‘Castiglione: Lost Genius’ loses his genius in a sea of brown

Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione (1609–64) was, I must admit, unknown to me until I visited this show, the only Castiglione I was properly aware of being the one who wrote The Book of the Courtier published in 1528; clearly not the same man. The artist Castiglione was a tempestuous character, always losing his temper and getting into fights. He tried to throw his sister off a roof and is said to have committed murder; perhaps more importantly for his artistic career, when he was at the height of his popularity in Genoa, he slashed to shreds a painting commissioned for the Doge of Venice, and fled the city in which he was born and trained. He seems to have been self-sabotaging at every opportunity, and there are easy parallels to be found with Caravaggio (1571/2–1610), with whose equally turbulent life he just overlapped. He never achieved the position or popularity he deserved, but in the 18th century his work was rediscovered, and became a particular inspiration to Giambattista Tiepolo. In 1762, George III acquired a group of 250 sheets by Castiglione from which the current exhibition is drawn — the first major show to be devoted to the artist in this country.

There are some 90 prints and drawings on display, and I have to say at once that there are too many, with too little variation. Castiglione is in many ways a fascinating artist: he was the first Italian to discover the etchings of Rembrandt, and in the 1630s he invented the monotype, that ultra-modern-seeming combination of painting and printing put to such great use by Degas. He also made remarkable large oil-on-paper drawings that were not intended as preparatory studies but as finished works in their own right. All these things are of great interest, but because of an injudicious selection of work, their impact is diminished.