Beautiful Barocci

Rest on the Return from Egypt, 1570-73, Vatican

The special exhibition currently at the National Gallery in London celebrates the works of Federico Barocci (c. 1533-1612), a master long neglected and rarely shown outside Italy. A friend sent me a review by Michael Prodger published in The Guardian.  The exhibit is happily titled: Barocci: Brilliance and Grace.

Barocci was in neglect for several reasons.  First because he was an artist working mostly in Urbino, away from Florence and Rome, though he studied with Michaelangelo in his youth.  For this reason, on the other hand, he escaped the shackles of ever-contorted Mannerist style much in fashion during his mature years.  Secondly, Art History as a discipline developed in the shadow of Hegelian historicism and thus concerned itself predominantly with the schema of stylistic development; so, this artist, who fell chronologically between Mannerism and Baroque, slipped through the cracks of critical attention.  But, perhaps most importantly, the 20th-century ethos, leaning toward the neurotically dramatic, favored artists who manifested difficoltà or expression of their inner struggle and preferred, for example, Michelangelo to Raphael and Correggio, as sung in T. S. Eliot's celebrated line "In the room the women come and go talking of Michelangelo", from The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, and then Picasso, until recently, to Matisse, and thus also favored Caravaggio in excess and left Barocci behind.  Beautiful, as much as decorative and colorist, was a term of reserved praise, not a highest critical expression.

So, the same fate fell on the mid-17th century Sassoferrato and to some extent, as I wrote earlier, to Poussin, whose dynamic drawings were preferred by 20th-century viewers to his finished paintings, seemingly overly calculated and therefore felt to be stiff and cold.  I always loved Barocci and, asked when interviewed for a position at Swarthmore to name my favorite Baroque painter, I said precipitously, if pretentiously, Sassoferrato.  And, surely, I adore Raphael and Correggio and venerate Poussin.