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 displayed
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 was organized in collaboration with the Foundation for Italian Art & Culture and was 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.
Animals in Combat: Giovanni Francesco Susini’s Lion Attacking a Horse
and Leopard Attacking a Bull (c. 1630–40)
February 15 through May 1, 2005
This installation celebrates Walter A. and Vera Eberstadt’s notable gift of Giovanni Francesco Susini’s Lion Attacking a Horse and Leopard Attacking a Bull to The Frick Collection in 2002. The drawings, prints, books, and objects on display here illustrate the subject of combating animals, as it was handed down from classical antiquity and transformed in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century art.
Small bronze sculptures like Susini’s always evoked a rich history that inspired their makers and collectors alike. Visitors were encouraged to begin anywhere within this installation and acquaint themselves with themes such as the revival of antiquity, the spectacle of animal combat, and the tradition of collecting small bronzes.
Animals in Combat was drawn entirely from the rich sources in New York public collections and was made possible through these institutions’ generous loans.
This exhibition was made possible through the generous support of the Helen Clay Frick Foundation and the Fellows of the Frick Collection.
Renaissance and Baroque Bronzes from the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge
February 15 through April 24, 2005
The Fitzwilliam Museum's collection of Renaissance and Baroque bronzes is one of the finest in Great Britain. Beginning February 15, The Frick Collection presented thirty-six of the Fitzwilliam's bronzes, many of which have never before been seen in America. Dating from the turn of the sixteenth century to the early years of the eighteenth century — the period that saw the flowering of the bronze statuette as an independent art form — the sculptures are remarkable for their beauty and refinement.
Many of the bronzes in the exhibition were among the fifty-five works bequeathed to the Fitzwilliam Museum in 1979 by the sister of Lieutenant Colonel Mildmay Thomas Boscawen, an explorer, naturalist, and botanist who owned several sisal plantations in East Africa. The collection includes masterpieces by renowned Italian Renaissance and Baroque sculptors such as Vincenzo Grandi and Alessandro Algardi, as well as outstanding works by Netherlandish, German, and French masters, which are rare among the Frick's predominantly Italian holdings. The Fitzwilliam exhibition, seen in conjunction with the Frick's permanent collection, provided visitors with a unique opportunity to explore the depth and range of European bronze sculpture.
Along with statuettes and devotional reliefs, the exhibition included exquisite examples of functional bronzes produced by the uncle-nephew team of Vincenzo and Gian Girolamo Grandi, who worked in sixteenth-century Renaissance Padua and Trent. Two of their greatest works, the Fitzwilliam's Perfume Burner and The Frick Collection's magnificent Hand Bell, were reunited during the exhibition. Both pieces are characterized by the extraordinary sharpness of their casting and represent pinnacles of luxurious artistry in bronze, helping to explain why these small sculptures enjoyed such enormous popularity among the most rarefied European clientele.
The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue written by Victoria Avery, of the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies. The catalogue also contains an essay on bronze casting technique and technical reports on each of the bronzes by Jo Dillon, Conservator of Objects at the Fitzwilliam Museum.
Presentation of the exhibition in New York was made possible, in part, through the generous support of Peter and Sofia Blanchard, Lawrence and Julie Salander, and The Helen Clay Frick Foundation, with additional support from the Fellows of The Frick Collection.
Special Installation: Gardens of Eternal Spring — Two Newly Conserved Mughal Carpets
May 10 through August 14, 2005
The two magnificent carpets on display in the Oval Room beginning May 10 were among the fewer than five hundred that survive from the court of the Mughal emperors. Woven in northern India in the mid-seventeenth century, these carpets were luxurious objects in terms of both the fabrics used to make them (silk and cashmere) and the artistically complex patterns that they display. The Frick carpets date from the reign of Shah Jahan (1628-1658) and were probably made at the royal factory in Lahore, one of India’s main cities for carpet production.
In constant use in palaces and mosques, carpets seldom survive in pristine condition over the centuries. The Frick rugs were each assembled from fragments of much larger carpets at some point during the nineteenth century, a common practice at the time owing to the demand by collectors.
The larger of the two, which is decorated with rows of trees, was most likely assembled from the carpet that was sent as a gift to the tomb mosque of Sheikh Safi in Ardabil in Persia by Shah Jahan himself. Its decoration, like that of the smaller carpet — which displays a variety of flowers — is meant to represent a garden in a mode directly connected with Mughal miniatures and relief decoration. Their rich crimson color is typically associated with Indian carpets from this period and provides a vibrant and sumptuous background against which the plants are set.
Henry Clay Frick purchased the two carpets in 1918 as furnishings for his New York home at One East Seventieth Street. After a nearly four-year restoration by preeminent textile conservator Nobuko Kajitani, they were displayed for the first time as works of art in their own right.
