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Visual Arts

Bartholomeus Spranger's wild, weird and voluptuous art at the Met

“Hercules and Omphale” (circa 1585) is among the paintings in a show at the Metropolitan Museum of Art billed as the first major exhibition devoted to Bartholomeus Spranger.

NEW YORK – The court of Rudolf II, the Habsburg king and Holy Roman emperor for more than 35 years, was rich in intellectual and artistic exotica. Astronomers and astrologers flocked there, as did serious scholars and silver-tongued hacks. The emperor, who never married but was widely renowned as a libertine, was deeply interested in alchemy, too, and in the catalogue to an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, that interest is posited as fundamental to understanding the wild, weird and voluptuous art characteristic of his reign.

“Bartholomeus Spranger: Splendor and Eroticism in Imperial Prague” is billed as the first major exhibition devoted to Spranger, who not only served Rudolf from the early 1580s until the painter’s death in 1611, but also Rudolf’s father, the emperor Maximilian II; Pope Pius V; and one of the greatest arts patrons of any age, Cardinal Alessandro Farnese. Born in Antwerp, Spranger studied with Flemish landscape painters before heading south, by way of Paris and Milan, to Rome, where he was deeply influenced by the prevailing Mannerist painters of the day. But it was the call to serve the Habsburgs, and particularly the febrile court of Rudolf, that allowed Spranger to produce the sensual, fleshy, sexually charged works for which he is most famous.

The Met exhibition, organized by guest curator Sally Metzler, brings together several of the most deliciously odd of these signature fantasies: “Hercules and Omphale,” “Jupiter and Antiope,” “Angelica and Medoro.” The “and” in these titles is a recurring figure throughout the works of Spranger, who delighted in depicting the amorous human couple, not always happy in love, but deeply intertwined physically and psychologically. And so Angelica, a character from Ariosto’s poem “Orlando Furioso,” has one leg draped over the thigh of her naked lover, Medoro, whom she has nursed back to health; Hercules has one foot interposed and rising between the shins of Omphale, who has gained temporary mastery over the emasculated hero; and the arms of Jupiter, disguised as a satyr, encircle the breasts of Antiope, who has one hand placed dangerously high on the god’s furry inner thigh.

The bodies depicted are uniformly muscular, outlandishly distended and impossibly flexible. They twist and turn, with hips heading in all directions, creating the serpentine S curves characteristic of Mannerist art. Spranger’s characters don’t seem so much to have bodies as to wear them, like another set of clothes just under the diaphanous veils and decorously placed swathes of rich fabric that accentuate the unseen naughty bits. This a world in which wardrobes are designed to malfunction.

Spranger also created religious paintings, and these are only slightly less risque. An exquisite, small work on copper made before Spranger’s arrival in Prague, “The Lamentation of Christ,” shows Christ’s body moving in three directions, the legs bent and flopping to his right, the torso turned to his left and his head angled again to the right. The foreshortening and the tight compression of the image into a small space create a powerful sensation of pain lingering even after death, as if his robust body is still racked by the memory of crucifixion. This moves his death into the realm of the sensual, a dangerous suggestion of the erotic confusion of sexual ecstasy and physical annihilation.

Even relatively chaste images, such as the 1591 “Noli Me Tangere,” which depicts Christ’s encounter with Mary Magdalene, has a peculiar charge. Christ appears as a gardener, in a rough, misshapen hat, looking down at Mary Magdalene, whose left hand plays gently with the loose fabric crossed over her ample breasts. Christ’s look is tender, hers rapturous. But Spranger amplifies the drama by heightening the line of their vision with a brilliant reflection off the fold of a red cape or cloak loosely worn by Christ. His nose, lips and beard seem almost as if caught in some kind tractor beam emanating from the red fabric, linking the two figures in more than just spiritual bonds.

