Metropolitan Museum of Art
Valentin de Boulogne - Beyond Caravaggio
We love Caravaggio and have seen his paintings hanging in Rome and an exhibition in London at the National Portrait Gallery. This exhibit of Valentin de Boulogne's work was spectacular in painting qualities and in numbers of paintings.
"The greatest French follower of Caravaggio (1571–1610), Valentin de Boulogne (1591–1632) was also one of the outstanding artists in 17th-century Europe. In the years following Caravaggio's death, he emerged as one of the most original protagonists of the new, naturalistic painting.
This is the first monographic exhibition devoted to Valentin, who is little known because his career was short-lived—he died at age 41—and his works are so rare. Around 60 paintings by Valentin survive, and this exhibition brings together 45 of them, with works coming from Rome, Vienna, Munich, Madrid, London, and Paris. Exceptionally, the Musée du Louvre, which possesses the most important and extensive body of Valentin's works, is lending all of its paintings by the artist.
Although he is not well known to the general public, Valentin has long been admired by those with a passion for Caravaggesque painting. His work was a reference point for the great realists of the 19th century, from Courbet to Manet, and his startlingly vibrant staging of dramatic events and the deep humanity of his figures, who seem touched by a pervasive melancholy, make his work unforgettable."
‘Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio’ Review: Intensity and Intricacy
A heightened sense of the individual set his work apart from that of the Italian master
Karen Wilkin •Oct. 25, 2016 4:38 p.m. ET
At the beginning of the 17th century, Rome was full of painters from elsewhere, most of them enthralled by the radically new, pitiless realism of Michelangelo Merisi, known as Caravaggio. Just as countless hopeful abstract painters in 1950s New York emulated Willem de Kooning’s gestural, wet-into-wet approach, many of Rome’s international community of aspiring artists in the early 1600s adopted Caravaggio’s way of filling canvases with large figures in theatrically lighted, indeterminate space, painted directly from models without preparatory drawings. Caravaggio fled Rome in the spring of 1606 and died, without returning, four years later, yet the influence of his potent, startling work persisted.
One exceptionally gifted French-born painter’s response to the allure and challenge of Caravaggio is the focus of “ Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a brilliant, compelling exhibition organized by Keith Christiansen, the Met’s chairman of the Department of European Paintings, and the French art historian Annick Lemoine. (Since the last survey of French followers of Caravaggio was seen in 1973, the current show was so eagerly awaited that the Louvre lent all six of its important Valentins, including those never made available.) Little is known about Valentin’s early years (born in Coulommiers, France, in 1591, he died in Rome in 1632), although he is documented as being in Rome in May 1614 and may have arrived as early as 1609, when he was 18. The young Frenchman’s earliest paintings clearly reflect the vanguard aesthetic of the time of his arrival in the Eternal City: dramatically lighted martyrdoms enacted by bald-headed, bearded old men; cinematic close-ups of saints stripped to the waist; groups of equivocal cardsharps; biblical stories featuring downstage violence. These are Caravaggio’s motifs, largely discovered at one remove by Valentin in the work of his own contemporaries, notably the Italian Bartolomeo Manfredi or Jusepe de Ribera, known as Lo Spagnoletto—the little Spanish guy.
But as the show’s subtitle, “Beyond Caravaggio,” attests, Valentin was no mere follower. A bare-chested, mustachioed St. John the Baptist, with an inquisitive lamb (probably a self-portrait painted c. 1613-14) at once acknowledges its sources and demonstrates a new angular intricacy of composition and a heightened sense of the individual. The young painter fully announces his gifts in an uncanny “David With the Head of Goliath” (c. 1615-16), in which the distinctly troubled boy-hero leans toward us, across the huge, monstrous head of his victim. The staging and lighting are effective, but it’s the immediacy and psychological intensity of the image that capture us—hallmarks, we discover, along with a ravishing touch, of Valentin’s most unforgettable works.
In his canvases made between the later teens and the mid-1620s, the angled limbs of musicians, fortune-tellers, cheats and biblical characters, arranged in complex groups, articulate rhythmic paths through fictive space, with the implied three-dimensionality of structure heightened by the play of light on crumpled linen, shiny armor and flesh against infinite darkness. In the astonishing “Christ and the Adulteress” (c. 1618-22), Jesus crouches before the accused woman sentenced to be stoned to death, his gaze fixed on her pale, spotlighted décolletage; it’s as if Christ has implicated himself in his pronouncement “Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.”
