paul

Heironymous Bosch, The Tree Ma n, detail, pen and ink, The Albertina, Vienna My last post of 2017 shows why ART is a better form of escapism than Star Wars .  Bosch's Tree Man has body of a crab held up by tree trunk legs riding in boats.  The world is not as it expected.  The many who made this fantasy portrait more than 500 years ago still gets more viewers than nearly any other other artist of any time period. Why?  Because he is so much fun. Two exhibitions last year celebrated the 500th anniversary of Heironymus Bosch's death.  One million people were expected to visit two different exhibits, first in the Netherlands, then in Spain. The Prado exhibition was so popular that the museum extended it an extra two weeks and kept the doors open until 10 p.m. The other exhibition had been held earlier that year in Bosch's birthplace, s-Hergotenbosch .     Currently, The National Gallery of Art in Washington has a show of "Dutch Drawings from Bosch t...

Piero di Cosimo, Giuliano da Sangallo  and Francesco Giamberti.   The two-part painting was on loan from Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum recently. An exhibition of Renaissance painter Piero di Cosimo's recently closed at the National Gallery in Washington a few months ago, and it's taken me awhile to develop and express my understanding of him.   Piero di Cosimo: The Poetry of Painting in Renaissance Florence continues a the Uffizi Gallery with a slightly different body of works in Florence, until September 27. It's an interesting look at this quirky painter, someone who was living and working at the same time as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Piero di Cosimo's Allegory,  is part of the National Gallery's own collection.  It is seen as an allegory of overcoming one's animal nature.  Many of my students who wrote reviews of the exhibition dealt entirely with his religious paintings, the subjects you expect to see most often in Renaissance art. Like most Renais...

Jan Van Eyck, Mary, part of the Deesis composition,  detail of The Ghent Altarpiece in St. Bavo's Cathedral, Ghent, Belgium, c. 1430 photo source: Wikipedia The Monuments Men  is a true story about saving cultural artifacts in war.  George Clooney has done a great job acting and directing this film which has an important message about art, what it means for us and the efforts some would go to save culture. One woman who played a huge part in saving art is shown and Cate Blanchett played that role with depth and finesse.   An all-star cast doesn't guarantee good reviews, but I often disagree with movie reviewers.   Matt Damon, Bill Murray and Jean Dujardin star in the movie, too. Tourists in front of the Ghent Altarpiece in recent times. A film, The Monuments Men, explores its theft and recovery in World War II.  Photo source: daydreamtourist.com The star monument is Jan Van Eyck's The Ghent Altarpiece , an example of one of the earliest oil paintings....

Albrecht Dürer , The Head of Christ , 1506 brush and gray ink, gray wash, heightened with white on blue paper overall: 27.3 x 21 cm (10 3/4 x 8 1/4 in.) overall (framed): 50 63.8 4.1 cm (19 11/16 25 1/8 1 5/8 in.) Albertina, Vienna The National Gallery of Art is hosting the largest show of Albrecht Dürer drawings, prints and watercolors ever seen in North America, combining its own collection with that of the Albertina in Vienna, Austria.  Across the street in the museum's west wing is the another exhibition of works on paper, Color, Line and Light: French Drawings Watercolors and Pastels from Delacroix to Signac .  The French drawings are spectacular, but it's hard to imagine the 19th century masters without the earlier genius out of Germany, Dürer, who approached drawing with scientist's curiosity for understanding nature. Albrecht Dürer, Self-Portrait at Thirteen , 1484 silverpoint on prepared paper, 27.3 19.5 cm (10 3/4 7 11/16 in.) (framed): 51.7 43.1 4.5 cm (20 3/8 16...

Last weekend the annual Sydney J. Freedberg Lecture on Italian Art at the National Gallery of Art was "Not a Painting But a Vision."   Andreas Henning, curator from Dresden, Germany, spoke about The Sistine Madonna , a magnificent altarpiece Raphael painted in 1512 which is now in the Dresden State Art Museum.   I have written about it in a previous blog , comparing the Mary of this painting to the  Raphael's lovely image of inner and outer beauty in La Donna Velata . However, as the title suggested, it is painting of a vision and that Mary is not of this world.  She has facial features of that generic beauty similar to those of the Donna Velata , but she is more ethereal and otherworldly.  As much as we may want to reach out and hug the baby Jesus, we can't. The Madonna also carries a tinge of sadness in this image, a practice artists used to reveal Mary recognition that her Son will die someday.  However, two saints, Saint Sixtus and Saint Barba...

Since 1993, Martin Schongauer's 10" x 13" drawing of Peonies has been in the Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Too fragile for permanent display, it may be in the Getty's exhibition of Renaissance Drawings from Germany and Switzerland, 1470-1600, March 27-June 17, 2012. A painting of peonies came up for auction in 1990 under the vague label of Northern Italian. However, a museum curator at the Albertina in Vienna recognized it as an important drawing from about 1472-73 by Martin Schongauer , an artist who lived in Alsace on the French-German border. The drawing, now in the Getty Museum, is a study for the flowers in Madonna of the Rosary , 1473, painted by Schongauer for a church in Colmar (now in France). Albrecht Durer traveled to Colmar to visit Schongauer in 1491, but the great Alsatian master had died by the time 21-year old Durer arrived. Martin's brothers met with him and gave him some of the master's drawings. This drawing may have been one of the drawings ow...

An exquisite of exhibition "mourning" statues at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, have a beauty and realism that give us something to cry about, a phrase Michelangelo used to describe Flemish painting. In the 15th century, Flanders was ruled by the Duke of Burgundy and similarities to the Flemish style of painting can be are apparent in the style of sculptors Jean de la Huerta and Antoine de la Moiturier. They learned their art from the great Claus Sluter, a Netherlandish sculptor who worked in Burgundy. The Dukes of Burgundy had one of Europe's richest courts, in rivalry with the King of France to the west and Holy Roman Empire to the east. The 40 statues line up as if in a funeral procession. At the exhibition, viewers have a chance to see the statues in more completeness and in a more realistic way than in the location they were originally placed, below the bodies of Duke John the Fearless (Jean sans Peur) and his wife, Marguerite. In the current display, th...

St Anthony Torment by the Demons, c. 1487, was painted by Michelangelo when he was only 13. The panel, 18 x 12 inches, is warped as happens to many panels over time. The Torment of Saint Anthony is a small panel painting which was recently discovered to have been painted by Michelangelo in 1487/88. Intensive cleaning in 2008/9 led experts to believe that Michelangelo painted it when he was 12 or 13 years of age. Only four easel paintings by Michelangelo are known, and this one of is in North America, at Fort Worth's Kimbell Art Museum. Michelangelo's St. Anthony looks remarkably calm despite the demons who are scratching him St. Anthony was an early Christian of the 4th century who lived as a hermit for many years. According to his biographer, the rigorous asceticism practiced by St Anthony in the Egyptian desert allowed him to float in the air, where he was attacked by devils trying to beat him to the ground. Anthony defeated these demons on more than one occasion, but n...