September 1958 Vol I Num 1

Few early balloonists' flights attracted more attention than the one that carried Mrs. Letitia Ann Sage aloft from London in 1785 as the first Englishwoman to brave the skies.  Our cover painting, The Three Favorite Aerial Travellers, done that same year by J. F. Rigaud, presents the scene - with one major inaccuracy.  As shown here, Mrs. Sage's companions were Mr. George Biggin, a fellow passenger also on his first flight, and, resplendent in the uniform of the Honourable Artillery Company, the Italian aeronaut Lunardi, already famous as the first man to make an ascent in England.  At the last moment before take-off, though, pilot Lunardi found that the balloon would not lift all three together and so stayed behind and let his passengers soar away on their own.  They landed an hour later in a field at Harrow.  An article on ballooning begins on page 114.  The picture is reproduced courtesy of Peninsular and Oriental Steam Navigation Company.

On his rearing charger, Jean de Bruges, the Lord of Gruthuyse, has lowered his visor to meet the Lord of Ghistelles in the famous tourney held at Bruges in 1392.  In memory of this event, King Rene of Anjou created his magnificent Livre des Tournois, whose illustrations are here presented with an article beginning on page 92.  Fortunately the book was preserved for posterity by Louis de Bruges, a descendant of Jean, who ordered two copies made and personally presented one to Charles VIII, King of France, in 1489.  Other copies were subsequently made, and the reproductions here are used from the parchment pages of French Manuscript No. 2692 in the Bibliotheque Nationale.

The unknown lady on the Cover sat for this luminous portrait in the middle of the fifteenth century.  Her cone-shaped hennin is fastened with a velvet loop beneath her chin and pushed back to reveal the high, plucked forehead so much admired in her time.  Aloof and tranquil, she gazes obliquely at her painter, the Flemish master Petrus Christus.  The Painting, Portrait of a Young Girl, is in the Gemaldegalerie, Museum Dahlem, Berlin.  For an article on modern painting, see page 95.

The water color Personnages devant le Soleil by Joan Miro, the Catalan painter, shows a red sun in an infinite sky of white in front of which stand two enigmatic figures.  The exuberant Miro often uses elements of nature, the sun, moon, and birds in his "cosmic children's corner" described in an article by Pierrre Schneider on page 70.  The painting, done in 1942, is in a private collection in Basel, Switzerland.

It is Wednesday.  Baham Gur, the king of Iran, is paying his weekly visit to his Egyptian queen.  Gay and pleasure-loving, Bahram Gur married seven princesses of seven countries, built for each a castle of a different color.  Bahram Gur was given to vivid imagery: his red Russian queen of Tuesdays was a "honeyed apple, sweet and rosy-hued."  To his Roman arus (doll) of Sundays and the yellow castle he said: "The shops close at night; but you, seller of beauty, you must open your shop at night."  Bahram Gur lived in the fourth century before Christ.  This fragment of a manuscript, dated 1589, is an illustration for the poet Nizami's (1140-1203) Khamsa, and is in the Spencer Collection of the New York Public Library.  It shows the king and his Wednesday queen seated in a garden pavilion.  An article on gardens begins on page 24.

One of the most celebrated paintings in the brilliant collection of old masters assembled by Isabella Stewart Gardner in Boston at the turn of the last century is The Rape of Europa by the great Venetian, Titian.  The full painting, of which this is a detail, is reproduced on pages 38-39.  It hangs (all 70 by 80 inches of it) in a heavy gold frame in the Titian Room in the unique museum at Fenway Court, which Mrs. Gardner left to her fellow Bostonians when she died in 1924.  The story of the acquisition of this masterpiece along with many others sought after by the original and redoubtable "Mrs. Jack" is told in this article "Mrs. Gardner's Palace of Paintings," beginning on page 26.

Carved at the start of the fifth century B.C. or earlier, this head of a helmeted warrior was on of many masterly early Greek sculptures to adorn now-ruined pediments of the temple of Aphaia on the island of Aegina.  All the surviving figures are now in the Glyptothek at Munich.  An article on page 30 on the meaning and adventures of the marbles introduces a sixteen-page portfolio of gravure reproductions.

