VENICE — Monstrous faces and caricatures: from Leonardo da Vinci to Baconan exhibition on the art of the grotesque at the Palazzo Loredan, invites the viewer to confront ugliness and the questions it raises about our relationship to it.
The star attractions of the exhibition are the distorted character designs of Leonardo da Vinci and Tiepolo. It begins with faces by Leonardo and progresses chronologically through his early Milanese period, until the “triumphal reappearance in Venice” of his grotesque faces, with Tiepolo and Anton Maria Zanetti, in the words of curator Pietro Marani in the catalogue.
We can say that caricature — which comes from the verb “care“, in the sense of exaggerating (in this case, physical features) – was pioneered by Leonardo, with his studies of the grotesque. Yet Leonardo’s caricatures focused on general characters and did not target specific personalities to highlight personality traits, as does caricature (distinguished from grotesque because of its comic intent). Neither is Tiepolo’s work caricatural, nor necessarily monstrous. It happens in Venice via Zanetti’s late 18th century caricature album.
In Leonardo’s “Four Grotesque Heads” (c. 1495-1505), for example, the busts are drawn with a quick but confident hand. And even if the animal characteristics can be assumed, they have retained their humanity.
As the critic Enrico Lucchese writes in his catalog essay, “Caricature and Caricaturists in Eighteenth-Century Venice”, Tiepolo also has no “satirical intent”, but is an exercise in “violence of distortion » to exalt « the superiority of art over nature also in relation to the hideous. Zanetti and Tiepolo, adds Lucchese, “mark the two extremes” of what is considered caricatural. Zanetti’s profile of singer Giovanni Battista Ruberti, with its protruding chin and prominent, drooping nose, is a beautiful design with intended comic effect that has probably not stood the test of time. Without context, today’s average viewer would miss the pizzazz of this performance.
The final work of the exhibition at the Palazzo Loredan is “Three Studies for the Portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne” by Francis Bacon (1965). The triptych, which alternates white skin with the reds of raw meat, contrasts a seemingly clubbed face with a head tilted slightly upwards to convey a sense of redemption. Yet violence permeates the composition of an artist who, in his last interview, said: “My painting is not violent; it is life that is violent.
While Leonardo may have brought about the birth of caricature in the modern sense, we see compassion in the exquisite treatment of his subjects, as Umberto Eco posits in his book On ugliness (2011): “The ill-famed faces were depicted not to mock the unfortunate or to represent evil, but to show sickness or the deadly work of time.”
Monstrous faces and caricatures presents a range of what is widely considered “the grotesque”, from the caricatures of Zanetti, through the satire of long-forgotten characters and events, to the unsettling force of Bacon. In between, Leonardo and Tiepolo still breathe life into their strange characters. It only takes a few brush strokes to impress a satirical, tragic or compassionate intention on the viewer, among the many emotions that these characters, who challenge our notions of beauty, arouse.
Monstrous faces and caricatures: from Leonardo da Vinci to Bacon continues at Palazzo Loredan (2945 San Marco, Venice, Italy) until April 27. The exhibition was curated by Pietro C. Marani.
