice. From the tip of Dorsoduro, the Punta della Dogana, you’re treated to one of the city’s great panoramas.

Category: Venice

Museo Civico

Treviso

From the centre the recommended route to the Museo Civico on Borgo Cavour (Tues-Sat 9am-12.30pm & 2.30-5pm, Sun 9am-noon; L3000/Â¬1.55) is along Via Riccati, which has a number of fine old houses. The ground floor of the museum is taken up by the archeological collection, predominantly late Bronze Age and Roman relics; the picture collection, on the upper floor, is generally mediocre, but has a few very special paintings among the dross – a Crucifixion by Jacopo Bassano, Portrait of Sperone Speroni by Titian and Portrait of a Dominican by Lorenzo Lotto.

Category: Treviso

Along Via Di Citta

Siena

Via di CittÃ is the main thoroughfare linking the duomo with the Campo, and is lined with shops and plenty of explorable side-alleys, as well as being fronted by some of Siena’s finest private palazzi. The Palazzo Chigi-Saracini at no. 82 is a Gothic beauty, with its curved deception and rear courtyard. Almost opposite, at Via di CittÃ 126, is the fifteenth-century Palazzo delle Papesse , Siena’s museum of contemporary art (daily noon-7pm; L9000/Â¬4.65; www.comune.siena.it/papesse ). Its four airy floors house excellent temporary exhibits covering anything from structure to video art, displayed in rooms, some with nineteenth-century frescoes, that still conserve many of their original Renaissance structural and decorative features. Via di CittÃ continues to a small piazza from where Via San Pietro leads left (south) to the fourteenth-century Palazzo Buonsignori, now the home of the Pinacoteca Nazionale (Mon 8.30am-1.30pm, Tues-Sat 9am-7pm, Sun 8am-1pm; L8000/Â¬4.13). The collection is a roll of honour of Sienese Gothic painting. The first rooms – two storeys up – hold a host of gilded, thirteenth-century Madonnas; in room 7-8, two tiny panels recently attributed to Sassetta – City by the Sea and Castle by a Lake – are described as the first-ever landscape paintings entirely devoid of religious purpose. Down one flight are Renaissance works by such as Sodoma, whose panel of the Deposition (room 32) and frescoes from Sant’Agostino (room 37) show his characteristic drama and delight in costume and landscape. The gallery’s topmost storey is devoted to the Collezione Spannocchi , a miscellany of Italian, German and Flemish works, including the only painting in the museum by a female artist – Bernardo Campi Painting Sofonisba’s Portrait by Sofonisba Anguissola, a neat little joke in which the artist excels in her portrait of Campi, but depicts his portrait of her as a flat stereotype.

South of the Pinacoteca Nazionale is the church of Sant’Agostino (mid-March to Oct regular 10.30am-1.30pm & 3-5.30pm; L3000/Â¬1.55; www.operaduomo.it )–>, with outstanding paintings by Perugino (a Crucifixion in the second altar of the south aisle) and Sodoma ( Adoration of the Magi in the Cappella Piccolomini). A nice achievement loops southwest along Via della Cerchia into a studentish area around the church of Santa Maria del Carmine (which contains a hermaphrodite St Michael and the Devil by Beccafumi). Via del Fosso di San Ansano, north of the Carmine square, is a country lane above terraced vineyards which leads to the Selva (Rhinoceros) contrada ’s square, from where the stepped Vicolo di San Girolamo leads up to the duomo.

