The Night Portrait: Two Women in the History of a Da Vinci Painting

I found out about The Night Portrait  by novelist and art historian Laura Morelli, when her assistant asked me to do a Q&A with the author on both of her 2020 historical fiction releases.  

The first was The Giant, a novel of Michelangelo's David which I reviewed on Shomeret: Masked Reviewer here.  That review is so far my most viewed post of 2020 on that other blog.

 I was gifted with a PDF of The Night Portrait well in advance of publication, but was unable to read it because I couldn't adjust the miniscule font on my Kindle e-reader.  So I had to wait until my pre-ordered copy arrived from Amazon.  I dived into The Night Portrait after I finished and reviewed the title I was reading for a blog tour with a post that had to appear on September 20th.  This is why it took me longer to get to this dual period novel dealing with the creation of Leonardo Da Vinci's Lady With An Ermine and its later history during World War II.

                                         

The first of the two women protagonists to appear in the narrative is fictional  museum art conservator Edith Becker who is introduced to us during 1939 in Munich.  The museum staff are poring over the records Edith had created about the great paintings by Old Masters in private hands in Poland. The Nazis were stealing art from every nation in Europe where they had a presence.  The Chairman of the Board at the museum where Edith worked was justifying German theft of these paintings with a conspiracy theory about Americans seizing them for Jewish museums in the United States. I have visited Jewish museums.  They only contain works by Jewish artists.  There's no possibility that you would ever have found a portrait by Leonardo Da Vinci hanging on the wall in a Jewish museum. 

I sincerely doubt that Edith took the Jewish Museum conspiracy seriously.  She was much more concerned about her life being hijacked.  She was being sent to Poland in order to assist with the largest art theft in history. Edith felt that these paintings  "had been cast like dice into a game that had spiraled out of her control."  This is a direct quote from Laura Morelli's narration.

It seemed to me that the Nazis were taking advantage of Edith's love of  art.  If a painting was given into her hands, she had to preserve it.  She would clean it and ameliorate any damage that had occurred during its travel from the home where it had been kept by its owner. Edith was portrayed as a consummate professional who was inwardly horrified to be conscripted into participation in a criminal enterprise.  Yet she wasn't helpless either.  Could Edith find a way to disrupt the Nazi plan to own all of Europe's great art? 

 The second female protagonist in The Night Portrait  is chronologically first because she is the woman that Leonardo Da Vinci painted when Ludovico Sforza, Duke of Milan, commissioned what became known as  Lady With An Ermine.  She was Cecilia Gallerani, the sixteen year old mistress of Ludovico Sforza.  So history remembers Cecilia as a perpetual sixteen year old.  Here is a public domain image of the painting from Wikipedia.

 

                                Lady With An Ermine by Leonardo Da Vinci

Cecilia might not be regarded as a feminist in the modern sense of the word, but she knew what kind of life would make her happy, and it wasn't becoming a nun as her family intended.  She wanted to be surrounded by the beautiful things that you would find in a ducal court, and to become a celebrated singer.  Ludovico Sforza fell in love with her, and she got everything she wanted.   Cecilia had beauty. She was also a musician and a gifted singer. The Night Portrait also tells us what happened to Cecilia after her relationship with Ludovico Sforza was over.  I will tell you only that Cecilia Gallerani's life was not a story of  victimhood.   Cecilia had a strong will, and she was able to charm people.

There were also significant male characters including Leonardo Da Vinci and participants in the Monuments Men.  The Monuments Men were officially known as the Monuments, Fine Arts and Archives Program.  I am linking to its Wikipedia article. They were a military organization run by the Allies of World War II to protect European art and return stolen art.  Stolen art was returned to the family that owned it when possible, or to the government of the place of origin.

I was most interested in the character of Edith.  Her inner conflict between her passion for preserving art, and her opposition to Nazi art theft gave her a fascinating level of complexity.  I was reminded of Hanna, the protagonist in The Woman Who Heard Color by Kelly Jones.  Hanna was an art dealer who facilitated Nazi art theft.  The main difference between Edith and Hanna is that it seemed to me that Hanna was a voluntary collaborator with the Nazis.  See my Goodreads review  of The Woman Who Heard Color. I admired Edith, but I thoroughly despised Hanna.

