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The man I knew only as a pilgrim has abandoned his pilgrimage. His portraitist, Rosalba Carriera, could have seen it coming—but not his place with Nicolas Party at the Frick Madison, through March 3. I also work this together with an earlier report on the wealth of “Tudor England” at the Met as a longer review and my latest upload.

Carriera entered the Frick Collection just this past year, with the Gregory gift, and her Man in Pilgrim’s Costume leaves a dark gray spot on the wall. Its companion, a female portrait, remains behind through the midsummer end of the gift’s display. So, too, does their shared spirit of Rococo excess. He might have claimed his luxurious surroundings, amid the decorative arts, as his own. He could also have scorned them, with pleasure, as impious and inferior—or was that just a pose? Scholars speculate that his costume merely alludes to his family name.

Perhaps, but art has a long tradition of titled wealth putting on airs of piety and humility. How better for the Tudor court in England to show its place among kings? How better for Pietro Aretino at the Frick, the author of lives of saints along with satires, to display his dignity. knighthood, and erudition, in a portrait by Titian. As I wrote about the gift, the man wields his pilgrim’s staff like a weapon. His identity remains unknown, but then Carriera could not pull off psychology or particulars. No wonder she appealed to collectors of ceramics, gilding, and privilege.

Is the pretend pilgrim also just plain silly? Party embraces silliness. His is the second pairing of historic work from the collection with contemporary art. The series began after the move to the former Whitney Museum and Met Breuer on Madison Avenue while the Frick mansion is closed for renovation. Dubious about the shift in great museums like the Met, the Morgan Library, and now the Frick to indulge in contemporary art? Party could well be satirizing it. He can also do a pretty good imitation of the old masters, give or take bright purple.

Carriera gives pastels the richness of portraits in oil, and Party does her one better. Born in Switzerland in 1980, he uses an alcove in a room for Renaissance portraits to give her portrait both its forebears and a place to itself. It hangs between facing waist-up portraits in the same high style. One has white hair, in accord with eighteenth-century fashion but as bushy as an afro. The other has black hair but flecked with white, to match the white spots of its outrageous clothing. The one with white hair is young and white, the one with black hair, sure enough, a bright purple.

They also have red lips and uncertain gender, like so much art today. (Your guess is as good as mine.) Their fancy dress approaches the decorative arts after all, but not nearly as much as the walls behind them. Party’s pastels extend to them. They blow up Carriera’s fluid touch to wallpaper. They also carry her realism to the illusion of fabric.

The wall behind her painting pictures folds upon folds of fabric, leaving the underlying folds and fringes in shadow. The one behind the purple person billows out, while the one behind the white person blurs away. Oh, and the latter wears a purple shirt and red tie to match its companion’s purple face and red-flecked top. Does all this pretence and patterning upstage a mere pilgrim? Maybe he would have said that he deserves the company. Or maybe he would have said that it shows his superiority and his piety.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

To pick up from last time on “Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini” at Frick Madison, the paintings faced each other, as curated by Xavier F. Salomon, as if the wall across from Bellini’s had been waiting all along for a companion. Marcantonio Michiel saw them both at the house of Taddeo Contarini as well.

It is his account that gave Giorgione’s its attribution and its name—and there the mystery begins. Attributions to this artist have long been all over the map, and not all historians accept this one. My old textbook does not so much as mention it. If I accept it, it is in no small part because a mere imitator would have smoothed over its enigmas.

Michiel notes that it took Sebastiano of Venice, known today as Sebastiano del Piombo, to finish it, which only adds to the puzzle. One would never know that Sebastiano came to specialize not in landscape but in portraits, with monumental poses, fleshy faces, and fine clothing. Then, too, why did the painting need him? Giorgione spent a good two years on it, and he quit as much as a year before his untimely death in his thirties. He may have seen death coming and found a need for philosophy. But then he was among the more philosophical of painters all along.

One might not know it from his reputed life as something of a libertine, but he was never fully of this world. His Madonna has a throne so block-like and so high that no human could ascend it. That sleeping Venus in an unlikely landscape seems not just dreaming but a dream. Perhaps his best-known painting, The Tempest, has three figures in a landscape, a nursing mother and a soldier, as unexplained as the one now in New York. What, though, of the philosophers? They, too, could be dreamers or the dream.

Surely we can trust Michiel that they are indeed philosophers. He could have heard it from Contarini, who would have known from his own commission or the artist himself—unless, of course, he bought the painting from a third party. But then Michiel also gave Bellini’s painting a title that the Frick still uses, which is preposterous. Francis faces not a desert but Italian sunlight and fertile land. Still, the three men look philosophical enough or at least sufficiently detached. But whose philosophy?

