Columbus’s journey was not an art event; its causes and characteristics belong to parts of experience that we classify elsewhere. To put it in academic terms, the Art History Department does not mention it in its explications of the art of its time—not, at any rate, in relation to European art or to that of most of the world. Its one best connection of that kind is with the origins of the Latin American art of the following colonial centuries. It is the History Department that must chiefly cope with Columbus, and in many of its subspecialties, ranging from the economic to the demographic, the technological, the political, and the military. For art history, the key event of 1492 is the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent.

If one decided to take note of Columbus’s journey, as a journey, by means of a display of objects, the result would have the tone of a local historical museum. At one end there would be maps, a few papers, and portraits of the admiral and of Isabella, and at the other there would be potsherds, as artifacts of the people of the western side. Besides such authentic survivors from circa 1492, ship models and more maps could legitimately be used to flesh out the installation.

The grand exhibition in Washington called “Circa 1492” is not like that at all.¹ It has brought from all over the world, especially Europe, the Far East, and the Americas, a stunning series of works of art, many exceedingly famous. (Only one of the larger cultures of the time seems to have no place in it, the Slavic.) The European masterpieces here, previously known to most of us only through reproductions, begin with Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych of the temptation of St. Anthony, and end with Dürer’s watercolors of his Alpine journey. The sudden enhancement from picture books to reality is so pleasing, indeed enticing, that it drives out any question about what these works have to do with the journey. The question has by no means been evaded, however, by the organizers of the exhibition. In his foreword to the catalogue, J. Carter Brown, Director of the National Gallery of Art, points out that the title omits Columbus’s name on purpose, that this is not about him but rather about his age. The works of art best allow us to grasp the lasting significance of that age.

The question has by no means been evaded, however, by the organizers of the exhibition.

In a further prefatory essay, the retired Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin makes a distinction between discovery, in which the latest continually supersedes its predecessors, and creation, which is forever, and tells us that the exhibition is predominantly about the latter. So the art of 1492, as creation, can still directly move us, yet part of the reason for showing it is to reveal the era that produced it. In this somewhat roundabout way the show does get back to the time of the journey, and with the added idea that the time was wonderful. This tone fits the exhibits better than it does the history.

In a third introductory essay, the organizer of the exhibition, Jay Levenson, writes that the period was one of “artistic excellence in so many parts of the globe” and that the exhibition is about that circumstance. He does, to be sure, make a historical point, about the heightening of awareness between world cultures that resulted from such voyages, of which Columbus’s was among the earlier. Yet this heightening hardly came about rapidly enough to be reflected in the art shown here (such allusions from one culture to another as this art presents derive mostly from older interconnections, such as those along the silk route). Levenson then makes the somewhat conflicting point that the show wants to present each culture firmly on its own terms, not as it appeared to others. This approach, which removes the voyages from a role, seems to apply better to what we see.

It does seem that now and then the show turns from its main purpose, that of being a celebration of artistic creation, to become something very much else: a documentary report in which the objects serve to illustrate other kinds of history. The interplay and occasional tension between these motives is most obvious in the fascinating section produced by Martin Kemp, an art historian who has studied to great effect the involvement of Renaissance art with technology and science. Here we are offered a group of astrolabes, navigational instruments essential at the time. Though they are beautiful in form and construction, they clearly do shift the point away from art as creation. Nearby hangs a spectacular loan, the only surviving copy of the huge woodcut world map of 1507 by Waldseemüller, the first to use the term America. (For quite sound reasons it is there attached to Brazil.) This map is not an aesthetic object but an operational tool, yet in several ways it is fully in harmony with the exhibition’s ambiance. One is its grand scale, another the effect it makes of a curatorial coup, of bringing to the public from a remote collection an object of rare significance. Other such coups appear in the Kemp section. Piero della Francesca’s manual on perspective is shown in what is thought to be an autograph copy, open to an intricate and refined drawing; here also are the two existing drawings by Paolo Ucello that work out especially tricky problems in the geometry of perspective.

