Ready to view at LACMA

A Renaissance bronze bust and an 18th century canvas by an artist considered one of the last representatives of the tradition of Bolognese painting have been acquired by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Ludovico Lombardo’s life-size bust of Lucius Junius Brutus, circa 1550, and the painting “Selene and Endymion,” circa 1770, by Ubaldo Gandolfi -- acquired from art dealers in New York and Paris, respectively -- were installed Friday in LACMA’s European painting and sculpture galleries) after several months of restoration and conservation at the museum. The bust has been in storage for 80 years and has not been seen publicly for at least that long. The dealer is Wildenstein & Co. of New York.

The artworks were purchased with funds from the Ahmanson Foundation, which has a special interest in art from the Middle Ages through the early 19th century and has donated works to the museum since the early 1960s. In 2004, the foundation gave LACMA a life-size plaster sculpture of French philosopher Voltaire by Jean-Antoine Houdon, widely considered Europe’s finest 18th century sculptor.

Along with his artist brother Gaetano and Gaetano’s son Mauro, Lombardo was a member of a small dynasty of Venetian sculptors. Contemporaries of Benvenuto Cellini in Florence, they were members of the school of Recanati, whose foundry in that city produced the bronzes of the basilica of the Santa Casa of Loreto and other large bronze monuments in northern Italy.

According to LACMA, the Gandolfi work is part of a tradition of Bolognese painting that began with the Carraci at the end of the 16th century, blossomed with Guido Reni in the 17th century and ended with the family’s late 18th century work.

“Cellini in Florence always justifiably gets a lot of attention, but there were things happening on the other coast of Italy at the same time, and those were the developments from the school of Recanati,” said Mary Levkoff, LACMA’s curator of European sculpture. “We already have a small bronze relief from that group of artists as well, so unusually enough we are a museum with two objects from the school of Recanati. I know that’s a little bit obscure, but for scholars it’s quite significant.”

Levkoff added that the acquisition is part of the museum’s attempt to strengthen its holdings in Renaissance and medieval sculpture.

“I really was elated to be able to get this sculpture -- I had it on reserve before we reserved the Voltaire, but the timing was such that we were able to acquire the Voltaire first,” she said. “Emotionally and personally for me by far this is one of my favorite acquisitions.”

At the museum, the Gandolfi painting will join another work from the Gandolfi dynasty, Gaetano Gandolfi’s “Study of an Oriental Head for the Marriage at Cana,” a 1982 gift of the Ahmanson Foundation. J. Patrice Marandel, chief curator of LACMA’s Center for European art, said the new acquisition is comparable in scale to other 18th century paintings in the museum’s collection, including Pompeo Batoni’s portrait of Sir Wyndham Knatchbull-Wyndham, or Ludovico Mazzanti’s “Death of Lucretia,” both also gifts of the Ahmanson Foundation.

Marandel said the Ubaldo Gandolfi painting is particularly interesting because it is a night scene. “It is unusual for the artists to represent things in semi-darkness,” Marandel said. “It was nice to bring in a note of quiet. It’s very, very soft, it’s painted in blues and grays, pale yellow, all bathed in the light of the moon.”

Denise Allen, associate curator of the Frick Collection in New York and a specialist in Renaissance and 18th century art, called both acquisitions exciting for LACMA. The mythological painting, she said, strengthens LACMA’s collection of European paintings. “The painting finishes, or ends, a sequence of acquisitions of large-scale paintings of the Baroque period -- it’s an 18th century picture, but it finishes the Baroque tradition in Bologna in the way that Tiepolo finishes it in Venice,” Allen said.

She added that the painting enhances what she calls LACMA’s holdings of “artists one wouldn’t expect,” including 17th century artist Michael Sweerts and Dutch Baroque era painter Gerrit van Honthorst.

She said the bust is significant to the museum’s holding in large-scale sculpture, including the Voltaire piece and Giovanni Bandini’s bust of Cosimo I de’ Medici, circa 1572.

“LACMA is renowned for its collection of small-scale sculpture, it has brilliant terra cotta sculpture from the 18th century, but it also has some remarkable large-scale sculpture, and this bust fits into that,” Allen said. “The collection is being aggrandized in terms of acquisitions in large scale, and it’s something that they really need to do, and they are recognizing that.”