Michael Lorenz: Joseph Lange

Showing posts with label Joseph Lange. Show all posts

Feb 6, 2013

"The Newly Discovered Mozart Portrait": Back to Reality

On 11 January 2013 the Mozarteum in Salzburg published a press release that contained the following page:

The gist of this announcement is as follows:

The Mozart Discovery. Hitherto the small portrait on a tobacco box came with a huge question mark. Now it is certain: it shows a portrait if the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart! In the course of a thorough study of all the documents and sources this portrait could definitely be identified as a Mozart portrait from 1783. The miniature shows a striking resemblance to the 1829 engraving by the Dresden engraver Gottschick, wh with this engraving refers to a miniature by Grassi. The portrait on the box could well be a work by Grassi, because Mozart and the painter met each other in Vienna.

Here is the page in the book about the exhibition that deals with the supposed Mozart miniature:

What we read here, quickly takes us down from the spheres of "sensationally new discoveries" to the low grounds of only too well-known dull speculation. The "certainty" that the press release has been bragging about is gone and the shadow of "we don't really know anything for sure" is lying heavily on the the portrait's supposed authenticity:

Joseph Maria[sic!] Grassi (1757-1838)?[sic!] [...] The miniature shows a striking resemblance to the 1829 engraving by the Dresden engraver Gottschick who refers to a 1785 miniature by Grassi. The portrait on the box could[sic!] well be a 1783 work by Grassi or done from a 1783 model, when Mozart and the painter met each other in Vienna. Possibly[sic!] the object is identical with the "box lid that was done not long after his death, probably based on speculation" as the widow [Constanze Mozart] put it in 1800. It is conceivable[sic] that there were several Grassi miniatures of this portrait which looks unfamiliar to us today.

Thus, the whole "sensation" simply boils down to the following points:

There is no proof that this miniature was intended to show Mozart.
There is no proof that it was done from life.
The miniature is being attributed to Joseph Grassi in the book based only on a handwritten[!] note on a copy of Gottschick's 1829 engraving. This note has no provable connection to Gottschick who (for reasons not difficult to imagine) did not put this attribution on his engraving, but only wrote "Nach einem Miniaturgemälde 1785, gestochen von Gottschick 1829".

From a purely technical point of view this portrait is starkly at odds with Grassi's work and does not fit into the corpus of his oeuvre. Dr. Großpietsch seems to have delved very lightly into Grassi's life, since he does not even know the painter's correct forenames and erroneously calls him "Joseph Maria" (while his name was Joseph Mathias).
The dating of the portrait with the appearance of Grassi's name in a Mozart letter is totally arbitrary. There is no provable connection between Mozart and Grassi, apart from the fact that at a ball in 1783 both of them took part in a pantomime.
None of the information presented by the Mozarteum on p. 96 of the book about the exhibition is new. The information simply copies research that has already been published in 2008 by Dr. Richard Bauer in his book Das rekonstruierte Antlitz (Neustadt an der Aisch: 2008). Bauer is not being given credit by the Mozarteum in connection with the miniature portrait in question.

The articles in the book published by the Mozarteum are classic examples of the deep lack of logical thinking among scholars, who seem to be dazed by the "Salzburg Mozart Bubble" when it comes to logic and a clear methodology in defining *authenticity* in historical portraiture. I will deal with fundamental issues regarding the authenticity of Mozart portraits in an upcoming review of the exhibition book on this blog.

In the course of a desperate publicity campaign, the Mozarteum took advantage of a journalist's naivete and launched an article in today's New York Times, titled "Wolfgang, Is That You?". In this strangely superficial piece of "popular science" we are being confronted again with the usual mixture of factoids and unsubstantiated conclusions. According to the article in the NYT, "a rummage through the archives found a document showing the object’s provenance". Quote:

The document said Mozart had owned the snuffbox for 10 years and gave it as a gift to Anton Grassi, a sculptor friend in Vienna. Letters from Mozart indicate that Grassi’s brother Joseph, also an artist, painted a miniature of Mozart. Joseph acquired the snuffbox from his brother and attached the miniature, Ms. Ramsauer said.