That kind of success in borrowing extends also to great objects that seem to have nothing to do with history but only with creation. The museum in Cracow loaned its portrait by Leonardo da Vinci, one of about ten paintings in the world agreed upon unanimously to be by him. Visiting art historians can only feel professional gratitude, since Cracow is hardly ever on their itineraries. The same applies to Lisbon, which has loaned not only the Bosch triptych, probably the premier masterpiece of painting in all of Portugal, but also, even more generously, a panel of the altarpiece by Nuño Gonçalves, the greatest painting by any Portuguese artist. The latter, to be sure, has some historical aptness, since in a corner, among other portraits, it includes the face of Prince Henry the Navigator. Even if he did not actually navigate much, he certainly has a firm place in the history of voyages.

The greatest object along these lines is one of the dozen or so drawings by Leonardo to be included in the show. This is his “Vitruvian Man,” the image of a naked figure stretching his arms and legs in two ways, so that they exactly fit a circle in one case and a square in the other. Demonstrating, in the simplest but most intense of diagrams, the notion of direct harmonious correspondence between humanity and the rules of mathematics, it functions widely today as a sort of logo of the Renaissance, though the concept actually belongs to the Renaissance’s other common pattern of adopting ancient classical notions. After seeing it in so many reproductions, including advertisements, even once on the side of a truck, it is a curiosity to find the real thing, a piece of paper usually hidden in the correct way in a box in a museum in Venice. This whole assemblage of great masterpieces from around the world—both in their origins and in their current ownership—recalls to the dizzied specialist the Musée Napoleon, which once aspired to do this permanently. Only in one case is there a clue of a failed attempt to borrow. Among the collection of perspective images on display are several examples of intarsia, the inlaid-wood technique that flourished only at this period. At the center of the gallery is an attractive and complex object, an octagonal table with a lectern on top, on loan from a church in the small Italian town of Gubbio. The catalogue, in a rare procedure, calls it an inferior example of its art, saying others have more geometric sophistication, and that it is not by the artist long supposed to have made it because his work is finer. Among the works it cites for comparison is the paneled room produced for the duke’s palace in the same town of Gubbio, which one would in any case recall. It is one of two such paneled rooms in the world from this early phase of intarsia, and in the 1940s was beautifully installed by its owner, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, reconstructing the tiny space and permitting entry into it. For decades now, however, it has not been seen by the public; the room was dismantled and the panels stored, doubtless as a result of a policy decision that the space could be better used otherwise. From the evidence of the catalogue entry, one is left in little doubt that a loan of it was desired for this exhibition but could not be obtained. If its reinstallation at the Met, rumored for years, should soon occur, it would offer the best explanation for the supposed refusal.

The aesthetic effect of it all is indeed glorious, and perhaps especially so to people who have an involvement with the art history of this era. The display of what people made then is grand. And if, in the end, the exhibition has only an indirect linkage to Columbus, the reason for the borrowers’ success has a perfectly direct one. None of these owners loaned these precious treasures to Washington to permit an exhibition about the high creativity of late-fifteenth-century art. If a similar show called “Circa 1892” had been attempted, it would obviously not have worked this way. The unique resonance of the date 1492 and its significance to the connections among the continents made the museums of the world available for persuasion by the United States and especially by its national institution for art. In this light it becomes easy to see why the governments of Portugal and the others made such magnanimous gestures. The most unusual gesture, though, came from our own government. Although the money for such tremendous exhibitions commonly comes from corporate foundations, in this instance, as the director writes, Congress received a “specific recommendation” in the national-budget message from the President to supplement the gallery’s regular funds. The money was provided over two budget years, to a total of $2.5 million, probably not a major fraction of the cost. Other funds came from organizations in this country and Japan, and also from a Spanish bank, whose gift was earmarked to cover “the gala opening dinner.” Well, yes, the wine for the important people is not a small factor in curatorial culture. Admiring all the sleight of hand, one might think it was wrong to betray the trick, were it not that it can’t be used again until 2092.

