More Talk About the Venetians

Let’s finish up that conversation with Frederick Ilchman, who co-curated the smart and hilariously lustrous new show at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, “Rivals in Renaissance Venice: Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese.”

LACAYO: In the fall of 2006 your museum reached an agreement with the Italian culture ministry to give back to Italy 13 disputed antiquities from the museum’s collections. Did that agreement make it easier to borrow important paintings from Italian churches and museums? You got around a dozen paintings from them, including some major works — Titian’s Flora from the Uffizi in Florence, his great Danae and his portrait of Pope Paul III from Naples, Tintoretto’s Saint George from the Accademia in Venice.

ILCHMAN: I think we have a special status with the Italians as a consequence of having been pro-active in our return of those pieces to Italy. You mention Titian’s Flora — that’s a direct example of things changing after the agreement was signed. I went to meetings of the ministry of culture in July 2007, after the agreement was signed, and when I got there a subminister produced an envelope and said the Uffizi would like to offer you one of these three pictures, take your pick. One was the Flora. Getting that picture made it possible to include a supreme example of the taste of an older generation of Venetian painters, from around 1500 to the 1520s. After Titian, younger painters like Tintoretto, Veronese don’t do those belle donne.

Also in Italy, the paper work, the number of stamps and approvals, not just from the museums, but from the surperintendency of the region and then the ministry of arts. And with loans from churches those have to have Vatican permission as well. Having a good relationship with the ministry of culture really helped us with that.

LACAYO: But did you have some of the loans nailed down before the agreement was signed?

ILCHMAN: We had great support at the curatorial level, from my counterparts at the Italian museums, but we didn’t have the actual permissions. Things being finalized was helped immensely by the agreement.

LACAYO: Did you try to get Tintoretto’s big breakthrough painting, The Miracle of the Slave, from the Accademia?

ILCHMAN: No, it’s much too big. The rule for this show was nothing that would have to be rolled in order to be shipped. Everything had to come in crates.

LACAYO: Given the realities of the recession, are we about to enter a period when we’ll see fewer and fewer big loan shows like this one, after the shows already in the pipeline have played out? These shows cost a fortune and don’t necessarily make a profit for the museums that host them even if you throw in catalogue and gift shop sales.

ILCHMAN: I think that’s right. You do these big shows as a service to people and to advance the discourse of art history. From a financial point of view you also do the shows to encourage people to become members and make the museum part of their lives. Had this show been scheduled to open next March instead of last March, it might have been severely diminished. A show like this has all kinds of costs. Look at the pair of full length portraits by Veronese, the mother and daughter, and the father and son. The father and son are from the Uffizi.

His wife and daughter are from the Walters Museum in Baltimore, so this is a rare reunification.

But the frame of the Baltimore picture was really fancy and huge. With that frame the two pictures would not look like a pair. So with the permission of the Walters Museum we made a copy of the Italian frame so we could present them as a matched set.

LACAYO: I was surprised that those were full-length portraits. They both date from 1551. Wasn’t it just in the 1520s that Brescia da Moretto did the first life-sized full-length Italian portrait, the one that’s in the National Gallery in London? So within 25 years or so that format was sufficiently well established to be used for an aristocratic family portrait.

ILCHMAN: What’s interesting too is that the full length portraits were done for a household on the mainland, not in Venice — in Venice that would still be considered a little showy. Venice was an oligarchy, but the oligarchs all wore black and looked the same. Gondolas all had to be painted black so rich men couldn’t outdo each other and only married women could wear pearl necklaces.

LACAYO: Until I saw your show I hadn’t known that only married women could wear pearl necklaces in Venice. Which is why courtesans wore pearls in their hair. So I really noticed the detail in Tintoretto’s version of Tarquin and Lucretia, where Lucretia, the virtuous wife of a Roman general, is about to be raped at knifepoint and her pearl necklace has snapped and is shooting pearls all over. The audience of that day would have understood that this was the symbol of her status as a respectable married woman, and if it’s breaking, something really bad is happening.

ILCHMAN: That’s an outstanding detail. With Tintoretto there’s so much going on. He needs to be reined in, with the snapping pearls and the spinning around of the figures and the cushion hanging in midair. Veronese’s response to Tintoretto is like, Calm down! And meanwhile Titians in his own world of caressing the paints.