Painting Life Stories: April 2014

Ugolino and His Sons, Marble, Modeled by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Carved by Victor Bernard, Metropolitan Museum of Art

I think it’s appropriate at this time to sing the praises of the marble carver Victor Bernard. His presumed masterpiece, the magnificent, majestic, anguished depiction of Ugolino and His Sons, is currently the centerpiece of a breathtaking sculpture exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Ugolino is an incredible figural composition in marble, and for years in my former job as a part-time Information Desk lackey for the Met I effusively praised its remarkable qualities to visitors. How, I wondered, could one man seamlessly carve such precise, intricate, anatomical detail for five intertwined figures from one block of marble without any discernible slip of the chisel?

Not much is known about Mr. Bernard, apparently. But everybody knows this sculpture depicting Ugolino and His Sons from Dante’s Inferno. The tyrant Ugolino is condemned to eternal punishment with his four sons and faces the agonizing choice of either starvation or cannibalism. One reason nobody knows much about Bernard is all the credit for carving Ugolino is usually given to the wrong man! I’ve long thought that this incredible masterpiece of marble carving was the work of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827-1875), whose sculptures and related artwork are on view in a spectacular exhibit at the Met through May 26.

Carpeaux is considered the greatest 19th Century sculptor before Rodin. And while Carpeaux did all the critical studies and clay and plaster models for Ugolino and His Sons from 1960-61, the marble version was carved by Bernard from 1865-67. Judging by this one incredible example, Bernard was an extraordinary marble carver. He is briefly referenced in the catalog accompanying the current exhibition, “The Passions of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux,” co-authored by James David Draper, the Met’s curator for European Sculpture and Decorative Arts, and Edouard Papet, chief curator of sculpture at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. There might be more information on Bernard buried in some archaic French publication in a massive PDF file that takes forever to download, but I’m not going to spend the rest of my life looking for it. I did do a little Google research, but came up empty-handed.

The bronze version of Ugolino was placed in the Tuileries Garden in Paris in 1863. In 1865, Stephane Derville, a Parisian marble carver, proposed creating a marble version. “The carving in an off-white marble from Saint-Beat, a quarry in the Pyrenees that belonged to Derville, was to be executed by Victor Bernard, as stipulated by the contract that was drawn up in Paris on December 23, 1865,” Papet writes. So there you have it, or as much as you are likely to have about it. Bernard gets a brief mention on the Met’s own website in a description of its Ugolino: “This marble version was executed by the practitioner Bernard under Carpeaux's supervision and completed in time for the Universal Exposition at Paris in 1867. The date inscribed on the marble [1860] refers to the original plaster model's completion.” Derville’s family retained possession of the marble Ugolino until 1950. The Met purchased it in 1967 from the Wildenstein Gallery.

The Met probably doesn’t want to make too much of the fact that its masterpiece was carved not by the great man himself but by a barely acknowledged skilled craftsman named Victor Bernard. In fact, in promoting the Carpeaux exhibit of 150 sculptures, paintings, and drawings in nine galleries, the Met has this to say about Carpeaux: “He strove for anatomical realism in all media, but especially in his marble sculptures and busts, which seem to capture flesh and blood in stone.” Well, yes they do, to an incredible degree, despite not being carved personally by Carpeaux. The soft, off-white beauty of the marble perfectly mimics the translucence of pulsating human flesh in a miraculous way. I couldn’t believe the sense of life emanating from those marbles. I stared long and hard at several of the portrait busts, including the handsome marble likeness of one of the 19th Century’s greatest academic painters, Jean-Leon Gerome.

Jeon-Leon Gerome, Marble, Getty Museum

Carpeaux, who died of bladder cancer when he was only 48, was the son of a stone mason and himself a skilled carver in marble when he was young, but after nearly going blind from an infection caused by marble dust, he created his greatest works without actually carving another block of stone.

Having belatedly learned this startling news about the creation of the Met’s Ugolino, I was extremely disappointed, even a bit despondent, over the fact that Carpeaux himself had not carved what I have always considered to be the most impressive sculpture at the Met. I was cruelly reminded that things we value in life are "seldom what they seem."

Making a clay or plaster model of Ugolino is one thing. But carving a huge block of marble to reveal five intertwined figures to anatomical perfection always seemed one heck of a lot harder. But what do I know about hard work. I’m only an easel painter. Painting an apple seems like hard work to me. I couldn’t contemplate the seemingly insurmountable task of carving Ugolino and His Sons. So I did a little Internet searching and found that it’s not quite as hard as it looks, and farming out the work to apprentices or skilled stonemasons was common practice among most of the big name sculptors like Rodin, and dates all the way back to the ancient Greeks. The self-hewn marbles of the incomparable Michelangelo, however, were on Carpeaux’s mind for nearly every one of his own figural creations.

