Splitting The Art

As I read an article by Tim Brinkhof written earlier this year about reuniting paintings with their lost parts, I started to think more about “The Strange Life of Objects,” as Maurice Rheims, French auctioneer, art historian, and novelist, called his book.

Medieval manuscripts have had their pages torn out of their bindings for centuries, but starting in the 19th century, and more so in the 20th, the illuminations were cut out to sell them separately. One such example is a large, illuminated prayer book by Jean Bourdichon from 1498 of the “Hours of Louis XII”. Sometime after 1700, it was in England that it was split up. Parts are today in the British Library, the V&A in London, the Free Library in Philadelphia, and the Louvre. In 2003, the Getty acquired 3 more pages, and 20 years later, the missing half of one of those pages is illustrated here.

Diptychs and triptychs were painted on separate panels, so they were easily separated and dispersed. One way or the other, these panels arrive in different places, but they are occasionally lent to a museum that holds the central panel for a special exhibition. The central panel of “The Entombment,” recently discovered and identified as by the Dutch artist Marten van Heemskerck (1498-1574), was acquired by the Worcester Art Museum and exhibited with its side panels on loan from the Selldorff family’s private collection. 

In an article by Richard Whiddington, we learn about Giorgio Vasari’s commission in 1541-42 of 9 panels for the ceiling coffers of the Palazzo Corner-Spinelli in Venice, where they remained for 200 years. Then, starting in the 18th century, it began to be broken up. Most of the panels had been sold by the middle of the 19th Century, ending up in various European collections. Starting in 1980, Venice made a concerted effort to reassemble all the panels, and after more than 40 years, including search and restoration, they are now installed in a reconstructed ceiling in Venice’s Gallerie dell’Accademia with two spaces left for the still missing elements.

And one more…After the death of Edouard Manet, one of his four versions of “The Execution of Maximilian" was cut into pieces and dispersed by his family. Degas, a friend of Manet's, was incensed at this desecration of the work and went about acquiring as many fragments as he could locate and rejoined them. In 1917, the National Gallery in London acquired the painting and took it apart again, showing the pieces individually for 80 years before stitching them together once more, still missing the parts that Degas had not been able to find.

To end with another book title, Thomas P.F. Hoving’s “The Chase, the Capture, Collecting at the Metropolitan”, Museum that is. Published in 1975, it detailed how the museum curators and the director pursued works for the collection. That is a whole different subject, but I was reminded of it by the exciting and continuous efforts to reunite what has been violated in the past and is part of the strange life of objects.