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National Gallery Of Scotland Reunites Masterpieces After 300 Years
By 24 Hour Museum Staff
28/01/2008
Sir Peter Paul Rubens, The Feast of Herod c. 1635-40. © National Gallery of Scotland
Two seventeenth-century masterpieces are to be reunited for the first time in over three hundred years at the National Gallery of Scotland this winter.
From January 31 2008, visitors will have the opportunity to compare and contrast two outstanding examples of baroque painting from north and south of the Alps – the National Gallery’s own Feast of Herod (c.1635-40) by Sir Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640), and the extraordinary Drunken Silenus (1626) by Jusepe de Ribera (1592–1651).
As part of a historic cultural exchange between Scotland and Italy, the Ribera painting has been lent by the Galleria Nazionale di Capodimonte in Naples, in recognition of the recent loan of the Rubens to an exhibition there.
In the mid-seventeenth century the two paintings hung together in the palace of Gaspar Roomer (c.1590-1674), a fabulously wealthy Flemish merchant and financier based in Naples.
Rubens’s The Feast of Herod was probably commissioned directly from the artist by Roomer, and it caused a sensation among local artists when it arrived in Naples from Antwerp around 1640. The Drunken Silenus was originally painted for another Neapolitan collector, Giovanni Francesco Salernitano, but it was bought by Roomer in 1653.
Jusepe de Ribera, The Drunken Silenus, 1626. © Museo Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples
His enormous fine art collection – by far the largest in the city at that date – already boasted numerous other paintings by Ribera. At his death, Roomer left many of his best pictures, including the Rubens and the Drunken Silenus, to the son of his former business partner, who in turn divided his collection between his three daughters.
In an inventory of the collection drawn up at that time (1688) by the celebrated painter Luca Giordano, they were the two most highly valued paintings. It was at that point that they were permanently separated – until their temporary reunion in this display.
Painted in 1626, Ribera’s Drunken Silenus is dominated by the grotesque figure of Silenus, with his taut contours, bloated belly and his genitals scarcely covered by a vine-leaf. In classical mythology, Silenus was a god of wine and revelry, a companion of Bacchus, who was also wise and endowed with the gift of prophecy.
He is crowned with a wreath of vine leaves by the goat-legged Pan, while a faun replenishes his shell-cup with wine from a goatskin. Silenus’s donkey brays comically and two of the figures look out of the painting grinning, suggesting that the painting may involve some kind of private joke.
Reunited: Rubens - Ribera runs from January 31 – April 6 2008
National Gallery Of Scotland (National Galleries Of Scotland)
Fine Art, The Mound, Edinburgh, EH2 2EL, Lothian, Scotland
Open: Museum:
Sat-Wed 1000-1730
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