In the first moment of the delightful, engrossing exhibition Drawing in Colour at Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford, stone becomes water: the sculpted figure of a gaunt, balding monk is rendered in fluent, warm yellow, grey and brown watercolour and black chalk. Wide-eyed, with arched eyebrows, furrowed forehead and an unnervingly candid, direct gaze, the aged, charismatic prelate welcomes you into this glowing winter show as a medieval preacher might have mesmerised a crowd.
The monk is thought to be either Bernardino of Siena, who persuaded his listeners to throw their mirrors and jewels on his bonfires of the vanities, or John of Capistrano, who aged 70 travelled to Hungary to crusade against Ottoman invaders. The 15th-century Tuscan artist is unknown, and one of the charms of this small, choice exhibition is that it pulls out some less familiar drawings in Christ Church’s stellar collection, alongside celebrated names. The theme — how and why Renaissance and Baroque artists began to use pigments in their sketches and designs — is an excuse to display both decorative beauty and original experimentation.
Every image is vivid, vital, from emphatic single figures such as the blue gargoyle-like “Bust of a young man in a fantastic helmet”, a 16th-century Florentine masque design, to Jacob Jordaens’ glorious multimedia urban scene “The anointing of a priest”, in coloured chalks, pen, watercolour and oil. Jordaens repeatedly added strips of paper as his vision of the group expanded: the devout and the uninterested, the powerful, the beseeching, the suspicious onlookers, children playing, a dog curled up — all human and animal life as encountered in 17th-century Antwerp.
Some of the most sumptuous pieces are precious as sole remnants of grand though unrealised monuments. Parmigianino’s fluid sketches from 1531 of figures and niches modelled through pen and brown wash, with vibrant green and yellow watercolour distinguishing different sections, are rapid jottings for the decoration of the vault in Parma’s Santa Maria della Steccata: elegant elongations, splendid though destabilising spatial incongruities. Unable to bring this complex scheme to a conclusion, the restless Parmigianino was jailed for breaking his contract.
Giovanni de’ Vecchi’s elaborate sketch “Christ in Glory” with six saints, for a Roman church, is more precisely orchestrated and was probably a presentation piece to a patron. Watercolour touches create light and shade, add volume to the figures and intensify the atmosphere, yellows and reds giving the impression of the sun setting behind the clouds. It is as if we see a painting in full colour called into being in the artist’s mind.
Drawings, in any age, fascinate because they reveal an artist’s first thoughts, fresh and immediate. This show catches an instant in the mid-16th century when artists, in Italy especially, were consciously exploring possibilities of colour on paper, and unfolds how their innovations developed.
The earliest surviving pastel studies, by Federico Barocci, date from the mid- to late-16th century: soft, iridescent depictions, sensuous yet ethereal, where colour allows a range of tones and textures. Oxford has two of his very fine heads of children, one a realistic portrayal of the soft skin and feather-light wisps of hair of a baby looking up intently, the other, more angelic, a study for the cherubs in “Il Perdono di Assisi” at Urbino’s National Gallery of the Marche.
Barocci created scores of such meticulous preparatory sketches for his monumental altarpieces. His refinement, his balance of realism with grace and the harmonies of his colours ensured that already in his lifetime they were prized as art works in their own right.
Collectors also began seeking highly finished pastels — for example the delicate, expressive “Head of a Girl” (c1600), by an anonymous Sienese artist — and soon, oils on paper. By the time it arrived at Christ Church in 1765, Jacopo Bassano’s late-16th-century “Entombment of Christ”, a fully coloured, animated oil sketch on paper made in preparation for a church commission in Padua, had been laid down on canvas and heavily varnished, to pass for an independent painting.
The thick brushstrokes applied directly to paper in Domenico Tintoretto’s “The Martyrdom of St Stephen” (1594), a stunning oil sketch for an altarpiece at San Giorgio Maggiore, Venice, are so free that the sheet resembles a contemporary abstraction. We seem to watch Tintoretto thinking in form through colour. He used neither graphite nor any linear technique; only subsequently he squared the paper for enlargement, the grid scratched in with the butt of the brush in wet paint.
In the mid-17th century, Giovanni Castiglione, a turbulent Genoese artist whose violent life is known mostly from numerous documented court appearances (including for trying to throw his sister off a roof), pioneered the use of oil on paper to create complete and finished works. His writhing, agonised “Christ on the Cross”, surrounded by mourners collapsing in shock, painted in white, red and brown oil on red paper, red blood gashing from Christ’s rib cage, is a masterpiece of Baroque painterly draughtsmanship and conjuring atmosphere by colour.
There is marvellous variety here, of emotional tenor and of securely documented works coexisting with wild cards. In “Madonna del Soccorso” (“Madonna of the rescue”), Mary towers as a freedom fighter, wielding a club, liberating children from the clutches of a demon; other diabolical creatures are already being swallowed by the flames of hell, conveyed as a pink wash flooding the paper.
And an imitator of Leonardo has taken his suggestion for a fire-spitting dragon — “the head of a mastiff or a pointer, the eyes of a cat, the ears of a porcupine, the muzzle of a greyhound, the brow of a lion, the crest of an old rooster, and the neck of a tortoise” — in a fantastical arabesque pen drawing, then added a delicate moth in bright yellow-gold. By sheer chromatic brilliance, the little animal outshines the bigger one.
We don’t know why these particular anonymous artists made their inventive, strange sketches, other than to express the pleasures of imagination and virtuosity which are at the heart of this show.
Previous visitors to Christ Church will appreciate the chance to encounter fresh things. For newcomers, the show is a lovely introduction to the Picture Gallery and its eclectic holdings: Annibale Carracci’s “The Butcher Shop” with its flayed carcasses, which until the mid-20th century hung in the college kitchen; John Riley’s weather-beaten “A Scullion of Christ Church”, one of the earliest servant portraits; Filippino Lippi’s affecting “The Wounded Centaur”.
The Picture Gallery’s sleek building, a bizarre though winning combination of glass, concrete and Portland, opened in 1968 and now listed, stands half submerged beneath the Dean’s garden made famous by Lewis Carroll: a wonderland where Modernism meets Old Master intensity.
To January 22, chch.ox.ac.uk/picture-gallery