This mysterious "document" (which could not be located by the Mozarteum experts in the course of the yearslong preparation of their current exhibition) is still unpublished. Since (as stated by Dr. Großpietsch) "Mozart owned several tobacco boxes", its provable[!] connection to the box in question remains doubtful. There is no proof at all that Anton Mathias Grassi (b. 26 June 1755, Vienna, d. 31 December 1807, Vienna) was a "sculptor friend" of Mozart's (as a matter of fact he was a model sculptor at the Imperial Vienna Porcelain Manufactory). To establish a close connection between Anton Grassi and Mozart is an even bigger stretch than the inflation of Joseph Grassi's dancing activities in 1783 into an intimate friendship with the composer. The claim that "Letters[!] from Mozart indicate that Grassi’s brother Joseph, also an artist, painted a miniature of Mozart" is a false and ruthlessly dishonest statement. Grassi does not appear in "letters", but only in one of Mozart's letters to his father on 12 March 1783, where Mozart only reports that "a[sic!] painter (graßi)" appeared as Dottore in a pantomime at a masquerade ball. Any similarity to scholarship is purely coincidental. There is no proof that Grassi ever painted a portrait of Mozart. There is no proof that "Joseph acquired the snuffbox from his brother" or that "he attached the miniature". These claims are all based on reckless speculation. To quote from the NY Times:

One of the most famous portraits — and the one Mozart’s wife, Constanze, considered the most true to life — has long been considered unfinished. It is by Joseph Lange, Mozart’s brother-in-law, and shows him in profile, looking down, his face emerging from a dark background, with a triangle of torso surrounded by scratched white space. The painting, dating from 1789, without doubt looks unfinished, like a classical symphony of two movements.

Fact of the matter is that there is no proof at all that this painting dates from 1789 (contrary to Großpietsch's claim, Franz Segl's 1856 photograph proves absolutely nothing). This dating is based on a mere assumption. No research on Lange's oeuvre and the development of his artistic style has ever been undertaken by the Mozarteum. Quote:

X-ray and infrared analysis performed at the Doerner Institute in Munich, an art research institution, last December, showed that a small completed painting of Mozart’s head and shoulder had been trimmed and mounted at some point on a larger canvas, with paint added around the edges to smooth out the surface. The enlargement was unfinished, not the original.

This paragraph offers no new information at all. It just repeats my 2009 discovery which I published on 19 September 2012, under the title "Joseph Lange's Mozart Portrait" on this blog. When I told Ms. Ramsauer about my discovery in June 2010, I learnt with astonishment that the thought of submitting the painting to X-ray and infrared analysis had never occurred to the Mozarteum curators. Only after my suggestion, did they undertake said analysis which led to the "sensational" results about which the Mozarteum is now bragging. In February 2013, the Mozarteum had the audacity to send me the following statement: "Unfortunately at the time of our press release, we were unaware of the results regarding the Lange portrait that you had published on your blog, because contrary to practice in the scientific community you failed to inform us of a publication about objects from our collection that we had allowed you to consult." The Mozarteum, who employs a librarian for keeping their database of publications up to date, now tries to accuse me of not having properly reported my research. The claim that I "consulted" objects is plain nonsense. I only took a look at the Lange painting which I also could have done by simply visiting the museum, had they not removed the painting from the exhibition. Of course, I do not quarrel with the fact that with this media announcement regarding the Lange portrait the staff of the Mozarteum is now claiming a priority that is not really theirs. There are so many colleagues who witnessed my discovery back in 2009, that today I can actually lean back and watch the ongoing (and partly embarrassing) events with great amusement. I am proud of my pioneering vision that needed no X-ray analysis to discover the truth about Lange's Mozart portrait already four years ago.