I was also interested in finding out more about the life of Da Vinci.  I was surprised by Laura Morelli's portrayal of Da Vinci's attitude toward the role of art in his life.  I knew that Da Vinci had a great many interests other than art.  In The Night Portrait Da Vinci was shown to have priorities that appeared to be far more important to him than being an artist.

The bibliography that Laura Morelli has included shows the depth of her research, but it also provided me with a number of really awesome candidates for further reading on the topics covered in The Night Portrait.  Among the volumes that I intend to obtain soon,  Women in Italian Renaissance Art: Gender, Representation and Identity by Paola Tinagli might be of particular interest to the readers of this blog.

The Night Portrait combines accuracy with narrative power.   Those who love books with moving characters and a plot with impact will want to read it for those aspects along with the compelling history and themes.  Laura Morelli seems to have built to a crescendo with her novels of 2020.   I anticipate her future fiction with enthusiasm.

A Savage Kultur: The Fictional Story of a Painting Seized by the Nazis

A Savage Kultur by Monique Roy is the second book that I am reviewing by this author.  I participated in the blog tour for her novel Across Great Divides on this blog here back in 2015.  I  received a free review copy of A Savage Kultur from Monique Roy and this is my honest review.

                               

The last time a review on this blog dealt with a book on the theme of the Nazi looting of art it was Stolen Beauty by Laura Lico Albanese which I reviewed here.  That novel involved an actual famous legal suit brought by a descendant of the original owner to recover an iconic Gustav Klimt painting. 

The  painting at the center of A Savage Kultur, "The Lovers: The Poet's Garden IV" by Vincent Van Gogh isn't well-known and has an unknown fate. An image of Van Gogh's sketch of the painting is reproduced on the bottom section of the cover shown above. Yet all the characters in A Savage Kultur are fictional creations.  So Monique Roy has given us a speculative narrative about this missing work.

Contemporary protagonist Ava Goldberg experiences what might have been a favorite fantasy come true for an art history student like her when she inherits an art gallery from her grandfather.  Her love of art and her devotion to her family are the most believable aspects of her character.   Her determination to reclaim the Van Gogh that had been owned by her grandmother's family is admirable.  On the other hand,  I didn't find the romantic aspect of her life very credible, and thought that the book could have dispensed with it entirely.

My favorite character in this book was Ava's grandfather, Karl Engel, who was the protagonist of the historical chapters in this dual period novel.  I consider him the most fully realized character and I think that the entire plot really does revolve around him.  His courage in Nazi Germany preserves the life of the woman he loves.  His decisions in the 21st century motivate Ava and give her life a focus.

The issue of art forgery arises in this book through the perspective of a character who engages in forgery.  Mention is made of the sophisticated techniques he uses to fool the experts.

What most sets apart this novel about Nazis and art is that this one doesn't portray Nazism as a defunct ideology.  There are unnerving survivals of Nazi beliefs and attitudes alive among their 21st century descendants in A Savage Kultur.  I was reminded of a William Faulkner quote.  "The past is never dead.  It's not even past."  So the resolution wasn't nearly as triumphant as other books in this sub-genre.  Instead there is a dark undertone that could cause readers to wonder when other manifestations of the Third Reich might surface.  One might also wonder whether the entirely too sheltered descendants of Holocaust survivors like Ava will be capable of stopping them. 
                          

Stolen Beauty: Blog Tour Review and Giveaway

 I'm interested in art history, and there was a Klimt shaped hole in my art education.   The only thing I knew about Austrian artist Gustav Klimt was that he painted The Woman in Gold.   Stolen Beauty by Laurie Lico Albanese takes the perspective of two real women.  One is Adele Bloch-Bauer, a prominent art patron.   The Woman in Gold is a portrait of her, but she also had an ongoing relationship with Klimt.   The other perspective is that of her niece, Maria Altmann, who eventually sued Austria to regain her family's ownership of The Woman in Gold.  There are a number of non-fiction accounts of this well-known case, but I love the immediacy of  skilfully written historical fiction.   So I joined the Stolen Beauty blog tour and received an ARC from the publisher via Net Galley.

                                     

Although I learned a great deal about Klimt from this book, I am going to focus on the women for Flying High Reviews.  I was more interested in Adele's narrative than Maria's.  Both were courageous women, but Adele was more complex.

