Editor's Note

It is with pleasure and sincere gratitude that I introduce the first issue of Tabula Quarterly. Thanks are due first to those who have contributed to this inaugural issue, and to the journal's fledgling editorial board. While the stable of contributors to the quarterly continues to grow, its first mission, as a platform for the most intelligent and readable reviews of exhibitions and books on art, is off to a fine start.

Unlike a monthly magazine, which can more easily serve to showcase current exhibitions, it is the purpose of Tabula Quarterly to survey a season in art. With this ambition in mind, the present issue can be considered a sample—in terms of literary style and international scope—of the more comprehensive coverage to come. As a curator of European art based in California, I am acutely aware of the frequency with which I miss exhibitions. Like the auction catalogues that clutter my desk, a growing stack of unread books taunt me with their titles. Literary reviews offer one kind of respite, but not for the reader whose first priority is the visual arts. The best of these publications, rather than plunging us deeper into the morass, offer their own reward. An issue of the New York Review of Books or the Times Literary Supplement can be enjoyed from cover to cover, regardless of one's area of expertise. This is my ambition also for the present journal.

Reviews of recently-closed exhibitions, or ones that continue to travel, may not serve to drive attendance, but—like a lively report from a colleague—can still inform, amuse, or provoke. The best art criticism remains an end in itself, a literary form that can be read for pleasure. This is the premise of Tabula Quarterly: an archived, online source for the most rigorous and spirited writing on art.

Ariel Plotek

Treasures of Heaven: Saints, Relics, and Devotion in Medieval Europe
Cleveland | Baltimore | London

Catalogue edited by Martina Bagnoli, Holger A. Klein, C. Griffith Mann, and James Robinson. Baltimore: The Walters Art Museum, 2010.

The main priority of a popular exhibition like Treasures of Heaven, which closed at the British Museum on October 9th, is to attract an audience. This ambition to create a memorable show, one that would hopefully mobilize the punters, accounted for the exhibition's bombastic title, the selection of exquisite objects, and the luxury boutique-like display, with spotlights that made the works shimmer like the precious objects they are. It also explained the brevity of the captions, which reduced works to the scenes or figures they represent, and celebrated objects for their costly materials and fine craftsmanship. This fervor, however, for reducing significant artifacts to consumer goods was, regrettably, the main drawback of an exhibition that made the occasional tourist its target audience and set the standards of its educational mission quite low. Amidst such a spectacularly rich array, the well-informed visitor still found objects of interest, and a careful perusal could not help but result in some compelling discoveries. Not that any special attention was called to these works in the show. (For this, fortunately, we have the catalogue.)

In brief, Treasures of Heaven aimed to survey the millennium-long history of religious relics, from the end of the Roman Empire to Luther's Reformation. The curators of the show (organized by the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Walters Art Museum, and the British Museum) amassed an extraordinary selection of objects, drawn mostly from the permanent collections of the three organizing institutions, with some exceptional loans, like the bust reliquary of Saint Baudine, which traveled for the first time out of the small village of Saint-Nectaire, in the Auvergne. Although the nine sections into which the exhibition was divided produced an overall sense of variety—they highlighted different typologies and national practices—this organization ultimately emphasized an overarching continuity. With relics being moved from place to place, and pilgrims traveling far and wide, the show should have stressed medieval mobility; and yet, it touched on this theme only occasionally, while presenting an overwhelmingly static picture of the period. The significance of places of pilgrimage was reduced to a few centers: Jerusalem, Rome, Santiago, Cologne, and certain sites in England. Constantinople, that most venerated land of relics, was omitted altogether from some of the maps, as were countless land and sea routes. Indeed, the Middle Ages, somewhat astonishingly, were presented as a fairly homogeneous cultural period throughout Europe, which they most certainly were not.

