Part 1

BRIEF GUIDE National Gallery of Art

History and Description

The National Gallery of Art belongs to all the people of the United States of America. Established by a joint resolution of Congress, it is supported by public appropriation. The Board of Trustees consists of four public servants, _ex officio_, and five private citizens. Chairman of the Board is the Chief Justice of the United States. Under the policies set by the Board, the Gallery assembles and maintains a collection of paintings, sculpture, and the graphic arts, representative of the best in the artistic heritage of America and Europe. Supported in its daily operations by Federal funds, the Gallery is entirely dependent on the generosity of private citizens for the works of art in its collections.

Funds for the construction of the original building were provided by The A. W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust. During the 1920s, Mr. Mellon began to collect with the intention of forming a national gallery of art in Washington. His collection was given to the nation in 1937, the year of his death. In 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt accepted the completed Gallery on behalf of the people of the United States of America.

Architect for the National Gallery was John Russell Pope, who also designed the Jefferson Memorial and other outstanding public buildings in Washington. The building is one of the largest marble structures in the world, measuring 780 feet in length and containing more than 500,000 square feet of interior floor space. The exterior is of rose-white Tennessee marble. The columns in the Rotunda were quarried in Tuscany, Italy. Green marble from Vermont and gray marble from Tennessee were used for the floor of the Rotunda. The interior walls are of Alabama Rockwood stone, Indiana limestone, and Italian travertine. The entire building is air-conditioned and humidity-controlled throughout the year to maintain the optimum atmospheric conditions for the works of art it contains.

The original building is no longer large enough to accommodate the Gallery’s acquisitions and interpretive art programs. A second building, presently under construction, will house new exhibition galleries and a Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts. The two buildings will be connected by a plaza above ground and by a concourse of public service areas, including a new café/buffet, below. The new construction has been made possible by generous gifts from Mr. Paul Mellon, the late Ailsa Mellon Bruce, and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

THE COLLECTIONS

3 Florentine and Central Italian Art 6 Venetian and North Italian Art 8 Italian Art of the 17th and 18th Centuries 10 Flemish and German Art 13 Dutch Art 15 Spanish Art 16 French Art of the 17th, 18th, and Early 19th Centuries 19 British Art 21 American Art 24 French Art of the 19th Century 28 20th-Century Art 30 Decorative Arts 30 Prints and Drawings 31 Index of American Design

_About the Works of Art Listed in this Brochure_

Owing to changes in installation, certain works of art listed in this brochure may not always be on view. For up-to-date information, please inquire at the information desks.

The paintings and sculpture given by the founder, Andrew W. Mellon, comprising works by the greatest masters from the thirteenth to the nineteenth century, have formed a nucleus of high quality around which the collection has grown. Indeed, in making his gift Mr. Mellon had expressed the hope that the newly established National Gallery would attract gifts from other collectors, so that these works of art might be enjoyed by all and would be a lasting contribution to the cultural life of the nation.

Mr. Mellon’s hope that others would carry on the work was realized, even before the Gallery opened, by the action of Samuel H. Kress, who gave to the nation his great collection of paintings and sculptures of the Italian schools ranging from the thirteenth to the eighteenth centuries. Enlarging and enriching the Kress Collection on subsequent occasions, Samuel H. Kress and his brother Rush H. Kress made the National Gallery outstanding for its representation of Italian art and also added a distinguished group of French eighteenth-century canvases and sculpture and fine examples of early German paintings, as well as works of first importance from other schools.

In 1942 Joseph E. Widener gave the famous collection of painting, sculpture, and decorative arts formed by him and his father P.A.B. Widener. Chester Dale, besides making numerous gifts during his lifetime, bequeathed his extensive collection of nineteenth- and twentieth-century French paintings to the Gallery. Ailsa Mellon Bruce also bequeathed her collection of French paintings to the Gallery and, in addition, generously provided funds for the purchase of many old master paintings, including the Leonardo da Vinci. Lessing J. Rosenwald has given over 20,000 prints and drawings.

In addition, more than 325 other donors have generously added to the collections of the National Gallery of Art.

The vigorous movement, muscular lines, and above all the grace and lightness of the bronze figure capture in this _Mercury_ the fleeting presence of an ancient god. Protector of the forlorn and travel weary, patron of shepherds, merchants, wayfarers, and even thieves fleeing the law, Mercury was the bearer of news and tidings for the gods of mythology. He was known by his winged feet, a traveler’s cap with wings, and his herald’s staff, a _caduceus_, perhaps given him by Apollo, who had the power of healing. The design of Mercury’s _caduceus_ with its two serpents intertwined has been traditionally associated with medicine and is the adopted symbol of the medical profession. This masterful piece was probably made by Adriaen de Vries, a Dutch artist trained in Italy, and was modeled after a _Mercury_ completed twenty years earlier by Giovanni Bologna.