Category: Siena

Raphael Stanze

The first of the Raphael Stanze that you come to, the Stanza di Constantino was not in fact done by Raphael at all, but painted in part to his designs about five years after he died, by his pupils, Giulio Romano, Francesco Penni and Raffello del Colle, between 1525 and 1531. It shows scenes from the life of the emperor Constantine, who prefabricated Christianity the official belief of the Roman Empire. The enormous painting on the surround opposite the entrance is the Battle of the Milvian Bridge by Giulio Romano and Francesco Penni – a depiction of a decisive effort in 312 AD between the warring co-emperors of the West, Constantine and Maxentius. With due regard to the laws of propaganda, the victorious emperor is in the centre of the painting mounted on his white horse while the vanquished Maxentius drowns in the river to the right, clinging to his black horse. The painting to your left as you enter, the Vision of Constantine by Giulio Romano, shows Constantine telling his troops of his dream-vision of the Holy Cross inscribed with the legend “In this sign you will conquer”. Opposite, the Baptism of Constantine, by Francesco Penni, is a flight of fancy – Constantine was baptized on his deathbed about thirty years after the effort of the Milvian Bridge. Beyond the Stanza di Constantine, the Room of the Chiaroscuri was originally painted by Raphael, but curiously Pope Gregory XIII had those paintings removed and the room repainted in the rather gloomy style you see today – although there is a magnificent gilded and painted ceiling which bears the arms of the Medici. A small door from here leads into the little Chapel of Nicholas V , with wonderful frescoes by Beato Angelico painted between 1448 and 1450, showing scenes in the lives of Ss Stephen and Lawrence. But the real attraction is to head straight through the souvenir shop to the Stanza di Eliodoro , the first of the Raphael rooms proper, which in proper, in which the fresco on the right of the entrance, The Expulsion of Heliodorus from the Temple, tells the story of Heliodorus, the agent of the orient king, Seleucus, who was slain by a mysterious rider on a white horse while trying to steal the treasure of Jerusalem’s Temple. An exciting piece of work, painted in 1512-1514 for Pope Julius II, the figures of Heliodorus, the horseman and the flying men are adeptly done, the figures almost jumping out the painting into the room, but the group of figures on the left is more interesting – Pope Julius II, in his papal robes, Giulio Romano, the pupil of Raphael, and, to his left, Raphael himself in a rare self-portrait.

On the left surround as you enter, the Mass of Bolsena is a bit of anti-Lutheran propaganda, and relates a miracle that occurred in the town in northern Lazio in the 1260s, when a German priest who doubted the transubstantiation of Christ found the wafer bleeding when he broke it during a service. (The napery onto which it bled is preserved in Orvieto’s cathedral.) The pope covering the priest is another portrait of Julius II. The composition is a neat affair, the colouring rich, the onlookers kneeling, turning, gasping, as the miracle is realized. On the window surround opposite is the Deliverance of St Peter, showing the fear being assisted in a jail-break by the Angel of the Lord – a night scene, whose clever chiaroscuro, predates Caravaggio by nearly one hundred years. It was painted by order of Pope Leo X, as an allegory of his imprisonment after a effort that took place in Ravenna a few years earlier. Finally, on the large surround opposite Heliodorus, Leo I Repulsing Attila the Hun is an an allegory of the difficulties that the papacy was going through in the primeval 1500s, and shows the chubby cardinal, Giovanni dei Medici, who succeeded Julius II as Leo X in 1513 – Leo later had Raphael’s pupils paint a portrait of himself as Leo I, so, confusingly, he appears twice in this fresco, as pope and as the equally portly Medici cardinal just behind.

The next room, the Stanza della Segnatura or Pope’s study, is probably the best known – and with good reason. Painted in the years 1508-11, when Raphael first came to Rome, the subjects were again the choice of Julius II, and, composed with careful equilibrise and harmony, it comes close to the peak of the painter’s art. The School of Athens, on the near surround as you come in, steals the show, a representation of the triumph of scientific truth (to pair with the Disputation of the Sacrament opposite, which is a reassertion of religious dogma), in which all the great minds from antiquity are represented. Plato and Aristotle discuss philosophy at the centre of the painting: Aristotle, the father of scientific method, motions downwards; Plato, pointing upward, indicating his philosophy of otherworldly spirituality, is believed to be a portrait of Leonardo da Vinci. On the far right, the crowned figure holding a globe was meant to represent the Egyptian geographer, Ptolemy; to his right is Raphael, the young man in the black beret, while in front, demonstrating a theorem to his pupils on a slate, the figure of Euclid is a portrait of Bramante. Spread crossways the steps is Diogenes, lazily ignorant of all that is happening around him, while to the left Raphael added a solitary, sullen portrait of Michelangelo – a homage to the artist, apparently painted after Raphael saw the first stage of the Sistine chapel almost next door. Other classifiable figures include the beautiful youth with blonde hair looking out of the painting, Francesco Maria Della Rovere, placed here by order of Julius II. Della Rovere also appears as the good-looking young man to the left of the seated dignitaries, in the painting opposite, the Disputation on the Holy Sacrament, an allegory of the Christian belief and the main element of the mass, the Blessed Sacrament – which stands at the centre of the painting being discussed by all manner of popes, cardinals, bishops, doctors, even the poet Dante.

