In Corsica: Musée Fesch, Ajaccio

By Dr Kathleen Olive

Ajaccio, the administrative capital of Corsica, is a lovely place to visit. Its small museums are interesting and its daily market of fruit, vegetables and local products is held in a sunny square directly alongside the harbour. You can walk to the beach for a swim from the town centre, and even a short drive will bring you out from the suburbs and through breath-taking panoramas of craggy red cliffs, Corsica’s iconic aromatic maquis or Mediterranean scrub, and blue, blue seas.

Oh, and Ajaccio is also home to the largest collection of Italian paintings in all of France.

THE PRIMATE OF THE GAULS AND HIS PAINTINGS

That’s a remarkable achievement, if you think about the embarrassment of Italian riches in the Louvre, and it’s thanks to Napoleon’s uncle, Joseph Fesch (1762-1839). The half-brother of Napoleon’s mother, and only seven years older than his nephew, Joseph was born in Ajaccio, studied at the Seminary of Aix in the 1780s and became archdeacon of Ajaccio cathedral chapter. He fled to France with most of the family in the turbulent 1790s – when Corsica joined France’s revolutionary fervour, led by statesman Pasquale Paoli – and by 1796 had abandoned his ecclesiastical career to accompany Napoleon into Italy as an army supply contractor.

Italy was in crisis, swept up for most of the eighteenth century in the nationalistic programs of France, Austria and – finally – the Savoy kingdom. Its religious institutions and aristocratic families, for centuries the great patrons of art, found their material wealth – paintings, sculptures, manuscripts and more – in danger. The French and Austrians alike “suppressed” minor churches and monasteries, closing them and centralising their possessions – or selling them off entirely. Later, aristocrats faced new national taxes that forced them to sell their collections. The art market in nineteenth-century Italy was dynamic and, oftentimes, murky.

His time in Italy allowed Joseph Fesch to capitalise – quite literally – on his taste for Italian art. Clearly very familiar with Giorgio Vasari’s foundational Lives of the Italian Artists, a sixteenth-century treatise that still informs how we admire and value much of Western art, he began to purchase high quality artworks in enormous quantities. The unsettled times ensured that he acquired many for a fraction of their value at their time, and it’s estimated that he ended up with 30,000 works across his various properties.

By 1800 Fesch had returned to the Church, a useful place for him to serve his newly-imperial family, and in 1802 he was nominated Archbishop of Lyon. This was a powerful position: since 1079, recognising Lyon’s position as capital of the Three Gauls of the Roman empire, whoever held the seat of Lyon was also known as the Primate of the Gauls. Three years later Fesch was a cardinal, and sent back to Rome as Minister Plenipotentiary to the Holy See.

THE POLITICS OF A COLLECTION

This was a thankless post, putting Fesch directly at the coalface of negotiations between the pope and Napoleon. He was deeply opposed to his nephew’s position, refusing the archbishopric of Paris in protest and instead opening a French church council with a statement of loyalty to the pope. While there would be consequences as the result of Fesch’s stance, at the very least he was back at the centre of the Italian art market. His collection grew ever more.

Eventually, Fesch’s resistance became an embarrassment to his nephew and he retired to his archbishopric in Lyon. When France was invaded and the empire fell, he fled to Rome. Despite French pleas to strip Fesch of his cardinalate, the pope would not comply and Joseph Fesch was still archbishop of Lyon at the time of his death in 1839.

In the last years of his life, Fesch gave much thought to what would happen to his significant personal collection of objects. His will provided for an Imperial Chapel, a classicising burial place incorporating a significant amount of local marble. It also gave funds for the construction of an art academy, so that apt pupils could study a collection of 1,000 of his Italian paintings at close hand; more than 800 of these were endowed in Fesch’s lifetime.

But the cardinal’s heir, Joseph Bonaparte, did not have the same appreciation for his uncle’s collection. He decided to sell a number of works earmarked for Ajaccio, sent others to Paris, and “relegated” yet more (that he considered of inferior value) to the island academy. Reconstructing the fate of Cardinal Fesch’s collection has taken scholars more than a century, but it reveals the extent of his connoisseurship and shows how the value of Italian art has changed over time.

Before his death, for example, Fesch decided to sell one of his paintings. Now in the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, the Dormition of the Virgin is a lovely work of tempera and gold on panel, and it is now considered to be one of the great Giotto’s most important works. No one would dream of selling it now.

RENAISSANCE MASTERS UP CLOSE

While Giotto is often called the Father of the Italian Renaissance in painting, it’s Masaccio who delivered the baby full term. The spatial coherence, anatomical attention and consistent approach to light and shade of his work makes it remarkably naturalistic for the 1420s. Cardinal Fesch owned two panel paintings by Masolino, Masaccio’s closest colleague and his collaborator on the landmark frescoes in Florence’s Brancacci Chapel. But after Fesch’s death, St Jerome and John the Baptist and Pope Gregory the Great and St Matthias were sold, and they are now in London’s National Gallery.

