ROBERTA SMITH
ART REVIEW


The very title “Art and Love in Renaissance Italy”is alluring. It promises romance, desire, youthful beauty, ritual, expensive gift items and possible sex in the land of Romeo and Juliet. It delivers on all counts.

But the exhibition, at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, is not an unbroken string of masterpieces. It has its ups and downs, both visual and emotional. The more than 160 works range across ceramic and glass vessels, jewelry, textiles and books as well as prints, drawings, paintings and sculptures. Most were created as public celebrations of engagements, weddings and childbirth; others served more private purposes.

Some objects seem pedestrian. Some paintings verge on folk art. But if a perfect harmony of impeccable artistry and that less quantifiable thing called love is not always achieved - well, welcome to reality.

One of the highlights of the exhibition is the Met’s great painting of a bridal couple, made by Fra Filippo Lippi in the early 1440s. The young man and woman are in stark profile. The bride, shown in left profile and lavishly robed, bejeweled and coiffed, occupies her small interior like a big, expensive doll in its box. The profile of the young man intrudes from a window on the left.

Yet the catalog notes that their eyes don’t meet, but more than that, the figures barely face each other. Their misalignment contributes to her objectification: she is not really seen. You hope for the best but suspect mismatched expectations.

In the status-conscious, highly regulated and self-aware hothouse of Renaissance Italy, few occasions mattered more than weddings. Both exhibition and catalog brim with facts gleaned from contemporary records: private journals and letters; inventories of dowries; descriptions of days on end of feasts, festivities and public processions; details of who wore what and how much it cost.

Childbirth, a perilous venture in these centuries, was also a cause for celebration and artistic commissions, with the most costly being childbirth trays about 60 centimeters in diameter and painted on both sides.

There is a section devoted to increasingly erotic erotica. The standout is a print by a 17th-century French artist called Monogrammist CLF that is Salvador Dali before the fact. It centers on a busy parade in which a large cannonlike phallus is being pulled toward a distinctly female tree. One can imagine it speaking for the feelings of many Renaissance brides, who tended not to be much older than 15, on their wedding nights.

These works underscore the erotic impulses implicit in the paintings of idealized women found in the show’s final gallery. Here you’ll see the show’s two bestknown masterpieces, both by Titian: the “Venus” from the Prado, where the organist’s dream of love is reiterated by the upright pipes of his instrument and the steep symmetrical plunge of the treelined park behind the couple; and, beside it, the more circumspect “Venus Blindfolding Cupid,” from the Villa Borghese in Rome. Also here is Lotto’s subtly kinky “Venus and Cupid” from the Met.

These three paintings alone merit a visit to the show. But it’s hard to appreciate them fully after all this revelatory exhibition has shown being visited upon women and their bodies. They may strike you, in a purely emotional sense, as overkill.