Castiglione - Rogue Genius of the Baroque Secret Knowledge

Back in 1985, when I was working for Christie's,

a major highlight for me was cataloguing a sale

of spectacular prints from the collection of Chatsworth House.

This exciting sale was packed full of printmaking gems,

iconic images by Durer,

a Rembrandt etching that sold for half a million pounds,

and yet the one that really leapt out off the page for me was this one

by the 17th-century Italian artist Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione.

It's just so bold and daring, dramatic, ahead of its time.

Yet the extraordinary thing is that until that point

I had really never come across Castiglione.

And even today, I'm sure there are many people who've never really heard of him.

Since then, I've been working with prints and drawings for almost 30 years,

but I've always held a secret fascination for Castiglione.

How could someone so brilliant have remained hidden for so long?

So you can imagine how pleased I am

that he is now having his first major UK exhibition

in the Queen's Gallery at Buckingham Palace.

Castiglione was a master of his art,

a rival to Rembrandt as the printmaker of the time.

But he was also a revolutionary,

technically innovative with a fluid, spontaneous style.

And he invented a new printing technique

that has influenced generations of artists right up until today.

So why did this talented artist

never become one of the great names of the Italian Baroque?

New research dug out of archives in Italy

reveals a turbulent life story,

involving a long line of criminal acts from assault to murder.

So here at last is my opportunity

to find out more about this clearly gifted man

who exploded onto the art world of 17th-century Italy

and then vanished almost without trace...until now.

With exclusive access behind the scenes of the exhibition,

I'll explore his extraordinary work,

new discoveries by conservators,

and the printmaking process he invented

to understand the question

at the heart of Castiglione's enigmatic life story.

Is it our fault that he's been such a genius lost to us...or his?

Britain has the largest and finest collection of Castiglione's prints

and drawings in the world, normally kept here at Windsor Castle.

Bought by King George III over 250 years ago,

catalogued for the first time in the 1950s,

many haven't seen the light of day for hundreds of years.

They are stored in a special library

that only the senior curators can access.

It's truly a privilege for me to be surrounded by so many of the best.

This group of about 250 works on paper by Castiglione

has been together since the artist's death.

In fact, they formed part of his own personal studio,

so it's as close to him as you can get.

I often find that people dismiss prints and drawings

as being somehow less interesting, less important than paintings,

or rank them lower in the pantheon of the visual arts,

but for me there's something so intimate about prints and drawings.

These are the artist's thoughts on paper, so it's here

that we really begin to understand the workings of the artistic mind.

And Castiglione is a perfect example.

From these works, I think we'll really get to know him.

The curators have let me hand-pick a select few pieces

that will help us get closer to this hot-headed talent.

It's so lovely to have an opportunity

to look really closely at this one,

because it's undoubtedly Castiglione's

most audacious etching.

He's called it The Genius of Castiglione.

And there it is right in the centre of the print.

And it's not necessarily a self-portrait,

but he has made a reference to the velvet cap

and that very showy plume that he was wearing in his self-portrait.

And that's a symbol of furia, creative energies and imagination.

In fact, the whole print is full of symbols.

And what he's done here is he's introduced lots of elements

that his erudite audience would have taken great pleasure in decodifying.

So you've got the crown of immortality,

you've got the palm of victory.

The central figure

is the personification of fame with his trumpet.

Fecundity down here symbolised by the rabbit and the chickens.

And then the artist's creativity here

with his palette and his brushes.

But what he was really doing of course with this etching

was saying, "Here I am. I'm a genius!"

So who was this self-proclaimed "genius"

and how did he become such a trailblazing artist and printmaker?

Let's go back to the Italian city

that helped hone his artistic talents...Genoa.

When we think of the artistic capitals of Italy,

we think of Venice, Florence, Rome.

Genoa doesn't usually make it onto that list,

yet 17th-century Genoa

was a cosmopolitan melting pot of cultures and communities.

Nicknamed "La Superba", it was also a city of wealth

where merchants attracted working artists from Italy and abroad

to decorate their homes and churches with art.

As money and talent flowed into the port,

Castiglione would have been exposed to the emerging and established artists of the day

and their latest innovations.

Van Dyck spent several years in Genoa in the 1620s,

and it's quite possible

that Castiglione even spent time in his studio.

Castiglione began to draw in the typical Genoese way.

This was often bucolic scenes with animals

or pastoral and patriarchal journeys.

