Art
Master Class
When the University of Texas wond the coveted Suida-Manning Collection, it scored a cultural coup for the who state.
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William Suida, who acquired perhaps a third of the works in the Suida-Manning Collection, was born near Vienna in 1877 and came to maturity just as art historians were beginning to give the Baroque a considerably more respectful reappraisal. A prolific author whose works ranged from scholarly monographs to a popular tourist guide to Genoa, Suida fled the Nazis in 1939 and eventually settled in New York, where he began advising Samuel Kress, the dime-store magnate, who acquired hundreds of old master paintings and gave them away to museums from Honolulu to Atlanta. Suida’s final opus, co-authored with his daughter in 1959, a year before his death, was a book on Luca Cambiaso; the Genoese master is so lavishly represented in the Suida-Manning Collection (seven paintings and 45 drawings) that it’s possible to reconstruct almost step by arduous step the artist’s progress through his turbulent times. An early drawing of a Zeus-like St. Luke—the evangelist on steroids—done while Cambiaso was studying in Rome, shows him struggling to assimilate Michelangelo’s muscular, awe-inspiring High Renaissance style. Cambiaso’s intimate, candlelit Madonna and Child With Saint Catherine and an Angel (1570), painted seven years after the closing of the Counter-Reformation Council of Trent, illustrates the kind of naturalistic, conventional piety the church mandated in hopes of winning back its straying congregants. But within a few years Cambiaso had joined the cult of Mannerism, striving for an artificial stylishness that delighted in the kind of bizarre, contorted pose found in his Lucretia (1575). Portraying the moment when ancient Rome’s most legendarily virtuous matron set a new standard for chastity by plunging a knife into her own breast after being raped by the son of Rome’s king (a gesture, the story goes, so noble that it brought down the Roman monarchy), Cambiaso largely forgets the moral instruction and invites his audience to admire the skill with which he plays games with human anatomy.
Cambiaso set the stage for a whole school of Baroque painting in Genoa, one of several Italian art centers that sent ideas pinging back and forth across the Apennines and Alps for the next 150 years. The most important locus was Rome, where the prospect of papal patronage drew major talent from throughout Italy and Europe: Rubens from Flanders; the Carraccis, Guido Reni, and Guercino from Bologna; Simon Vouet, Claude Lorrain, and Nicolas Poussin from France. The Suida-Manning Collection offers sparkling examples of all their work. By the time Guercino (which means “Squinter”; his real name was Giovanni Francesco Barbieri) arrived in Rome, in 1621, he had already mastered the full-blown Baroque formula seen in what many regard as the collection’s signature masterpiece, Landscape With Tobias and the Angel (circa 1616—17). Almost alive in its fresh, brisk brushwork, more concerned with nature than the supernatural, Guercino’s little landscape vibrates with the sensuality that became the hallmark of the Baroque aesthetic. And the story of its acquisition, during the 1968 edition of the Suida-Mannings’ perennial summer tours of European antiquaries and museums, illustrates how a keen eye—and a bit of luck—enabled two scholars of modest means to amass a collection that would tax a billionaire’s resources today: While giving his young daughter, Alessandra, a respite from Vienna’s galleries with a trip to a local toy store, Robert spotted the painting in the window of the antiques shop next door; unattributed, it was offered for little more than the value of its antique gilt frame. Robert and Bertina were renowned for an uncanny, often unspoken agreement on their acquisitions, but on this occasion they had a minor difference of opinion. Robert wanted to come back later, Alessandra remembers, but her mother insisted they snap up the painting on the spot.
From its Italian genesis the Baroque exploded across Europe, fracturing into competing schools of thought as it expressed the spirit of a complicated age. Poussin’s Arcadian Landscape (1627), a shepherd peacefully playing his pipes in an idealized Roman campagna, represents the conservative, classical point of view. By contrast, Claude Vignon, a French follower of the Italian realist Caravaggio, takes his David With the Head of Goliath (circa 1616—1622) into the streets; with his ragamuffin hairdo, fur-and-feather cap, and saucily bared shoulder, the biblical hero appears to have been modeled after a male prostitute. That conflict between the spirit and the flesh pervaded the age; paintings ostensibly intended to convey classical ideals or religious ecstasy often resulted in displays of skin as gratuitous as sex in a soap opera. Among concupiscent goddesses like Ricci’s peekaboo Flora (circa 1712—1716) and sumptuously attired, décolleté saints like Simon Vouet’s Saint Cecilia (circa 1627), a Saint Agatha (circa 1640’s) newly attributed to the Florentine Giovanni Martinelli bears special mention. When the Suida-Mannings acquired the age-darkened picture, they thought the busty, elegantly dressed (two strands of pearls) martyr was holding an enormous set of shears used to cut her hair. Cleaning the canvas revealed something else beneath a layer of overpainting: two centerfold-perfect, amputated breasts on a silver salver, presented along with the shears as symbols of Agatha’s particularly cruel, gruesome martyrdom.
For all the sizzle and sublimity of the current exhibition at the Ransom Center, the Suida-Manning Collection will have its greatest impact years and decades down the road, drawing scholars from all over the world to search this extraordinary archive for their own discoveries; already, Bober has authenticated an oil study by the preeminent Mannerist, Parmigianino, and a portrait by the Venetian High Renaissance master Tintoretto. When the drawings and paintings are exhibited together in the Blanton’s new home, the public and generations of UT students will be able to study an epoch in the history of art in a context sorely lacking in most museums: They will see, rather than a series of astonishing leaps from one genius to the next, a complicated dialogue that progresses in fits and starts between masters major and minor.
But for the moment, the arrival of the Suida-Manning Collection in Texas represents a remarkable homecoming for the son of a Missouri Pacific railroad engineer, who was fondly “regarded as the odd bird” (his daughter’s phrase) in a family of five boys and an invalid sister, and is still remembered in Mart for studiously copying old master paintings and exuberantly decorating all the local wedding cakes. Because Robert Manning never surrendered that youthful passion—and got a few lucky breaks along the way—this gifted but modest man has now immeasurably enriched the culture of his native state.
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