Cardinal Fesch knew his stuff – you almost wonder if he had Vasari’s Lives by heart. He owned Fra Angelico’s spectacular Last Judgement in an International Gothic style: lavish, elegant, courtly and colourful. Vasari describes the painting in his Lives, which is perhaps how Fesch recognised it, but it was sold in his lifetime and is also now in Berlin’s Gemäldegalerie.

It seems most unlikely that Fesch’s heir had the same breadth of art historical knowledge as his uncle. Joseph Bonaparte “relegated” a lovely Madonna and Child with Angel to the Ajaccio museum (and it is still there), but his cardinal-uncle was enough of a connoisseur to correctly identify this painting as a work by a young Sandro Botticelli, still under the gentle influence of his master Filippo Lippi.

It’s a rare experience to get so close to a work by Botticelli without crowds all around you. Even better, in Ajaccio’s Musée Fesch you can set Botticelli’s work directly in the context of his colleagues, a change from The Great Museums where he is usually shown in splendid isolation. In Ajaccio, step from this early work to any of the handful by his popular contemporary Jacopo del Sellaio, a skilful painter who also trained with Filippo Lippi. Comparing the two reveals how a less technically proficient work – yes, I mean the painting by Botticelli! – can nevertheless be more masterful than one following all the rules to the letter (Jacopo del Sellaio).

THE CONNOISSEUR’S EYE

Identification of this early Botticelli is not the only tour-de-force that Fesch’s learning and eye permitted. He was sure that a Pietà, still in Ajaccio’s Musée Fesch, was a rare smaller-scale painting by none other than Michelangelo. The jury is still out on that – but not on Fesch’s attribution to Michelangelo of an unfinished Entombment, now a celebrated work in London’s National Gallery. Fesch owned that painting at one point, too.

My favourite identification by Fesch is his attribution of a painted table top as two halves of Leonardo da Vinci’s unfinished St Jerome. He had the table restored back into a sole painting but after his death it was sold to the Vatican, where you’ll still see it. The Musée Fesch in Ajaccio still owns a lovely Virgin and Child holding a pomegranate by Leonardo’s fellow student and friend, the vastly underrated Lorenzo di Credi. Look closely and you’ll see how it is connected to the milieu of Leonardo.

Fesch had an eye for badly treated masterworks. You may know Carpaccio’s Venetian Ladies in Venice’s Museo Correr, long thought to be a portrait of two bored courtesans. Fesch owned a scene of the same dimensions, showing patrician young men hunting in the Venetian lagoon. Sold and later acquired by the Getty, it has now been definitively identified as a pendant to the Correr’s Ladies. These two panels of a decorative cupboard don’t show courtesans: they present us with two expensively dressed aristocrats, awaiting the return of their husbands from a hunt.

Of course, Fesch was still taking punts and he did get some of them wrong. He owned at least two works by Raphael. One of these is The Mond Crucifixion now in London’s National Gallery, a work betraying the young artist’s indebtedness to his master Perugino. (Ajaccio has a lovely Head of a Saint by Perugino.) Alas, this sublime work of colour, symmetry and spiritual harmony was sold from Fesch’s collection and the “Raphael” retained for Ajaccio is now considered inauthentic.

A CORSICAN LEGACY

The cardinal’s taste stretched to Italy’s so-called minor schools – the Musée Fesch still owns a work by Cosmé Tura, an artist associated with fifteenth-century Ferrara whose reputation is still primarily known in academic circles only. The Ajaccio museum also contains lovely works from the Venetian school: a serene Madonna and Child by a young Giovanni Bellini; a moody Portrait of a Man with a Glove, by Bellini’s pupil Titian or workshop.

One of the collection’s saddest losses is Giorgione’s Adoration of the Shepherds. Known as the Allendale Nativity, it is a peerless work by an artist whose paintings are today in short supply. It was sold after the cardinal’s death and is now a key work in Washington’s vast National Gallery.

When it came to art, Fesch was a true catholic: he owned at least two works by Jan van Eyck, one of which might have been the celebrated Lucca Madonna now in Frankfurt’s Stadel Museum. He had an impressive Dutch collection too and had a taste for landscapes by Poussin. So why were so many of Fesch’s beloved paintings sold, even in his own lifetime?

The cardinal bought many works as part of job lots, with a lot of filler padding out the undisputed masterpieces. Fesch offloaded a lot of that dross himself. And Joseph Bonaparte just wasn’t his uncle: he sent an unfortunate number of fakes to Ajaccio – a “Raphael”, a “Guido Reni”, a “Titian” – and had no personal appreciation for the so-called “Primitives” of the Early Renaissance. If they had been retained for Ajaccio, these would now make it one of the most priceless collections in the world.

Still, it bears to remember that Cardinal Joseph Fesch’s collection is thought to have numbered 30,000 paintings. Ajaccio’s Musée Fesch does retain a priceless collection, regardless: Fesch donated 843 masterworks for his academy before he died, and more subsequently made their way into the collection. Opened in 1852, its four floors and storage facilities contain the largest collection of Italian paintings in France.

And so, the Musée Fesch in Ajaccio remains a highlight of any trip to Corsica’s pleasant harbourside capital.