"And for the drink-offering thou shalt present the third part of a hin of wine, of a sweet savour unto the Lord."  In an action of final libation resembling that prescribed for the Hebrews in Numbers 15:7, Nebamun, superintendent of sculptors in Egypt, pours wine on the sacrificial pile of animals and meal.  As if to insure his safe passage to the other world, the ritual is executed to perfection under the watchful eye of Nebamun's mother, the house-mistress, Thepu.  This Egyptian wall painting of the Nineteenth Dynasty is from the Tomb of the Two Sculptors near Thebes.  An article on current progress in the field ob Biblical archeology begins on page 4.

In Tahiti the musical words Fatata te Miti mean "by the sea."  Paul Gauguin chose them as the title for the canvas of which this is a detail, and which he painted in 1892.  In it one encounters the blazing color and golden-skinned people that make up the enduring vision of the South Seas held by generations of Western travelers.  An article on the Dream of the South Seas begins on page 28, and is followed by a portfolio in gravure of some of Gauguin's greatest paintings of the area.  Fatata te Miti is in the Chester Dale Collection at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

This pair of lovers caught in the act of fleeing, with drapery flying, from a sudden squall form the central images of the huge painting, The Storm, by Pierre Auguste Cot, reproduced in its entirety on page 60.  Painted in 1880 for the French Salon trade, it has belonged to the Metropolitan Museum of Art since 1887.  Although most of the once fashionable academic paintings of the nineteenth century remaining in museum collections have long since been relegated to basement storage.  Cot's "classical" tour de force occupies a place on a gallery wall.  An article about Salon paintings both in their prime and decline begins on page 52.

This bearded visage, crowned with thorns, is that of Achelous, great river god of the Greeks, as represented in an Etruscan pendant of the late sixth century B.C.  The work, belonging to the Louvre, is testimony to Etruscan mastery of the goldsmith's art and to the fact that the Etruscans adopted this deity, like so many others, from the Greeks.  The Etruscans and their arts are the subject of an article beginning on page 56.

Using a palette of hot primary colors and his customary slashing brushwork, painter Richard Diebenkorn was trying to evoke on canvas the noonday glare of midsummer.  Ant the big, bold result, with its amusing hint of flags and bunting, is called - what else? - July.  Like two other San Francisco artists, David Park and Elmer Bischoff, Diebenkorn painted for several years in the abstract expressionist manner.  Now, with their styles loosened up and their colors ablaze, all three have abandoned the purely abstract to paint the human figure and the California landscape.  An article on this rising trio, together with a portfolio of their work in gravure, begins on page 16.  July is in the collection of Martha Jackson.

Napoleon Bonaparte, first consul of France, points the way south across the Alps at the head of forty thousand troops about to cross the Great Saint Bernard pass to descend upon the Austrian army.  "I would be painted calm and serene on a fiery steed" were his instructions to his court painter, Jacques Louis David, for this portrait done after the victory at Marengo in June, 1800, and now in a private French collection.  By loot and treaty, Napoleon's forces gained many of Italy's greatest paintings and sculpture for the new museum wings of the Louvre in Paris.  For a history of the Louvre and Napoleon's part in it, see page 57.

When Benozzo Gozzoli painted this rapt little band of angels in 1459, he unhesitatingly gave them softly undulant robes, splendid wings, and the further support of rainbow clouds.  Not that he had ever seen an angel himself (how many mortals have?) - he was simply following a well-established convention.  How that convention grew up is discussed in an article, on page 26, on the iconography of heavenly beings.  Gozzoli's angels may be seen in the chapel of Palazzo Medici-Riccardi in Florence.

When the Chinese Nationalists left the mainland for Formosa in 1949, they took with them the vast Palace Museum Collection of art treasures.  A detail from one of the finest of several thousand paintings in the collection - Eight Riders in Spring, attributed to the tenth-century master Chao Yen - appears here.  Painted in ink and colors on silk, it shows a group of noblemen in colorful jackets riding through a palace courtyard.  The figure at the right, with whip raised, may be an emperor.  This is one of the Formosa paintings coming to America this year (see the article, with portfolio, beginning on page 14).  It appears in Chinese Painting, a recent Skira Art Book.

