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Sunday, April 29, 2007
Judith and Holofernes--two paintings
An experiment:
When the weekend rolls around, I'll post depictions of the same subject by two different artists and ask for comments or (even better!!) submissions for posts regarding their similarities/differences.
Something provocative, I sense, should kick things off. It's difficult to think of two more provocative works than these. Click on the images to enlarge them:
Caravaggio's Judith and Holofernes (ca. 1598)
Artemisia Gentileschi's Judith and Holofernes (1612-21)
For a quick overview of the relevant events from the book of Judith (which, for my Protestant readers, is in the Apocrypha), here is the Wikipedia entry; and here are the texts of chapters 11, 12, and 13.
National Gallery online exhibitions of Baroque art
Jusepe de Ribera, The Martyrdom of Saint Bartholomew, 1634
The homepage of the National Gallery in Washington, DC, currently features an online exhibition of paintings from 17th-century Spanish painters. In addition to the Ribera you see above, the exhibition features works by Juan van der Haben y León, Zurbarán, Velázquez, and Murillo. All these paintings are presented beautifully and are well worth a half-hour or so of your time to see.
Other NGA online exhibitions of Baroque art and artists appear below the fold.
Rijkmuseum desktop widget
Amsterdam's home of some of the greatest paintings of the Dutch Baroque has what it calls the "Rijkswidget": it allows Mac and PC users to see a different painting from the collection each day.
Nifty . . . or it would be if, that is, my computer and the museum were on speaking terms--which they aren't, at the moment.
Correction: It's working now, and the first image is this one, Rembrandt's The Prophetess Anna.
Tuesday, April 24, 2007
Art, or art history? Painting, or sculpture?
Top: Bernini, Bacchanal: A Faun Teased by Children
Bottom: Poussin, Bacchanal before a Statue of Pan
Though not about Baroque art per se, Conrad Roth of Varieties of Unreligious Experience has up a thoughtful, closely-argued post addressing just these questions. Roth arrives at a couple of (for me) surprising conclusions, the money quotes of which are below.
Roth notes that, traditionally, painting has been held in higher regard than sculpture because art criticism tends to work from reproductions--engravings or drawings--and paintings naturally will suffer less from 2-dimensional renderings than sculptures will. But consider this:
For [Johann Gottfried] Herder, . . . mere visual sensation is inadequate to an understanding of space, and therefore of Being: 'sight is but an abbreviated form of touch. The rounded form becomes a mere figure, the statue a flat engraving. Sight gives us dreams, touch gives us truth'. Sculpture is greater than painting because it is not confined, as painting is, to the image, to the eye—in Platonic terms, its subject is truth, not dreams or impressions. It cannot be reduced to a series of views, 'dismembered into a pitiful polygon'. Where the painter merely depicts, the sculptor, like God fashioning Adam, creates. The spiritual power of sculpture, as Herder explains towards the end of his treatise, is witnessed by primitive idol-worship; the ancients were aware, he thinks, that the statue must always be an image of the soul, of the world of Forms, bodied forth.
But then Roth expresses his own preference in sculpture for "the unfinished, fragmentary and deliquescent," because
in being (or appearing) incomplete, these sculptures call into question the primacy of the eye. If visual beauty arises from perfect form, these works decline such standards; rather they invite the mind to complete them—what Gombrich called the 'beholder's share'. The intellect, not the eye, is entertained. And this intellectual sculpture, this 'virtual' sculpture, cannot be considered in terms of views or images, not even three-dimensional ones. It cannot even be visualised—to do so is to compromise, to break the spell, just for a moment. It is, in fact, very much like another sort of intellectual construction: the castle of words, which must, again, remain ever incomplete.
Is it any surprise, then, that I, who prize the intellectual above the visual, the unseen above the seen—I, who greedily want my share of the work—should prefer the history of art to art itself?
I personally don't know how to articulate where I stand on these matters, but I'll give it a preliminary try.
Sunday, April 22, 2007
Rembrandt, Portrait of a Young Man
In its gallery, it is not front and center on the wall directly opposite the entrance, as you might expect. It hangs on one of the shorter walls, and then not even in the center of that wall. It's in a semi-shadowy corner, in fact, the sitter's white collar being the first thing to catch the visitor's eye there in its penumbra. (Note: the actual painting is not quite this dark.) You almost have to be looking for it to see it: an odd thing to say about a museum's choice in hanging a Rembrandt.