Even more egregious was the decision not to discuss the transformation of so many objects. Contrary to the image put forward by the exhibition, of relics and reliquaries as objects of unchanging devotion, these sacred vessels were receptacles of meaning—always a function of time and place. Even the saints' stories could vary drastically from region to region, but this variety was nowhere noted in the exhibition. Such fixity is part and parcel of the outmoded view that pervaded the show. Indeed, Treasures of Heaven harked back to a series of disputable assumptions. The show reiterated, for instance, Louis Grodecki's reading of the Sainte Chapelle as a monumental reliquary despite the many challenges to this theory, most notably from Meredith Cohen. And I wonder if the exhibition's curators considered that many medieval communities turned a deaf ear to the directives of the Second Council of Nicea of 787, which forbid consecrating a church without holy relics? Pisa cathedral begun in 1064, grew into one of Europe's largest and most spectacular churches without the authority bestowed by any holy presence.

The show suffered from other interpretive shortcomings, such as an almost non-existent treatment of the relationship between relics and sacred space. Although Eric Palazzo's catalogue essay offers some compensation in this regard, this was countered by the decision to display the reliquaries in the show at navel-level, a choice that may have allowed for close scrutiny but also presented the objects as precious commodities. Such a mode of display demeaned the key issues, discussed in the catalogue, of visibility and hiding. The show did recall that reliquaries were containers meant both to conceal relics and to magnify their presence (sometimes as a statement of the Church's political position), yet this paradoxical character was mentioned only in passing, probably because this exhibition was very much more concerned with presentation. The objects, after all, were so nakedly presented that you could identify crooked bolts. Some pieces, indeed, had been taken apart, with the relics (along with their wrapping textiles and identifying labels) removed from their containers.

More problematic, however, were the chronological parameters of the show. Historically, the cult of relics was presented as a quintessentially Christian phenomenon, playing down its connections to the Classical cult of heroes—think of the Greek cult of Orpheus' head as opposed to that of his lyre, which was buried separately and gave rise to a distinct devotion—not to mention Buddhist worship practices. The show concluded with Luther, a decision presumably designed to please American and British audiences, but in defiance of what most historians have argued. Before Luther was born, important figures like Petrarch and Pico della Mirandola had openly disputed the validity of relics. The historian André Vauchez has long argued that already in the fourteenth century the cult of relics was on the wane, giving way to the worship of images, part of the widely successful cults of new holy figures such as St. Francis and St. Dominic. This rivalry between relics and images is an important one that continued for centuries, and it is strange that it did not merit more attention. Icons, after all, had been competing with relics since Early Christian times; so too had spolia, vestiges of holy sites that were often thought to possess miraculous powers, and attracted a devotion similar to that of relics. The problem posed by these categories led, in fact, to a medieval solution: the practice of certification, which should also have received some mention in the exhibition.

After a section on Luther, the show at the British Museum strangely closed with a coda on King Charles I of England, who fostered a cult of his own body in a fashion similar to other rulers. This final section may have had something to do with the final venue, and served as a bridge to the grand finale: an embarrassing video which reminded us of the many forms of devotion still common in our world, from Chinese street altars to the cults of Lenin, Elvis, or Pope John Paul II. This video was objectionable less in its execution than in its premise, implying that the world is everywhere the same and that feelings of attachment and veneration are universally shared by mankind. This is a crass form of humanitarianism, the sort of vacuous plea for fraternalism which should have no place in a venerable institution such as the British Museum, devoted to fostering knowledge of the world's many cultures, with their harsh differences and outrageous diversity, and not to flattening these out.

Emanuele Lugli

Roma Naturaleza e Ideal: Paisajes 1600–1650
Paris |Madrid|

Catalogue edited by Andrés Úbeda de los Cobos. Madrid: Museo Nacional del Prado, 2011.