Embodying the exotic grace of one of the few surviving island paradises of our time, a Balinese dancing girl appears in her ceremonial headdress, or galungan, before the camera of a visiting American, Ewing Krainin.  She is costumed for the legong, a religious pantomime accompanied by classical Balinese music and narration.  Her galungan is a jewel-studded crown made of leather dipped in gold and surmounted by semodja flowers sacred to the Hindu religion.  Trained in the dance since early childhood and chosen for her beauty, she is no more than twelve.  An article by Snatha Rama Rau on Bali and other unruined retreats around the globe begins on page 20.

Eugene Delacroix was never more in his element of violent drama and intense color than when painting his Abduction of Rebecca (1846), a masterly canvas inspired by Sir Walter Scott's romance Ivanhoe and that now hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Here the heroine, Rebecca, is seen at the moment when, amid the siege of the burning castle of Torquilstone in which she has been held prisoner, she is seized by the African slaves of the Templay Bois-Guilbert (at right) who has evil designs on her.  A survey of "The Romantic Revolt," including Delacroix's place in it, begins on page 58.

When Francisco Guardi painted the piazza San Marco late in the eighteenth century (in a painting of which this is a detail), Venice had long since developed a way of life that was unique.  "It resembled," said the Italian historian Pompeo Molmenti, "the life of a great family that never left the house; the canals and calli were its corridors, the little squares its anterooms, and the larger squares its salons."  The problem of today's cities is to recover this intimate quality, as Lewis Mumford points out in his new book The City in History.  A pictorial treatment of the theme of Mumford's book, coupled with passages from it, begins on page 32.  Guardi's Piazza San Marco is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bequest of Mary Stillman Harkness, 1950.

While European Old Masters continue to cross the ocean to enter American museums and collections, contemporary American paintings in increasing numbers are finding comparable homes in Europe.  Such a one is Albert's Son by Andrew Wyeth, recently presented to the National Gallery in Oslo by a former United States ambassador to Norway, L. Corrin Strong.  Wyeth says that this study of a neighbor lad in Maine is "really a self-portrait of me as a kid."  On page 88, an interview with Wyeth introduces a color gravure portfolio of some of his leading paintings.

Paul Klee had the kind of innocent magic that could evoke a wistful human face from the simplest of geometric forms.  In Senecio he does it with circles for head and eyes, a straight line to suggest a nose, and two tiny rectangles where one would expect a mouth.  "It is not my task to reproduce appearances," he once wrote in his diary; "for that there is the photographic plate . . . but my faces are truer than life."  Senecio (now in the Kunstmuseum in Basel) was painted in 1922, a year or so after Klee had entered upon a happy decade of teaching at the Bauhaus in Germany.  This was the revolutionary school of design created by Walter Gropius; in its artistic ferment - to which Klee contributed - were born the ideas that have since influenced everything from advertising to architecture.  An article on the Bauhaus begins on page 58.

What mysterious portent has filled the Delphic Sibyl's wide-set eyes with wonder and apprehension?  We do not know, for at the moment of revelation she was transfixed forever on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel and thus became part of the world's most famous work of art.  She is perhaps the most beautiful of the five pagan sibyls that Michelangelo incorporated in his stupendous fresco to symbolize pre-Christian intimations of divine truth.  Although the Sistine ceiling provides the overwhelming experience of any visit to the Vatican, it is only one of the marvels in that tiny state-within-a-city.  Many of these are described in an article by Alfred Werner beginning on page 22, which is accompanied by a portfolio of Vatican treasures by Skira.

Against a background of the glowing crimson that has since come to be know as "Pompeian red," a trembling woman waits for the blows of a lash.  This is no scene from the Marquis de Sade, nor even from Uncle Tom's Cabin, but a detail from one of the frescoes uncovered at Pompeii.  It reveals a little about pagan religious cults and a great deal more about the high state of painting in that luxurious Roman colony before it was buried in A.D. 79.  An article about the rediscovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum in the eighteenth century, and its effect on taste ever since, begins on page 42.

