REVIEWS
 

MASTER OF DECEPTION
Andrea Pozzo
Palazzo Poli, Rome

5 March – 2 May 2010
http://www.undo.net/it/mostra/99383

REVIEWED BY: David Mayernik April 2010

ndrea Pozzo—or Padre Pozzo, since he was a member of the Company of Jesus (the Jesuits)—is often hailed as the apotheosis of Baroque illusionism, his own work a kind of triumphant coda to the triumphalist spirit of the Counter Reformation not unlike the celestial triumphs he painted in fresco. A wonderful, albeit compact, show of his work and the culture surrounding it is now on at the Palazzo Poli (backstage, as it were, of the Trevi Fountain). The show consists of drawings and oil sketches by Pozzo, a model of the altar of S. Luigi Gonzaga in S. Ignazio, prints and some their original copper plates, architectural drawings by others, and some reconstructions of mechanical devices for drawing perspectives, anamorphics, etc.

What hasn’t been said already about the padre’s mastery of perspective, not to mention the human figure, and his easy sliding between painting, architecture, and scenography? Let me say this, then: what enabled an Andrea Pozzo to happen were two things, 1. an ongoing culture of figurative art that was focused on rigorous depictions of the world (idealized and otherwise), whose skills were measurable and cumulative, and 2. a culture of appreciation that valued the spectacular, the adventurous, the wonder-full. The good father seems to have been a rather modest man, devout, and generous of spirit; but he was graced with that sense of adventure, that sense of mastery and wonder at his craft that led him out to the edge of his abilities. Everything he did seems to have been an exercise in pushing the envelope of what perspective and painting could do, or what he could do with it; he invented no new principles or theories, he “simply” reveled in the possibilities; in other words, he didn’t invent the Formula 1 car, he just drove it as fast as it could go.

Dizzyingly fast, it seems. And he did it because his audience—the Jesuits, but European culture generally—wanted him to. Not to sour his joy with a lament, but what we lack today is precisely those two things with which he was blessed: a living culture of figurative art that builds on the achievements of previous generations, and a sense of adventure and joy in the deployment of that culture to its limits. Our greatest challenge today as artists is rebuilding that culture of achievement, but also deploying it wherever possible in ways that are adventurous and ambitious, to prove it’s possible even if no one seems to want it. That will come later, we can only hope; but it doesn’t absolve us from trying.

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