Joseph Grassi's signature (which appears on none of his supposed "Mozart portraits")

Postscript (January 2014)

The document that according to the 2013 article in the New York Times, "said Mozart had owned the snuffbox for ten years and gave it as a gift to Anton Grassi, a sculptor friend in Vienna" has still not been published by the Mozarteum.

Postscript (January 2015)

Postscript (May 2025)

In an essay entitled "Grassis Mozart Porträt. Die Revision einer Miniatur" (Mozart-Jahrbuch 2014, 257-93), in which all kinds of heavy props of scholarship were dragged onto the stage, Christoph Großpietsch presented the miniature in question as an "authentic Mozart portrait" by Grassi. To make matters worse, in this essay, the collector Aloys Fuchs was presented as the main witness to the authenticity of the miniature and was even referred to as a "manuscript expert." Fuchs was anything but an expert, and his many erroneous "expert opinions" demonstrably prove this. The most notorious example of Fuchs's incompetence is his erroneous opinion about the forged 1790 Schikaneder billet to Mozart "Lieber Wolffgang derweilen schicke ich dir dein Pa Pa Pa zurückh" (Wienbibliothek, H.I.N. 8355). Furthermore, Fuchs misidentified Freystädtler's counterpoint studies (A-Sm, Autogr Var 2) as "Mozarts eigenhändig geschriebene Uibungen"; and (to name only one of countless other examples) he "guaranteed the authenticity of the above musical notation of the great W. A. Mozart" of a fragment of the Church Sonata K. Anh. C 16.01 (US-NYpm, M9397.C559), which is actually a copy written by Leopold Mozart. However, even with the greatest effort, the two main obstacles to authenticating the miniature cannot be argued away: 1) The person depicted on the miniature bears no resemblance to Mozart, and 2) the painting technique and style of the miniature do not fit into Grassi’s oeuvre at all.

Sep 19, 2012

Joseph Lange's Mozart Portrait

Joseph Lange's unfinished portrait of Mozart is one of the most popular and best known images of the composer. Its somber coloring and its unfinished state have made it a visual icon of Mozart in his Vienna years. Mozart's life, being tragically cut short, is hauntingly paraphrased by the incompleteness of the painting.

And yet, Mozart scholarship does not even know for sure when Mozart's brother-in-law painted this portrait. In 1913, Edward J. Dent claimed that it originates from 1791. After having met sharp criticism from Téodor de Wyzewa in a review in the Revue des Deux Mondes, and Edward Speyer, Dent, in a later edition of his book Mozart's Operas, corrected the dating to 1782. In an article in the 1926 Salzburger Museumsblätter, art historian Julius Leisching assigned the Lange portrait to 1790. This dating did not gain acceptance either, and in 1931, Roland Tenschert, in his book Mozart. Ein Künstlerleben in Bildern und Dokumenten, presented the portrait as having been painted in 1782. Otto Erich Deutsch seems to have pondered for several decades over a possible dating of Lange's work. In 1956, he dated the portrait with "winter of 1782-83", curiously describing it as "a sketch in oils, unfortunately never completed". This dating was influenced by the assumption that Lange's portrait of Mozart was somehow related to his portrait of Constanze Mozart which, since 1931, belongs to the University of Glasgow as part of the Zavertal Collection, and is presumed to have been one of the two small portraits that Mozart sent to his father on 3 April 1783: "Auch folgen die 2 Portraits; – wünsche nur daß sie damit zufrieden seyn möchten; mir scheint sie gleichen beyde gut, und alle die es gesehen sind der nemlichen Meynung." ("The two portraits will follow; – I only wish that you will be pleased with them. I think they are both good likenesses and all who have seen them are of the same opinion."). Within the next five years, however, Deutsch changed his opinion again, and in his 1961 book Mozart und seine Welt in zeitgenössischen Bildern (published as part of the NMA), he assigned the Lange portrait to 1782/83. Since then, this dating has been revised by Mozart scholarship to 1789, based on Mozart's remark in a letter to his wife from 16 April 1789: "ich möchte gerne wissen ob schwager Hofer den Tag nach meiner Abreise gekommen ist? ob er öfters kommt, so wie er mir versprochen hat; – ob die Langischen bisweilen kommen? – ob an den Portrait fortgearbeitet wird?" ("I want to know if brother-in-law Hofer visited the day after my departure? If he is visiting more often, as he promised me; – Whether the Langes come by now and then? – If work on the portrait is being continued?")

