A Note from the Curator
Celebrating 40 Years
Over the course of 40 years, generations of Loyolans and a host of supporters have come to refer affectionately to the art collection begun by Father Donald Rowe, S.J., as “the D’Arcy.” Street banners now herald its ruby anniversary with three words: inspiring, uplifting, transcending. From the outset, Father Rowe’s intention was to acquaint students with the power and beauty of original works of art. For decades, students studied and relaxed in the company of art when the collection was housed in Loyola’s Cudahy Library, its presence (often silently) inspiring generations to look beyond the immediate demands of schoolwork and daily life. Countless Chicagoans have adopted the collection as their own, finding the D’Arcy’s intimacy uplifting. In 2007 the collection was transferred to LUMA on the Water Tower Campus. There in a suite of vibrantly colored galleries, an even larger audience is invited to transcend the mundane and quotidian through art. The three italicized words are not hollow boasts but an assertion of the power of art, and of the D’Arcy in particular, to enrich our lives.
Like so many American museum collections, the D’Arcy has triumphantly exceeded its modest initial goals. When Father Rowe opened the Martin D’Arcy Gallery in 1969, a single painting, Madonna and Child–at the time thought to be the work of Giovanni Bellini–constituted the entire collection. Yet 40 years later, the computerized database now contains 323 entries, totaling over 500 individual pieces. Did Father Rowe foresee this expansion? Did he aspire to create a matchless collection in which visitors immerse themselves in the creative genius of Christian Europe from the Middle Ages to the early 19th century? For that indeed has been his achievement.
Recognizing the modest means he had with which to build a collection, Father Rowe employed a number of tactics that have contributed to his vision’s success. He avoided disadvantageous competition with larger Chicago institutions; thus, the D’Arcy is primarily a collection of three-dimensional objects. Furthermore, he did not stray into the much more expensive fields of modern and contemporary art, nor did he dilute the collection’s cohesion by collecting non-European art. The 
D’Arcy continues to be governed by these guidelines, though I am keen to make one slight adjustment: to collect works of art made specifically for the Jesuits or under their influence, including works in their missions across the globe, up to the Order’s suppression in 1773. Jesuit commissions were influential in the development of Baroque art in Europe. Indigenous artists in Jesuit missions fused European and local traditions in ways that reveal much about the means of artistic transmission and the visual appeal of western art to other cultures.
As curator, one of my goals is to ensure that scholars learn about the D’Arcy’s holdings and integrate it into their scholarship. Dr. Roland Krischel, a German scholar, illustrated his analysis of mixed media devotional altarpieces with the Crucifixion Altarpiece (1510-1520, Circle of Heinrich Duvermann). In part, he argued that the combination of sculpture and painting in the D’Arcy piece repeats on a small scale the mix of media found in a chapel: a sculpted or cast cross upon an altar standing before a painted altarpiece or against the chapel’s painted walls. Recently, a Toronto-based graduate student alerted me to an Italian scholar’s discovery of a reference to Matthias Stomer’s Christ Among the Doctors in a 1675 inventory of a Sicilian collection. The painting was one of five commissioned by the Prince of Butera. Scholars had previous located three of the five, now dispersed among collections in Houston, San Francisco and Sydney, Australia. In the past month, not only have I been able to advise scholars of the existence of the D’Arcy painting, but my intern, Emily Olsen, has taken the lead among scholars in the pursuit of the missing fifth painting–a hunt that has led to contact with curators in England, France and Russia.
This year will be a busy one for the D’Arcy:
• Thousands will see D’Arcy pieces on exhibition at the Merchandise Mart during the International Antiques Fair over the May Day weekend and hopefully be enticed to visit LUMA.
• While six pieces will be on view at the Art Institute this summer, a dozen pieces celebrating the Renaissance domestic arts will be on loan from the collection of D’Arcy supporters Larry A. and Lynn Janes Schmidt.
• As part of Science Chicago, the city’s year-long celebration of science, an installation at the end of the summer will present a scientific analysis of the
paint layers and techniques employed by Bernardo Lorente German in San Francisco de Borja, a portrait of a Jesuit saint whose identity I only recently established.
• Finally, I invite you, once the museum’s redesigned website is up and running,to search out the monthly highlighted D’Arcy piece. The accompanying text will draw attention to recent scholarship.
Please join us this year in celebration of this remarkable collection and experience for yourself the inspiring, uplifting and transcendent power of the D’Arcy.
Jonathan P. Canning
Martin D’Arcy Curator of Art
Image credits top to bottom:
Follower of Giovanni Bellini, Madonna and Child, ca. 1470 – 80, Italian, oil on panel. Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Morris I. Kaplan, 1960-13; Crucifixion Polyptych, Sculpture: Circle of Heinrich Douvermann, German (Kalkar?), ca. 1520; Painting and frame: Flemish, ca. 1510, oil on panel, carved ash and fruitwood. Bequest of Mr. Thomas F. Flannery, Jr., 1984-01; Matthias Stom or Stomer, Christ Among the Doctors, ca. 1630, Dutch, oil on canvas. Gift of Dr. and Mrs. Thomas J. Stamm, 1983-06