The jockey with his invincibly English face is a detail from a larger canvas by George Stubbs (1724-1806), who is so well known for his portraits of horses as to obscure the fact that he painted their owners and handlers with equal directness, honesty, and lack of sentimentality.  He was, in fact, one of the best English painters of his time; and as such he was inevitably drawn into the orbit of the Royal Academy of Arts - although more as a satellite than as one of its great, wheeling planets like Reynolds, Gainsborough, or Lawrence.  An account of the founding of the R.A. and its once formidable role in English art, as well as its current decline, begins on page 56 and includes a portfolio in gravure of paintings by the artists mentioned above.  This detail from Antinous with his Jockey and Trainer is reproduced by courtesy of the Duke of Grafton, for whose family Stubbs painted it about 1764.

The pleasures of a day by the Seine were never more smilingly evoked than they are in this detail from Auguste Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party (1881).  As any visitor to France knows, the river often flows beneath leaden skies or through grimy industrial districts; but in the mind's eye one sees it only in the timeless afternoon of French impressionism, where the season is most often summer.  This is what the Seine owes to art.  What art, literature, and philosophy owe to the Seine is the subject of an article beginning on page 52, written by Pierre Schneider and illustrated with more paintings and the photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson.  Renoir's Boating Party is in the Phillips Collection, Washington D.C.

This preliminary sketch by Marc Chagall, in vivid pictorial shorthand, sows one of the twelve stained-glass windows with which he created a crown of light for a new synagogue in Jerusalem.  Chagall's windows are a high-water mark of the current revival in the art of stained glass, which is described in an article beginning on page 22.

This portrait of Saint Jerome is from an especially handsome manuscript copy of his translation of Didymus Alexandrinus's De Spiritu Sancto.  The book was made in Italy for King Matthias Corvinus of Hungary, whose library in its time rivaled that of the Vatican.  After his death in 1490 the great collection began to break up, and in 1541 the bulk of it was seized by the Turks.  Since then, Corvinus books have been much sought after, but only two hundred forty-four can be accounted for.  Among them is De Spiritu Sancto, which is now in the Pierpont Morgan Library.  An article on the ways in which books have managed to survive the ravages of history begins on page 74.

This golden winged bull, reproduced slightly smaller than its actual eight-inch height, was fashioned by a Persian artist in the fifth century B.C.  Though it had been borrowed from the earlier Mesopotamian civilizations, the bull became a favorite symbol of the new, virile kingdom founded by Cyrus the Great.  It was worked in gold and other precious metals to evoke the fertility of the flocks; sculptured on stone pillars, it became the warden of the palace gates.  For Persia's unique contribution to world culture, as it prepares to celebrate the 2,500th anniversary of the Empire, see page 40.

This jeweled book cover is one of the many treasures of Venice originally commissioned for use in St. Mark's Cathedral.  The book it was made to enclose has disappeared, the only clue to its contents being the portraits of Christ and of the apostles surrounding Him.  Moreover, one of the apostles too has disappeared, to be inexplicably replaced by an angel, seen directly above Christ's head.  The binding, which dates from the tenth century, is gilded silver; rows of pearls and semiprecious stones outline its borders and the enameled medallions, which depict the holy figures in Byzantine style.  An article on the greatest treasure of the doges, Venice itself, begins on page 14. 

During the 1870's Winslow Homer created an indelible image of bustled, hatted, and neatly shod young women strolling by the sea, but in this detail from On the Beach the ladies have at last removed their shoes.  Homer was one of the first artists to discover the charms of eastern Long Island, but he went out there to paint the ocean; those who live there now - as the article on page 4 attests - paint anything but.  Thus do art and fashion change; today a bustle on the beach would draw more stares than a bikini.  The painting, one of Homer's most charming in the genre, dates from about 1870 and is in the Canajoharie (N.Y.) Library and Art Gallery.

In 1527 Sir Henry Guildford sat for the painter Hans Holbein the Younger, who had just come over to England from Basel.  The result confirms David Piper's observation, in his book The English Face, that "Holbein seems to have that purity of style through which a sitter appears to tell his own story, with a clarity that is a distillation of the truth."  Guildford was a man of parts, a friend not only of Henry VIII but of Sir Thomas More, and an acquaintance - or at least a correspondent - of Erasmus.  His superb portrait is now in the British royal collection, which is described by Oliver Millar, Deputy Surveyor of the Queen's Pictures, in an article beginning  on page 92.  (Reproduced by Gracious Permission of Her Majesty the Queen.  Copyright reserved.)