As a general rule, portraits leave me a bit cold. I don't know these people; why should they hold my attention? Of course, there are exceptions, and those I will happily stand in front of, trying to get to know them--it is, after all, as though they have introduced themselves to me, rather than myself to them. I think that's the initial paradox of this painting for me: off in the corner like a wallflower in the Dutch Baroque gallery, as though intimidated by the older, more-worldly man in the 3/4-length Hals in the same room, it's Rembrandt's young man that I want to spend time in front of. The Hals, as good as it is, is dead to me--just another portrait. No offense, sir. Even so, the intensity of the young man's gaze is such that I have to move away from it for a while and then come back to it.
Why is that?
Rembrandt has used the butt end of his brush to make incisions in the still-wet paint of the hair to provide a richer sense of texture.This is certainly true, but it's not what I'm drawn to when I approach the painting for a closer look. What I notice is that Rembrandt also used that butt-end to create a slight depression in his subject's pupils, giving them a 3-dimensional quality. It's the sitter's white collar that initially catches my eye; it's his eyes that hold it.
Tiny wells, "just" minute displacements of pigments on the canvas, nevertheless draw me into the sitter's mind and heart and not just look at his face. I have no choice but to look at this fellow and take seriously his steady, quiet, confident optimism. Whether student, graduate or aspiring artist, Rembrandt certainly seems to take him seriously as well.
But here's where looking at this painting becomes not merely an aesthetic experience but a personal one for me. As so many have said regarding Rembrandt's self-portraits, the directness, the honesty of this fellow's gaze has the effect of not just regarding the viewer but implicitly putting a question to him/her: "And you? What have you to say about your spent time?" A good question, and one that, depending on the day, can be an uncomfortable one to consider. You can't rebut this fellow: he will always be quietly confident, optimistic, damn him. His life remains perpetually ahead of him. But what about yours?
What else to do, then, but promise to amend your life?
Thursday, April 19, 2007
Jonathan Janson, Lover of the Baroque
Randall Sherman of Musings from the Hinterland has up a friendly nod toward this blog (thank you, sir) and a pleasant remembrance of an exhibit of Rembrandt etchings at the St. Louis Museum of Art from last year. His choice of Rembrandt etching reminds me that I should probably be walking my dog instead of posting this. But never mind that.
Randall also posts a link to REMBRANDT:
life, paintings, etchings, drawings & self portraits, an attractive site by Jonathan Janson, who, I learned when I visited, is also responsible for the extraordinary site Essential Vermeer. But, good to know as that is, I learned after a little more poking about his site (sorry, Scruffy, we'll be going soon) that Janson is also a working artist whose work is powerfully influenced by Dutch Baroque art. Have a look in particular at these amusing but respectful Vermeer parodies.
In short, Janson's various sites are well worth the visit if you have read this far. I know that I'm looking forward to looking more closely.
I hear you, Scruffy. We can go now.
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Baroque art and architecture in Latin America
The cathedral in Mexico City, begun in 1567.
Those interested in an introductory discussion of how the Baroque manifested itself in Latin America will benefit from reading "The Angel with the Arquebus: Baroque Art in Latin America" by Miguel Rojas Mix. The whole piece is well worth reading, but the following, the concluding paragraph, sums up nicely:
Baroque art in Latin America is not a mere transposition of Spanish or Portuguese art. It is a hybrid art. And it embraces more than two cultures, for along with the Spanish tradition it received the Arab heritage in the form of the mudejar style. It is said that the Indian contribution is shown in a preference for a range of pure colours and in the use of abstraction in the portrayal of figures. But the Black influence can also be seen, both in the dark complexion of angels and Virgins and in the syncretism of African gods with the traditional Christian saints. A marvellously enriched style emerged from all these influences, the style of an art that was fundamental to a new world. Such is the art we know as "Latin American Baroque'.
Rojas Mix's article, by the way, originally appeared in the September 1987 issue of the UNESCO Courier, the entire issue of which (contents here) is devoted to discussions of Baroque art, architecture, music, literature and thought from throughout Europe and Latin America. If the titles of the articles are any indication, there's much to learn on those pages.
