What you learn from Archives

Recently, Old Ken went on a visit to the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena to see some of the object files. What might be in these files, you ask, and what could anyone possibly want with them? Well, let's take an image like this one of a geographer and find out.

If we consult the object file for this painting, we find that it was purchased by the collector Norton Simon at Sotheby's in London in 1968 for 2500 GB pounds (or what was then $5,974). Incidentally, at the same auction, Simon also bought one of the Chardin still lives now in the Museum's collection for 4000 GBP.



Purchased as an anonymous work and credited only to the fictional "School of Caravaggio," several attempts have been made to make a secure attribution of this "Geographer" to a particular artist. As early as January 1971, Alfred Moir (a professor of art history at UC Santa Barbara) had assigned the painting to the obscure Baroque painter Pietro Paolini, whose "Achilles Among the Daughters of Lycomedes" (ca. 1625-30, now in the Getty) is above. Offered in correspondence to Simon, Moir's assessment was made on grounds such as the following:

"it [the painting] seems conceived in terms very close to Ribera, but the dress and to a certain extend the face seem to be handled in a manner similar to Valentin's. [...] It occurs to me, however, that their influence, and hints of a responsiveness to the style of G.B. Caracciolo, together with the general coloring and handling of the picture, would not be inappropriate to Pietro Paolini, and tentatively I would suggest this as the appropriate attribution of the picture."



Above, and also now in the Getty, is a specimen of work by this "Valentin" mentioned by Moir (the French Baroque painter known as Valentin de Boulogne) - - a "Christ and the Adultress" from ca. 1620. So, according to this connoisseurial way of thinking, attribution or the assignment of a creator's name to the object is of central importance and this is to be done by identifying the visual similarities of the work to some pretty obscure figures and then advancing a "likely candidate" from amongst them.

Now, copies of the Museum's old labels indicate that Simon clearly accepted Moir's attribution; from "School of Caravaggio," this painting was then assigned to Pietro Paolini. By the late 1980s, however, the "School of Caravaggio" label still had some currency as the Museum appealed to Edward Maeder, Curator of Costumes and Textiles at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, to try to identify from whence the costume may have come, and thus the likely nationality of the artist. In response, Maeder suggested the following:



"I would agree ... that the costume is indeed of Eastern European origin. The ties on either side of the collar at the neck of the white shirt are typical for the first three-quarters of the 16th century. ... The 'frogs' or front closings of applied braid are typical for Hungary and Poland in the late Renaissance. ... The biggest problem from the point of view of the costume historian seems to be the fur-lined coat with long sleeves. Am I correct in assuming that the sitter's left sleeve (the viewer's right) ... is a different color from the sitter's right sleeve (the viewer's left)? This would indicate that he is wearing the fur-lined over garment on this right arm and holding in place beneath his left."

The logic here seems to run in the following way: by identifying visual resemblances between the "typical" products of various known (if very obscure) artists and imagining what they might look like if inflected by certain erudite artistic influences, it becomes possible to place this mysterious painting and its maker in a likely space and time. Equally, the depiction of costume is taken as an index of what was "normal to" the geography and time-period in which the painting was made. All of this must neglect the possibility that the painter might have asked the sitter to dress in archaizing clothing (or vice versa) or that the artist executed this one picture as a radical departure from his conventional mode of painting. The intellectual-parlor-game-dimension of this attribution fun is then taken to an even higher pitch by Leonard J. Slatkes, late Distinguished Professor of Art History at CUNY Queens, who claimed - - solely on the basis of visual inference - - that "the work was probably executed in Rome during the first third of the third decade of the 17th century. The artist was most likely from the Southern Netherlands"!

I would hasten to emphasize that through all of this very learned discourse, not a single line had yet been wasted on exactly what it is that the geographer is shown doing or what we might make of the strange objects represented around him. The image is certainly suggestive in these regard; although the volume opened before the geographer is rendered as an opaque block merely suggesting legibility, other features are depicted in detail. Drawn to our eye by the diagonal, ivory slash of the quill pen, the inkwell in the foreground, for example, is a fascinating form. It appears to be a triangular box with corners decorated by the heads of elephants whose curving trunks form loops.

This sixteenth century Italian inkstand, now in the Victoria and Albert Museum, offers an interesting parallel. It too is supported by three animal heads (in this case, rams), which appear to carry the ink in a central reservoir. Perhaps further research could identify a much closer approximation of the inkwell we see depicted in the Norton Simon painting - - not to mention what we might learn by trying to identify the globe or even the kind of calculation signaled by the gesture and mode of discourse being conducted by the geographer himself.

If nothing else, then, what is fascinating about reading through these archives is just how different the questions the contemporary interpreter (or at least this contemporary interpreter) are from those that were the primary interest of art experts only a few decades ago.