Seeking Jacopo Bellini’s Iris
Adele Rossetti Morosini (PiV '92–'94)
$2,000.00
Mixed media on paper
12 x 16 inches
2019
Framed
50% of proceeds benefit the Pratt in Venice Scholarship Fund.
In the Louvre album of Jacopo Bellini drawings there is a single, full-color painting of an iris. Among the complex perspective studies and multi-figural compositions that fill the book, drawn from the artist’s prodigious imagination and executed in precise metalpoint lines, this careful color study of a real object, painted from life, is almost startling in its immediacy and intimacy.
Every detail of the flower’s structure is closely observed and carefully recorded. The sharp “byzantine” contours of some of the petals in the painting look slightly stylized, but similar, angular folds actually occur in many irises when they are first unfolding.
Jacopo Bellini, Iris, 1470 or before. Album Bellini Jacopo, folio 56, Fonds des dessins et miniatures (RF 1524, 70), Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais - Photo: G. Blot.
The painting’s somber coloring was puzzling to me and made me wonder about the appearance of the living flower used as a model. The closely observed realism of the form of the flower in the watercolor would seem to indicate that the coloration of the flower was recorded just as faithfully. Botany and Art History are some of my favorite study topics, so the fantasy of tracking down the identity of this ancient iris was irresistible, and painting it to try out my supposition visually was a delightful experiment.
The shape of the flower in the Bellini watercolor is typical of two ancient, European species: Iris germanica and Iris pallida. Several varieties of these species exist, named according to the places where wild populations were first encountered. I narrowed my guesses to varieties from areas near to Venice and known from genetic analysis to have existed since at least the fifteenth century. Another important criteria was that they still be extant today. Though the Bellini iris may have belonged, in fact, to an Iris species and variety that had become extinct, In order to paint it, I had to keep my guesses among the ones whose colors I could observe in living specimens.
Iris germanica and Iris pallida varieties range from pale lavender to purple and white. The model for the watercolor can reasonably be expected to have been within this color range, but no European iris of that time period that I knew of matched the color of the painting.
On observing the watercolor painting further I wondered if the original pigments might not have faded. This may account for the watercolor’s presence in the album of unrelated drawings; it may have been placed there to protect it from further exposure to light. Today, the color of the painted flower is a dull, reddish-brown, possibly because it was painted with a red pigment that breaks down and fades with light. The color looks purplish in areas where it is underpainted with a wash of cold gray. These shaded or rendered areas of the petals were painted in washes of a more stable black ink. The use of grays and black for the shadow areas seem to imply that the local color was also fairly dark originally. It would have to have been saturated enough to make the added black or gray look like natural variations of itself in different lighting situations. Probably, a non-lightfast red pigment such as madder, commonly used for water-based paints in the early Renaissance, may have been combined with indigo or turnesol to obtain a deep, reddish purple.
Few ancient, natural varieties of Iris germanica or Iris pallida have flowers of a saturated red-purple color, so for the time and place, my guess is that the flower depicted in the Bellini drawing book has good chances of having been a dark-flowered Iris pallida, var. dalmatica from Croatia, or, better yet, an Iris pallida, var. cengialti, that grows in several places in northern Italy, including the Veneto.
Based on these fascinating bits of evidence from Botanical History, Geography and Art History and Materials and Techniques, my painting is a re-imagining of the marvelous iris in Jacopo Bellini’s book of drawings as an Iris pallida var. cengialti, in this flower’s glorious color.
Adele Rossetti (PiV ‘92–‘94) is an artist and art instructor working in the NYC area and the Hudson Valley. She is also a lecturer, published art and scientific illustrator, private art tutor, and exhibiting artist. She has a MFA degree in Painting/Drawing and a MS in the Theory, Criticism and History of Art, Design and Architecture from Pratt Institute. She is a fellow of the BBG Florilegium Society, and a recipient of the American Society of Botanical Artists’ Excellence Award, the Royal Horticultural Society’s Grenfells Science Medal, and several Mellon Foundation, Cantor-Fitzgerald Foundation, Fulbright, and Pratt Institute grants. Her artwork is found in numerous collections in the US and abroad, including the Alisa and Isaac Sutton Collection, the most important American private collection of Botanical Art, and that of Natasha Trethewey, the present U.S. Poet Laureate. Adele is presently teaching at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden and the New York Botanical Gardens, and has an online class on Craftsy.
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