Florentine and Central Italian Art (Galleries 1-10)

Because the Church defined much of the social and cultural structure of medieval life, Christian themes predominated as the subject matter for the arts of the period. In the National Gallery collections, works created in Florence, Siena, Rome, and Central Italy show the range of skills and styles prevalent in painting as it progressed from the highly religious art of the Middle Ages to the more secular art of the Renaissance.

The usual technique for medieval religious art was egg tempera on wood panels covered with a fine bone plaster, called gesso. Egg yolk mixed with powdered pigments was applied to the gesso surface resulting in pictures characterized by bright colors and clear outer contours. To recall the radiant light of the heavenly kingdom and to heighten the patterns typifying this art, the artist often used gold-leafed grounds as well.

By the late fifteenth century, tempera gave way to oil paints that dried more slowly, permitting the artist subtle modulations in his color and allowing him to create realistic atmospheric effects. As the Renaissance progressed, artists combined a renewed interest in nature, analytical science, and classical humanism with the recently developed techniques in media to bring about a corresponding realism in art.

A medieval walled city is transformed into a throne by this imaginative, unknown artist to symbolize the dominance of Christ and Mary, Queen of Heaven, over the celestial city. To symbolize Christ’s rule on earth as well, the artist included, in the rondels, images of angels bearing orbs and scepters. So typical of the art of the Byzantine Empire, this painting is an icon, or holy image, and reflects within its composition a fusion of ancient Roman and medieval Oriental styles. A feeling for classical solidity shows in the faces, which are modeled with cast shadows to suggest three-dimensional forms, whereas a Near Eastern love of decoration accounts for the flattened drapery patterns and their dazzling highlights. The _Enthroned Madonna and Child_ and another large Byzantine icon of the same subject, also in this room, are among the earliest paintings in the collection.

Called to be “fishers of men,” the brothers Peter and Andrew pause in their labors at the persuasive words of Christ. In him, their future as apostles, or teachers, and the future of mankind hang momentarily suspended—like the net in their hands. This panel is part of an altarpiece commissioned for the high altar of the Cathedral in Siena and called the _Maestà_ (“majesty”) because its central theme was the Virgin splendidly enthroned with angels and saints. The purpose of this piece, like so many medieval paintings, was to teach, and Duccio arranged bright colors in simple shapes so that the story could easily be recognized.

Painted by two monks (_Fra_ means “friar”), this important painting fuses the concerns and techniques of medieval and Renaissance artists. The tapestrylike lawn, the decorative bright colors, and the inverted perspective of the shed are elements common to medieval art. The realistic rendering of birds and animals, the weight and volume given the kneeling Magi in the foreground, and the classically inspired nude figures at the distant left reflect the new-found interest of the Renaissance in both classical antiquity and the external world. The colorful, festive mood of the painting, moreover, is emphasized by the bustling throngs of people arriving to worship the Christ Child.

Not simply a work of art, this painted leather shield reflects the uniquely nationalistic consciousness of the Florentine city-state. As a public image carried in parades and ceremonies, its function was to symbolize the Florentine struggle for freedom and, as a gruesome depiction of victory against oppression, to warn all potential enemies of Florence. On the shield, both main episodes of the Old Testament story appear concurrently: David takes aim with his sling, while the giant’s head lies already severed at his feet. The effective, although awkward, foreshortening of the upraised arm and the sharply delineated veins and muscles attest to Castagno’s Renaissance interest in the realistic rendition of perspective and anatomy.

With precise draftsmanship and an infinitely subtle manipulation of light and shadow, Leonardo captures the character of a young Florentine noblewoman of the fifteenth century. In her eyes he has drawn a look of intelligence; in her bearing and the set of her mouth, there is a sense of determination and conviction. Punning on the name of his sitter, the artist has framed her head with a juniper bush—_ginepro_ in Italian—and decorated the back of the panel with a juniper sprig. Commissioned just after he completed an apprenticeship with Verrocchio, this early work is the only painting in the Western hemisphere accepted by scholars as indisputably by Leonardo, one of the true geniuses of the Renaissance.

