GALLERIES
Leigh Hatts
the Harari and Johns moved to Duke Street Fortnum and Mason four years ago Philip Harari and Derek Johns bought copies of 17th-century Italian Cardinal's chairs which now look at home at part of the gallery's first major exhibition.
The School of Bologna 1570-1730: Calvaert to Crespi (daily except weekends until May 15: admission free) runs concurrently with The Age of Correggio and the Carracci exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
The London gallery became interested in this school of painting when Derek Jolms discovered and sold Annibale Carracci's "Boy Drinking" which is now part of the New York exhibition.
The once well known Bolognese painters ceased to be mentioned after John Ruskin, worried by their counter Reformation message, questioned their prestige. This has not however prevented the notorious Bob Jones University of South Carolina (where. graduates include Ian Paisley) from acquiring Guido Reni's "Four Evangelists" as well as Francesco Cavazzoni's "St Helen and the True Cross".
WHEN Gallery behind
The last 40 years has seen a renewed interest on both sides of the Atlantic in the Bolognese taste but no London gallery has focused on the Bolognese School for almost 15 years.
Bologna had no court, unlike Rome, Florence and Venice. But it is the oldest university city in Europe and at the end of the 16th-century it was also the centre of the Reform Movement which embraced Archbishop Gabriels Pakotti of Bologna's desire to explain the doctrines of faith.
He favoured a new naturalism in art and the greatest local exponents were three obscure artists — butcher's son Lodovico Carracci and his cousins Agostino and Annibale.
The first picture at the London show is by Carracci's first master, Prospero Fontana, who was a favourite of the reforming archbishop. Fontana's Holy Family with Saints Jerome, Catherine and John the Baptist (lent by the Bowes Museum) shows traces of the Mannerist ideal that was to give way to the naturalistic modelling of the Carracci.
The introspective mood of Lodovico's St Mary Magdalen in Meditation is characteristic of the type of devotional image created by the artist to confront the viewer and inspire religious devotion.
Abraham and Isaac is attributed to Agostino Carracci but it may be the work of all three Carracci. Annibale once replied "all three of us" when accepting responsibility for a fresco. Here there are similarities to Annibale's half length compositions and the figure of Abraham resembles Agostino's Si Jerome. Indeed the subject of this painting was once thought to be St Jerome and The Angel.
The Angel Appearing to St Francis, once attributed to the Carracci, is by Guido Reni, who with other young artists spread the reforms beyond Bologna. An example of Reni's highly personal style is the Penitent Magdalen which is exhibited for the first time having been discovered only three years ago in High Barnet at the home of Julian Byng, a descendant of the
ill-fated Admiral Byng. Admirers of Reni's many versions of this subject included a Cardinal Legate who was widely held to be behind the theft of one.
Also exhibited for the first time is The Holy Family with the Infant St John by another Carracci follower, Domenichino, who worked with Annibale in Rome under the' patronage of Cardinal Girolamo, Agucchi in 1601.
In this painting a child angel holds back a curtain revealing the Holy Family and visitors can themselves raise a nearby curtain to study a precious and recently identified preliminary sketch for the positioning of the Virgin's hand.
At the Victoria and Albert Museum there is a feminist version of the Madonna and Child by Helen Chadwick who has used a photocopier. Her One Flesh is part of Towards A Bigger Picture, an exhibition of British photographs (daily except Fridays until July 21 admission free).
Although this large scale photo related new technology is an accessible form of reproduction it is still being discovered as a medium.