A Beautiful and Gracious Manner: The Art of Parmigianino
January 27 through April 18, 2004
 Born in Parma in 1503 and known as Parmigianino after his native city, Girolamo Francesco Maria Mazzola lived only thirty-seven years, yet in that brief time the quantity, variety, and sheer beauty of his drawings came to exemplify the art of draftsmanship. Less than twenty years after his death, the theorist Ludovico Dolce observed, "Parmigianino endowed his creations with a certain beauty which makes whoever looks at them fall in love with them. So delicate and accurate was his draftsmanship that every drawing of his . . . . astonishes the eyes of the beholder."
Parmigianino was an artistic prodigy whose gift first manifested itself in drawing. In Rome, he was celebrated as a Raphael reborn. During his lifetime, his drawings were prized by collectors for their combination of seemingly effortless technical brilliance and enigmatic subjects, and his first monumental public commission, the frescoes decorating the vault and apse of the church of Santa Maria della Steccata in Parma, today ranks among the greatest achievements of European architectural painting.
A Beautiful and Gracious Manner: The Art of Parmigianino celebrated the five-hundredth anniversary of Parmigianino's birth by presenting some fifty drawings and five closely related small-scale paintings that span his twenty-year career and illustrate the genius of his achievement. Also included were a dozen prints that demonstrated his pioneering experiments with printmaking and two portraits, notable, as are all his portraits, for their acutely observed detail and enigmatic psychology.
The exhibition was organized by the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa. Curated by David Franklin, Deputy Director and Chief Curator, National Gallery of Canada, and coordinated at The Frick Collection by Associate Curator Denise Allen, it was accompanied by a fully illustrated catalogue.
Presentation of the exhibition in New York is made possible, in part, by a major grant from the Peter Jay Sharp Foundation with additional generous support from Mr. and Mrs. Howard Phipps, Jr., Melvin R. Seiden, The Helen Clay Frick Foundation, Hester Diamond, W. Mark Brady, Diane Allen Nixon, and the Fellows of The Frick Collection.
Special Loan: Portrait of a Man with a Book by Parmigianino
April 18, 2004 through November 21, 2004
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Parmigianino (1503-1540), Portrait of a Man with a Book, c. 1523-24, York Art Gallery, United Kingdom |
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Frick Collection visitors had the extended opportunity to view a painting by the Renaissance artist Parmigianino (1503-1540), Portrait of a Man with a Book. The work was on loan from the York Art Gallery, and began its presentation through as part of the highly praised special exhibition A Beautiful and Gracious Manner: The Art of Parmigianino, which closed to the public on April 18 after setting winter attendance records. It remained on view at the Frick until November 21, 2004, representing an outstanding complement to the holdings of the museum, which — despite great strength in sixteenth-century paintings, sculptures, and decorative arts — does not otherwise include any works by this artist.
Once controversial, the attribution of Portrait of a Man with a Book to Parmigianino (previously given to Correggio) has recently been substantiated by the discovery of its listing as such in documents pertaining to the famous Farnese Collection in Rome. The canvas was on view in the Anteroom, a permanent collection gallery on the principal floor of the mansion, where it was displayed along with such cabinet-scale pictures as Memling's Portrait of a Man and El Greco's Purification of the Temple. Comments Chief Curator Colin B. Bailey, "It is tremendously generous of the York Art Gallery to leave Parmigianino's magnificent brooding portrait in our care for a year. The introspection of the unidentified sitter — youthful and self-assured, cultivated and something of a dandy, perhaps — strikes a particularly modern note. Clearly this work has yet to reveal all of its secrets, and we are hopeful that the sojourn at the Frick might stimulate renewed inquiry into its meaning and significance."
The Unfinished Print
June 2, 2004 through August 15, 2004
When is a work of art complete? And when do further additions detract from the desired result? These questions lie at the heart of aesthetic theory and have preoccupied artists, critics, and collectors for centuries. The problem of "finish" is particularly relevant in the graphic arts, in which images are developed in stages and often distributed at various points in their making.
