In the Kitchen of Art (1)

An Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of In the Kitchen of Art: Selected Essays and Criticism, 2003-20 by Marco Grassi.

Duccio di Buoninsegna, Madonna and Child, 1300, tempera, 11 × 8¹⁄₈ inches, Metropolitan Museum of Art (source)

The first time my writing appeared in The New Criterion, a review of a 2009 Prendergast exhibition at the Williams College Museum of Art, I flipped back and forth in disbelief between an article by Karen Wilkin and an article by Terry Teachout. That my work was deemed fit to appear next to theirs was astonishing. Before then I knew only that I could write better than a typical art school graduate, a bar so low you stub your toe on it. If you had asked me whether my prose belonged in the same journal as that of James Lord, for God’s sake, I would have demurred. But an editor thought otherwise and proved otherwise, regardless of my feelings about the matter.

I relived a bit of that wonder upon reading the first part of In the Kitchen of Art: Selected Essays and Criticism, 2003-20 by Marco Grassi. The book collects Grassi’s essays for The New Criterion, and takes its title from his first. Grassi is a Florentine conservator of paintings whose father and grandfather were art dealers. He is the product of a world of connoisseurship, erudition, multilingualism, and high culture that even classy Americans can only approximate.

Yet this is his introduction to the book:

Seeing, in print, what one writes is, even for a professional penman, a uniquely satisfying experience. For an amateur like me, it is sublimely ego-enhancing. I am all too aware of possessing zero credentials and less-than-zero name recognition as a writer. What I do have, thankfully, are good friends: Roger Kimball and James Panero, respectively Editor and Executive Editor of The New Criterion, and Brandon Fradd, eminent cultural entrepreneur-about-town and generous patron of this book. Pure vanity prompted my immediate, and enthusiastic, response to their generous suggestion that some of the articles I had submitted over the years might be collected in book form. Because I am neither a published “art historian” nor an academic scholar, I felt it necessary to clarify my personal profile as an “outsider.”

Apparently, you belong in The New Criterion if you quietly suspect that you don’t.

Grassi’s is the kind of writing for which you ought to subscribe to the magazine, even if you’ll never make it to the performances that Kyle Smith and Paul du Quenoy write about so eloquently, even if you can’t abide Roger Kimball’s politics. Many people are qualified to write about historical Italian art. I have been known to do so myself on occasion. Grassi writes about it like he was there.

Following Lotto’s long career is a fascinating pilgrimage through northeastern Italy. It begins in Venice, his native city, and continues—with endless comings and goings—to Rome and other less important centers such as Treviso, Bergamo, Recanati, Jesi, and Ancona. There were also long detours to obscure villages in the backwaters of Lombardy and the Marche to which the artist consigned some of his most significant commissions. Being a young apprentice-artist in Venice at the beginning of the sixteenth century must have been a thrilling but also daunting experience. The established master, Giovanni Bellini, although approaching the end of a brilliant career, continued to re-invent his style and to cast a giant shadow; emerging from it may not have been easy, but it was a task at which Lotto’s close contemporaries Titian and Giorgione succeeded all too well. Their genius, grounded in Bellini’s sober Classicism yet animated by an entirely innovative tonal approach to color, must have seemed, even then, a winning combination. Lotto’s earliest works clearly show his awareness and understanding of these developments, but even then he must have felt a strong urge to hew to a different course. A clue to the young painter’s independent character was his next move: he simply threw in the towel and decamped to nearby Treviso. Here, from 1503 to 1506, with the patronage of a cultivated local bishop and some influential friends, Lotto got his start in earnest.

Seasoning this deep scholarship is Grassi’s being Italian. Moreover, Grassi is in the scrutiny business, and his writing proves it. On Gentile:

It was probably for a Venetian patron that Gentile carried out the first of his three major surviving altarpieces, the so-called Valle Romita polyptich (Milan, Brera). Conceived within a relatively conservative framework comprising a central composition—The Coronation of the Virgin—flanked by separate standing figures of saints, with a Crucifixion and smaller figures of saints above, this impressive pile is much more than a sum of its parts. The relationship of attitudes and poses is so skillfully orchestrated that the viewer is hardly troubled by the fact that the altarpiece is actually a composite of ten separate and discrete images. Each element blends seamlessly into a single, and sublime, heavenly vision. If considered at close quarters, however, one discovers with wonder how Gentile’s brush is tireless in its careful exploration of the substance and texture of real things such as fabrics, flowers, and flesh; each item is examined, weighed, and then revealed in its corporeal—utterly truthful—specificity.

I bring my own strengths to criticism, but as Eliot dedicated “The Waste Land” to Pound, Il miglior fabbro. I hope you’re enjoying this book as much as I am.

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Our current title in the Asynchronous Studio Book Club is In the Kitchen of Art: Selected Essays and Criticism, 2003-20 by Marco Grassi. For more information, see the ASBC homepage.

Dissident Muse’s first publication, Backseat Driver by James Croak, is available now at Amazon.

Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard is out now at Allworth Press. More information is available at the site for the book. If you own it already, thank you; please consider reviewing the book at Amazon, B&N, or Goodreads.