Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio

With “Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio” (New York, October 2016-January 2017; Paris [Louvre], February-May 2017), the Metropolitan Museum of Art has again reached back into the annals of art history to revive an important but largely forgotten figure—something it does with welcome frequency. Valentin de Boulogne (1591-1632) was one of the most successful and venerated artists of the post-Caravaggio generation and thus roughly contemporaneous with some other recently resuscitated figures like Francesco Vanni (at the Yale University Art Gallery, Sept. 2013-Jan. 2014), Giovan Battista Moroni (at the Royal Academy, Oct. 2014-Jan. 2015) and Bartholomeus Spranger (at the Metropolitan, Nov. 2014-Feb. 2015). As was the case with those artists, in looking at Valentin’s paintings and reading about his contemporary significance and reputation, one wonders how he was able to linger under the radar for so long. But this is a comprehensive exhibition, the first monographic show devoted to the artist, presenting fifty pieces (almost all his painted oeuvre in a corpus of approximately sixty extant works) gathered from some thirty-five international lenders, including all of the pieces owned by the Louvre, which has the most extensive collection of his work in the world, and including even “The Martyrdom of Saints Processus and Martinian” (1629-30), held so closely by the Vatican Museums that, we are told, it will never again be seen in the public domain in our lifetime. An additional bonus of this breadth is that it provides the first occasion on which the two different versions of two important paintings have been hung together, allowing a unique opportunity to consider their relationship: the 1624-25 and 1627-30 versions of "The Judgment of Solomon" and those of 1618-22 and 1627-29 of "Christ Driving the Merchants from the Temple." Some of the paintings will be exhibited only in New York and some only in Paris. Several have been newly restored expressly for this exhibition, and the commentators have benefitted in a number of instances from information gathered by new technologies (x-ray and infrared reflectology) that were unavailable to earlier researchers. The Museum has produced what is now the definitive monograph on the artist, in all likelihood the only book on Valentin that one will need for the foreseeable future. Perhaps the basic reluctance of art historians to deal with him was a result of his essentially dual nature as an artist: as a French painter working in Rome, he had a natural tendency to fall through the cracks of what was (and still tends to be) a nationally-oriented historical approach: in 1934, a Paris exhibition of seventeenth-century French realist painters declared that Valentin"s “lyricism and his vehemence belong profoundly to the Italian spirit” (vii), and just a year later, in 1935, the great Italian scholar Roberto Longhi called him "the premier FRENCH naturalist" (my emphasis): to the Frenchman he's deeply Italian; to the Italian he's profoundly French! In any case, a good deal of recent research has refined our understanding of the context in which French painters were working in Rome in the years following Caravaggio’s flight from the city, and a good deal of new light has been shed on the artists whose work was vital to Valentin’s formation, so that we are now in a better position to appreciate the relative importance of the influences on his development of French and Italian (and also Northern) elements.Such matters and others are addressed in the several scholarly essays that precede the catalogue. Annick Lemoine, co-curator and co-editor, an art historian at the University of Rennes, provides a general overview of what she defines as the three periods of Valentin’s development, always with a view to elucidating the artist’s manner of painting “dal naturale,” i.e., directly from a posed model, as opposed to “al naturale,” i.e., simulating a naturalistic effect by other means. The other co-curator and co-editor, Keith Christiansen, John Pope-Hennessy Chair of European Paintings at the Met, also emphasizes that style of working, tracing it from the revolutionary innovations of Caravaggio but underscoring how Valentin’s independence and individual genius led him to modify Caravaggesque techniques, which merged with Venetian pictorial traditions in creating his own style. Topics of the other essays include the conditions of living and working in Rome at the time and the economic situation of painters and their arrangements for work and payment; the creative atmosphere in Rome in the early decades of the seventeenth century, the competing aesthetic “schools” and the early difficulty of Valentin’s acceptance into that artistic ferment until his “Last Supper” (1625-26) finally signaled his rise from relative obscurity to a position equal to that of his compatriots Simon Vouet and Nicolas Poussin, who had already made their names in Roman circles; his eventual triumph and extraordinary success among the collectors and cognoscenti of the following century, when it became clear after Caravaggio’s death that Valentin was not a mere follower of the “dal naturale” manner but a major force in the reinvention of Caravaggesque