Castiglione in his early days

was often dismissed by his peers as a simple animal painter,

but as his ambitions grew,

he realised that he needed to move to a bigger artistic centre...Rome.

He would go on to become somebody

who was constantly moving from place to place.

And I almost sense that certain restlessness in his drawing style.

The beauty of Castiglione's hand

was the way the images just flew off his brush.

1630s Rome was a daunting place for an ambitious artist.

It was the time of the Counter-Reformation

and Pope Urban VIII wanted to bring people back to the Catholic faith

through religious art.

This competitive artistic period became known as the Italian Baroque.

Castiglione was suddenly vying with artistic rivals

from Italy and the rest of Europe for fame, fortune

and the great prize of religious or royal patronage.

Now he had to up his game to survive and stand out.

Castiglione was very conscious that he was not as classically schooled

as many of his contemporaries,

but worked in a very different, less traditional way.

He didn't really like life drawing, for example,

which was a staple part of much artistic training.

He didn't make endless anatomical studies like Leonardo,

but tended to draw very freely onto the paper,

his limbs suggested with a flourish.

And whereas most artists

used drawings as preparatory studies for their paintings,

Castiglione's were finished works in their own right.

So Castiglione was really out on his own with this style.

But, as legal documents from this time reveal,

he often had a higher profile

as a bad-boy troublemaker than as an artist.

In fact, there's more in the Italian archives about his court appearances than his art commissions.

One evening in the spring of 1635,

Castiglione joined his fellow artists at a friend's house.

It was a customary form of entertainment

to put on improvised comedies gently sending each other up,

but this one went too far when the Roman artist Greppi

mocked Castiglione saying that he

merely "touched upon the profession of painting".

Instead of storming out in indignation,

Castiglione beat Greppi with his fists

and was then accused of trying to shoot him.

It's no surprise his biographer, Niccolo Pio,

noted that Castiglione was "more feared than loved".

There's a really shocking manuscript here from the Italian archives

based on a court case against Castiglione,

where it describes how he left Rome and fled to Genoa in such a hurry

that he forgot to take anything with him.

So the witness records how he had to lend Castiglione everything,

from pots and pans, to laundry, to bed sheets,

to various items of clothing...including his underpants.

He must have been in a hurry to leave without those.

But the accusation was murder.

He certainly looks pretty guilty.

These documents are really letting me get to know Castiglione's character.

The combination of beauty and violence does feed into the page.

There's a sense of a tortured mind putting pen to paper,

particularly when he began to tackle more complex subject matter

like allegory and mythology.

There's perhaps a hint of the darker side of Castiglione's personality in this one,

which shows Circe

who's just transformed the companions of Odysseus into animals.

And that theme of transformation

was quite an important one to Castiglione,

because it underlines the fragility of human existence.

One moment there are soldiers in armour

and the next moment they're gone and it's just the armour discarded.

And there are a whole lot of animals here.

And, actually, Castiglione's put his own touch on it here,

his own sense of humour,

because he's added the monkey, the tortoise, the rabbit,

which is rather lovely, it brings him back to his subject matter he's comfortable with.

But there's also the scary face here on the left

balancing out the whole composition.

And that's really what appeals to me about this one,

it's the combination of the beauty and the torment in one image.

And it appealed to audiences at the time, too.

Despite his volatile personality,

Castiglione was becoming a successful artist.

He was soon back in Rome

confidently developing his own style.

Deep inside the core of Windsor Castle,

I've been granted special access to see Castiglione's work in a new way.

Normally prints and drawings are kept mounted and protected,

but I've come to see some of them in the conservation studio.

I still find it really thrilling to get up so close

to a beautiful piece of 17th-century paper like this.

This is Venus and Adonis and it's a pen and ink drawing

with his characteristic dogs on the left here.

But what's remarkable to me

is the effect he's achieved with just pen and ink,

because you can see these cross-hatched lines there

really suggest the light and shade.

But there's something even more special about this sheet.

When the conservators were preparing for this exhibition,

they discovered on the reverse of the sheet

a drawing that hadn't been seen for 250 years.

And here it is.

It looks like the design for a tomb perhaps,

which does suggest that Castiglione

was busy working on many different projects.

And it's rather wonderful that we can go on

discovering new things about him from these drawings.

What was really revolutionary about Castiglione

was that he didn't only draw with pen and ink on paper,

but he also drew with a brush and oil on paper,

which was really unusual.

