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Vittore Carpaccio Ep.4: So Many Mysteries

Our final episode in our long look at Vittore Carpaccio examines the mysteries raised by a reunited panel painting and how a good cleaning can make all the difference. 

Seven wide, shallow row boats carrying four men each are scattered across a blue-green lagoon. The men are dressed in tunics and leggings and many point bows and arrows at birds in the water.
Fishing and Fowling on the Lagoon (recto); c. 1492/ 1494, oil on panel, The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.
Letters are tucked behind or draped over a red ribbon stretched across a light-colored wooden frame with a marbled green and brown background. The frame appears to be hanging on a brown wooden wall.
Letter Rack (verso)
Two blond, pale-skinned women dressed in luxurious gowns sit on a balcony bordered by a stone balustrade. A young boy, dogs, birds and shoes are scattered before them.
Two Women on a Balcony, c. 1492/1494, oil on panel, Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, Museo Correr, Venice.

SHOW NOTES (TRANSCRIPT BELOW)

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

Episode music is “La Verde Primavera,” “My Lady Carey’s Dompe,” and “Salterello” performed by John Sayles http://www.jsayles.com/familypages/earlymusic.htm

Exhibition catalogue
“Vittore Carpaccio: Master Storyteller of Renaissance Venice,” Peter Humphrey, Yale University Press, 2022. 
https://shop.nga.gov/vittore-carpaccio-master-storyteller-of-renaissance-venice-exhibition-catalog

Fishing and Fowling on the Lagoon & Letter Rack (Getty Museum) 
https://www.getty.edu/art/collection/object/103REK

Two Women on a Balcony (Museo Correr/Google Arts and Culture)
https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/due-dame-veneziane-vittore-carpaccio/5QEssF9uMskmLA

New interpretation of reunited panels
“Carpaccio’s ‘Hunting on the Lagoon’: A New Perspective”
https://www.jstor.com/stable/886357 (JSTOR, check your local library for access)

Fishing scene theories
Journal of Art and Society 
“Carpaccio’s Double Enigma: Hunting on the Lagoon and the Two Venetian Ladies”
https://www.artinsociety.com/carpacciorsquos-double-enigma-hunting-on-the-lagoon-and-the-two-venetian-ladies.html

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 is going to be a special, expanded episode because I’m looking at two separate paintings that originally were one. Each painting is done in oil on wood and together they’re roughly 6 ft. high x 4 ft. wide. If you want to follow along, you can find them at alonglookpodcast.com/balcony.

This is gonna be a long description, so get comfortable! 

We’ll start with the top one, which is called Fishing and Fowling on the Lagoon, which comes from the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. Seven long, shallow boats are scattered across blue green water streaked with light brown under a watery pale peach and blue sky. Four tall, skinny men stand in each boat, dressed in kind of fancy clothes in tones of white, scarlet red, chocolate brown, or peacock blue. They wear belted tunics and leggings and round hats, some of which fit snugly over their heads while others look fuzzy, like they’re made of feathers. 

Three boats are clustered near us, along the bottom of the panel and the men in them have their backs to us, focusing on the birds popping up in the water around them. One man stands at the front and aims a bow and arrow at the birds while the others propel and steer the boats with long poles. Two birds with thin, curved necks poke their heads above the water while a third dives down leaving his tail feathers sticking up. The longer I look, I realize one of the birds is about to get hit in the beak with a small, round object! 

About halfway way up the panel the water is divided by a tan-colored fence with a few birds perched on it. Two boats drift in front of it while two others float beyond the fence in front of dark-brown marshy-looking land where three large sand-colored huts huddle together on the left side. Blue mountains rise beyond the marsh under that soft sky studded with puffy blue-grey clouds. A V-formation of birds rises toward the upper right while a solitary bird heads to the upper left.

The really strange thing about this scene is there’s a random pretty large white lily flower with a long stalk just sticking up from the lower left! 

The bottom panel, called Two Women on a Balcony, is from the Museo Correr in Venice. Two very bored looking women sit facing our left on a brightly lit terrace lined with a stone balustrade that forms an L-shape railing behind and alongside them. A balustrade is basically a stone railing that sits on a series of arches and columns and defines the edge of an outdoor space like this.

The women have pale skin tinged with pink and upswept honey blond hair topped with straw-colored caps. The woman closest to us in the lower right bends forward to hold the paw of a white dog sitting upright at her feet. It looks like a chihuahua. She holds the end of a stick or a riding crop with her other hand and reaches it toward a skinny black dog in the lower left that has a narrow peanut-brown face and paws. We only see its head and front paws because the rest is cut off by the left edge. But it is firmly gripping the frayed end of this thing in very sharp teeth! 

She wears a sliver necklace and wine-red gown with a very deeply scooped neckline and dark brown and gold patterned sleeves. The sleeves have openings where puffs of white fabric are pulled through and that pearl-studded neckline reveals a whole lot of cleavage! 