Every work on view offers fresh excitement and new revelations about this superb painter. Groups of strangely serious musicians, seated around tables or chunks of Roman spoil, allow us to savor Valentin’s ability to convincingly conjure up everything from carpets to silk to carved stone while still celebrating the character of paint. The delectable, thinly painted surfaces of his later works have been read as evidence of an interest in Titian, yet the fierce naturalism of the result is quite different, just as the psychological dramas of Valentin’s strongest works differ from Caravaggio’s meticulous, eloquently still prototypes. Yet, as we move through the show, we recognize Valentin’s habitual models, a revelation of artifice that turns his deeply felt narratives into staged fictions, without, however, diminishing their impact. Like his accomplished touch, this quality explains why Valentin was admired by Édouard Manet and Gustave Courbet, painters acutely attuned to both nuances of paint-handling and dispassionate presentation.
This dazzling exhibition ends, crescendo, by bringing together both of Valentin’s largest and most important commissions, “Allegory of Italy” (1628-29), with its muscular river gods and gorgeous red drapery, and “Martyrdom of Sts. Processus and Martinian” (1629-30), with its tangle of bare limbs. The latter, commissioned for St. Peter’s, departs from Caravaggio’s magnificent “Martyrdom of St. Matthew” (1599-1600) in Rome’s San Luigi dei Francesi. Valentin pays homage to his predecessor but creates an innovative composition of stunning spatial complexity, powerful emotion, and heart-rending realism. The dramatically lighted scene, crowded with torturers and victims, is horrifying but confusing. Something terrible is happening, but we’re not entirely sure what. We shudder and then are seduced by the picture’s formal strengths. Beyond Caravaggio, indeed.
‘Valentin de Boulogne,’ Bright Star in Caravaggio’s Orbit
By JASON FARAGO•
“The Concert With Eight Figures” (circa 1629-30), in “Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.Musée du Louvre, Paris
A canon is not a static list of dead white men. It’s an assertion of who from the past can speak to the present, and its shape is always up for negotiation. “Valentin de Boulogne: Beyond Caravaggio,” a big Baroque blast of a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the first exhibition anywhere devoted to a French painter whose theatrically lit tableaus of musicians, cardsharps and saints now stand in slight obscurity. It is also, quite explicitly, an application for canon membership, a full-throated bid to place Valentin (1591-1632) alongside Jusepe de Ribera and Georges de La Tour as a pioneer of the early 17th century.
Valentin de Boulogne’s “Martyrdom of Saints Processus and Martinian” (1629-30).Vatican Museums, Vatican City
With 45 of his 60 extant works, including a whopper of an altarpiece from the Vatican and every single one of his works in the Louvre’s holdings, you have the evidence before you, and you may, especially if Baroque drama is not your thing, find him a mere follower of an earlier genius. Or, like me, you may be overcome by Valentin, and find in his dark vision truths about our own lives, our pleasures and our shortcomings.
A Valentin show has been a longtime dream of Keith Christiansen, who leads the Met’s European paintings department and who has organized this exhibition with the French art historian Annick Lemoine. Its subtitle, “Beyond Caravaggio,” may be a marketer’s necessity to win attention for a less famous artist, though it sets the exhibition’s stakes. There is nothing by Caravaggio in this exhibition, but his influence and example permeate the Frenchman’s art, and you’ll need to know something about him and his devotees to fully adjudge Valentin’s invention. (Next week, the National Gallery in London is opening its own show, “Beyond Caravaggio,” which places Valentin among a trans-European tradition of Baroque naturalism.)
“Cardsharps” (circa 1614-15), a genre scene painted by Valentin in Rome.Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden
Caravaggio was the leading painter in Rome at the turn of the 17th century. His two grand paintings of St. Matthew, done in 1600 for the church of San Luigi dei Francesi, shocked an older generation but made younger artists swoon. When he bailed town in 1606 — he went on the run after murdering a pimp — he left behind a generation of young painters who emulated his tight cropping, bold light and taste for flesh. Three paintings by other Caravaggisti, as his followers were called, open this show, and the best is a scene by Bartolomeo Manfredi (circa 1582-1622), in which Christ wields a cat-o’-nine-tails on slack-mouthed merchants.