And look at this sheet. It gets so many techniques in here.

The lighter stroke, the drier stroke,

it's really painting and drawing merged into one.

And this was a really quick technique

that was obviously very suited to a quick mind.

There was no other artist

exploring oil and paper like he was in the 17th century.

At this time, Castiglione could be confident of his talent and ambition.

But he still didn't have an official court patron,

so he needed to keep selling himself to stand out.

Prints were a great advert for an artist's work and status.

And one of the most influential print publishers in Rome, De' Rossi,

was keen to spread Castiglione's work

to his circle of erudite print buyers.

By the 17th century the print trade was flourishing

and one fellow printmaker really caught Castiglione's eye...

Rembrandt.

Castiglione was hugely inspired by Rembrandt

and was one of the first known artists in Italy to be influenced by him.

He was particularly drawn to Rembrandt's use of tenebrism,

a tonal effect using dramatic contrasts of light and dark.

Castiglione became known as the second Rembrandt of his day,

but he didn't stop there.

He set himself apart from his rivals this time with a new invention.

Rembrandt was a master of printmaking,

but once again Castiglione worked in a defiantly different way.

Etching is a rigorous discipline

and Rembrandt worked at his plates over and over again,

creating several different states of each plate.

But Castiglione tended to etch his plates all in one go

and then just print them.

What he really wanted was something

that was less methodical but more spontaneous.

And this led him

to devise his own completely new technique...the monotype.

For someone like me who loves prints,

it's Castiglione's experimentation and invention

of a whole new technique that's so fascinating.

It's all about the materials, the paper and the inks

and the artist's skill in using the relationship between the two.

So to see the process in action,

I have come to see artist Hughie O'Donoghue,

who's currently engaged in making a monotype here at Paupers Press.

Hughie's created a design

inspired by a horse's skull detail from a Castiglione print.

-How's it coming along? Rather well by the look of things.

-Very well, thanks.

So what is it for you about a monotype that is so appealing?

Well, it's... A monotype is unique,

it's a one-off, it's one impression,

so there's a kind of risk with that.

-So it comes straight out of what you're thinking.

-It does.

Yeah, you've quickly got to sort of manipulate the ink.

And you manipulate the ink like you would handle paint.

So how long have you been working on that one, say?

-Erm...probably been working about 20 minutes.

-Oh, really?

-Yes.

-I see. So it really is quick?

-It is.

But with a monotype,

you've got nothing on the plate other than the ink.

The links between the monotype and a painting are very strong.

With a painting you get a build-up of layers,

with the monotype there's all sorts of things that you can do

by sort of pulling the brush across the surface,

and the way the brush breaks in parts

and you get an uneven line, all these things provide...

-Different textures?

-Textures and interest.

I'm not just thinking, "Well, this is a horse's skull." Well, yeah, it is a horse's skull,

but it's also an aluminium plate with ink on it.

-So I'm looking at the abstract forms, shapes and patterns.

-Yes! And coaxing an image out of it.

Absolutely. And...so that's part of the process.

And when I start, I don't know necessarily what it's going to be like.

So there's an element of the unknown and surprise, is there?

-Is that how it works?

-That is how it works.

And I want fluidity and a natural feel to it.

You know, if you drop turps...

-some of this mixture into the surface...

-Oh, yes.

-..this will again affect how...

-Oh, yes, look!

-I see, it lifts it off.

-Yeah, it lifts it off.

You can work back into your image.

And this, of course, would have been interesting for Castiglione

if he's working, trying to create tenebrist,

-chiaroscuro effects, light and dark.

-Yes, because it's mottled.

Yeah, absolutely. It's not...a science,

it requires an intuitive...response to the medium.

-You've got to feel the medium.

-That's a really good way of thinking about it.

-So you have to be in quite a brave mood, in a way, to make a monotype.

-Yes.

-Either that or...

-Reckless.

-Reckless. Yeah, well, I do lots of reckless.

Castiglione's new invention in the 1640s meant that artists

could now draw or paint ink straight onto a plate

without engraving and simply print a one-off design.

There are only 20 known monotypes by Castiglione anywhere in the world,

so it's such a privilege for me

to be able to be here with three of the finest from the Royal Collection.

And what it tells me about Castiglione

is that he just loved paper and ink,

because it's a combination of painting and drawing and printmaking.

