Vittore Carpaccio Ep3: Virgin Reading

Our next stop is Carpaccio’s “Virgin Reading.” We discover a hidden Jesus, a still-unsolved art mystery, and how Carpaccio broke the rules in his unusual depiction of the Virgin Mary. 

The photos below illustrate a couple of the points discussed in the episode:  

SHOW NOTES (TRANSCRIPT BELOW)

“A Long Look” theme is “Ascension” by Ron Gelinas https://youtu.be/jGEdNSNkZoo

Episode music is “Goldberg Variations, BWV. 988 – Variation 12. Canon on the fourth.” Performed by Shelley Katz. Courtesy of musopen.org.
https://musopen.org/music/4107-goldberg-variations-bwv-988/

Virgin Reading info
https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.498.html

Italian Paintings of the Fifteenth Century by Boskovits, Miklós., and David Alan Brown. Washington: National Gallery of Art, 2003.

Exhibition information 
https://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/2022/carpaccio-renaissance-venice.html

Vittore Carpaccio: Master Storyteller of Renaissance Venice by Peter Humphrey et al. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022.

X-radiography
http://www.fineartconservation.ie/x-radiography-4-4-45.html

Giorgione episode
https://alonglookpodcast.com/the-adoration-of-the-shepherds-by-giorgione/

Post comments or questions at alonglookpodcast.com

(TRANSCRIPT)

This season we’ll find out by looking at the works of Vittore Carpaccio, the star of a fantastic exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC called Vittore Carpaccio: Master Storyteller of Renaissance Venice, now on view through Feb. 12, 2023.

MUSIC

Today I’m looking at Virgin Reading If you want to follow along, you can find it at alonglookpodcast.com/virgin. https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.498.html

So what do you first notice? 

A young woman with pale skin sits facing our left on a ledge covered with blue and greenish-brown patterned carpets. She is the Virgin Mary and takes up most of the height of this vertical oil painting with a misty blue and green landscape behind her. 

We see Mary from the hips up with her back to us and her body turned to our left. Her lower legs are hidden behind the ledge and her head tilts down to look at an open book she holds at chest level in both hands. Her skin is smooth and creamy and her face is in profile with a very slender eyebrow, straight nose, and small pale pink mouth. 

Mary’s dressed in a  cranberry-red gown with a long, puffy carrot-orange sleeve and thin black belt that bunches the dress into pleats around her waist. The neckline is outlined with a wide sage-green band covered with a delicate pattern of leaves and vines that comes to a point on her upper back. Her head is wrapped in a beige turban and draped with a sheer veil that falls to her shoulders. A few wavy strands of blond hair straggle down her the back of her neck. Carpaccio does this cool thing of using a few thin strokes of white from her head to shoulders to suggest the folds of veil. A little glint of gold caught my eye and I realized there’s a very thin delicate halo behind her head. 

The sunny landscape behind Mary starts out as pale green grass with two trees rising on either side of her. The tree on the left has bare branches while the other is leafy and green. The grass extends back to meet a line of leafy dark green shrubs and plants. Beyond that is a slate-blue lake with three hazy blue-green mountains on the right sloping down like fingers into its water. Ghostly white buildings and the tower of a distant town sit on the lake’s edge, silhouetted against the closest mountain finger. Clusters of white and gray clouds drift in the pale blue sky overhead.

The white stone ledge she sits on forms the border of an enclosed area that could be a terrace. Imagine a rectangle cut in half with the long sides running across the width of the canvas and the short side on our left. And that’s where I notice the toes. Five little pearly toes dotting the upper half a foot. It’s part of a person who’s been cut off on the left side of the painting! This person appears to be sitting, propped up by a large maroon-red cushion with their leg stretched out towards us. Aside from the foot, all we can see is a bare arm with a deep ocean-blue cloth tucked into the bent elbow that also covers their leg. They have very pale alabaster skin almost the same color as the ledge and just like Mary there’s a sliver of a halo where their head would be. 

MUSIC

That little foot belongs to a hidden figure of baby Jesus. He was discovered when the painting was examined with x-radiography a few years ago and Joanna Dunn, a conservator at the Gallery, uncovered him while preparing the work for this exhibition. 

X-radiography is basically where paintings are x-rayed so conservators and curators can see any hidden damage or overpainting, like with Jesus and to find out which pigments the artist used. The scanner reacts with the chemicals in the pigments to create a grayscale image of what’s under the surface. So for example, if the artist used a paint containing lead, those areas will appear white. The big advantage to this technology is it doesn’t damage the painting.

It turns out the painting had been cut down or separated along the left side back in the 1700s and somebody decided to paint over Jesus to hide the split. So they ended up filling him in with his upper body painted to blend with the pillow and the white ledge extended to cover his leg. Which left us with this random pillow just bizarrely standing up by itself. I’ll include an image in the blog post. 

And nobody knew about it until the x-radiograph revealed his pudgy little foot and arm and that sliver of his halo, just visible against the pillow. Even though hidden Jesus has been restored to us, the mystery remains that no one knows where the rest of the painting is or what it showed. 

Carpaccio also kind of broke the rules with this painting. First of all, having Mary dressed as a contemporary Venetian woman is a huge difference from how she’s traditionally shown. Whenever she’s shown with Jesus, she’s usually standing or sitting, facing us and cradling him in her arms or propping him up on her lap. And she usually wears a blue cloak over a red gown. 

Another big change is Jesus’ position. Like I said, he’s usually in Mary’s lap or lying on a ledge or even on the ground in front of her as she gazes lovingly down at him. You can see an example in the episode on Giorgione’s Adoration of the Shepherds. 

Here, he’s off to one side, and Mary basically seems to be ignoring him, maybe taking a little “me” time to read outside on a lovely day. As a matter of fact, her pose and outfit were so unusual, a lot of people thought she was just a random female saint or even just a regular Venetian woman! 

There’s even a story with those trees. In Christian art, they symbolize humanity’s redemption through Christ. Carpaccio used similar trees in some of the other works in the exhibition.

I hope you’ll try out a long look on your next museum visit! Just take a little time and let the art reveal itself.

And btw, if you’re into Italian politics, business, or culture, check out my friends at the US-Italy Global Affairs Forum. The forum is dedicated to promoting dialogue and coverage of issues that affect the United States-Italy relationship. Check out usitalyforum.com.

Thanks for joining me!