It is hard to believe that there are any painters of genius still ripe for rediscovery, in this country at least, but so it seems with the elusive 16th-century Italian portraitist Giovanni Battista Moroni. A discreet and watchful figure, Moroni spent most of his 30-year career in the northern town of Bergamo painting the people around him, from the doctors, clerics and craftsmen to the politicians, poets and aristocrats. His psychological insights are strikingly acute, his portraits of men, women and children alive with human presence. A hundred books could not give us a better sense of the characters of this little world – beyond which Moroni (and most of his paintings) never travelled, which may be one reason he has never received his due praise.
Moroni’s most famous painting, The Tailor (1570), ought to be world-famous by now, and it feels like an extraordinarily lucky strike that it happens to belong to our National Gallery. The tailor stands in the silvery shadows of his workshop, shears in hand, about to cut his cloth, looking up from his work with a gaze of steady intent. We see him and he sees us: the mutual exchange is startling and immediate (think of Velázquez, but almost a century in advance). This is who he is, what he does, where he works, how he reacts to others: an exemplary moment from the life held intact down the centuries.
The encounter is close and intense; there appears to be no psychological distance between the tailor, his painter and their viewer. And it turns out from this tremendous show at the Royal Academy, which includes many privately owned pictures never seen in public before, that this is Moroni’s singular gift. His portraits stage each figure as a solo performance; they have the time-stopping intimacy of soliloquies.
The Duke of Albuquerque is a man on edge. Boxed into a corner of some cold stone palace, he is tensely flexed for any hostile action. One hand grasps the ledge behind him, thumb hovering on the hilt of his sword, the other holds tight to his purse. If you did not know it from the hint of hypertension in the flushed cheeks, or the defensive narrowing of the eyes, you might guess he was hot-tempered and defiant. And everything in Moroni’s fine and subtle brushwork – from the almost-sneer of the mouth to the dapper, head-in-air erectness of the figure – is borne out by the motto inscribed on the wall beside the duke. Me? I’m afraid of nothing, not even death.
Moroni was the son of a mason and he loves to position a figure beside a pillar, ivy-clad wall or classical ruin. The cockiest of heroes may have a backdrop of crumbling masonry: life surrounded by the ravages of time. In the full-length portrait called A Knight With His Jousting Helmet, the eponymous gallant leans languidly against a huge chunk of stone, armour strewn around his feet, as if to suggest that the battle is done and dusted. But weeds are sprouting around him and the masonry is streaked with brown damp.
The knight will soon become involved in a murder plot between two aristocratic families; in exile from Bergamo, he will die by falling down a well when drunk. There are stories behind Moroni’s portraits – beautifully conveyed at the Royal Academy – but there are narratives within them too. The woman in scarlet silk holds a loving letter from her husband; the man in black holds his latest solemn essay. A monk, briefly appearing before Moroni, gives a faint half-smile, the measure of both his shyness and his daring.
There are books, manuscripts and epigrams everywhere; Moroni’s portraits are full of writers and readers. A woman leans urgently forward in her chair to address us: she is a poet. An old man in a beret and heavy jacket turns slowly from the leather-bound volume he has been reading to meet the viewer’s eye. His gaze is almost hypnotic, hooking you with a long and searching look. A man in a void, surrounded by nothing but the diaphanous shadow that seems to express his own stern charisma – Moroni’s portrait anticipates many artists to come, from Velázquez to Manet and Degas.
Moroni was one of the first Italian artists to paint life size portraits at full length, but for less wealthy clients he produced smaller pictures of heads with no loss of power. He worked directly from the life without any preliminary drawing – unusual at the time, and for which Titian himself commended Moroni – and that sense of encounter is inherent in each image. A child gives the painter a candidly inquisitive stare as he works away at the canvas; a duchess turns her full hauteur upon him, suspicious and evidently impatient to be done with the session.
A particularly touching triple portrait shows a young widower trying to manage two jobs at once as he sits for Moroni – holding his own formal pose before the artist and at the same time reaching out as a father to gather his little children into the frame all together.
It is no insult to Moroni – the opposite, in fact – to say that his studio eventually has something in common with a photo booth in which sitters come to show an infinite variety of eyes and faces to the rival lens before them. Partly that comes from his Holbein-like precision of line, and his heightened naturalism. But in later life (not that we know quite when Moroni died: it may have been 1579 or 1580) he drops the background context so that the focus falls entirely and intensively on the individual.
Heads tilt and turn, eyes crease, contract, open wide with fascination, grow moist with too much staring; a frown gives way to sober restraint, an anxious glance to a warm-hearted nod of acknowledgement. Walk through this show and the citizens of Bergamo gather around you – vital, alert, each with his or her unique inner self, expression and stance, freshly present in Moroni’s exceptional portraits. This is the kind of painted miracle that so many artists would aim for in the centuries to come: nothing less than the tangible embodiment of human nature.
There are many figures but few portraits in Egon Schiele: The Radical Nude, a show that puts an unprecedented focus on Schiele’s images of bare bodies, emaciated and splayed, arms twisted, torsos hunched, vertebrae like pebbles, thighs wide, genitals exposed. The main claim here – that Schiele reinvented art’s pituresque nude – is true but insufficient. Even the word seems wrong; these people are naked, not nude.
Schiele drew himself, his sister, lovers, wife and many models naked from 1910 until his early death in 1918, aged 28. The images are beautiful and horrifying in equal measure. His drawing is spectacularly elegant, the black line moving with superlative ease around each figure, pinning the anatomy to the page with suave graphic register. But the supple line is in equal tension with the tortured poses.
Squatting, straining, bending over, kneeling painfully upright: every position involves obvious discomfort for the models. And Schiele’s overlay of watercolour makes them (and himself) appear mottled, bruised, charred, monstrously made-up or discoloured by heavy blood.
It is a uniquely unnerving combination: stylishness and misery. Schiele’s women could be fashion plates – rouged cheeks and nipples, black stockings and high heels, art nouveau faces and long, slender limbs – except that they must become poor bare forked animals to show him what he wants to see. Exacting observation goes with grotesque theatre. Even the exposed vulva is touched up with rouge.
The show might have been more radical had it included any of the raw-red masturbation drawings, in which naked figures are sexual without being sexualised. (It is well said that Schiele’s erotic representations have no erotic content.) But far more controversial are the images thieved from life. A pregnant woman depicted from the gynaecologist’s position – a caption says the doctor, not the woman, gave Schiele permission – her swollen belly mounding upwards, her face a crude, red Spider-Man mask. Schiele has no interest in the person, only the womb as vessel for a baby, and the possibility of depicting that baby’s entry-point into the world.
The actor Erwin Osen turns himself into a bony marionette (very aptly) for Schiele. But other than the violently cropped self-portraits, where the body language is pure agony, this is the only portrait in the show. What shocks is never the nakedness which so offended Schiele’s contemporaries, but his extreme detachment from the human beings he depicts. Whatever we are as people, we are infinitely more than our bodies.
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