This thoughtful, often ravishing exhibition, which closed on September 25th at the Prado in Madrid, featured over one hundred renderings of landscape and landscape-like settings that were born of Roman origins. The majority of these (89 works) were paintings; the rest (32 works) were drawings. The exhibition, reviewed here in Madrid (with titles corresponding to those in the catalogue), was organized in collaboration with the Louvre, and presented first in Paris. Although the show purported to trace the development of the genre of landscape from 1600 until 1650, it would be more accurate to describe the exhibition as featuring works from ca. 1600 (Jan Brueghel, Marina con el templo de la Sibilia, ca. 1595, if not slightly earlier) to ca. 1650 (Juan Bautista Martínez del Mazo, Paisaje con Mercurio y Herse, ca. 1660). Since the Metropolitan Museum of Art's magnificent exhibition of 2008, Poussin and Nature: Arcadian Visions, questions about the birth of landscape as an independent genre—landscapes, or the attributes of landscape, that neither function merely as backgrounds, nor serve simply to foreground a religious or mythological subject—have emerged as a tangible area not only of scholarly inquiry, but also of visual investigation. The subject lends itself naturally to the format of an international loan exhibition.

The word landscape (paisajes, paysage, paesaggio, in the Romance languages) derives from the late sixteenth-century Dutch word landchap. This formulation, which refers to the land first, and then to its image (whether in a wild or cultivated state), enters the English language (as landskip) in the same period. We are, therefore, on shaky conceptual ground when applying the term to art works created in Rome in the first half of the seventeenth century. The notion of the "Italian" landscape tradition originating with artists from the various regions of Italy and foreigners such as the German Adam Elsheimer, the Dutch Cornelis van Poelenburgh, and the French Nicolas Poussin, must be explored on its visual rather than etymological merits.

The exhibition made manifest that the development of the landscape genre is a complex and interlocking network of visual cues, where subject, optics, light, and the preceding traditions of artistic genres interweave. Although the northern origins of landscape were acknowledged with a couple of works by Jan Brueghel, landscape painting in Rome was presented as beginning with Annibale Carracci and his Bolognese followers (Domenichino et al.), alongside their northern counterparts (Elsheimer et al.), without much of an attempt being made to synthesize or untangle these parallel, but often intertwining, traditions (an issue the accompanying catalogue goes some way towards addressing). To my mind, the exhibition was as much about understanding the birth and breadth of the landscape tradition as it was an opportunity to admire stunning works of art: the precipitous inward movement of Matthijs Brill's pen and ink drawing Torrente en una garganta rocosa; the luminescent surface, delicately rendered reflections, and textured build-up of the foliage in Orazio Gentileschi's painting on copper of San Cristóbal; and the moving sense of the fluctuations of absence and presence created by the cloth over the central female figure's head in Guercino's El baño de Diana, are notable highlights. The judicious selection of landscapes commissioned from artists in Rome by Philip IV for the Buen Retiro Palace (from a possible selection of nearly 40 works) by Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Jan Both, Jean Lemaire, and Herman van Swanevelt were alone worth a visit to the exhibition, as was the splendid, largely Poussin-filled room that closed the show. However, the surface condition of a handful of pictures prevented the full story of the landscape tradition from unfolding freely before the viewer's eyes. Carlo Saraceni's Ariadne abandonada and Salmacis y Hermafrodito, and Adam Elsheimer's La Aurora, fall into this category and could benefit from cleaning.

It was not always clear why some works were included in the exhibition in lieu of other—to my eye, at least—more viable options. Most likely this was accounted for by the reality of international loan shows, where convenience and the availability of certain pictures dictate the hanging and grouping. From the ancient Roman painter Studius, to the Chinese immersion in the genre, and the nineteenth-century French and American fixation on the subject, landscape painting has captured the artistic imagination and this exhibition goes no small way toward contributing to our understanding and romance with the depiction of nature in its myriad permutations in Rome in the first half of the seventeenth century.

Eve Straussman-Pflanzer

Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus
Paris | Philadelphia, to October 30| Detroit, November 20, 2011–February 9, 2012|

Catalogue edited by Lloyd DeWitt. Philadelphia: The Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2011.

The thought-provoking exhibition Rembrandt and the Face of Jesus at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, organized by former Associate Curator Lloyd DeWitt, aims to synthesize several aspects of Rembrandt's notoriously complex life and art. Among the rich themes addressed are Rembrandt's evolving attitude toward the subject of Christ, the artist's position in seventeenth-century Amsterdam (particularly in regard to his Jewish neighbors), and his teaching practice in the workshop.