The Unfinished Print addressed this complex issue in a presentation of some sixty impressions in varying degrees of completion by European masters from the fifteenth to the early twentieth century, primarily from the National Gallery of Art's extraordinary collection of 58,000 prints. Landmarks in the history of printmaking by artists including Dürer, Rembrandt, Piranesi, Degas, and Munch provided illuminating examples in the fluctuating history of aesthetic resolution, inviting the viewer to look over the artist's shoulder as he develops an image through a series of working proofs and states to a point he deems complete.
This exhibition was organized by Peter Parshall, Curator of Old Master prints, for the National Lending Service of the National Gallery of Art, where a larger version of the exhibition was shown in the fall of 2001. Additional loans from The Frick Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Epstein Family Collection were included in the New York presentation, which was coordinated by Curator Susan Grace Galassi. The exhibition’s presentation in New York was made possible, in part, by Angelo, Gordon & Co., the Fellows of The Frick Collection, and anonymous donors.
European Bronzes from the Quentin Collection
September 28, 2004 through January 2, 2005
Created to delight and engage their audience over countless viewings, bronze statuettes enjoyed immense popularity with rulers and the wealthy educated classes who collected them between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. The Frick Collection was pleased to have, as its special fall exhibition, European Bronzes from the Quentin Collection, the first public presentation of a distinguished, little-known private collection devoted to the art of these small- and medium-scale sculptures. Discriminatingly assembled over the last twenty-five years, the almost forty sculptures, primarily in bronze but also in terracotta or precious metal, share an exceptional level of quality, revealing the extraordinary invention and technical refinement characteristic of works made when the tradition of the European statuette was at its height. The Quentin Collection presented some of the best efforts by generations of European master sculptors. Exemplary works by Italian masters Giambologna and Susini were represented, as were those by their equally gifted Northern contemporaries.
The Quentin Collection's emphasis is on the idealized human figure, and the exhibition's gathering of powerful, elegant nudes provided visitors with a focused entry to the pleasures offered by the bronze statuette. At the Frick, the sole venue for this exhibition, most of the sculptures were shown freestanding without vitrines — as in the Collection itself — so that visitors could fully appreciate their delicately modulated, highly detailed surfaces as well as the subtle differences among the bronzes' colored, lacquered patinas.
The exhibition was accompanied by a scholarly catalogue coauthored by Manfred Leithe-Jasper, Director Emeritus, Department of Sculpture and Decorative Arts at The Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, and sculpture dealer Patricia Wengraf. It included new research and technical findings, as well as a large number of comparative illustrations.
Presentation of European Bronzes from the Quentin Collection was made possible through the generosity of The Quentin Foundation with additional support from the Fellows of The Frick Collection.
Special Loan: Raphael's Fornarina
December 2, 2004 through February 3, 2005
From December 2004 through January 2005, in collaboration with the Foundation for Italian Art & Culture, The Frick Collection will display La Fornarina by Raphael Sanzio (1483-1520) from the National Gallery of Art at the Palazzo Barberini in Rome. Painted around 1518 and signed by the artist, this celebrated work has never before been exhibited in the United States.
According to legend, the model was the daughter of a baker (fornaio) and the artist's lover. La Fornarina stands out among works by Raphael — an artist renowned for his mastery of female beauty — for its virtuoso depiction of a nude sitter and the diaphanous material she holds. The extraordinary sensuousness of the painting and the ensuing legend have earned it a special place in the history of art, inspiring interpretations and variations by artists from Raphael's contemporaries to Picasso.
The painting was displayed in the Oval Room and was accompanied by an illustrated booklet by Dr. Claudio Strinati, Superintendent of the National Museums of Rome. Following its presentation at the Frick, the work traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
Presentation of La Fornarina in New York is organized in collaboration with the Foundation for Italian Art & Culture and is made possible, in part, through the generosity of Hester Diamond, Jon and Barbara Landau, and with additional support from the Fellows of The Frick Collection.
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