Monsù Desiderio
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Monsù Desiderio and Desiderio Monsù are emergency names for two painters from Metz who worked in Rome and Naples in the first half of the 17th century and were actually called François de Nomé and Didier Barra .
Life dates and alienation of names
According to the scarce sources, it can be assumed that François de Nomé was born in 1593 or 1594. According to his self-assessment on the occasion of his marriage in Naples in 1613, he had left Metz as a child, had come to Rome around 1602 and was raised there by a painter (probably Balthasar Lauwers, a student of Paul Brill). From 1610 he lived in Naples. The only other life documents that have been found so far are purchase contracts for paintings that span the years 1614 to 1627. The year of his death is unknown.
Didier Barra was probably born in Metz in 1589. He worked in Naples from 1619. The year of his death is also unknown. Sales contracts found for his paintings cover the years 1619 to 1656.
Like their contemporary Georges de la Tour (* 1593; † 1652) de Nomé and Barra soon fell into oblivion. The name Monsù Desiderio first appeared in 1742 in a work by the biographer Bernardo De Dominici, where Monsù was an Italian variant of Monsieur and Desiderio was probably derived from Didier because Barra used the name Desiderius to sign. Whether François de Nomé and Didier Barra worked together and shared a studio is an art-historical guess. The view that de Nomé and Barra had already sold paintings under a company sign under the pseudonym Monsù Desiderio during their lifetime is in any case doubtful, because the name Francesco di Nome was discovered on some paintings and Didier Barra on others and because of the sales contracts each contain the individual names. Contemporary documents mentioning the collaboration between the two painters have not yet been found.
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The paintings known today can be divided into five groups:
- Pictures that François de Nomé and Didier Barra created together based on art-historical assumptions
- Pictures that François de Nomé made in collaboration with other painters
- Pictures that François de Nomé painted alone
- Pictures that Didier Barra made in collaboration with other painters
- Pictures that Didier Barra painted alone.
The themes of the main work are predominantly nocturnal scenes, dream landscapes, enigmatic hallucinatory ruins with fantastic architecture and many larger-than-life sculptures, as well as high church interiors and collapsing or burning buildings. The main actors in Monsù Desiderio's paintings are the architecture and the gestural, moving sculptures in the spirit of the Baroque; people are small, insignificant, inconspicuous. Sometimes mythological content is hinted at or recognizable: Daniel in the lions' den, Jonas in the port of Nineveh, the conversion of Paul, the fire of Troy or the flight of Aeneas, for example. The nocturnal scenes presumably come mainly from François de Nomé, which parts Didier Barra contributed has not been clarified. The hypothesis of a collaboration between the two painters comes from the Belgian psychiatrist Félix Sluys. Because of the overabundance of the sculptures and the frequent repetition of motifs - for example an ox keeps appearing - Sluys also hypothesized that the painter of the sculptures must have been schizophrenic. In terms of painting technique, it is definitely noticeable that the sculptures are often sketchy with fleeting, nervous brushstrokes. The view that the image content was a direct expression of the artist's obsessions was later contradicted. In the catalog of the exhibition “The Magic of Medusa - European Mannerisms”, the view is taken that de Nomé deliberately varied subjects popular with his buyers in a virtuoso manner. So far, no art-historical research has been carried out on which models Monsù Desiderio actually used. The fantastic architecture was probably influenced by the ancient ruins of Rome, which de Nomé knew from his stay in Rome and which were the subject of Mannerist art as early as the 16th century. The church interiors and squares are reminiscent of paintings by Hans and Paul Vredeman de Vries, but also of Paris Bordone. Cities burning at night can already be found in Albrecht Altdorfer (Lot and his daughters, 1537) and Battista Dossi (The Night, around 1540), collapsing columns are the invention of Giulio Romano (Giant Fall, 1535).
A second, smaller group of works includes vedutas with port scenes from Naples and Venice. The paintings with gray day skies are attributed to Barra, the versions with dramatic night skies de Nomé.