I noted that Adele gave up on becoming an artist as a child because she wasn't being taught to draw human beings.   She didn't realize it, but this issue had held back woman artists for centuries.   Women weren't allowed to learn human anatomy because it would empower them sexually as well as artistically.  Society was invested in keeping women ignorant of men's bodies as well as their own.

I was also interested in the fact that Adele chose to marry a man who promised her freedom.   That was her priority in the selection of a husband--not love, attractiveness or wealth.   He certainly had wealth, but her own family was wealthy.   She was accustomed to always having whatever she needed, yet her strict mother made her feel very constrained.  She couldn't go where she pleased or follow her interests.   So she married for independence, and for the most part she got it.   She met artists, musicians, writers and intellectuals.  She founded her own salon to discuss the issues of the day.  She also founded an art museum and selected its collection.  The Woman in Gold made her prominent and admired.

Adele tried to instill the importance of independence in her niece, Maria.   Maria grew to adulthood in a world that was very different from Adele's.   Adele's influence turned out to be a significant source of strength that allowed Maria to survive WWII.

Adele's family was Jewish, but religion was largely irrelevant to her.  She grew up in a completely secular home.  Adele encountered anti-semitism, but it never impacted her life very much.   Maria, on the other hand, lived to see the rise of Nazi Germany and the invasion of Austria.    Her uncle's collection of Klimts disappeared when the Nazis looted the art of Jewish families. 

This brings me to Maria's litigation with Austria.  I admit that I originally wasn't sympathetic to Maria's point of view, and I found the case that her lawyer made troubling from a feminist perspective.  Yet I eventually came around to the argument that Austria shouldn't benefit from Nazi theft.

I was glad to learn about the woman behind the famous Klimt portrait.  It was also important for me to find out more about the Jews of Austria during WWII.  I found Stolen Beauty an enlightening and provocative historical novel.   

                                 

                                       Laurie Lico Albanese
                              Photo credit: Martha Hines Kolko
 
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The Garden of Letters: The Cellist Who Was Code Named Dragonfly

The Garden of Letters by Alyson Richman takes place in Italy during WWII.  I have not visited Italy in WWII through the pages of a book since reading The Garden of the Finzi-Continis during my teen years. Regrettably, I have not read Alyson Richman since The Mask Carver’s Son which I very much admired for the way it showed the differences between the perspective of art as a tradition, and the perspective of art as an individual accomplishment.  In The Garden of Letters Richman deals with the perspective of a musician discovering her true priorities in a time of fear and privation.  

                                                

When I read about fictional protagonist Elodie Bertolotti’s dedication to music and her love for the fine cello that her father had given her, I was reminded of The Rainaldi Quartet by Paul Adam, a mystery I read some time ago  dealing with luthiers and the love of great violins with a history behind them.  It also took place in Italy, but it didn’t stray outside the world of music as The Garden of Letters does.  Because when your friends are courting danger and your country is about to be invaded by alleged allies, being absorbed in music is not enough for a person of integrity.  I was impressed by Elodie’s courage when she joins the Resistance, and her ingenuity in inventing a new means of secret communication.  I’ve read a number of novels dealing with the French Resistance.  I had expected the Italian Resistance to be similar, but Elodie brought her background into the Resistance which gave fighting the Nazis an unusual twist. 

I would like to discuss a few thoughts I had about The Garden of Letters of the title.  It was seen as a private expression of love, but no one ever called it art or its creator an artist.  Do people only think it’s art if it’s public and the elite give it sanction?   Does the fact that a woman created it for her husband make it not art?   If so, then the definition of art needs to be broadened.  My paternal grandmother had examples of her crewel embroidery hanging on a wall of her living room.  Few people got to see them, but I’d definitely consider them art.  My grandmother was an artist with her needle.   I think that Dalia, the creator of The Garden of Letters, was an artist though she probably would never have thought of herself that way.  All expressions of the creative impulse could be considered art. The Garden of Letters also gave Dalia the strength to deal with separation from her husband.  Therapeutic art is still art. 

The Garden of Letters shifts perspectives and time periods.  I never got confused even though the story didn’t unfold in linear order.    I didn’t think that the head hopping was unclear or excessive.    Other readers might have problems with the author’s narrative techniques, but I consider this the best historical fiction that I’ve read so far in 2015.