Fit for a King
The magnificence Charles I brought to puritanical Britain
Acloset-catholic autocrat who alienated parliament, plunging Britain into civil war and precipitating his own trial and subsequent beheading, Charles I was a king who got just about everything wrong – except art collecting.
Reuniting around 140 key works – about a tenth of the total – from a collection that is widely regarded as one of the greatest ever assembled, this major exhibition is out to show how Charles imported European ideas of princely magnificence to a puritanical, provincial Britain that had in many ways barely been touched by the Italian Renaissance.
The point hardly needs labouring, because the art itself is so patently magnificent, with works by Titian, Dürer, Holbein, Veronese and Rembrandt, starting with portraits of the people who helped Charles create his collection.
The Flemish painters Rubens and Van Dyck, for instance, both of whom spent time here working for Charles and were knighted for their efforts, are represented by superb self-portraits, while Charles’s characteristic expression of weary hauteur is showcased in Van Dyck’s iconic triple portrait – a work that is almost eclipsed by the same artist’s hypersensitive image of Charles’s “art adviser” Thomas, Duke of Arundel.
Having developed a taste for opulent European painting during a sojourn at the Spanish court in his early twenties, Charles filled his palaces with large canvases full of Catholic imagery, classical symbolism and acres of female flesh – a taste manifest here in Veronese’s sumptuous Mars, Venus and Cupid, with its goddess modelled on a 16th-century Venetian courtesan, and Rubens’s tumultuous Peace and War.
Hooked on Renaissance painting, Charles snapped up one of the greatest collections of such art from the Gonzagas of Mantua, who sold every one of their 2,000 paintings and 20,000 other art objects between 1627 and 1630, when they were short of cash. Its crowning glory, the 15th-century painter Andrea Mantegna’s The Triumphs of Caesar, fills the largest of the RA’S galleries, the triumphal procession of figures, banners and trumpets brilliantly deployed over nine monumental canvases.
Certainly, there are wonderful treasures everywhere you look in the exhibition: an array of austere but marvellously penetrating portraits by Holbein and Dürer; Tintoretto’s explosive, visionary Esther before Ahasuerus; a trio of monumental, and very odd, Old Testament scenes by Orazio Gentileschi – and that’s to name just a tiny handful of highlights.
Yet the show gives the impression of offering both an embarrassment of riches and slightly too many makeweight paintings. Of the four Titians, only the mesmerising Supper at Emmaus is a real stunner. Virgin and Child with Saints by the minor painter Dosso Dossi feels like a poor stand-in for the work it superficially resembles, Raphael’s La Perla from the Prado, the painting that fetched the highest price when Charles’s collection was sold off by the Parliamentarians in 1649.
And, though representing Raphael’s cartoons (full scale drawings) for the Vatican tapestries with a collection of later English tapestries from these designs is a good idea in principle, the fact that the actual cartoons can be viewed free at the V&A means most visitors won’t linger long in this room.
It’s with an array of spectacular portraits of Charles and his family by Van Dyck that the exhibition really takes off. Charles, wearing always the same expression of slightly dazed bemusement is seen in satin-clad magnificence with his wife and children against a view of the Thames or striding out in red breeches in the famous Charles I in the Hunting Field, on loan from the Louvre.
Indeed, this really is Van Dyck’s exhibition almost as much as it is Charles’s. The Flemish artist succeeded in fusing the great painterly tradition of Titian and Rubens into a sumptuously atmospheric mise-enscène that guaranteed his patron immortality as an icon of preening hauteur, if not as a great king.
From Jan 27 until April 15; 020 7300 8090; royalacademy.org.uk
‘Certainly there are wonderful treasures everywhere you look in the exhibition’