Sunday, April 15, 2007
Why the Baroque? One response
I'm one of those I-know-what-I-like-but-can't-quite-tell-you-why kinds of writers, but it seems to me that if I am going to have a blog devoted to one style of art I should try to articulate in some way why I want one--and why for Baroque art, a whole ocean and 300 years removed from my degree-conferred area of expertise (20th-century American literature). So, it seems appropriate to post some apologias here from time to time until I can whip up my own manifesto. What follows appears to me a very good way to begin that collection of apologias.
Richard John Neuhaus, in this brief review of R.A. Scotti's book Basilica: The Splendor and the Scandal of Building St. Peter's, quotes the following passage from that book:
The Baroque is to art what opera is to music–the elevation of pathos; a spectacle of color, emotion, and drama; fantasy rising to frenzied ecstasy. Bernini’s Baroque was art designed to serve religion, and more specifically to serve the needs of the Counter-Reformation.
Whether it was contrived to meet a clear purpose or whether it was a spontaneous expression, it fulfilled the mandate of the resurgent Church. The static perfection of the Renaissance was the art of the elite. The hot, intense Baroque was art to move the masses. It was popular art in the truest sense–cinematic special effects without a camera lens.The (in)applicability of this observation to the Dutch and Flemish Baroque artists is a topic for another day, but it's hard not to agree with its rightness when applied to the Italians. Equally spot-on is the notion of the (Italian) Baroque's intent to inspire religious fervor in the viewer.
Comments welcome, of course.
Caravaggio as "underworld painter"
Rather than merely torture visitors to this blog with my own insipid observations about great works of art, I'll also be pointing them to folks much better at writing about these things than I am. One of those is John Berger, in this piece on Caravaggio. Below is his comment on one of my favorite Caravaggios, The Calling of St. Matthew (which Berger would later rewrite a bit for his book Ways of Seeing.
'The Calling of St. Matthew' depicts five men sitting round their usual table, telling stories, gossiping, boasting of what one day they will do, counting money. The room is dimly lit. Suddenly the door is flung open. The two figures who enter are still part of the violent noise and light of the invasion. (Berenson wrote that Christ comes in like a police inspector to make an arrest.)
Two of Matthew's colleagues refuse to look up, the other two younger ones stare at the strangers with a mixture of curiosity and condescension. Why is he proposing something so mad? Who's protecting him, the thin one who does all the talking? And Matthew, the tax-collector with a shifty conscience which has made him more unreasonable than most of his colleagues, points at himself and asks: is it really I who must go? Is it really I?
How many thousands of decisions to leave have resembled Christ's hand here! The hand is hold out towards the one who has to decide, yet it is ungraspable because so fluid. It orders the way, yet offers no direct support. Matthew will get up and follow the thin stranger from the room, down the narrow streets, out of the district. He will write his gospel, he will travel to Ethiopia and the South Caspian and Persia. Probably he will be murdered.
And behind the drama of this moment of decision is a window, giving onto the outside world. In painting, up to then, windows were treated either as sources of light, or as frames framing nature or an exemplary event outside. Not so this window. No light enters. The window is opaque. We see nothing. Mercifully we see nothing because what is outside is threatening. It is a window through which only the worst news can come; distance and solitude.
Las Meninas: Some places to visit
It's easy to become obsessed with Velázquez's magnificent painting. Speaking for myself, it first fascinated me on an intellectual level when I was introduced to it via Foucault's intricate discussion of it (here is an abstract) in the opening chapter of The Order of Things). The emotional connection came later: One day I realized that my younger daughter, when she was younger, is (or was) the spitting image of the Infanta Margarita, right down to the rather coy, even impish turn of the head.
For some time now, I've also been using this painting in classes to raise questions of just what happens when a viewer stands in front of a painting: Las Meninas, we come to realize, makes explicit what we tend to forget when we're looking at most paintings, that the painting creates a space into which the viewer enters vicariously. I've even used the painting as a way of trying to articulate the complicated reading and authorial perspectives in Mark Z. Danielewski's Baroque-styled postmodern novel, House of Leaves. That novel has a good bit of textual figure-ground confusions, just as Las Meninas, explicitly extending its space outward to include the viewer, creates more than a little disorientation in the viewer who contemplates it.