Yet another work, “The Holy Family with Infant Saint John the Baptist,” from 1587-1588, problematizes the whole religious milieu in which Spranger was working. Mary holds Jesus over one shoulder, while John looks in from the lower right corner of the painting, only his head visible above a tray of fruit. The juxtaposition of John’s free-floating and disembodied head with the platter recalls the saint’s death by beheading, at the behest of Salome. Is this a joke or a visual allusion that has slightly misfired? The former seems plausible if you study the face of the infant Christ, who wears a small, tight smile, and an impish look of mischief. He has the eyes of a toddler in the throes of pure evil, intent on disobedience and destruction. Curiously, Christ’s left hand also prefigures the gesture of Antiope in the later, secular painting with Hercules based on a story from Ovid.

These are hard works to love but well worth admiring. The argument about alchemy advanced by Metzler in her biographical essay enhances the understanding of Spranger’s work beyond the obvious and simple fact that he worked for a notoriously sensual emperor. Rudolf was also intellectual and particularly fascinated with the erudite and arcane.

Alchemy was not, at the time, merely pseudo-science, nor was it entirely a matter of converting base metals to gold. There was a belief in a kind of spiritual alchemy, or alchemy theoretica, which was bound up with the pursuit of wisdom.

Further, the union of two bodies was a powerful metaphor for the chemical and spiritual bonding that led to the transmutations so eagerly sought through alchemy. “Fix the volatile and dissolve the fixed” was one basic tenet of alchemy, and it is a useful tenet to keep in the mind while looking at the works of Spranger. The solidity of the body becomes fluid, while the intangibles of desire and love seem to take fixed forms. The Christian tradition, dating to the Old Testament, is full of intertwined bodies, playing out a spectrum of physical encounters, from the violent and murderous to the purely sensual; and, of course, the union between Christ and his Church was explicitly seen as a kind of marriage.

Still, Rudolf was obviously a horndog and Spranger his brilliant visual servant. It takes work not to indulge a slight condescension to Spranger, given how clearly he foregrounds a slightly infantile lasciviousness. Just as the postman in cheap erotica is always hunky and ready for action, the women in Spranger’s paintings seem to live in a world where dresses are designed to slide off the chest. Men wear a patchwork of armor but seem disinclined to protect any part of the body that might be sexually appealing to others. In his rendering of Hercules and Omphale, the young queen is seen from behind, naked, holding Hercules’s big old club on her shoulder, while Hercules delicately pinches the end of his distaff so that it rises at a 45-degree angle in exactly the right direction. Is anyone minding the store? Are there any adults in the house?

Pointing more in the direction of gravitas is a gallery wall that reproduces a portion of the famous “kunstkammer,” or chamber of wonders on which Rudolf lavished his energies and attention. Mimicking the rooms in the Prague Castle where Rudolf kept his prized collection of artistic and natural wonders, the wall is meant to remind visitors of the degree to which Rudolf’s passion for collecting elided lines between art and science, and reinforced the public perception of his imperial power. In an age before near-universal digital access to everything, Rudolf’s collection was a prodigious display of his authority and the reach of his empire. For all their erotic sizzle, his paintings of scenes from Ovid and other classical writers were also data points, of a sort; visual elaborations of historical, mythological and religious narratives. His art, his kunstkammer, his castle and his court were all methods of containing and encompassing the world and all its riches.

Given Spranger’s long and productive stay in Prague, many of his works ended up in Eastern Europe, which limited access to them for Western scholars during the Cold War. One work in the catalogue – which is designed to give a comprehensive overview of his career, including many works not in the exhibition – was long believed to be lost but may be in the collection of Cornelius Gurlitt, the German art collector and son of a Nazi-era art dealer who trafficked in paintings deemed “degenerate” by the Nazis. So Spranger’s reputation may evolve yet further, as new works are discovered and old ones are seen in the light of exhibitions such as this one.

Will this exhibition turn out to be, as one Met official said at an opening event this month, the “sleeper” of the fall season? That depends on audiences, who will need to suppress first and second impressions to get beyond the froth of this strangely insipid yet appealing painter. But it’s work well worth the effort.



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