I have been studying Joseph Lange's life and work for over ten years and I assume in all modesty that I have seen more of Lange's paintings than anybody else. Lange's Mozart portrait has been the object of my scrutiny for a long time and I have always been intrigued as to how its appearance and its state of preservation have changed during the last 60 years. Moreover, I was always sceptic regarding its supposed "state of incompleteness", which, owing to the unusually straight edges of paint on Mozart's body, is at odds with many other unfinished paintings I know. Could it be that the painting was not unfinished, but represents an enlargement of an orignal small portrait which then was never completed? There is a model for this particular procedure: Lange's portrait of Constanze Mozart which today is on display in Glasgow. That this painting is an enlarged version of a small portrait (previously 18 x 13 cm, now 32,3 x 24,8 cm) has long been known and has been pointed out several times in the literature, most recently in the catalog of the 1991 Mozart exhibition in Salzburg. The irregular size of the original portrait (as shown approximately in the following picture) was caused by cutting and the obviously bad state of canvas quality on the lower left corner of the original painting. The enlargement was either sewn or glued to the original painting after it had been turned about eleven degrees to the right.

The difference of color between the old and the new canvas becomes visible with the picture's histogram being modified.

It is not known when the Constanze portrait was enlarged. Old black and white photographs, taken before a very intensive restoration of Mozart's portrait in the early 1960s, show that the painting underwent a similar treatment as the painting in Glasgow: a miniature, showing only Mozart's head, was turned about four degrees to the right and inserted into a bigger canvas which was supposed to show Mozart's upper body and the shape of a piano, but later remained unfinished. A photograph of the unrestored painting (in deplorable state of conservation), taken in 1946, eerily shows the distinct contour of the original small painting:

Lange's painting in 1946 (photograph by David E. Scherman)

The pre-restoration state of the painting is also documented in Roland Tenschert's article entitled "Wie Mozart wirklich aussah", which in 1941 was published in the Austrian journal Die Bühne.

Die Bühne, Heft 24/1941, 7

The original miniature, about 19 x 15 centimeters in size, looked like this (in exact size relation to the colored picture above):

In March 2009, I realized that the portrait is an enlargement, a discovery whose date can be attested by several colleague musicologists. On 29 June 2010, I visited Mozart's birthplace and examined the Lange portrait, which at that time, had been taken from the exhibition to be scrutinized by the museum staff. I told Dr. Großpietsch and Dr. Ramsauer about my hypothesis and had to realize that there was no scholarly documentation on the 1963 restoration of the painting, and the Mozarteum had never X-rayed the portrait. The restoration, of course, has rendered the visible distinction between the original minature and the enlargement almost imperceptible. Not only was the gaping horizontal crack, which is visible on old photographs, filled with putty, the edge of the brown paint at the lower end of the painted area on Mozart's chest was also horizontally adjusted, as if to hide the tilted original miniature.

Lange's portrait of Mozart before and after the restoration (which, according to a personal communication by Dr. Ramsauer, was done in 1963).

Given the current state of the painting, the different canvas of the small original portrait is only discernible as a slightly lower rectangular area, when looked upon in a very flat angle in backlight. Therefore I concluded that in the course of the enlargement the small painting was mounted from behind to the larger canvas. The Mozart portrait by Joseph Lange is not an unfinished painting of "Mozart at the Piano", but an unfinished enlargement of an original miniature of Mozart's head.