Upon entering the exhibition, visitors encounter paintings by Rembrandt and his predecessors which depict Jesus in an idealized manner based on putative "primary sources" such as the Mandylion of Edessa and the Veil of Veronica (pieces of cloth believed to preserve impressions of Christ's face) or the Lentulus Letter (an apocryphal description of Christ's appearance also supposed to date from his lifetime). Pictures exemplifying this traditional representation of Christ include Rembrandt's Christ and the Woman taken in Adultery of 1644 from the National Gallery, London, and others from the Philadelphia Museum of Art's collection, including paintings by Robert Campin and Jan Pynas. Through these works, the exhibition impresses upon the viewer the canonical representation of Jesus as a fair young man with light brown hair, a high forehead, and a long nose, from which Rembrandt would come to break so dramatically.

The following gallery is dedicated to drawings and prints of Jesus dating primarily from the 1630s and 40s—the first half of Rembrandt's career. Among these works on paper are biblical subjects Rembrandt and his circle returned to time and again: the Last Supper, the Raising of Lazarus, and the Supper at Emmaus. This group reveals Rembrandt's tendency in the period to select for his religious works moments of recognition and transition, oftentimes capturing the precise instant when faith crystallizes for those confronting Jesus.

The show then shifts to Rembrandt's contemporary milieu in Amsterdam, namely the Jewish neighborhood where he settled on Sint Anthoniebreestraat in 1639 (today his home stands as the Museum het Rembrandthuis). The artist's attitude toward his Jewish neighbors is a weighty topic in Rembrandt scholarship, and is described variously as positive, curiosity-driven, or simply commonplace. Referring to several drawings and paintings thought to be of Jewish sitters, the exhibition posits emphatically that Rembrandt's use of such models is proof-positive of a close relationship with his Jewish neighbors.

The third gallery, which draws together several lines of thought presented so far, is the most compelling of the exhibition. The centerpiece is Rembrandt's masterful Supper at Emmaus of 1648 from the Louvre, presented alongside six heads of Christ produced by the Rembrandt studio, including one possibly by the master himself. Published as a group by Seymour Slive in 1965, these six heads are painted on oak panels of approximately the same size; several may correspond to those listed in an inventory of Rembrandt's possessions from 1656, including one "nae `t leven," or "from life." In a departure from the master's earlier works, these pictures present Christ not as a mere catalyst for dramatic expressions of faith, but as a contemplative figure. Moreover, the similarity of Christ in these panels to the Jewish subjects in the preceding gallery makes a convincing case that Rembrandt, upon abandoning the conventional depiction of Jesus, turned to an extraordinary source for his model: a young Jewish man from his neighborhood in Amsterdam.

Seen together, the heads of Christ bring to the fore major questions surrounding Rembrandt's studio and its workings. Rather than focus on distinguishing the hand of the master—in the manner of the Rembrandt Research Project—the exhibition aims to connect these six heads in the hope of better understanding their role within Rembrandt's workshop practice. Making sense of the purpose that may connect these works remains, however, a challenge. Technical examinations suggests that they date from 1648 to 1656, and therefore could not be studies for the Louvre picture of 1648. Nevertheless, the uniting of these heads underlines the value of bringing such works together: they force viewers to consider the role of copying, originality, and working from life in the Rembrandt studio. To demonstrate the revolutionary aspect of Rembrandt's new depiction of Jesus, as well as his commitment to it, the exhibition devotes galleries also to Rembrandt's most famous works on paper: Christ Preaching (also called the Hundred Guilder Print) of ca. 1649, and the oft-repeated subject of the Supper at Emmaus. The works selected stress the way in which, over time, Christ came to be seen by Rembrandt in an increasingly contemplative light; an approach with consequences, arguably, not only for his finished works, but his very artistic process. Moreover, the exhibition reveals that Rembrandt's pupils shared these concerns with their master.