See what I mean?
All this is to say that it'd be very easy to keep a blog devoted just to this one painting. Indeed, I contemplated doing just that, once upon a time, but in the end I decided that that would be a wee bit excessive: I already use it enough in my teaching life that it doesn't need to have more room than it does here in my blogospheric life. This entry, which I'll also post a permanent link to over in the Sites of Interest, will eventually serve as both a happy medium and as, I hope, a service to others with an interest in this painting. As I and others run across sites that, to my mind, contribute to our thinking about Las Meninas, I'll add links to them here.
Housekeeping
Welcome to visitors to this site, first and foremost. We hope you feel welcomed here and will feel that you have a home where you can indulge your tastes in these wonderful artists and their works. The virtual fatted calf is out back; we'll be bringing him round directly.
Two things:
The first is that, through trial and error, I think we have a Labels system that makes sense. As the blog grows, though, we'll have to work out some solution for its eventual unwieldy length. But that hasn't happened yet. First things first.
The other thing is that you can now subscribe to this blog's feed via FeedBlitz. This system allows you to receive e-mail notifications of updates to this blog: definitely a plus in these early days of this blog, given that it's not likely that lots of posting will be going on here. If you like what you find here, I hope you'll consider subscribing by clicking on this link and, even, using it for your own sites as an augmentation of whatever subscription service(s) you use.
So. That's that. I look forward to continuing to grow this blog my and others' contributions and your visits; I hope you'll come back and let others know about us.
UPDATE: A third thing, now: A slight adjustment to the title, from "Admirers of" to "Admiring." What matters more here is the act of admiring, not who is doing the admiring. So there.
UPDATED UPDATE: An enormous thank-you to Hackosphere for two elegant hacks for the not-so-Beta Blogger that this blog, I hope you'll agree, is benefiting from: one for expandable posts, and one that displays recent comments (this last being especially helpful because Blogger, once again, is NOT emailing me notifications when someone comments). Anyway, I strongly encourage those looking for these and other hacks for the new Blogger templates to try Hackosphere first.
Saturday, April 14, 2007
"Blinded by the Light"
Via Raminagrobis, this brief, sharply-observed post on two paintings by Rembrandt, Anna and the Blind Tobit and A Man Seated Reading at a Table in a Lofty Room, which hang in the same room in the National Gallery in London.
Solitude is the unifying theme of these two paintings. Tobit's blindness isolates him from his wife Anna, and he prays for death ("for it is profitable for me to die rather than to live […] turn not thy face away from me." Tobit 3:6). The reader (or is he a writer? Is that a pen in his left hand?) hunched over his desk, withdrawn fully within the ‘little world’ oblivious to those symbols of the ‘big world’ on the right: what looks like two globes, barely visible in the gloom. The function of the light here, it seems to me, is paradoxically not to draw the eye ‘outside’, but to involve it more deeply in the darkness.More follows, on the relationship between blindness and writing.
"Art to See Before You Die"
Via Crooked Timber comes news that the Guardian has started a blog on the arts. In its inaugural post on art, Jonathan Jones has a post called "The works of art that matter most," its intention being the generation of a list of the 50 works of art one must see in person before dying. Jones kicks things off with his personal list of 20 works (the list and an accompanying slideshow are below the fold), and he solicits recommendations from his readers. He notes as a sort of pre-emptive strike that his list is exceedingly Euro-centric and Renaissance/Baroque-heavy; still, though, he says that these are the works that he alsways finds himself returning to--which, I suppose, would be the one criterion for works for this list. Not fame, not "beauty;" what works, finally, can you not get enough of, no matter how many times you see them?
Jones includes a Vermeer on his list, but my personal addition would be the one you see here, The Milkmaid. Long, long ago, I blogged about this painting, if you're curious, here and here in an attempt to get at why it may be my favorite Vermeer and one of my very favorite paintings, period.
Honestly, though, I'd have to think a bit before I add some others. I mean, we all have our personal favorites, but do we feel so strongly about them that we would have the temerity to insist to total strangers that they will be lesser human beings if they do not make time to see them in person? I'm pretty sure I can say that about The Milkmaid.