For a while observers identified them with the three Magi on their way to the Holy Family, a misplaced piety that Giorgione never knew. These men are not bearing gifts like the Magi—apart, perhaps, from a geometry lesson. The young geometer could be Pythagoras, and his body does fit neatly within a right triangle. (Remember the Pythagorean theorem?) But then Pythagoras is usually shown older, and if the other two men are his teachers, they ignore him entirely, not to mention one another. Besides, while the one at right has the full beard, robe, and dour expression of a proper Greek, the one at the center wears a turban.

They could be the proverbial three ages of man, or they could be philosophers from three traditions—the natural sciences, the East, and the ancients. The cave, if it is one, could be Plato’s cave or the darkness that Renaissance science was beginning to dispel. For now, though, philosophy can explain only so much. It leaves open the enigma of nature and culture, as does painting in oil. You will just have to consult the landscape and the three philosophers for yourself. Unlike Francis, they will not be with New Yorkers for long.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.

Not even bright sunlight can dispel the mystery of Saint Francis in the Desert at the Frick. How could it? The painting’s glorious sunlight is its greatest miracle.

It infuses the landscape, as painting before Giovanni Bellini never could. If Francis here is receiving the stigmata, or wounds of the crucified Christ, as the story goes, light may also be the bearer of that miracle. Not just scholars will be arguing over it for a long time to come. As it is, no one can agree on what Bellini depicts or even the time of day. The saint, in legend, wrote songs while renouncing worldly goods for a life in nature, and his open mouth may express ecstasy, wonder, or the moment before singing. No other work at the Frick Madison has had its own room.

For now, though, he has a still more mysterious companion in paint, on loan from the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna. A visitor to a villa in Venice in 1525 described it as Three Philosophers, but was he right, and which three? Whatever are they doing together, out of doors and far from home? What did Giorgione, its likely painter, owe to philosophy, and what was his contribution to the painting of sunlight, shadow, and landscape in oil? Did he in fact paint this one? Scholars have been looking for answers ever since, but you will just have to find your own in “Bellini and Giorgione in the House of Taddeo Contarini,” through February 4.

Giovanni Bellini completed his Saint Francis before 1480, with clean lines and clear skies that mark him as a painter of the early Renaissance. Giorgione painted Three Philosophers thirty years later, in 1509. That, the richness of his colors, and the fullness of his forms place him in the High Renaissance in Venice. Titian, its greatest figure, entered his workshop and completed at least one of his surviving works, a Sleeping Venus. Bellini was part of the city’s leading family of painters, along with his father, Jacopo Bellini, his brother Gentile, and his cousin, Andrea Mantegna. Giorgione was a stranger to Venice when he arrived from a small town to make his career.

Still, they seem made for each other. They may belong on paper to different eras, but they share that special moment when oil paint was transforming art, by allowing that richness and fullness. Jacopo himself may have introduced it to Venice, decades after Jan van Eyck and Robert Campin made it the medium of the North Renaissance. One can see it in Saint Francis in a tree, where the colors run into one another and the oil still seems wet. One can see it that much more in the warmth of Three Philosophers. One can see it in everything from the loose brushwork of a philosopher’s short beard, to leaves emerging from darkness seemingly as one looks, to the translucency of a church or villa in the middle distance, to the blue of distant mountains.

The two paintings seem made for each other as well. Both depict figures in a landscape—not so much to contemplate nature as to take part in it. Nature, in turn, responds to them. That tree from Bellini leans toward Francis from across the canvas, as part of the miracle. In a minority view of the painting, after a folk tale, bright morning sunlight has appeared before dawn, calling a shepherd in the distance to his work. Two trees intertwine to frame perfectly the central of the three philosophers.

In both, the actors appear at the right. Tall rocks form natural stairs and a natural home. Francis emerges from one cave mouth, while the leftmost of the philosophers, seated, faces another. At least tradition calls it a cave, but if it is only a rock face textured by vegetation, its darkness is interesting enough for him and for me. He holds a mathematician’s or artist’s tools, a compass and a triangle, to take its measure. Francis faces only an ass, as stoic as any philosopher, and the light, but that, too, is enough.

In both paintings, the figures are decidedly apart from civilization and ever so close. Francis has an entire city, behind a fence and across a stream, with no need for other signs of life. Giorgione’s translucent church or villa seems to arise from its place in the landscape like a vision, with another an indefinite distance behind it. Both buildings give way to far-off hills, covered with greenery and dissolving into blue. Some historians see the color, which to me looks natural, as unexplained, perhaps a further miracle. Once again, nature and culture respond to each other.

And then there is the shared mystery of what is really going on. Francis has spread his arms, out of obedience or in joy. If he is indeed receiving the stigmata, though, where are the rays that in other depictions pierce his open palms? I devote a longer review (and one of this Web site’s first) to the painting’s mysteries, and you can read more for the whole story. I argue that sunlight itself is the source of the miracle—and, by extension, so is painting in oil. That and, for now, natural light from a Marcel Breuer window at the Frick Madison—and I turn next time to the three philosophers.

Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.