The final room of the show focuses on Rembrandt's late work. Visitors to Rembrandt's Late Religious Portraits of 2005 at the National Gallery of Art, will remember the psychological and emotional—rather than narrative—focus of Rembrandt's religious figures from the 1660s. Concluding this exhibition are Rembrandt's paintings of Christ from the Hyde Collection (ca. 1657–61) and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1661). These examples reveal how, at the end of his life, a period marked by personal and financial turmoil, Rembrandt remained committed to representing an individualized, meditative figure of Christ. Also persistent was Rembrandt's interest in Jewish subjects, even after he had left the Jewish quarter—exemplified here by the Bust of a Young Jew of 1663 from the Kimball Art Museum. Yet, while the master was unwavering in his dedication to a new representation of Christ, many of his students turned away from his model; Samuel van Hoogstraten emphatically rejected his teacher's vision of Jesus by advocating instead a return to canonical forms.

This conclusion to the exhibition presents a moving, melancholic vision of Rembrandt's late career: the solitary master, his religious and artistic ethos spurned by his students, persists alone in creating deeply personal works that continue to evoke strong emotional responses in viewers to this day. Still, after experiencing the preceding galleries, it is difficult to accept unequivocally this portrayal of the man. Certainly Rembrandt was an artist who rendered deeply affecting images of Christ which completely revolutionized the history of art, and may well have been inspired by his progressive and unconventional relationships with his Jewish neighbors. Still, however intimate his expressions of Christianity, and however unusual his relationship with the Amsterdam Jewish community, Rembrandt's vision of Christ was one that could be taught and imitated. And imitated it was, over and over, as the heads of Christ emphatically demonstrate. Visionary, businessman, teacher, man of faith, the figure of Rembrandt once again confounds us, even as we are awed by his art.

Elizabeth Nogrady

Bronzino One Year On
|Jet Lag|

In 1922, Walter Benjamin asserted that "the real purpose of a review is to testify to the spirit of the age." Hence, the review, in essence, should be "ephemeral." Such was the case with his own project, Angelus Novus, the periodical Benjamin was hoping to create when he made this pronouncement, a publication which never got off the ground. Despite Benjamin's assertion, it was equally clear to the critic that his ambitions as a reviewer differed from those of a journalist; that his concern was not to capture the quotidian, but ultimately to fix the present in a more permanent fashion. Every periodical is predicated, in this sense, on a contradiction: the will, on the one hand, to be of its time, and the desire, on the other hand, to produce something enduring. In the field of art history, a recent example of this dual attitude can be seen in the "Art History Reviewed" section of The Burlington Magazine. In addition to the usual feature articles and reviews of current exhibitions, the Burlington has, for the past two years, published a series of essays on the most significant books in the discipline (principally studies in English). Straddling past and present while looking to the future: such should be the ambition of Tabula Quarterly.

It is my purpose in these pages to focus on art-historical events (whether exhibitions or publications) that belong neither to the present, nor to decades past. This tipping point, when an event is either acknowledged as important, or collectively consigned to the dustbin of history, is of special interest. Within this temporal window, the present no longer blinds us with the immediacy of its newness, nor has the repetition of a common reference yet forced us to a look in a certain way. It is a moment with no set boundaries, an opportunity to see things afresh. It may be compared, in the words of Marcel Proust to "that privileged moment which does not last, and in which, during the brief space of a return, we suddenly find ourselves able to perceive our own absence." This "privileged moment," between past and present, is also that of jet lag.

My first subject is an exhibition that took place precisely a year ago. This might still count as recent for a scholarly book, but not for an exhibition—more rapidly superseded by season after season of subsequent shows. Since I first saw Bronzino, pittore e poeta alla corte dei Medici at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, however, the exaltation has not diminished. On the contrary, the intensity of the initial impression has only strengthened: Bronzino is probably the best Old Master exhibition I have yet seen. Such an assertion may seem highly subjective, and indeed it is. One may ask, moreover, whether it is the role of the serious scholar to indulge in such trivial ranking. I believe it is, as art history begins with art criticism. However subjective, my impressions are no less strongly felt; and a re-view in the true sense of the word can, I believe, inform both our present and our understanding of the past.

