Art: FRESH FROM THE CLOISTER WALLS

VIRTUALLY none of the masterworks from one of the greatest eras of painting have ever been shown in the U.S. or anywhere else outside their native land. These are the fresco paintings of Italy, some of the transcendent achievements of the Italian Renaissance. For centuries, art lovers have had to admire them by reputation and reproduction. To see them firsthand required a trip to Italy. Before oil painting was imported from Northern Europe and the artist’s vision shrank to the size of canvases that could be moved from wall to wall, the greatest Gothic and Renaissance artists decorated entire cathedrals, cloisters and chapels with floor-to-ceiling murals illustrating religious legend with robust humanistic imagery. Because these pageants were done a fresco—painted onto the wall while its plaster was still fresh—they became part of the fabric of the building and could not be taken down or moved.

Airily Mysterious. Now, thanks to new scientific techniques that allow the murals to be removed, the U.S. public will be able to see with its own eyes a bountiful portion of the quattrocento’s springtime splendor. With $150,000 from Italy’s Olivetti and the approval of the Italian government and Rome’s Pontifical Commission on Sacred Art, Manhattan’s Metropolitan Museum this week puts on view 46 frescoes from walls in Tuscany. Many were removed from their original locations and mounted on separate panels during the past two years because of severe damage resulting from the disastrous 1966 Arno River floods. All are being allowed this unprecedented, seven-week-long excursion across the Atlantic as Italy’s way of saying grazie to Americans who, through the Committee to Rescue Italian Art, gave $2,200,000 for the restoration of Florentine monuments and masterpieces.

For the public, including scholars, the exhibition will offer the first real chance to examine, at close range and under modern museum lights, the way in which Renaissance artists made their frescoes. The craft, developed by the ancient Minoans and Etruscans, was so exacting that artists have devoted a lifetime to mastering the technique. First, the brick wall had to be prepared with several coats of a special plaster made with slaked lime that had been aged for a year or so. Then the painter deftly laid on his water-base colors, which were sucked into the wall by capillary action. He had to work quickly, for the paint he added after the plaster had dried lay on the surface and could eventually flake off. But color applied while the plaster was damp stayed in it for centuries. As visitors to the Metropolitan can see, the roses, rusts, golds, apple greens and tangy violets today remain as lusty, yet airily mysterious, as they were 500 years ago.

Hidden Sketches. Detaching a fresco from its wall is a process that has only been perfected in the past decade. In essence, it requires that a piece of canvas be glued temporarily to the face of the fresco. Then the canvas and the attached mural surface are gently peeled off together. The back of the fresco is then remounted on a panel, and the canvas protecting its front is removed. It is a delicate operation, and until Masonite and Fiberglas came along, no backing could be found that did not sag, warp, wrinkle or crack.

In many cases this process has not only made possible the remounting of frescoes but has also laid bare the long-hidden preliminary sketches, or sinopias, drawn on the underneath layers of plaster. The current exhibit includes 24, which have been mounted separately and are shown next to their frescoes.

Leonine Shepherd. “These drawings are often surprisingly modern,” observes Claus Virch, the Met’s curator of European painting. “There is an expressiveness to them not found in the fresco.” In some cases, a comparison of the sinopia with the fresco has revealed surprising differences. The sinopia beneath Andrea del Castagno’s muscular St. Jerome [on this page and opposite] is no more like the finished fresco than the youthful Dorian Gray was like his aging portrait. The sinopia shows a handsome young man; the fresco, a gnarled and suffering ascetic. The difference is so striking that Princeton’s Renaissance scholar Millard Meiss suggests that perhaps the sinopia was by a different artist.

While the Met’s visiting exhibit does not—and cannot—include any of the near-legendary series of frescoes to which pilgrims trek, vignettes from major masters, together with larger pictures by significant unknowns, have been included. Giotto, Italy’s first great fresco painter, is represented by a fragment showing the leonine head of a shepherd, Piero della Francesca by a lone saint. The gentle spirit of Fra Angelico is manifest in a lunette from the Florentine cloister of San Marco. It portrays St. Peter Martyr (a 13th century Dominican monk) putting his finger to his lips to enjoin the monks to silence.

Lilac Coif. Three of the most diverting larger pictures are by anonymous masters. The Prato Master is responsible for an exuberant Birth of the Virgin, in which graceful Florentine ladies foreshadow those in a similar scene by Ghirlandaio. The ironic hand of The Master of the Cloister of the Orange Trees can be seen in two scenes from the life of St. Benedict.

The masterpiece of the exhibition is easily Jacopo Pontormo’s Annunciation. Rarely, in this country, has the troubling 16th century mannerist been represented by such an ethereal, yet commanding, picture. Looming above the onlooker, Pontormo’s Angel Gabriel is shown as a dissipated Florentine gallant with an exquisite shell-pink ear, hennaed locks and a flattened head. As for the Virgin Mary, she is both innocent and sophisticated, a strangely languorous vessel of the Lord, whose fashionable lilac coif emits a greenish, phosphorescent glow.