The solidity and serenity of the figures derive from the forms and poses seen in ancient Roman sculpture and from the art of Raphael’s contemporaries, Leonardo and Michelangelo. The equilibrium and stability of the grouping provides not only a freshness and majesty suitable for the religious moment but also a source of contrast to the subtle but painful implications of the reed cross held by the two children. Named for the Spanish Dukes of Alba who once owned it, the _Alba Madonna_ is one of five paintings by Raphael in the National Gallery of Art.

Venetian and North Italian Art (Galleries 19-29)

The splendor of Venetian art reflects the city’s prosperity during its years as a major Mediterranean port. Typical of Venetian lavishness is _The Feast of the Gods_ (gallery 22) by Giovanni Bellini, Renaissance artist and teacher of Giorgione and Titian. This huge painting draws from the fantasies of mythology, turning a Venetian picnic into a feast for gods.

Aware of the subtle reflections of light and shadow playing in the misty air over the lagoons of Venice, sixteenth-century artists such as Titian, Veronese (gallery 28), and Tintoretto (gallery 29) strove to capture the illusion of surface texture and tangible atmosphere through their paints. Because oils blended easily together and because one could thicken these paints with pigments, artists soon established a more flexible technique. At the same time, they abandoned rigid wood panels for canvas supports, which allowed larger, lighter pictures. These innovations, combined with worldly subjects, soon had a significant impact on the rest of Europe.

Dominated by a placid landscape bathed in the half-light of dawn, Giorgione’s composition focuses on the small group placed off-center in the foreground. Rendering the Holy Family in luminous colors, the artist has silhouetted them against the dark mouth of a cave, a traditional nativity setting borrowed from Byzantine art that here reflects the strong cultural ties between the city-state of Venice and the empire to the east. This composition, one of the very few existing paintings by the master, demonstrates Giorgione’s mastery of color and control of mood, elements which helped him to achieve fame during his short life of thirty-three years.

One of the rare, life-sized bronzes of the Renaissance now in the United States, the _Venus Anadyomene_ is of unparalleled elegance. While the softness of the modeled forms and the vertical sweep of the curving silhouette invest the nude with a heightened grace, her twisting pose invites the viewer to move around the statue, following the fluid line of her encircling arms. Shown holding a seashell, a reflection of Venus’ birth from the sea, this statue is appropriately entitled _anadyomene_, “rising from the waters.” The artist, Jacopo Sansovino, was trained in Florence and Rome. Moving to Venice in 1527, this major high Renaissance sculptor and architect designed or remodeled many important private and public buildings including several palaces and the Library of Saint Mark.

Typically Venetian was Titian’s method of starting with a dark preparatory ground, then building up the forms with thin layers of oil paint. Choosing the pose that best focuses our attention, Titian has captured his sitter’s restless vitality in the turn of the doge’s head and the penetrating glance. By accentuating the size and grasp of the hand and the bulk of the body beneath the sumptuous ceremonial robes, the artist has drawn a massive and commanding presence befitting this renowned admiral and doge, or duke of Venice. As seen here, the figure seems to emerge quite powerfully from the shadow, and the predominant hues of red and yellow have a rich, smoldering quality.

Italian Art of the 17th and 18th Centuries (Galleries 33, 34, 36, 37; Lobby A, West Stair Hall, and Rotunda Stair Hall)

The baroque period began around 1600, when the Church was engaged in a movement to curb the spreading of the Protestant Reformation. To appeal to the large numbers of ambivalent Christians torn between the two theologies, the Catholic clergy commissioned and supported a realistic but dramatic art designed to involve the populace in the teachings and the authority of the Church. Indeed, so appealing was the baroque style that it was quickly adapted to the worldly subjects of the secular arts. Representative of the Counter-Reformation era is Gian Lorenzo Bernini, an enormously successful and influential architect and sculptor. As world trade shifted to the Atlantic nations, however, Italy’s economic position declined, and by the eighteenth century many Italian painters had to search for commissions elsewhere in Europe. Through their travels, decorative painters and muralists, such as Giovanni Battista Tiepolo, soon established an international style filled with brilliant colors and virtuoso brushwork.

A masterful example of the immediacy of baroque art, this bust of the uncle of Matteo Barberini, who became Pope Urban VIII, captures the textural qualities of living flesh. Through Bernini’s virtuosity, the highly polished forehead gives the illusion of glossy skin, whereas the starched fabric has been left with a rough, light-absorbing surface. To create a thoughtful expression, Bernini has exaggerated the depth of the eye sockets, casting deep shadows. Such a convincing portrayal of aging flesh and stern character—commissioned by the pope as a tribute to his uncle—is all the more impressive since Bernini had never seen the long-dead Francesco Barberini. The bee on the pedestal is the emblem of the Barberini, a wealthy Roman family.

