A Visit to Sarasota’s Ringling Museum

It’s both whimsical and serious, though its website is awful. And, Governor DeSantis, don’t mess with its governance.

T he John and Mabel Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota is a rara avis, understood in part by knowing that its founder, John Ringling (1866–1936), was the circus entrepreneur who, with four of his brothers, merged their family-owned circus with Barnum & Bailey Circus. The circus behemoth that emerged defined the genre for decades. The Ringling Museum features a collection of circus memorabilia. No human cannonballs allowed, though — it’s a museum. Housed in a mansion named Cà d’Zan, Venetian dialect for “House of John,” it’s a 56-room mostly pink Venetian Gothic Revival estate that John and his wife, Mabel (1875–1929), completed in 1926. It was to be their dream house in Sarasota, a rising resort, and it’s furnished more or less as they left it, ornate to the nines. A vast wing in back surrounds an open, colonnaded Palladian courtyard. There’s the Asolo Theater, a small theater designed in 1798 and bought by the museum lock, stock, and arabesque cornice from its owners in Asolo in the Veneto and reassembled at the Ringling. It’s still a performance center.

In the last few years, the Ringling built an Asian art pavilion and also a pavilion for contemporary glass. There’s a lush rose garden, too, and a sculpture garden focusing on dwarves, fountains, and — located as the Ringling is on the water — sweeping views of the gulf.

And then there’s the art collection. John had the circus in his blood, which means a Big Top aesthetic. Trapeze, daredevil stunts, magicians, jugglers, elephants, clowns, and giraffes dominated the circus ring. All was very Roman and exotic. At the Ringling, by John’s and Mabel’s design, Cà d’Zan is a show in itself but, indoors, the top of the bill has to be Peter Paul Rubens’s Triumph of the Eucharist, four 14-foot-wide paintings from the late 1620s. Rubens painted them for the Convent of the Descalzas Reales in Madrid, an order of barefoot nuns. The paintings were used as models for tapestries to be woven for the convent.

The four paintings are displayed in a single gallery that has to be one of the most stunning art spaces in America. Putting aside the oddity of barefoot nuns, the subjects themselves are esoteric and circus-appropriate. The jaw goes slack at the sight of Abraham and Melchizedek meeting and, nearby, the triumph of divine love, a comely personification of charity, in a chariot pulled by lions as she vanquishes evil — all framed by painted Solomonic columns.

John’s taste pointed him toward Baroque art — lush, colorful, muscular, dynamic, you-can’t-believe-your-eyes art. Did he buy well? Here and there. Carlo Dolci’s small, oil-on-copper picture of Saint John the Evangelist, from 1647, is very refined. He shares the canvas with his attribute, an eagle, a bird thought to have John’s visionary aptitude since it’s the only creature that can stare into the sun without blinking. This might have appealed especially to John Ringling. Building a museum in so humid a place — nothing in Florida ever dries out — and building it in the South, lacking as it was in high culture, required leaps of vision. In the 1920s, he and his American dealer scoured Europe for good buys. They might have focused too much on good buys since there are lots of copies and studio work in the museum.

Still, there are two nice, small Canaletto views of Venice, from 1750, Anton Raphael Mengs’s serene Dream of Joseph, from 1773, and an immense, full-length portrait of the aristocrat James Joseph Hope-Vere by Henry Raeburn, from 1805. Raeburn is a wonderful painter who was based in Scotland rather than London, so he often missed the spotlight. A lovely Hals portrait from 1639 and, from the 1630s, Still Life with Fighting Monkeys, by Frans Snyders, round out a painting collection heavy on the look of performance, but, hey, John ran a circus.

And then there’s Velázquez’s portrait of Philip IV from the late 1620s, possibly reworked a few years later. John bought it at an auction in 1928, and it’s always had detractors and supporters on the question of whether or not Velázquez painted all of it. It’s got wall power, and I’ve seen it a few times over the years. One problem for the Ringling is that art cognoscenti don’t often visit Sarasota. They don’t like the sun, and it’s Florida, and a circus magnate bought it, so how could it be good enough? I’ve always thought that Velázquez painted it himself. It’s too good to be a studio work or a fake. Curators and academics suffer from groupthink. The late 1980s Met retrospective of Velázquez gave it a green light. A 2015 show at the Grand Palais in Paris hedged.

Technology seems to have come to the rescue. Advanced X-rays show the figure of Philip IV in armor painted under the portrait of him dressed for a fancy cocktail party. Velázquez may’ve reconceived the portrait once he returned from his long sabbatical in Rome in 1629 and 1630. His work when he returned had infinitely more dash and sparkle. Also, the many tweaks in Philip’s position show an artist noodling a complicated problem, something a studio helper wouldn’t have bothered to do. It’s in very good condition, the handling of paint is so much like other Velázquez royal portraits from the 1630s into the ’40s, and his choice of colors is characteristically spruce.

Among John’s idiosyncrasies was a love for ancient Cypriot art, and in mid-October, the Ringling inaugurated its first gallery dedicated to it. It’s splendid. John and Mable owned 3,500 Cypriot antiquities, about a third of their entire art collection. His goal, at least in the 1920s, was the establishment of an encyclopedic collection from antiquities to today. He didn’t do it, since he lost much of his fortune during the Depression.