I will be brief in listing the principal reasons for the critical and popular success of Bronzino. The loans were secured many years in advance, and some works were sent to Florence with the specific understanding that this was the last time they would be permitted to travel: such was the case with the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Portrait of a Young Man of the 1530s. (These pious promises are, of course, made to be broken one day, but the symbolic gesture is still worth noting.) The research undertaken for this exhibition led, most spectacularly, to the rediscovery—or convincing reattribution—of three major paintings by Bronzino, an exceptionally high number for such a well-studied artist. Important conservation work was also undertaken for the occasion, as some of the exhibited works had not been seen in public for half a century, to begin with the four magnificent tondi painted by Pontormo and Bronzino for the Capponi chapel in the church of Santa Felicita. The installation and organization of the exhibition was also praiseworthy, a rarity in itself: the Palazzo Strozzi collaborates with the Polo Museale Fiorentino, but is run by a private foundation. This partnership may have resulted in some real failures (such as the recent De Chirico, Max Ernst, Magritte, Balthus: Uno sguardo nell'invisibile or the current Denaro e Bellezza. I banchieri, Botticelli e il rogo delle vanità) but it has also produced some excellent results (such as Cézanne a Firenze, in 2007) and indeed exceptional ones, as in the case of Bronzino. In a country reputed to be in a cultural recession, and derided daily for poor political and fiscal management, the significance of this model show (and not merely by Italian standards) cannot be overstated. The nostalgia that many Italian art historians express for their country's great post-war era of exhibitions is certainly understandable, but Bronzino demonstrates that epochal exhibitions can still take place today—provided the organizers and the underwriters can collaborate fruitfully.

Despite their importance, these circumstances surrounding the exhibition could not, in and of themselves, have guaranteed a great show. This, of course, was due chiefly to the subject. A monographic survey is perhaps not the most original perspective, even if the decision to focus on a not overly famous artist (without mentioning Michelangelo in the title) appears to be somewhat courageous by present standards. More interestingly, the curators of the show—Antonio Natali and Carlo Falciani—did not attempt merely to summarize what has been said about the artist to date. Rather, they aimed to offer a new image of Bronzino: a painter often categorized as a "Mannerist" but who should, according to them, be viewed as a "painter of reality" avant la lettre. This thesis was spectacularly demonstrated by the newly attributed Christ on the Cross from the Musée des Beaux-Arts of Nice; a picture in which the powerfully luminous emergence of form can indeed be qualified as Caravaggesque. The lighting of the exhibition significantly enhanced this aspect as well. Bronzino achieved what is often claimed, but seldom accomplished by exhibitions: it made us look with new eyes.

This "new" Bronzino, however, did not fully overshadow the "old." Quite the contrary: looking at many works in the show—and not only the Christ on the Cross from Nice—there could be no doubt that the reference to Michelangelo was acknowledged (and not always in a spirit of rebellion), or that many compositions and chromatic schemes were not at all related to seventeenth-century "paintings of reality", but to the less-than-realistic "stylish style" called Mannerism. The curatorial discussion of this topic was far too simplistic, attempting to reduce the fundamental studies of John Shearman or Antonio Pinelli to "trappole di formule classificatorie rigide e conformistiche; quale non di rado si mostra, per esempio, la categoria del 'Manierismo.'" In the labels of the show too, every naturalistic detail was emphasized to support this "new" interpretation, neglecting in the process the overall sense of Bronzino's oeuvre as a whole (not only the paintings, but also, and more spectacularly, his designs for tapestries). In the end, Bronzino's art cannot simply be switched from one category to another, as the curators here attempted; the artist, like every great genius, proves resistant to clear-cut efforts to categorize his art.

While an impressive number of first-rate Bronzinos were reunited at Palazzo Strozzi, his single most iconic painting, the Venus and Cupid from the National Gallery in London, was missing. Compared to other allegories of the same subject present in the show—such as the Venus, Cupid and Jealousy (or Envy) from the Szépmvészeti Múzeum, Budapest—the London picture is of such exceptional quality that one might be tempted to view this lacuna as a grave fault in the exhibition. Unexpectedly, however, this absence had a beneficial consequence: it allowed Bronzino to be considered not as the author of a single, isolated masterpiece, but as a complete and thoroughly inventive figure.

