Endymion Porter

Transcription

I would like to talk about this painting, one of the most beautiful portraits in the Museum, which is saying a lot in a museum that has such a splendid collection of portraits. I’m referring to the portrait of Anthony van Dyck and Endymion Porter. It’s a friendship portrait and there are few portraits of this type in the Museum. This is a tradition that emerged in Italy in the sixteenth century, for example with Raphael, and in Venetian portraits where friends are depicted together in a single image and in which the painting is commissioned with the idea of manifesting this relationship between friends. In some cases these are individuals of the same social level while in others they are from different social classes, such as a tutor and anaristocrat, for example. In this case the painting itself explains the situation: they are two people of comparable but slightly different social status. Endymion Porter was a diplomat from an aristocratic family with a fairly important position at the court of Charles I of England. Van Dyck was a painter, again with quite an important position at the court of Charles I. He was around twelve years younger than Endymion Porter and a remarkably brilliant artist of truly extraordinary talent who was recognised from a young age for his outstanding natural talent. He was accepted when still very young by no less than Rubens to work with him, not as a pupil or servant but as a close collaborator. In 1620 Van Dyck went to England for the first time. He would return at a later date and also went to Italy, spending almost seven years there, in Genoa, in Rome and also in Sicily. He then returned to England in the 1630s and became the portraitist of the English aristocracy just prior to the civil war, and in fact we can see here above one of his English portraits, "The Countess of Oxford", as well as a beautiful portrait that he painted of his wife, Mary Ruthven. So, he was a history painter and a painter of religious subjects. You can see them around us, as at the Museum we have the privilege of housing an absolutely marvellous collection of works by Van Dyck. Here we see the two friends, next to each other as I said. We see Van Dyck, who locates himself slightly lower in the pictorial space. His head turns to our right while Endymion Porter, who should be seen as the figure of higher social status, is seen frontally and occupying a larger part of the space within the painting. He also plays with the contrasts: taller and shorter; younger and slightly older – if Van Dyck is around 34 or 35 here, Endymion Porter would be roughly 47 or 48 – the right side enclosed, the left side open; Endymion Porter dressed in white and Van Dyck in black… He creates a series of interplays of symmetry and contrast inside the painting. It’s an oval painting, a relatively unusual format for a portrait. The oval format is normally vertical and later, particularly in the eighteenth century with the rise of the Rococo, it would become much more common and widely used, so we see that Van Dyck again wanted to do something rather original, rather different, and this undoubtedly arose from a conversation between the painter and the art lover, doing something rather original and different. Van Dyck is dressed in black, which is essentially a sign of elegance and an elegance that was particularly associated with the Spanish court, so it may be that even here Van Dyck is giving out some signs about his relationship with Porter and his Spanish background. He raises his hand to move his cloak while also bringing it close to his heart. I think this is significant. Think about El Greco’s portrait of the "Gentleman with his Hand on his Breast", as raising the hand to the heart has to do with a relationship of affection or loyalty towards the other person. It seems as if this close relationship between the two is momentarily disturbed by our presence in front of the painting. There are other symbolic elements that should be pointed out: on the right, for example, and although perhaps not painted with the clarity that it should be, is not the rest of the curtain that we see in the centre of the painting but rather a column. The column has a relatively obvious meaning which is strength and solidity, which should be understood in relation to the stone. I don’t know if you’ve noticed that the two figures have their hands resting on a stone, which is rather interesting in iconographic terms. The stone, like the column, is thus a symbol of solidity and stability. So the fact that the two of them rest their hands on the rock should be understood in terms of the solidity of their relationship and their friendship. Van Dyck is wearing gloves. Gloves always make the person wearing them more elegant. Furthermore, if you look carefully, the glove is slightly longer than his fingers, so it seems even more refined than the hand itself, and Van Dyck’s hands are the most refined possible. Wearing black is also to be seen in Titian’s "Self-portrait" in the Museo del Prado, which belonged to Rubens, making it a painting that Van Dyck undoubtedly knew, and for all these seventeenth-century painters - Velázquez, Rubens, Van Dyck - Titian is always the model. Without any doubt, Van Dyck wanted to be seen as in some way related within a sort of genealogy that starts with Titian and continues through Rubens to himself and to Velázquez, obviously. This is a painting of truly extraordinary pictorial quality, as if he were putting everything into the painting. Including this area of landscape with the sky on the left; we seem to be seeing the sunset, so he even establishes the time of day in which the scene is taking place. Van Dyck was not particularly a landscape painter, there are elements of landscape in his works but he was essentially a history painter and a portraitist of sitters with marked personalities. In addition to being a diplomat, a linguist and a connoisseur of art, Endymion Porter was a bon vivant. Van Dyck’s paintings, particularly his English portraits, always have a melancholy note. This was in fact considered particularly appealing, an element that made the painting nobler and more attractive to the patron who commissioned it and the viewer looking at it. This painting dates from the final part of his career although we don’t have an exact date: probably around 1632 or 1634. Experts are not entirely in agreement, but this last phase of his activity seems to relate to the fact that he had decided to move to a Protestant country where there was no interest in commissioning religious works of art and so he focused entirely or almost entirely on portraiture. He had a remarkable facility for portraiture, for capturing his sitters’ appearances and also for conveying something of their inner psychology, but he also was also enormously skilled at depicting expressions and gestures as well as dress and clothing, the textures of the silks: an artist of truly extraordinary talent.