Rediscovery and aftermath
Like Georges de la Tour, the forgotten Nomé and Barra were not rediscovered until the 20th century. Gustav René Hocke played a key role in the rediscovery . In his groundbreaking book on Mannerism, Die Welt als Labyrinth , published in 1957, he wrote “Perhaps the most significant discovery of recent years ... the most enigmatic painter in Europe between 1600 and 1650 is Desiderio Monsù ...” In his appreciation, he saw Desiderio Monsù on the one hand as a mannerist painter, on the other as a forerunner of surrealism , a view shared by André Breton. In fact, a direct line seems to lead from the nightmarish landscapes of Monsù Desiderios to the empty squares of Giorgio de Chirico, the petrified landscapes of Max Ernst and the empty backdrops by Fabrizio Clerici. In terms of painting, there are also similarities with Max Ernst's grattage technique. In several of Monsù Desiderio's paintings, columns and parts of the building were created by working with a burin: by scraping off a second dark layer of paint over a lighter background.
Despite the great public interest in Surrealism and its precursors, Monsù Desiderio is still largely unknown today. Perhaps this is also because the paintings are either in private collections or in smaller museums. He is almost not represented with major works in the major Western European museums.
Selection of works
In public collections:
- Daniel in the Lions Den, Metz Museum
- The fire of Troy with the flight of Aeneas, Stockholm Art Museum
- Saint George kills the dragon, Harrach Rohrau Gallery, Austria
- The Conversion of Paul, Copenhagen Art Museum
- Hell, 1622, Museum Besançon (a major work, created after a style-critical comparison in collaboration with Jacob van Swanenburgh)
- The Legend of Saint Augustine, National Gallery London
- Exploding Church, Fitzwilliam Museum Cambridge
- Inside of a church, Budapest Art Museum
- Jonas in the port of Nineveh, Hermitage Saint Petersburg
In private collections:
- Apollo and the four-leaf clover moon, private collection, location unknown (exemplarily discussed by Hocke as a dream landscape in the surrealist sense)
- Fire in a church ruin, private collection, Basel
- The Tower of Babel, private collection, Rome
- Fantastic architecture with falling columns, private collection France (perhaps Monsù Desiderio's most impressive architectural fantasy)
- Flight of Aeneas, private collection, Rome
- Inside of a church, private collection, France
- Jonas and the Whale, private collection Florence
- Martyrdom of a saint, private collection, Switzerland
- Scene from the life of St. Januarius, private collection, Basel
- Composite church, private collection, location unknown.
literature
- Jacques Bousquet: Painting of Mannerism , Bruckmann, Munich 1963
- André Breton , G. Legrand: Art magique , Club français du livre, Paris 1957
- Gustav René Hocke: The world as a labyrinth , Rowohlt, Hamburg 1957
- Werner Hofmann : Magic of Medusa - European mannerisms , Löcker Verlag, Vienna 1987
- Jörg Krichbaum , Rein Zondergeld : DuMont's small lexicon of fantastic painting , Cologne 1977
- Michel Onfray : Métaphysique des ruines: La Peinture de Monsù Desiderio , Mollat 1995
- Juan Antonio Ramirez: Urban Evanescence: from Monsù Desiderio to the Twin Towers (Where we are coming from) , www.barcelonametropolis.cat/en/page.asp?id=21&ui=8 2008
- Monique Sary, Maria Rosaria Nappi: Enigma Monsù Desiderio: Un fantastique architectural au XVIIe siècle , éditions Serpenoise, Metz 2004
- Pierre Seghers: Monsù Desiderio ou le Théâtre de la fin du monde , Robert Laffont 1981
- Félix Sluys: Didier Barra et François de Nome dits Monsù Desiderio , édition du Minotaure, Paris 1961
- Martin Stritt: The beautiful Helena in the Rome ruins , Stroemfeld / Roter Stern, Frankfurt 2004
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Monique Sary, Maria Rosaria Nappi: Enigma Monsù Desiderio: Un fantastique architectural au XVIIe siècle, éditions Serpenoise, Metz 2004
- ↑ Jörg Krichbaum , Rein A. Zondergeld : DuMont's small lexicon of fantastic painting, Cologne 1977
- ^ Félix Sluys, Didier Barra et François de Nome dits Monsù Desiderio, édition du Minotaure, Paris 1961
- ↑ Werner Hofmann: Magic of Medusa Medusa - European mannerisms, Löcker Verlag, Vienna 1987
- ^ Jacques Bousquet: Painting of Mannerism, Bruckmann, Munich 1963
- ^ Hans Vredeman de Vries and the Renaissance in the North, Hirmer, Munich 2002
- ^ Gustav René Hocke: The world as a labyrinth, Rowohlt, Hamburg 1957
- ^ André Breton, G. Legrand: Art magique, Club français du livre, Paris 1957