Her companion sits further up the bench in the corner of the balustrade with one arm resting on it while loosely dangling a white handkerchief in that hand. 

She sits upright with her head just brushing the top of the panel. She wears a pearl necklace and low-cut gown with a flowing butter yellow skirt and tight-fitting forest green and golden brown bodice covered with pearls and arrowhead shapes. Her golden sleeves are also slashed with white fabric pulled through. And she has these crazy shoes! They look like huge, wide, forest-green platform bedroom slippers! 

Two plump doves, a piece of fruit, and a couple of urns holding plants are scattered along the balustrade near her. One of the urns holds just a tall green stalk cut off near the upper left. 

More random creatures and objects are on the peach-colored floor in front of them that fills the lower width of the scene. Aside from that chopped off dog, there’s a dark brown parrot that appears to be marching toward the women past two cranberry-red platform slip-on shoes. A young boy with brown hair in a copper-brown tunic and pink leggings ducks through one of the arches to reach toward a fat, reddish-brown bird in front of him identified as a lady peacock. The official term is peahen. 

Beyond all the people and stuff on the balcony is a splotchy dark green and brown background that peeks through the arches and fills the space above them.  

MUSIC

So that random lily at the bottom of the hunting scene is the first clue the door was cut in half. These two panels once formed the front of a bi-fold door. Picture a bedroom or hallway closet door that folds in half when you push it to one side and you’ll get the idea. It might have opened onto a small private study belonging to a wealthy man, maybe the guy who commissioned it. 

Amazingly the exhibition catalogue suggests it was one of the later owners who cut it apart! Back in the 1700s, two brothers, Francesco and Bonomo Algarotti had their art collection inventoried and this complete panel is described as a duck hunt with Carpaccio identified as the artist. The current theory blames Francesco for splitting it in two. He was, among other things, an art dealer and may have wanted to make a little extra cash! 

There had been discussion since the 1960s that these two pieces might be from the same panel but it wasn’t until both panels underwent cleaning and conservation in the early ’90s that it was confirmed. The top and bottom halves were lined up and like Cinderella’s slipper, the lily fit! 

Making things even more complicated, the back of the hunting scene on the top half is also  painted to look like a creamy yellow frame filled with a brown and olive-green marble texture hanging on a wooden wall. Folded letters are tucked behind or draped over a brick red ribbon strung across it. 

So what’s happening in that hunt? 

Well, believe it or not, there are many theories about this. According to the catalogue, those birds with the slender necks are called cormorants, which catch fish by swallowing them whole and then regurgitating them. The Venetians trained their cormorants to catch the fish and bring them back to the boats when clay pellets are fired at their heads. It’s one of those pellets heading toward that bird’s head. There are also dead waterfowl that look like ducks draped over the sides of the boats, so the archers were obviously having a busy day.

As for the women, there was long-time debate about who they were. For a long time, a lot of people thought they were courtesans, basically high-class prostitutes, mostly because they look so bored and their clothing is pretty suggestive. Plus the doves, the peahen, and some of the other objects can be symbols for lust and vanity. But all this changed when the women were reunited with the hunters. Suddenly, it provided a whole new context. Now the pair are understood to be wealthy, upper-class wives dressed in the fashions of the day waiting for their men to return from their outing. And like so many symbols, those doves and dogs, especially combined with that lily, can now be interpreted as wedded bliss and faithfulness.

The story gets even weirder. It turns out Fishing and Fowling had fallen off the radar until the early 19th century when it was owned by a cardinal followed by two other collectors. But it ended up in a Roman antiques shop where it was discovered in 1944 and was eventually sold to the Getty Museum. 

The Gallery reunited the door for this exhibition and I’ve included photos on the blog post. But there’s a big chunk missing! That fake marble wall on the back side was cut away at some point leaving a huge gap below it.

So, although reuniting the panels solves one mystery, so many others remain. What did the bottom half of that fake wall show and where did it go? And that weird cropping of dog on the left and the two women looking off in that direction clearly suggest there was a companion left-hand part to the door. What happened to it and how did it connect with our ladies and hunters?  

So. many. questions. But it’s cool to see how a lot of detective work by art historians and conservators can tell a more complete story, even after all these years! And keep your eyes peeled for a panel painting with the body of a skinny black dog! 

OUTRO:

Well, we’ve reached the end of our long look at Vittore Carpaccio. After the show closes in DC on Feb. 12, it travels to Venice where it’ll be at the Palazzo Ducale from March 18–June 18, 2023.

A Long Look will be taking a break but you can always revisit these Renaissance gems or any of your other favorites at alonglookpodcast.com or wherever you listen to podcasts. There’s 75 of ‘em, so plenty of options for your art fix! 

I’d like to thank the US-Italy Global Affairs Forum for their promotional support during this special season. I hope you check them out at usitalyforum.com for coverage of Italian news, business, and culture. 

You can find links to today’s information in the show notes at alonglookpodcast.com and in most podcast apps and as always, thanks for joining me!


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