Valentin spent his whole career in Rome. He got there from France no later than 1614, and his early paintings display a Caravaggesque taste for low life in the holy city. Soldiers play dice, cheat at cards. Young men play music while getting drunk and eyeing up Gypsies. A young military man offers his palm to a fortune teller while robbers ply him with wine. The figures’ buttery flesh and midaction positioning make these genre scenes uncannily lifelike, and Valentin’s religious pictures, too, relinquish sacred precision for the realities of the flesh. In “Christ and the Adulteress” (circa 1618-22), Pharisees in contemporary armor look every which way as the accused woman’s bodice droops down, and Jesus kneels in the dirt. A painting of John the Baptist, half-naked beneath a flowing red mantle, is probably a self-portrait of Valentin: young, mustachioed, beautiful and on the make.
Valentin’s “Judith and Holofernes” (circa 1626) tells a biblical story.National Museum of Fine Arts, Valletta, Malta
Like Caravaggio, Valentin lived fast and died young, succumbing at 41 to fever after a night of binge drinking that ended in a fountain. He belonged to a hell-raising confraternity of artists known as the Bentvueghels — “birds of a feather” in Dutch — whose motto celebrated the pleasures of “Bacco, tabacco e Venere”: drinking, smoking and sex. Like Caravaggio, too, he refused to make preparatory drawings, relying instead on the innovative practice of painting from live models. You’ll see favorites recur as you work through this show. A man cast as a pensive Joseph in a 1624-26 painting re-emerges later in a grand allegory, sporting a longer beard and a rug of chest hair.
The difference from his paragon, especially in the paintings after 1620, is in the darkness. For Caravaggio, chiaroscuro — the contrast of light and dark — was principally a painterly conceit, a means of bringing drama to altarpieces like “The Calling of St. Matthew” (1599-1600) or “Seven Acts of Mercy” (1607). The darkness in Valentin’s mature painting, by moving contrast, is pervaded with a melancholy absent in Caravaggio, a haze of lost love and the certainty of death. At the Met, a single, heart-stopping gallery contains six large paintings with musical motifs, and in all of them the parties ache with a worldly regret. Sitting at tables or castoff blocks of Roman marble, soldiers stare into space as musicians strum lutes or beat tambourines. Two paintings featured depressive violists who look down as they aimlessly bow their instruments. Valentin’s nights out in Rome may have been dissolute, but the nights he painted are suffused with pain.
Valentin’s “Judith With the Head of Holofernes” (circa 1626-27).Musée des Augustins, Toulouse
Rome in the early 17th century was no honeymoon destination. It was a fetid, debauched, wildly unequal metropolis where starving artists hustled for commissions — Valentin got one of his largest from a diamond thief who used art to launder money — and where painterly disputes were settled with rapiers. In this show’s catalog, the art historian Patrizia Cavazzini provides a bulging register of artists brawling in taverns, and even, after Caravaggio’s example, indulging in a little light murder. Valentin’s own roommate, a sculptor, was stabbed to death in 1626. This was not a place suited to the lofty perfection of the High Renaissance, nor even to the moralizing of contemporary Dutch genre painting. Death was everywhere, and that put life on canvas into a more plangent key.
Toward the end of his short life Valentin got his most important commission, for an altar of the recently completed St. Peter’s Basilica. He painted a barnstorming composition of the martyrdom of the saints Processus and Martinian, whose nude bodies, splayed on the rack, bisect a deluge of torturers, mourners and angels. Its vertical collision of saints and seraphim strongly echoes Caravaggio’s “Seven Acts of Mercy,” and here, too, the high drama of holy suffering is tinged with the violence of the Roman street. At the time, Valentin’s altarpiece was contrasted unfavorably with one by Poussin, another Frenchman in Rome, whose cleaner finishes and bows to antiquity had come into fashion. The rest is canon formation: Valentin became a mere follower, when he was so much more.
The altarpiece is a wildly accomplished work of art, but to modern eyes the most immediate pictures in this momentous exhibition are those melancholy musical paintings, and one in particular. An allegory of the four ages of man, painted around 1628, depicts in a diamond arrangement a boy with a bird cage, a youth with a lute, a grown man with a book, and an elder with a drink. They’re all downcast, reflective, awash in sad thoughts. The man with the book seems skeptical of learning, the boy fiddling with the cage wonders about the meaning of freedom. The mustachioed lutenist plays despite his sorrows, and he looks a lot like John the Baptist in the earlier painting: a lot, that is, like Valentin himself. This world is vanity, but he plays all the same.
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