The conservation and presentation of Gardens of Eternal Spring: Two Newly Conserved Mughal Carpets has been generously supported by The Hagop Kevorkian Fund, The Ahmanson Foundation, The Helen Clay Frick Foundation, and the Fellows of The Frick Collection.
From Callot to Greuze: French Drawings from Weimar
June 1 through August 7, 2005
 During the spring and summer of 2005, The Frick Collection presented a selection of approximately seventy drawings from the Schlossmuseum and the Goethe-Nationalmuseum in Weimar, Germany, offering visitors a unique opportunity to view many works that have never before been exhibited outside the former Eastern bloc countries. A number of these sheets were once in the private collection of the renowned poet, novelist, playwright, and philosopher Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) or were collected by Grand Duke Carl August of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach, whom Goethe served as privy councilor from 1776. Assembled with Goethe’s encouragement, the duke’s collection of drawings was intended to survey the history of European art and provide aspiring artists with models from which to learn.
The exhibition included drawings by Jacques Callot, Claude Lorrain, Charles Le Brun, Jacques Bellange, Simon Vouet, Antoine Watteau, François Boucher, Charles Natoire, Jean-Baptiste Greuze, and Charles-Louis Clérisseau, among others, and shed new light on the individual oeuvres of these artists as well as deepened the viewer’s understanding of their practice as draftsmen within the context of other French masters.
From Callot to Greuze was co-organized by The Frick Collection and the Schlossmuseum, Weimar, and its presentation in New York was coordinated by Chief Curator Colin B. Bailey. The exhibition was accompanied by an illustrated catalogue published by G + H Verlag, Berlin, which is available in the Museum Shop.
The exhibition was made possible, in part, through the generous support of The Christian Humann Foundation, The Florence Gould Foundation, and The Helen Clay Frick Foundation. Additional support has been provided by the Fellows of The Frick Collection.
Memling's Portraits
October 12 through December 31, 2005
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| Hans Memling, Portrait of a Man, c. 1470, oil on panel, The Frick Collection, New York |
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Memling’s Portraits, The Frick Collection’s special fall exhibition, offered the most comprehensive gathering to date of
works in this genre by the celebrated Netherlandish artist Hans Memling
(c. 1435-1494). Memling’s oeuvre comprises some one hundred paintings,
of which thirty are portraits. Executed in Bruges between 1470 and the artist’s death some twenty-five years later, his portraits bear eloquent witness to “Memling’s exasperatingly seamless evolution,” as noted in 1998 by Memling scholar Dirk De Vos. While issues of chronology, authorship, and the identification of sitters have long been debated by historians, the panels themselves never fail to impress by their humanity, truthfulness, and peerless technique. The exhibition, which featured a selection of more than twenty works by Memling and his school, also explored the function of portraiture in the Netherlands during the fifteenth century.
Although his date of birth is not recorded, Jan van Mimnelinghe (Hans Memling) was born sometime between 1435 and 1440 in the German town of Seligenstadt, near Mainz. His early training was carried out probably in Cologne, and it is generally agreed that, having arrived in the Low Countries in the late 1450s, Memling spent a prolonged period in the Brussels workshop of Rogier van der Weyden (1399-1464). Following van der Weyden’s death, he made the move north to Bruges, a thriving commercial center that was also a hub of international banking. He was granted citizenship of the city in 1465, and by the 1470s he was Bruges’s preeminent artist.
Memling was engaged by a variety of local and foreign patrons primarily as a painter of devotional works, in which portraiture often played an essential role (in altar wings or as part of a diptych or triptych). More or less similar in scale, format, and presentation, his portraits might also celebrate forthcoming nuptials, commemorate a long-standing union, or—as in the case of one documented work—serve as an independent epitaph, to be placed near the sitter’s tomb. Many of the independent portraits that Memling painted seem to have been commissioned to commemorate a foreigner’s sojourn in Bruges. Such half-lengths, with waterways and swans dotting the lush countryside in the background, were particularly popular with the Italian bankers and merchants who did business in this international trading city.
For more information, see Memling's Portraits.
Memling’s Portraits was organized by The Frick Collection, the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, and the Groeningemuseum, Bruges. Its presentation in New York is coordinated by Chief Curator Colin B. Bailey.
Memling’s Portraits was accompanied by a full-color catalogue published by Ludion, available in the Museum Shop.
 Major funding for Memling;s Portraits has been provided by The Peter Jay Sharp Foundation, with generous support from Melvin R. Seiden in honor of Joseph Koerner, Meg Koster, and Leo Anselm Koerner. Additional support has been provided by The Samuel H. Kress Foundation, The Council of The Frick Collection, the Consulate General of Belgium in New York, The Helen Clay Frick Foundation, and the Fellows of The Frick Collection.
This exhibition was supported by an indemnity from the Federal Council on the Arts and Humanities.
The project was also supported, in part, by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts, which believes that a great nation deserves great art.
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