About 200 works in all are on view in the new Cypriot gallery, but the centerpiece is a crowd of 50 sculptures from a prayer sanctuary site dedicated to Apollo. They range in date from the seventh century b.c. to the first century a.d., so there’s lots of style variation, but since the arrangement suggests a votive site, there’s nothing wrong with abundance.

The Cypriot gallery is the legacy of Luigi Palma di Cesnola, the first director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. More an adventurer and networker than an archaeologist, Cesnola excavated temples and tombs while he was the U.S. consul in Cyprus. Born in Sardinia, he immigrated to America in the 1850s, married well, and was a Medal of Honor recipient for Civil War gallantry. His fame led to his time in Cyprus and his accumulation of thousands of antiquities that he later sold to the very new Met. His connections to the museum and board led to his appointment as director. Known for his large Italian personality, pince-nez, walrus mustache, and cape, he served at the Met for 25 years.

In the 1920s, the Met decided to sell much of the Cypriot art that Cesnola had sold it, siting duplication but knowing that Cesnola’s archaeological methodology and restoration strategies were shady. John bought a huge chunk of what the Met sold. The Ringling is showing the best, which has few if any peers.

Today, the Ringling is in that fevered space between looming disaster and upbeat progress. It wasn’t exactly impoverished the day it opened — John left it $1.2 million — but for years the art galleries were open only haphazardly. John was nearly a bankrupt when he died, and Mildred had died in 1929. His creditors and the State of Florida bickered in court for years over who could get their hands on the art, real estate, and endowment. In 1946, the state prevailed, but did the pols in Tallahassee know much about museum-ing? Wrestling alligators, grapefruit, and land speculation loomed large, but Rubens, Velázquez, and Rococo dwarf sculptures? Not so much.

The appointment of Arthur Everett “Chick” Austin Jr. as the Ringling’s first director had upsides and downsides. Austin was the groundbreaking, savant director of the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford from 1927 to 1944. He bought brilliantly, roaming from Caravaggio and Zurbarán to Picasso and Surrealism, producing avant-garde plays at the museum, and bringing George Balanchine to America. He was fired from the Atheneum in 1944 for his chaotic management style and flings with men — awkwardly, he was married to the board chairman’s daughter. His masters in Tallahassee knew he was flamboyant and famous but not that he was manic. They hired him as director.

Austin loved the circus component of the Ringling since he saw himself as a performance. He was an amateur but very good magician, performing as the Great Osram, Masked Master of Multiple Mysteries. The Ringling was a plaything. Not even the Great Osram could put the Ringling on solid footing or, for that matter, cheat death, which came for Austin in 1957. His biggest success there was purchasing the Asolo Theater.

For years, the problem for the Ringling was basic. Florida didn’t know what to do with it. Deferred maintenance became the norm. By the late 1990s, the building housing the Asolo Theater was condemned. Cà d’Zan wasn’t far behind. The art museum’s roof leaked and leaked badly. Nothing was air-conditioned. Security was of the “remember to lock the doors and close the windows” variety. In 2000, the legislature transferred the management of the Ringling from the secretary of state’s office — remember Katherine Harris of hanging-chad fame in the presidential election of 2000 — to Florida State University. A $42 million appropriation for upgrades and additions followed, along with a $50 million endowment campaign aimed at private donors.

Just when it was thought safe to go in the water, dark clouds appeared overhead and the Jaws music sullied the sweet sea breezes, some thought. This past spring, Governor DeSantis proposed transferring the Ringling’s management from FSU, headquartered in Tallahassee, more than 300 miles north of Sarasota, to New College, the autonomous public college in Sarasota reborn as Florida’s classical college.

There are pluses and minuses to DeSantis’s plan. FSU has nearly 45,000 students, a trove of young minds, and a major audience for a university museum like the Ringling with a very good and broad-based collection. But nearly all these students are in Tallahassee so, for them, the Ringling in Sarasota is an abstraction, the jewel in a crown kept locked in a case. New College has only 700 students, but they’re in Sarasota, in a 1920s building that was once the home of Ringling’s brother and partner, Charlie. Does New College have the capacity to run a museum? Maybe, maybe not. Would the Ringling overwhelm it? I could see New College and the Ringling fighting over fundraising prospects. The relationship between the Ringling and FSU seems to be a positive, functioning one. If something’s not broken, why try to fix it?

The flood of tears shed after the DeSantis proposal — more new water than what fell on Sarasota during Hurricane Milton — doesn’t have much to do with administrative prowess. Cries of “catastrophe” came from left-wingers who hate New College, from the People Will Die crowd who grind their dentures — this is, after all, Florida — whenever they hear that New College is the Southeast’s version of Hillsdale, which I don’t think is the case. The New College’s trustees dumped its woke president, ditched the Gender Studies Department, and canned a few Trot faculty, but that doesn’t mean it’s incapable of running the Ringling Museum. In any event, DeSantis’s money for the handover didn’t make it to the most recent budget that the Florida legislature passed. I hope he lets the effort drop.

In 2024, the Ringling had 406,000 visitors, its best attendance since 2019. Given its many additions, it’s now, in campus size, one of the biggest university museums in the country. Its website is awful and about as easy to use as a bad patient portal at a big-city hospital website. What a marketing and scholarly embarrassment. But the Ringling is still a destination, and it seems to meet the challenge that museums in sunny seaside places have. No one wants to be indoors, except for a few months out of the year, and for that alone, the Ringling’s HVAC system is a boon. It does well with fundraising as Sarasota has grown and attracted more and more rich people.