What are the implications of this discovery? The original miniature portraits of Mozart and his wife, painted by Lange, both of which were later enlarged, could well be the two small paintings that Mozart sent to his father in April 1783. The Mozart miniature portrait from 1782/83 is "lost", because for over 200 years, it has been hidden in plain sight in the supposedly unfinished painting of Mozart at the piano. Constanze's small portrait was successfully resized, while the enlargement of Mozart's portrait – at some time sent back to Vienna – was never completed. That Lange had not finished the work by 1812 may well have been caused by the fact that at this time he had long separated from Constanze's sister and had started a third family with a woman 30 years his junior. The enlargement with the addition of the piano could have been the work Mozart was referring to in his 1789 letter from Dresden ("an den Portrait fortgearbeitet"). Recently, some pseudo-scholars tried to cast doubt on the authenticity of the Lange portrait. Their aim was twofold: first, to boost the credibility of the so-called Hagenauer Mozart which simply does not resemble the man on Lange's painting. And second, to add probability to the absurd idea that "the man in the red frock" could have been the small portrait that Mozart sent to Salzburg in 1783. One proponent of this crude hypothesis even went so far as to visualize Mozart wearing a pigtail on the Lange portrait, which (original quote) "can't be seen because of the chiaroscuro[sic!]".

An engraving by Carl Pfeiffer after a self-portrait by Lange from around 1820

As a portraitist Joseph Lange was one of the best eighteenth-century amateur painters I have come across. He enjoyed a first rate education at the Vienna Academy of Arts and his technique, his shading, his mixture of skin tones was (considering his amateur status) highly professional. I have never seen any reproduction of the Salzburg Mozart portrait that really does justice to the artistry of color and glazing technique of the original. Contrary to a wide-spread misconception, caused by an entry in Joachim Daniel Preisler's diary, Lange did not give up painting in 1788, but diligently pursued this activity into his old age. Many of Lange's paintings, such as the group portrait of his mistress Therese Koch (1780–1851) and her three daughters, are still extant in the possession of Lange's descendants. Among the many amazing portraits by Lange, the following is my favorite. P. Maurus (Franz Borgius) Stützinger (b. 6 January 1775, in Gmunden, d. 7 August 1842, in Salzburg) was elected abbot of Lambach Abbey in 1812. In 1820, he was deposed owing to the abbey's complete bankruptcy. Joseph Lange's life-sized portrait of Pater Maurus Stützinger was painted in 1815:

Joseph Lange's official seal and signature

Joseph Lange's private seal

Postscript (January 2013)

In January 2013, the Mozarteum issued a press release regarding "sensational discoveries" in Mozart portraiture which is fraught with misinformation and grossly false statements. 1) The "Boy with the Bird's Nest" (attributed to Zoffany) "does not show Mozart and is a fake". The truth is: that it does not show Mozart had been known to art historians for ages. The painting is not a fake, but a misattribution by wishful "experts" who already existed at the Mozarteum back in 1925. 2) "The 'Unfinished Lange portrait' had been already finished before it was enlarged which has been proven by X-ray analysis." The truth is: this fact was uncovered by me back in March 2009, without the use of X-ray, and the analysis was done following my suggestion to Dr. Ramsauer on 30 June 2010. To nobody's surprise, my name and my breakthrough discovery is now being ignored by the Mozarteum. 3) "The miniature on ivory on a tobacco box definitely shows Mozart" (quote: "Nun ist es sicher!"). The truth is: this miniature has already been dealt with by the Munich historian Dr. Richard Bauer in 2008, in his excellent book Das rekonstruierte Antlitz. Scrutinizing the sources, Bauer came to the conclusion that the portrait is posthumous and "is meant to show Mozart". Of course, Bauer's prior achievement is not mentioned by the Mozarteum experts, and half of their comments on the genesis of this portrait is simply inaccurate. And finally, 4) "Boßler's silhouette of 'Signor Mozart' was done in Mozart's lifetime." Yes, but we knew that already.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, engraving by Heinrich Philipp Boßler after an own silhouette (Beethoven-Haus Bonn, B 2275)