The case of the Venus and Cupid is symptomatic of a broader issue, which may appear, at first sight, to present a paradox: the success of an exhibition cannot be measured by the number, or even the quality, of the works assembled. This can easily be demonstrated by the many shows where the impressive number of loans fails to hide the absence of an organizing principle, or the tiresome repetition of a theme or format. What made Bronzino so monumental was precisely the dramatic and surprising unfolding, from one room to another, of works of different sizes, mediums and subject: from small scale allegories to gigantic tapestries, from "dark" pictures to extravagant colors, and from Madonnas to court portraits. (One could only regret the absence of drawings by Bronzino, which were the subject of a special exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art earlier in 2010.) In a sense, one can describe the perfect show in the same way Leon Battista Alberti, in his 1435 De Pictura, defined the perfect painting: narrative (historia) should be balanced by copiousness and variety.

Certainly what I am describing is a subjective impression. There was a sense, in visiting Bronzino at Palazzo Strozzi, of being on a stage, like a bit player in Lorenzaccio, faced with portraits that felt strangely human and contemporaneous. But the astonishing minutia of Bronzino's art also rewards close observation. Fortunately, some details were beautifully reproduced in the catalogue, even though these cannot convey the surprise one felt in discovering them through long and careful looking. I would have loved to reproduce as a series the details that were the most significant to my eye, and will mention here only the surprisingly irregular shadow that models the pilasters of the niche behind the Christ on the Cross from Nice. This is a perfect complement to the immediate shock one felt upon viewing the painting at a distance. And all of this supports my sense that Bronzino should now be considered among the greatest artists of all times—a highly subjective, but significant category nonetheless.

Neville Rowley

Art Theft and the Case of the Stolen Turners by Sandy Nairne.
London: Reaktion Books, 2011. Hardcover, 280 pages, £20.

What makes art theft so appealing? As a business, it offers relatively poor returns. (The "street value" of stolen art is generally estimated at ten-percent of its insurance value. Clever thieves steal diamonds, not DaVincis.) Nevertheless, "unsalable" works of art continue to be stolen, fueling a secondary trade: that in books on the subject. Among these, Art Theft and the Case of the Stolen Turners, is the first of its kind (part memoir, part exposé) to be penned by an acting museum director. Sandy Nairne, who took the helm of London's National Portrait Gallery in 2002, was the Tate's Director of Programmes when a pair of the museum's most important paintings was stolen while on loan to an exhibition in Frankfurt. On July 28th, 1994, J. M. W. Turner's Shade and Darkness – the Evening of the Deluge and Light and Color (Goethe's Theory – the Morning of the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis (both painted in 1843 and part of the Turner Bequest) were stolen from the exhibition Goethe and the Visual Arts at the Schirn Kunsthalle, together with a small painting by Caspar David Friedrich.

At the time of the theft, the Tate's director, Nicholas Serota, was overseeing a massive expansion project: the creation of Tate Modern. It was Nairne who was dispatched to Frankurt, and it is with this early morning phone call that the author's account begins. It will be no spoiler for anyone who has seen the paintings hanging, once again, in the Clore Gallery at Millbank to reveal that the two Turners were eventually recovered. Shade and Darkness was returned first, but this was kept secret until Light and Color had been recovered as well. Even then, the details of the operation could not be fully revealed, ostensibly for fear of compromising the fate of the still missing Friedrich. What the museum did make public, at a press conference on December 20th, 2002, was the total cost of the operation: just over £3.5M. The lion's share of this, it was later revealed, had been paid to the German lawyer who had brokered the deal—in exchange also for immunity from prosecution.

