There is no doubting though the continuing impact of paintings such as Whaam! (1963) and Drowning Girl (1963). This show's strength, however, is in stressing how Lichtenstein treated non-Pop Art subjects; for example the nude (Blue Nude, 1995), other art movements from Impressionism (Interior with Waterlilies, 1991) to Surrealism, and even Classical statuary (Laocoőn, 1988). Indeed his post-Pop career can be read as a long experiment into seeing how malleable his style could be and if there was a subject that couldn't be treated with dots, four colours and thick black lines. He even used them for his own sculptures. It meant that there was stylistic progression but also that he was stuck in half a rut and to get out of it he tried to find a way of joining the dots.
A distinctive stylist of a very different sort is on display at the National Gallery. Federico Barocci (1535-1612) belonged to the generation that immediately succeeded the High Renaissance greats and was subsequently overshadowed by them. Michelangelo and Titian were still alive when Barocci was born, while Raphael and Leonardo had been dead for more than a decade. Nevertheless, Barocci became one of the most sought-after artists in Italy, renowned for his extraordinary colour harmonies and humanising conception of religion.
The National Gallery owns only one of his paintings, the Madonna of the Cat from 1575, and most other major European galleries are equally empty; the bulk of his paintings remain in his home region of the Marche. That is a large part of the reason why this remarkable painter is now so little known. Another is that he was almost exclusively a painter of religious subjects and unrelieved altarpieces are not generally to the British taste. Nevertheless, those on show in the exhibition reveal a painter of huge refinement and dedication. He planned his compositions through innumerable drawings and oil sketches so their seeming effortlessness was hard won. Above all, however, he transmitted an authentic religious sensibility that was intended, in the Counter-Reformation age, to speak directly to the souls of the worshippers. His style evoked the delicacy of Correggio with a theatrical sense of movement that prefigured the Baroque. Barocci has been hidden in full sight and this is an exceptional rediscovery.