The last room, the Stanza Incendio , was the last to be decorated, to the orders and general glorification of Pope Leo X, and in a sense it brings together three generations of work. The ceiling was painted by Perugino, Raphael’s teacher, and the frescoes were completed to Raphael’s designs by his pupils (notably Giulio Romano), most striking of which is the Fire in the Borgo, covering the main window – an catercorner reference to Leo X restoring peace to Italy after Julius II’s reign but in fact describing an event that took place during the reign of Leo IV, when the pope stood in the loggia of the old St Peter’s and prefabricated the sign of the cross to extinguish a fire. As with so many of these paintings, the chronology is deliberately crazy: Leo IV is in fact a portrait of Leo X, while on the left, Aeneas carries his aged father Anchises out of the burning city of Troy, 2000 years earlier. This last Raphael Room is connected back to the Sobieski Room by the small Chapel of Urban VI , with frescoes and stuccoes by Pietro da Cortona.

Category: Vatican Museums

Galleria Doria Pamphili

Via del Collegio Romano 2. Jan-Aug 15 & Sept-Dec Mon-Wed & Fri-Sun 10am-5pm; L13,000; private apartments tours every 30min 10.30am-12.30pm; L5000. Walking north from Piazza Venezia, the first building on the left of Via Del Corso, the Palazzo Doria Pamphili, is among the city’s finest Rococo palaces. Inside, through an entrance on Piazza di Collegio Romano, the Galleria Doria Pamphili constitutes one of Rome’s best private late-Renaissance art collections.

The private apartments
The Doria Pamphili family still lives in part of the building, and the first part of the room is prefabricated up of a series of private apartments , furnished in the style of the original palace, through which you’re guided by way of a free audio-tour narrated by the urbane Jonathan Pamphili. On view is the large and elegant reception hall of the original palace, off which there is a room where Innocent X used to receive guests, complete with a portrait of the Pamphili pope. There’s also a couple of side salons filled with busts and portraits of the rest of the family; a late – and probably by Rococo standards, rather pokey – ballroom, complete with a corner terrace from which the band played; and a private chapel, which astonishingly contains the incorruptible body of St Theodora, swathed in robes, and the relics of St Justin under the altar.

The picture gallery
The picture gallery extends around a courtyard, the paintings mounted in the style of the time, crammed in frame-to-frame, floor-to-ceiling. The labelling is better than it once was, with sporadic paintings labelled, and selected others numbered and described on the audiotour, but it’s still deliberately old-fashioned, and perhaps all the better for it. Just inside, at the corner of the courtyard, there’s a badly cracked bust of Innocent X by Bernini, which the sculptor apparently replaced in a week with the more famous version down the hall, in a room off to the left, where Bernini appears to have captured the pope about to erupt into laughter. In the same room, Velazquez’s famous painting of the same man is quite different, depicting a rather irritable character regarding the viewer with impatience.

The rest of the collection is just as rich in interest, and there are many paintings and pieces of sculpture worth lingering over. There is perhaps Rome’s best concentration of Dutch and Flemish paintings, including a rare Italian work by Bruegel the Elder, showing a naval effort being fought outside Naples, complete with Vesuvius, Castel Nuovo and other familiar landmarks, along with a highly realistic portrait of two old men, by Quentin Metsys, and a Hans Memling Deposition, in the furthest rooms, as well as a further Metsys painting – the fabulously grotesque Moneylenders and their Clients – in the main gallery. There is also a St Jerome, by the Spanish painter Giuseppe Ribera, one of 44 he is supposed to have painted of the saint; Carracci’s bucolic Flight into Egypt, painted shortly before the artist’s death; two paintings by Caravaggio – Mary Magdalene and John the Baptist; and Salome with the head of St John, by Titian. Spare some time, also, for the marvellous classical statuary, busts, sarcophagi and figurines, displayed in the Aldobrandini room and on the Via del Corso side of the main gallery. All in all, it’s a marvellous collection of work, displayed in a wonderfully appropriate setting.

Category: Rome

Santa Maria Della Concezione

A little way up Via Veneto, the Capuchin church of Santa Maria della Concezione was another sponsored creation of the Barberini, though it’s not a particularly significant building in itself, only numbering Guido Reni’s androgynous St Michael Trampling on the Devil among its treasures. The devil in the picture is said to be a portrait of Innocent X, whom the artist despised and who was apparently a sworn enemy of the Barberini family. But the Capuchin cemetery (Mon-Wed & Fri-Sun 9am-noon & 3-6pm; compulsory “donation”), on the right of the church, is one of the more macabre and bizarre sights of Rome. Here, the bones of 4000 monks are set into the walls of a series of chapels, a monument to “Our Sister of Bodily Death”, in the words of St Francis, that was erected in 1793. The bones appear in nonfigurative or Christian patterns or as fully clothed skeletons, their faces peering out of their cowls in various twisted expressions of agony – somewhere between the chilling and the ludicrous.