Despite this considerable sum, and the incalculable stress of the eight-year operation, the Tate had (in strictly monetary terms) profited from the theft. Though national collections in Britain are not commercially insured, the two Turners had been insured by Lloyds for £12M each while on loan. In the months following the theft, a £24M payout was made to the museum, and the underwriters—who continued to offer a £250,000 reward—became the titled owners of the missing pictures. The Tate, however, could not touch this money, as it would need the full amount (plus interest) to buy back the paintings if and when they were returned. An unprecedented arrangement was devised in 1998, whereby the Tate (in need of cash to fund its expansion) bought back the title to the missing Turners from the underwriters for £8M. The latter recouped a part of their loss, and responsibility for recovering the stolen paintings passed entirely to the museum—which was now free to reinvest the remainder of the payout (£18M including interest).

The meeting between the motley crew of underwriters and Geoffrey Robinson, the Treasury's Paymaster General, reads like an episode of Yes, Minister invaded by the cast of The Long Good Friday. This account, excerpted from Robinson's memoir, The Unconventional Minister, is one of the chorus of voices that punctuate Nairne's narrative. These serve to remind us that Art Theft and the Case of the Stolen Turners is very much an authorized account, published with the blessing of the Tate. The most conspicuously absent point of view is that of the lawyer, Edgar Liebrucks, who brokered the deal with "the other side." We do, however, have the colorful personalities of the other key players, which serve to enliven Nairne's understandably earnest narrative. In fairness to the author, Nairne is the first to admit that nothing had prepared him for the role of secret negotiator, brokering closed-door deals with organized criminals. Indeed, as the author takes pains to stress, the facts of art theft are very far from the fantasies instilled in the popular imagination. Rather, it is the very real highs and lows of Nairne's eight-year ordeal that are chronicled in the first part of this book.

Despite nail-biting rendez-vous in shabby hotel lobbies, and an associate named Rocky, our hero remains, alas, a museum director, whose account reads like a polite presentation to the board. (One imagines the kind of shenanigans Thomas Hoving would have got up to in Frankfurt.) Nairne's repeated references to "high-value art" and "high-risk theft" are bloodless, perhaps deliberately so. This language pervades the second half of the book, a treatise on such broad topics as "Ethics" and "Value." On the one hand, this serves to flesh-out what might otherwise have been the too slight story told (in 144 pages) in part one. Part two, particularly the chapter on "Ethics," also affords Nairne an opportunity to address one of the stickier questions posed by the case of the stolen Turners: was the £3M paid to Liebrucks (split, presumably, with the criminals who had possession of the paintings) tantamount to a ransom? On this point, Nairne's position is unequivocal: absolutely not. The distinction, however, between a ransom/reward and a payment made to a third party for "information"—as the author insists was the case with the seven-figure sums paid to Liebrucks—seems less clear than Nairne would like to believe. If one agrees with the experts, that the payment of ransoms for the return of stolen works has the pernicious effect of encouraging future thefts, then what one chooses to call such payments is moot. Nairne contends that, critically, those holding the paintings on "the other side" never threatened to destroy the works, nor were they the direct recipients of any ransom or reward. Rather, the money paid to the lawyer, Liebrucks, is characterized as a "fee" for transacting the return of the paintings. Certainly, the Tate was scrupulous in its actions, which were undertaken with every possible precaution. Still, it was money, not legal negotiations that secured the return of the two stolen paintings. On the one hand, one is sympathetic to Nairne's sense of anguish and frustration, as his efforts are repeatedly scuppered by forces beyond his control. On the other hand, it is clear from the outset that those holding the paintings are seeking to profit from their position, and I could not help but think that if, after much haggling, the Tate had just offered twice as much money, they could have had their paintings back in half the time. And, given what was at stake, perhaps they should have. Certainly, Nairne seems justified in thinking that the museum, the police, and the courts were damned if they did (negotiate with the criminals who held the paintings) and damned if they didn't (do everything in their power to get them back). If Nairne's saga makes one thing clear it is that however firm one's principles, once an irreplaceable work of art is stolen, it is the criminals that call the shots. The fact that all parties (save the insurers) profited in the case of the stolen Turners hardly suggests that we will be hearing fewer such stories in the future.

Ariel Plotek