“With the introduction of the full-sized clay or plaster model in the Cinquecento [16th Century Italy], it had become more and more possible for the sculptor to leave the transfer from the model to stone to his apprentices,” wrote Chandler Rathfon Post, an associate professor of Greek and Fine Arts at Harvard, in his 1921 book, A History of European and American Sculpture. “The gradual perfection of methods for such transfer, especially the invention of the pointing machine, entailed the unwelcome result that by the nineteenth century, masters had generally abandoned the practice of hewing their own statues and reliefs. Sculpture thus lost that life, warmth, and vivid impression of the artist's individuality which constitute so much of the appeal, for instance, in Michael Angelo [sic].”

In today’s digital world, stone carving can even be done by automated milling machines controlled by computer data. Using this technology, a work in marble can be executed in about one-third the time of more traditional methods, I read somewhere. But many of today’s sculptors still prefer to carve marble themselves and use the pointing device for accurate carving of the figure. Here’s a link to a contemporary sculptor’s marble carving process and his thoughts on the use of surrogate carvers. http://www.jasonarkles.com/process/.

To be honest, I don’t know anything about these pointing devices for stone carving. I’ve never been curious enough to look into them myself and have never seen how they work. But having a skilled carver do the work for you seems to be a form of cheating, especially when the work is the one sculpture you are best known for. After winning first place at the French Salon in 1863 for the bronze Ugolino, Carpeaux wrote to a friend, “The first step has been made: Everyone in Paris knows the name Carpeaux.”

I wonder if Victor Bernard got due credit when Carpeaux received a first place gold medal for the marble Ugolino at the Universal Exposition in 1867? But you know, whether he did or not, it probably wouldn’t have mattered to him. He had steady work for a couple of years, probably got paid pretty well, and could take symbiotic pride in having worked closely with the celebrated sculptor. I imagine the workers on Henry Ford’s first assembly line felt the same way about helping put together the Model T Ford. There isn’t room for everybody at the top.

Raffaello Sorbi (1844-1931), An Outdoor Osteria, 1892, Oil on Canvas, 19 by 31 1/2 in., Private Collection

Suppose you were as good at drawing and painting as Raffaelo Sorbi was in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. You might have been able to carve out a pretty good niche market for yourself, as he did. Sorbi concentrated on painting small, highly detailed historical paintings of gentry and villagers playing games and relaxing together in harmony outside rustic restaurants in the sun-filled Tuscan countryside. He was so successful and his works were so popular that he was awarded the country’s highest honor, Commendatore del Regno, or Order of the Crown of Italy. The order has been suppressed by law since the Republic was founded in 1946. But in Sorbi’s day, it was a very big deal.

I am in awe of all those 19th Century genre painters from Italy, France, Germany, Spain and other European nations. When I first started going to the auction exhibitions of 19th Century European paintings at Sotheby’s and Christie’s in the 1980s, there were literally hundreds of small genre paintings on display, each of them carefully designed and accurately drawn and painted, with lively color and brushwork, and with loads of atmosphere to boot. It wore me out after paying close attention to the first 20 or so, and I was relieved to go to the rooms housing the work of artists who painted on canvases big enough to see some detail without putting your nose to the surface. The exquisite details these genre artists were able to paint on a very small scale is truly amazing. What remarkable control of the medium and the brush they had. Starting their training as kids, they drew accurately with a loaded brush. Most of us today fill in careful drawings with thin paint or simply push the paint around until the detail looks almost as good as a photograph.

I came across the painting reproduced above in a 1988 Sotheby’s London auction catalog I added to my huge collection a few years ago. What a perfect example of genre painting it is. Sorbi has covered his small canvas, only 19 by 31½ in., with eye-catching detail from north to south and from east to west, leading the viewer on a relaxing, casual stroll through his vivacious and charming 18th Century mise en scene. The placement of the central figures and the little bits at the corners and edges of the canvas make for a very pleasant visual entertainment. The balance of all the elements in this painting is outstanding.

Little did I know Sorbi had done dozens of similar paintings with a dependable cast of characters that he used interchangeably for these outdoor café scenes, most featuring an attractive waitress standing in a prominent location, with the action swirling all around. Sorbi’s romantically nostalgic paintings depicting good times in the beautiful Tuscan countryside of 18th Century Italy are said to have appealed to the 19th Century Italian reunification wish for all social classes to live in harmony. Sorbi made a very good living selling his work through important picture dealers in Paris, London, Munich and Berlin.

The brilliant, sun-dappled effects in Sorbi’s paintings indicate his affinity for the Macchiaioli plein air movement that developed in his native Tuscany in the mid-19th century as an antidote to the studio paintings of the academics. The Macchiaioli artists focused their attention on nature by recording the effects of light, shadow and atmosphere in their paintings, while often commenting on current socio-political topics.

Sorbi was born in Florence in 1844 and died there in 1931. He studied design and painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Florence, where he was heavily influenced by Antonio Ciseri (1821-1891), a painter of portraits and historical subjects. Before turning to depictions of an idyllic 18th Century rural Italy, he painted a number of classical subjects inspired by Pompeii, the ruins of which were a popular stop on the Grand Tour.