This Roman coin, bearing the image of Agrippina the elder, was minted in the reign of her son, the mad emperor Caligula (A.D. 37-41).  The inscription reads AGRIPPINA M F MAT C CAESARIS AVGVSTI (Agrippina, daughter of Marcus, mother of Caius Caesar Augustus).  A stong-willed lady, she made so much trouble over the mysterious death of her husband, the army commander Germanicus, tht the emperor Tiberius had her exiled to the island of Pandataria, where she starved herself to death at thirty-three.  The coin is a bronze sestertius, about the size of a silver dollar.  An article by Michael Grant on the high art of Roman coin portraiture begins on page 33.

Under his heavy crown, the heavy-lidded eyes of Justinian look out at us from the walls of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy.  He was the greatest of the Byzantine rulers, and his portrait is, appropriately, one of the greatest examples of Byzantine art.  An article on Byzantium begins on page 4.

The innovative French painter Edouard Manet adored all things Spanish, a passion that survived even a visit to Spain itself (he was revolted by the food and the dirt).  His Torero Saluting, however, was painted in Paris, and the torero is his brother Eugene dressed up in the traditional "suit of lights."  The painting is now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Bequest of Mrs. H. O. Havemeyer, 1929.  The H. O. Havemeyer Collection).  An article on Edouard Manet and his world begins on page 84.

One of the apparently irresistible themes in art is the legend of Judith, the beautiful Jewish widow who seduced Nebuchadnezzar's general, Holofernes, in order to cut off his head.  This regal profile is a detail from Andrea Mantegna's pen-and-brush treatment of the subject, which successfully emphasizes the heroic rather than bloodcurdling aspects of the story.  The drawing, dated 1491, is in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.  It is reproduced in full in an article on Mantegna beginning on page 70.

The pottery statue, modeled in the exuberant style known as Remojadas, was made in Mexico between A.D. 500 and 800.  It represents the goddess of childbirth and death thereby, the same deity that the Aztecs later called Cihuacoatl ("serpent-woman") and that they probably identified with the Virgin Mary after the Spaniards came.  Three flat serpent heads form her headdress, and her jewelry is of shells.  Her closed eyes, open mouth, and outstretched hand almost suggest sleepwalking.  The statue belongs to the museum at Jalapa, Veracruz, where Lee Boltin photographed it.  An article on new discoveries in Latin America begins on page 73.

The Presidential Bodyguard, led here by their sergeant-major, is the elite corps of the Indian Army.  The history of the native corps, formed in 1773 to protect the British Governor General, provides a curious microcosm of the history of British rule in India.  Originally set at one hundred cavalry, it was increased in 1803 to four hundred troops, two light guns, and a band.  Throughout the nineteenth century, as British fortunes rose and fell, the numbers of the "bescarleted and silvered" corps rose and fell, too.  Today, as India's Presidential Bodyguard, it is made up of three hundred men.  The photograph is by Brian Bake, whose color portfolio of India today follows an article on Rudyard Kipling that begins on page 60.

No single painting can wholly epitomize the protean art of Pablo Picasso, but this detail from his Girl Before a Mirror combines in one complex image two extremes of his style: the revolutionary and, in the girl's pure classical profile, the traditional.  The artist is the subject of an article by John Canady beginning on page 65.  The painting (1932) is in the Museum of Modern Art, New York, a gift of Mrs. Simon Guggenheim.

Even after arriving in the Holy Land, Jerusalem-bound pilgrims had a good deal farther to go than this fifteenth-century miniature suggests (the city is forty miles from the sea, not the short stroll it seems to be here).  Despite that, the unknown artist who painted it in 1455 for Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy (the manuscript is now in the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris), got some things right.  One can recognize the octagonal Dome of the Rock, even though he improved on the dome itself, and, to the left of it, the open-topped dome of the Holy Sepulchre.  The little red-and-white toy town is Bethlehem.  A history of Jerusalem begins on page 4.

