BWW Reviews: Close Quarters with Renaissance Portraiture in MEN IN ARMOR: EL GRECO AND PULZONE

What is the smallest number of paintings that can yield a striking exhibition? A hundred? Fifty? Twenty, provided they're all ten feet long? At the Frick Collection, which has brought forth one entrancing display after another in the recent past, the numbers have barely broken double digits. Yet it is hard to deny the cumulative grandeur of offerings such as Masterpieces of Dutch Painting from the Mauritshuis (about a dozen paintings), The Poetry of Parmigianino's Schiava Turca (about four), and now Men in Armor: El Greco and Pulzone Face to Face (two, and only two). As organized by Frick Curatorial Fellow Jeongho Park, the last of these is set up like a standard compare-and-contrast, but quickly leaves behind the realm of mere exercise and enters a world of evocation.

Here, the men in armor are Vincenzo Anastagi, a 16th-century fortifications expert and middle-ranking nobleman from Malta, and Jacopo Boncompagni, a son of Pope Gregory XIII. Boncompagni's likeness was painted by Scipione Pulzone in 1574, and painted with an attention to detail that is both fascinating and overbearing; every filament of Boncompagni's lacy cuffs is perfectly articulated, every gleam of light on the tiny figures on his minutely ornamented armor perfectly rendered. El Greco's rendering of Anastagi was completed one year later and was quite possibly influenced by the Pulzone. The two paintings, however, could not be more different. While Boncampagni seems to be lounging at ease and looks pale, dandyish even, Anastagi appears standing upright, decked out in gleaming, battle-ready armor. There is none of the ornamentation that Pulzone reveled in: the backdrop is as simple as possible, and the wobbly contours and contrasted colors give the entire composition a blunt energy.

The temptation to read the warped, brooding El Greco of View of Toledo and The Opening of the Fifth Seal into this earlier commission is probably too great to be resisted: to what extent are the feathery reflections and the slightly askew perspective of the 1575 painting signs of things to come? This may not be a wholly futile exercise, but it isn't the best way of looking at a painting that operates on very different terms. As Park notes, El Greco may well have been using the Anastagi portrait to gain the attention of patrons of the arts, including Gregory XIII and the papal offspring. (As for the sitter himself, Anastagi "does not appear to have been particularly interested in paintings and therefore would have been unlikely to commission future works.") This isn't quite El Greco the ecstatic visionary; this is El Greco the profit-seeker, and that isn't a bad thing. After all, without a little of the mercenary in him, he would never have been the man to comprehend and capture a subject as no-nonsense, as of-this-world as Anastagi.

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