Current and coming: Ghosts of art at the Getty
Left: Study of an Apostle by Bernardino Gatti (1495– 1575), c. 1560–1570. All objects illustrated are in the Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Right: Taddeo Drawing by Moonlight in Calabrese’s House by Zuccaro, c. 1595. A forthcoming show of drawings at the Getty, The Lost Murals of Renaissance Rome, explores what was, in all likelihood, the biggest waste of time in the history of art. Few painters today adorn the facades of important public and private buildings for the excellent reason that—as you might expect—as soon as rain and sunlight hit the dazzling surface, the paint begins to fritter away, leaving only ghostly traces and then none at all. View of Saint Peter’s (recto); Study of a Young Man (verso) by Federico Zuccaro (1541–1609), 1603. But it took years, apparently, for the artists of the Renaissance, so wise in other respects, to awaken to this fundamental fact. In the meantime much was lost. Perhaps the most eminent example of such destruction is the frescoes completed around 1508 by Giorgione and Titian—who were roughly thirty and twenty years old, respectively, at the time–on the facade of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice. In no time at all the damp and salinity went to work, ravaging the surface of the building, and thus largely depriving us of one of Titian’s earliest and Giorgione’s latest masterpieces. Taddeo Leaving Home Escorted by Two Guardian Angels by Zuccaro, c. 1595. Rome’s facades—the focus of the Getty show— fared somewhat better than Venice’s in the sense that, due to a slightly better climate, ruination could be put off a little longer. Indeed, a few surviving works offer some measure of reward—and a sense of what has been generally lost—to tourists willing to stray from the beaten path. The most significant figure in this line