prototypes; and some of the aspects of his art that may, indeed, qualify him as a preeminently French painter after all. The essays are all clearly written, well annotated and easily accessible to the lay reader.The catalogue of fifty plates is arranged roughly chronologically, beginning with reproductions of paintings by Cecco del Caravaggio, Bartolomeo Manfredi, and Jusepe de Ribera, three painters in Valentin’s Roman circle who greatly influenced him by transferring to him the basic “dal naturale” impulse from Caravaggio. These and the ensuing plates of Valentin’s works are printed full-page and in excellent color and clarity. Each reproduction is accompanied by a signed annotated commentary of several pages by one of the contributing scholars and by comparison illustrations (numbering about seventy) when necessary. They provide full curatorial data including provenance and selected references and are interspersed with occasional (about twenty in sum) full-bled enlargement pages. One of the more engaging aspects of Valentin’s art is that, since he was painting as often as possible from live models, many of his figures are recognizable from work to work, and it is amusing to see the different uses to which the same figures and faces are put. This is especially so in his secular paintings, which tend toward light-hearted tavern scenes with the music-making, card-sharping, and pocket-picking hijinks familiar to us from Northern genre painting of the time. (Indeed, Valentin’s preferred social company in Rome were the so-called “Bentvueghels,” the hard-drinking, hell-raising, mostly Flemish and Dutch crowd that frequented exactly such locales.) It may also be the relative stability of that staffage that enables us more easily to see the gradual development of this theme from a rather farcical staging reminiscent of commedia-dell’arte burlesque to a more serious and introspective rumination on the more “Northern” concerns of ethical living, wasted time, the transience of life, etc. Keith Christiansen’s commentaries on the paintings are particularly valuable in following this development and point out that in the earlier works the gestures of the figures seem simply taken from everyday life, whereas in later paintings they are demonstrative and derive from rhetorical conventions, inviting us to read the pictures as “emblematic pantomime” (148). Not all these individual commentaries will be equally intriguing to everyone; many of them deal extensively with rather arcane questions of exact dating, the precise circumstances and origins of commissions, and other matters that are vital to art historians but less than electrifying to a general audience. This serves to remind us, though, that exhibitions and catalogues of this scope serve two quite different but interdependent constituencies. There is on one hand the scholarly community of museum curators and academic historians and on the other hand the general museum-going public. The years-long labor of organizing such an exhibition and editing its accompanying catalogue has as its aim not solely the delectation and edification of the second group, although that is often the primary motivating consideration; it is also a scholarly enterprise intended to stimulate new thinking and original research and to provide a forum for learned conversation among the members of the first group. For some years the major exhibitions/catalogues of the Metropolitan Museum have striven to serve both purposes, and the current project is another excellent example of their success in balancing the requirements of both constituencies. There is a very useful chronology of the artist’s life, and the scholarly community will welcome particularly the extensive notes and selected bibliography (current to 2016) as well as the comprehensive index. The public at large benefits from a superb general introduction to this fully accomplished and quite enchanting artist who is easily the equal of his most celebrated contemporaries but who has been allowed to languish on the sidelines of scholarly commentary. This is an excellently produced volume and a very high recommendation to everyone interested in the history of European painting.

Color reproductions could have been better.

Beautiful book... but very very poor reproductions! I just purchased this book from the Met after seeing the Boulogne show (3 times!) and I absolutely loved his paintings. The lush, saturated cover image heavily belies the extremely muted and dull (no accurate saturation of color, nor accurate contrast compared to the originals) reproductions throughout this book. Compared to the images of his (Boulogne's) paintings that I took with my own camera phone, this book's image quality is very poor. As a painter, I fully understand that a book is no substitute for the original painting, but compared to the rest of my library of art books, this book exhibits way too much disparity between original and reproduction.That said, the book is very well written and the layout is beautiful.

Volume ottimo per la conoscenza dei caravaggisti! Studio accurato nella prosa tipica dei critici stranieri che vanno dritti alle problematiche delle opere dell’artista in questione senza perdersi in divagazioni estetizzanti od ontologiche tipiche della critica nostrana!