Philippe de Champaigne was Cardinal Richelieu's favorite painter, and the artist painted at least four full-length portraits of him (there is one on page 20), as well as this Hydra-headed version.  The latter was painted at the request of one Mocchi, a sculptor who was thus enabled to make a bust of Richelieu in Rome while its subject remained in Paris.  Although it is invisible in this reproduction, an inscription over the right-hand profile reads: "De ces deux profiles cecy est le meilleur."  The painting is now in the National Gallery, London.  An article about Richelieu begins on page 20.

In the current enthusiasm for beautifying the face of America, billboards, posters, and similar types of advertising have come in for some harsh words.  With our cover illustration (and on pages 97-104) we recall that belle epoque when, among other colorful developments, the poster flowered into a fresh art form that brightened city life everywhere in the Western world, particularly Paris.  There, it was said, the lithographs of Toulouse-Lautrec "took possession of the street."  Our cover detail is from the first and best known of these lithographs, printed in 1891, advertising the performances of La Goulue, the celebrated entertainer, at the Moulin Rouge.

When this searching study of a young woman was painted, about 1455, the art of secular portraiture in northern Europe was scarcely a generation old.  Yet within that short span a genius like Rogier van der Weyden had developed a mature style, capable of interpreting the subtle contradictions in his strong-willed sensuous-looking sitter.  Historians suppose her to be the illegitimate daughter of Philip the Good, whose Burgundian court, withdrawn to Flanders, helped to nurture the great revolution in Flemish art discussed by John Canady on pages 84-95.  The painting, just 14 inches high, is one of the jewels of the Mellon Collection, whose disposition in the National Gallery is chronicled in "Art and Taxes," beginning on page 4.

This noble countenance was carved about A.D. 810 at the imperial court of Charlemagne.  Only about two inches high, it is part of an ivory plaque that once adorned the back cover of the famous Lorsch Gospel.  It depicts Zacharias, father of John the Baptist.  Like Charlemagne's great empire, the Gospel was eventually divided; parts of it now rest in Bucharest, Rome, and London.  The portion here reproduced, now in the Victoria & Albert Museum, is one of the finest ivories bequeathed us by the Carolingian era, that brief and brilliant period of political unity in what has so long been called the Dark Ages.  An article on Charlemagne's achievement begins on page 16.

Le Mezzetin, a slightly cropped reproduction here, was painted by Jean Antoine Watteau shortly before his untimely death.  This small canvas probably represents a friend, dressed in a costume owned by the artist, as one of the stock characters of the commedia dell' arte.  The painting was acquired by Watteau's patron Jean de Jullienne and later, in 1767, by Catherine the Great.  In 1934 it was sold by the Soviet Union and is now one of the treasures of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (Munsey Fund).

The Bayeux Tapestry, a 230-foot length of embroidery that tells the victors' version of the Norman Conquest, depicts Harold of England as a mustachioed gentleman, hawk on his wrist and spurs on his boots.  He is riding to a rendezvous with Duke William of Normandy in the summer of 1064.  The bird in the upper border is one of many decorative animals that adorn this eleventh-century masterpiece.  Harold was a brave and princely man, but his encounter with William in France was eventually to cost him his kingdom and more.  Morris Bishop, the noted biographer, recounts the story, beginning on page 4.

The Hunters in the Snow, of which this is a detail, is one of the supreme achievements of the great Netherlandish painter Pieter Brugel the Elder.  It is from a series of landscapes of the seasons painted during 1565 and probably commissioned for the palatial house of the Antwerp connoisseur Niclaes Jonghelinck.  There is some doubt as to the original number of paintings in the series, but five still exist; three of them, including this one, are in the Kunsthistoriches Museum in Vienna.  The full painting appears in color in an article on Bruegel's life and work beginning on page 22.

J. M. W. Turner's The Fighting Temeraire Tugged to Her Last Berth is probably his most popular picture.  A detail appears on our cover; the full painting now hangs in the National Gallery, London.  The warship was in Nelson's fleet at Trafalgar.  An article on Turner begins on page 88.