New paintings at Waddesdon Manor
The collections at Waddesdon have been enhanced by the recent acquisition of four major paintings, by Callet, Chardin and Panini, described here by Juliet Carey.
Juliet Carey, Monday, 25th August 2008
A cantata by Rinaldo di Capua, La Pace universale (‘Universal Peace’), was performed on the Monday evening. Panini’s painting shows the cardinals of Rome seated in the front row, their skullcaps represented by little red circles within circles of hair. The carpet that separates them from the performers might have been made at the French royal carpet manufactory, the Savonnerie. French diplomats placed great emphasis on French luxury goods and showed them off to stimulate trade, although in this instance the gaze of those members of the audience who are not chatting to each other or reading the libretto is directed upwards. Contemporary descriptions of the event catalogue the gods, goddesses and allegorical figures that peopled the stage and glowing heights above it. Seated in the painted clouds of the backcloth was the Genius
of France, dressed in blue and holding a crown and sceptre, flanked by Peace (with a laurel branch), Fidelity (guarding a flame), Royal Authority, Justice (holding the fasces of ancient Roman magistrates) and Abundance (with her cornucopia). In the earthly register two singers and three musicians represented (left to right) Jupiter, Apollo, Rome, France and Virtue. In Panini’s rendition, the figure on the far right looks more like Mars than Virtue, one of a handful of inconsistencies between the paintings and eye-witness accounts.
The figures to some extent repeat the arrangement in Panini’s painting of a performance in the Teatro Argentino in Rome to celebrate the wedding of the Dauphin to the Dauphine in 1747 (Musée du Louvre, Paris), commissioned by Cardinal de la Rochefoucauld, chargé d’affaires at the French embassy in Rome. Panini based some of the hundreds of figures in the Waddesdon paintings on drawings he had made several years earlier for the 1747 picture. A sketchbook in the British Museum contains studies he reused for some of the men on the rows of red chairs and women seated in boxes, musicians (Fig. 4) and servants with refreshments. As well as these studies from life, Panini used portraiture to enforce the authenticity of his pictorial record, although the portraits themselves were not necessarily based on the artist’s own observation.4 In the Waddesdon Ball, the figure in the central lower box may be Cardinal York. The lay figures to his left may be James iii and his wife, Maria Sobieska, but it is not clear. The Waddesdon paintings do not emphasise the recognisable faces, but instead subsume rather more generic physiognomies into the overall effect of a crowd pulsing under a viewer’s restless eye. Indeed, the paintings may have been produced before the concert and ball rather than intended as a record of what they looked like. David Marshall has suggested that they served as modelli for the actual events, painted to evoke the effect of the decorations, performance and assembly.5 The acquisition of the Waddesdon paintings prompts further research into their status and function.
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