The most casual elements of this intimate portrait of human activity combine to create a masterful composition of complex and dynamic parts. The pose of the girl, shown with arm and head poised as she tunes her lute, generates a feeling of sustained movement. The intricate still life fading into shadowy depths at the left is in deliberate contrast to the brightly lit costume and solid figure of the lute player. The combination of abrupt spotlighting and suggested deep space was characteristic of baroque painting in seventeenth-century Rome, and Gentileschi, an international court artist, transmitted this robust style to Genoa, Paris, and London.

In an era of travel, when men and women of wealth toured the continent as part of their education, factual renderings of interiors and cityscapes became important souvenirs. A major attraction on the Grand Tour during the eighteenth century was Rome; and in Rome, the Pantheon, a circular temple built in the second century. Converted to a Christian church, it became the burial spot of Renaissance authors and artists, such as Raphael, and has proved the source of inspiration for many later structures, including the central rotunda of the National Gallery. Panini was the greatest view painter in Rome during the 1700s, although his precise manner of painting was paralleled by his Venetian contemporaries, Canaletto and Guardi.

Flemish and German Art (Galleries 35, 35A, 39-43)

At the beginning of the fifteenth century, northern European art was caught up by the same spirit of empirical inquiry and technical innovation that predominated in Italy during this period. Northern art, however, reflects neither the influence of classical art nor the development of a single-point perspective that are the hallmarks of the Italian Renaissance. Rather, Netherlandish artists such as Jan van Eyck achieved mastery in the new technique of oil painting. The use of oil on wood panel permitted an extraordinary increase in the depth and richness of color, which, in turn, was coupled with the tradition of minute, craftsmanly detail established in late medieval manuscript illumination.

Around 1500, Italian humanism and Renaissance science had a discernable effect upon northern European painting. Albrecht Dürer (gallery 35A) and Francois Clouet (gallery 41) both profited from their exposure to Italian art. The Renaissance influence carried over into the work of Rubens in the seventeenth century despite the religious and political upheaval of the Reformation which affected so much European art of the mid-1500s. Catholic Flanders, the home of Rubens, remained relatively untouched by the changing times and maintained a continuity of political and economic ties to the Spanish monarchy. Rubens, who drew heavily from the work of earlier Italian masters, at the same time developed a baroque preference for large-scale canvases and bravura brushwork, transmitting this style to his associate van Dyck.

The sacred setting of a medieval church provides the backdrop to van Eyck’s interpretation of the Annunciation. The archangel Gabriel, dressed in jewels and rich fabrics, greets Mary: “Hail Mary, full of grace.” The simply gowned young virgin lifts her hands in wonder and replies, “Behold the handmaiden of the Lord.” The two Latin phrases (Mary’s is written upside-down) reinforce the contrast and balance between these two important figures: Gabriel in his sumptuous attire and with wings in rainbow colors stands slightly in front in a partially turned position, whereas Mary in her subdued glory sits slightly behind the angel and faces forward. Following the established tradition of the story, van Eyck added a lily, symbol of purity, and a dove, symbol of the Holy Spirit. He also decorated the floor tiles with Old Testament scenes prefiguring the life and triumph of Christ—Samson destroys the Philistine temple and David slays Goliath. This subtle integration of religious history into the background of the painting is indicative of the late medieval belief that objects of the external world are imbued with religious symbolism.

One of the few surviving paintings by Grünewald, this crucifixion amply displays the emotional power of this German Renaissance artist. Set against a sky darkened by an eclipse of the sun, the scarred and haggard body of Christ makes the scene painfully and physically immediate. With the agonized gesture of the hands, the ragged loincloth, the dislocated shoulders, and twisted feet, little remains to soften the tension of the painting; rather, the artist emphasizes the human suffering necessary for Christ to redeem mankind. Painted on the eve of the Protestant Reformation, this panel reflects the growing insistence in northern Europe upon the reality and importance of private religious experiences.

Scholar, collector, diplomat, and one of the finest artists of his century, Rubens was famed for the boundless enthusiasm and technical wizardry of his paintings. This monumental piece was executed early in Rubens’ career. Its impact depends not only upon its large scale but also upon the baroque combination of the theatrical—the dramatic lighting and Daniel’s expressive pose—with a convincing realism—the lifelike postures and superbly rendered lions’ fur.