The National Gallery by Gabriele Finaldi

Happily, the benevolence continues today. Picture after picture is permitted new life in his company – what you thought you knew turns out to have been insufficient.Īs we go from Singer Sargent to Van Gogh, Finaldi reveals how the entire gallery is a symbol of generosity proliferating across time. Listening to Finaldi talk, that’s particularly a pity.

And, of course, that’s crucial: art and culture don’t traditionally score as highly as they might in lists of charitable causes. His enthusiasm before the pictures – quiet and insistent – is catching: his erudition is an advertisement for the transcendent possibilities of painting. More recently we have Scandinavian pictures.’ There is also talk of expansion, and a commitment to new technologies such as mobile phone services.īut first and foremost, Finaldi is an art historian. So what is the direction of the gallery at the moment? Finaldi observes how the collection has evolved: ‘In the 1980s and Nineties we bought a lot of German Renaissance pictures because we really didn’t have those. ‘My father was a teacher of French and was more interested in music than in art.’ Clearly, it was a cultured family.Īfter studying at the Courtauld Institute, and a ten-year spell as a curator at the National Gallery, Finaldi took up a position at the Prado as deputy director for collections and research, before returning here to take up his current position. ‘My mother developed my passion for art,’ he says. We pass the first picture in the gallery which he came to know: this is Ingres’s Madame Moitessier (1856), which was included as an illustration in an academic essay by his mother. I was pleased Sir Denis Mahon left this one to the National Gallery.’įinaldi grew up in Catford in south London, the son of a Neapolitan father and a half-Polish, half-English mother. He paints as if with butter, and has such a facility for showing quivering flesh – flesh which is alive. ‘Liss died young in the 1631 plague – he’s obviously exceptionally talented. ‘It’s a picture I know well,’ says Finaldi, squinting up at it. It’s called The Fall of Phaeton and was probably painted around 1624.

It turns out to be not a prime candidate like the Velázquez Rokeby Venus – though he has interesting things to say about that – or the Leonardo Virgin on the Rocks, but a picture by a little-known artist called Johann Liss (1595–1631). If you ask Gabriele Finaldi, the director of the National Gallery since 2015, to name his favourite painting in the collection over which he presides, you get a surprising answer. A tour of the National Gallery with its impressive director, Gabriele Finaldi, reveals much about the passion and generosity that enables such institutions to survive and prosper, writes Christopher Jackson

The National Gallery by Gabriele Finaldi