There are also significant ways in which the theme of creation gets affected by the factor of the voyage of discovery, even to the point of distortion, notably in the installation. In the European section, the Bosch triptych, with the saint’s horrible dreams of torturing and tempting devils, is the focus of the first room, and the work of Leonardo, with its scientific graphics, is a focus of the last. A notion is evoked that in this era we progress nicely from superstition to true knowledge, despite the fact that the Bosch was made after the Leonardos, or at about the same time. The director’s introduction seems to endorse this notion of progress in speaking of a “new Humanism growing out of centuries of concentration on other-worldliness.” Medievalists may feel some despair on reading that, after generations of efforts to kill off the notion of a dark age when nobody thought of this world as true. Lynn Thorndike, especially, may be recalled, with his exhaustive life work to show to most other specialists’ satisfaction that experimental science, strong in the Middle Ages, declined in the time of humanism, making the Renaissance in a way the more otherworldly of the two. The Bosch triptych itself tells us about superstition in a reportorial way, useful to Freudians and scientists who investigate fantasy in people’s heads; it is a rendering of real things seen in real hallucinations. In all Bosch’s work it may be the most keenly focused in this way, on the nervous human being made wretched by the intrusion of such dreams on his solid waking life, for it is more distinct on the matter than the better-known Garden of Earthly Delights. Its fresh cool landscapes, in pale blue sweeps at the horizon line, are relevant and have a kind of Renaissance beauty too easily overlooked as typical of Bosch. The horizon is remote and tiny (tinyness is omnipresent) and blocked from us by dark barriers, but all the more it can ground the whole circumstances in a final tranquility. In the foreground the bugs and monsters, in splendid preservation, are blessed by a similar clean light that forces belief from us, not only in their nastiness but in their physicality. After all, that is not so incompatible with the last room, with its Leonardos of body parts and outdoor specifics, and, even more, its presentation of Dürer’s great watercolors of the same years, with their mountain grasses.

Ought we to have been told about beheadings and plagues? Such things are not entirely absent.

“Circa 1492” is brilliant partly because it almost all seems happy, at least after Bosch is passed, and this is due, to a major extent, to everything’s seeming rich. There is effective use of the occasional huge object, neatly installed to push against the edges of wall surfaces. A rug nineteen feet long is hung vertically, and a tapestry thirty-four feet wide just fits into a catenary curve. (This work, with some historical reference, shows “The Taking of Tangiers,” but without any violence. Working from the left, we see an army marching to the middle, where the town is unpeopled but enlivened with roof and water patterns; the march resumes further to the right, with the exit of the defeated.) A good number of quite small objects are of precious materials and show off their glitter, among them a Turkish battle-axe “damascened with gold.” The culmination perhaps is a cup of “cast zinc, turquoise, rubies, and emeralds.” Potsherds are absent. We find an age brilliant not only in discovery and creation, but, more immediately, in consumption and display. The period appears to have been something like a handsome exhibition: our vision of the era comes to fuse with the installation. Ought we to have been told about beheadings and plagues? Such things are not entirely absent. The catalogue entry for Dürer’s drawing of “Katherina, the Moorish servant of a Portuguese factor” in the Netherlands, briefly mentions the bringing from Africa to Europe at the time of some 150,000 slaves—Columbus did nothing original in this respect—some of whom were “baptized and then freed amid great pomp.” Reproduced in the catalogue but not a part of the display (it is one of the several works belonging to the Gallery included by reference but left in their permanent rooms) is Grünewald’s little Crucifixion, where the Christ shows plague sores. The Leonardo drawings do not include his hanged man, nor do we have the grander one by Andrea del Sarto. The great artists were equally committed to a serious view of the true world in these subjects as in those emphasized here of discovery and creation. To get that range, the visitor is on his own, and probably needs to be a historian of some kind. For most visitors, “Circa 1492” may work best without the history at all, as a rare sequence of star turns. It is probably just ungrateful to ask that the exhibition be what it is not, when it is already more than just about any other assemblage of great things.

Notes
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