And look, here he's used it in a positive way,

so he's drawn onto a copper plate and printed from that with ink.

And then he's done it in reverse,

the negative technique, where he's painted over the copper plate with black ink

and then scraped out the highlights with a blunt instrument.

And in this one here, he's combined the two,

so that you get the image that's been painted onto the plate

and then he's scraped off the highlights and then even added

some brushwork and some wash behind to give it real depth.

So this was a real coming together

of everything he'd worked with before.

He was a real pioneer of this technique.

LAUGHTER

-Here you go.

-Cheers.

-See what you can do with that.

-Hmm!

So this is a really big moment,

because we only get one chance at this, don't we?

We get one chance and, hopefully,

-we'll get a print out of it that's acceptable. Hope so.

-No pressure.

So you have a pretty good idea

-of how it's going to translate onto paper, do you?

-Yes.

I'd say so, yeah. Usually, if it looks OK on the plate,

-it'll look all right on the paper.

-Hmm.

Oh, look at that!

That's wonderful!

-Look at all those different tones.

-It's quite liquid, yeah.

-Isn't it?

-This area here, this is absolutely typical monotype feel

to not just Castiglione but many artists who've used monotype.

You get that sense of the sort of tones being fragmented

and, you know, the sense of a brush

-as opposed to...a needle or a marker.

-Hmm.

I mean, it's very fluid and...

..although it's derived from the Castiglione,

-it's my own...not his.

-Yes!

Quite right.

Well, for me, one of the things that struck me about Castiglione

was how modern he looked.

For me, the word would be "timeless",

I feel that they have a timeless quality to them.

That's partly to do with the fact that they're very rooted in drawing.

They're very fresh and to our modern eye

they appear not distant, not unapproachable.

The monotype didn't actually re-emerge

until the 19th century with Degas,

who refined the effects of spontaneity and light

to express the secretive drama of his intimate scenes.

And then a long line of modern masters followed

including Gauguin, Picasso.

The list carries on up until today.

Monotypes may seem timeless, but it's important to remember

that Castiglione invented and experimented with this technique

250 years before the next artists would pick it up.

I still find that incredible.

He really was ahead of his time.

So what went wrong?

Why wasn't Castiglione's talent and legacy remembered and recognised?

The new recasting of Castiglione's character

often comes from legal battles and witness statements.

He's constantly in and out of court, moving around Italy or on the run.

By the end of Castiglione's life

even his own lawyer had turned on him,

bringing 78 counts against him.

Various misdemeanours he's been accused of,

including throwing his sister off a roof.

And each time he asks, "Is this a man that can be trusted?"

"Si possa chiamare l'uomo da bene?"

By the time he died in 1664 in Mantua,

Castiglione's violent personality and constant court battles

had denied him official patronage

and obscured his artistic brilliance.

It would be a long journey

for his works to get to where they are today.

As an art historian, I'm always really interested

in how things literally got to where they are now.

So this group of Castiglione's work

probably ended up in the collection of the Dukes of Mantua,

from here they were bought by the great Italian connoisseur collector, Sagredo,

and then in turn by the great British collector, Joseph Smith,

who was consul in Venice in the mid-18th century

and also happened to be Canaletto's art agent.

In 1762, King George III

bought Joseph Smith's huge personal art collection

to decorate his new home, Buckingham House.

The Castiglione prints were buried in albums

and catalogued as being of "no value".

But finally his works were dug out

and catalogued by a fellow rogue, the Soviet spy Anthony Blunt,

who was Surveyor of the King's Pictures from the 1940s.

And now that his story has been uncovered,

perhaps the reputation of this lost genius will be restored.

So here I am back in the exhibition.

And it's wonderful to see the best collection of Castiglione's works

on paper anywhere in the world

hung altogether in the Queen's Gallery at Buckingham Palace.

He's finally getting the recognition he deserves

as a master of the Italian Baroque and as the inventor of the monotype.

I always think you can get so much

out of simply looking at works on paper.

And with all we now know about Castiglione's fiery character,

it's all the more gratifying to see them

hanging here in these elegant galleries,

his talent, his trailblazing techniques,

his tormented temperament all rolled into one.

I don't think that this genius will be lost for much longer.

And there is something rather satisfying about this rogue

having made it back to the heart of the establishment in his own way.

He certainly thought he was a genius and I think I'd agree with him.

A devilish and unconventional one maybe,

but that just makes me love him all the more.

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