Prékopa Ágnes (szerk.): Ars Decorativa 32. (Budapest, 2018)

Miklós GÁLOS: An Antonio Tempesta Rediscovered in the Collection of the Museum of Applied Arts, Budapest

At first, stone was treated as merely a new kind of support, but at the end of the 16th century, multi-coloured stone sheets came into use, in which the colour and patterns of the stone were visible and defining elements in the composition.19 Nature and art become partners in these paintings—the work is a joint product of the art of nature and the skill of the painter. These works, whose materials alone were extraordinarily expensive, satisfied refined tastes. Collections that included both artificalia and naturalia—known as Kunst- und Wunderkammer—accommodated items that did not fit clearly into either category. Such were painted stones, along with nautilus and coconut cups, ivory cups with metal mountings and chains of coral. With these objects, opposing categories merged, and the crossing of boundaries between art and nature was guaranteed to astonish viewers.20

Antonio Tempesta was not only one of the first to paint on coloured stone but also the most important artist working in this field. Tempesta used a wide range of stones: colourful marbles, lapis lazuli, alabaster and dendritic limestone. In Tempesta’s works, the relationship between nature and the artist was complex and multi-faceted. The border between the support and the painting was often blurred. The stone appears in the painted details, either alone or peeking through the paint layers. The parts of the stone sheet that at first glance seem unpainted were, in many cases, modelled with fine glaze. The artist may have perhaps been imitating the structure of the stone. In the painting in the Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest, Tempesta reproduced the reddish sections of the support in the area between the Jews and the Egyptians in order to cover the grey streaks naturally occurring in the stone.

The subject of a significant number of Tempesta’s paintings on stone is Crossing the Red Sea.2' Almost half of the pictures attributed to him portray this scene, including two of the three works on stone signed by the artist.22 These works show no signs of a serial production or self-repetition. In every case, the composition is adjusted to the structure of the stone; therefore the same subject matter is always depicted in a new way.

The closest analogies to this newly discovered picture are Tempesta’s paintings on lapis lazuli. The most important of these, which can be regarded as the greatest masterpiece in his oeuvre, is Pearl Diving in India in the Louvre in Paris.23 (Fig. 8) Even the frame of this enormous, 42.5 x 60 cm piece of lapis lazuli reveals incredible richness, with its silver inlays and enamel and gemstone decorations. The picture itself depicts an oriental scene. Is his 1597 work Viaggi alle Indie Orientali, the Venetian jeweller Cesare Federici writes about the pearl divers who every spring move to an island near Ceylon and search for pearls in the surrounding sea.24

The support fulfils a variety of roles in the painting in the Louvre. The lapis lazuli, rich in certain parts in whitish yellow cal- cite, portrays not only the sea but also the cloudy sky. The large rocky cliff in the background, whose form is indicated only by vegetation along its edges, is conveyed by a certain section of the stone glittering from pyrite. The mountains on the Eden side of the newly-discovered Budapest painting are represented in the same way, and the sea and sky are likewise expressed in an extraordinarily similar fashion.

Tempesta allows the support to appear in smaller details too. The dishes in the woman’s hand in the left edge of Pearl Div-