How about you? Jones is soliciting suggestions at his post, but you're welcome to comment here or, even better, take a hint from this post's title.
Below the fold, a slideshow and list of Jones's selections.
A quick visit with Las Meninas
One of my favorite personal blogs is 327 Market, which I seem to recall having learned of via Ariel's blog, Bittersweet Life. The writer may or may not be named Camille, but for convenience's sake we'll assume it is. She lives and teaches art and publishes her own work in a place that in some way corresponds to the Bay Area but to which she's assigned her own place names. And she often includes marvelous pictures that she or friends of hers have taken. There's a whimsical, urban-fairy-tale-like quality to the world her blog documents that keeps me visiting and reading.
Context, context. Sorry. But way DOES lead on to way.
This morning I came across her most recent post, in which she describes the circumstances surrounding the accompanying picture. I'll not rehash all that; go read the whole thing, as we say here on the Internets. But what follows is most of my comment that I left there.
I'll believe that you didn't plan it. The thing about Art, though, is that when the artist sees something in his/her work that wasn't planned but it improves the composition, s/he has the good sense to leave it in. It's harder to say this about Las Meninas (or painting in general) because of the medium, but it occurs to me now that the same rule applies--and that Velázquez is even commenting on it in his painting. On the left, the painter himself, palette and brush in hand, gazing at us with his critical, calculating painter's eye at the no-doubt-stiffly-sitting King and Queen . . . balanced on the far right by the little girl doing something I'm pretty sure she's NOT been asked to do.
There's more to say, of course, about the geometric connotations of that word "calculating," and some have done so to such an extent that I don't feel the need to. Besides: I'm more the "oh, look at the pretty picture!!" sort of viewer, anyway. So I'll just conclude this not-terribly-profound post by saying something else equally-lacking in profundity: Sure: Velázquez probably used grail geometry as a way of arranging the figures in this painting; so also, probably, did Vermeer. But, you know, so also, probably, did any number of Baroque-era painters, along with any number of poets of the time, along with Shakespeare and Donne and others you could find in your friendly neighborhood Norton Anthology, who wrote sonnets. To which I can only say, those features, those calculating frames are not why we keep looking at/reading certain people's work. There is something else, another sort of calculating, that exists beyond angles and rhyme schemes, the sort of sensibility that can see, in real life, a little girl's casual act of stepping on a dog and say, "That's going into a painting"--and then make it feel in Art like the casual act it originally was.
Velazquez, The Supper at Emmaus
As an option for their research papers, students can write about some paintings of their choosing by a painter of my choosing: the idea (the hope, actually) is for them to choose paintings that have something in common and offer and support an opinion about what they think the painter wants to convey via this whatever-it-is that recurs in the paintings they've chosen. So today, I talked through how that might work by showing them three paintings by Velázquez (who, by the way, isn't on their list of painters). Two of them, Las Meninas and Venus at Her Mirror, I've posted images of before and so won't here, but the third one is 
this one, The Supper at Emmaus. They are very different, to my mind, in terms of style, but what they have in common, and what we as a class have spent time discussing, is the presence of mirrors in each. We spend some time speculating as to why Velázquez has them in these paintings, functioning, as they do, as something more than mere detail; we've also meditated a bit on what mirrors themselves do and so begin to get at the implications of words such as "reflection" and "image." Ultimately, though, the goal has been simply to model for them how to get started on this task of writing about the paintings they've chosen.
Anyway, in the course of discussing The Supper at Emmaus this morning, a student said something interesting that I found interesting about a possible theological reading of the painting.
Doorsien, and why Vermeer doesn't employ it
I should alert you from the beginning that what follows probably isn't going to set the art history world ablaze. It's just one of those "ah-ha!" moments that, for me at least, gives me a handle on thinking about a painter whose works I love and, as long-time readers know, have posted about before.
Doorsien is a Dutch word that literally means "plunge through." Here is a description of how doorsien works, from Karel van Mander's 1604 book, The Painter's Book:
Our composition should enjoy a fine quality, for the delight of our sense, if we there allow a view [insien] or vista [doorsien] with small background figures and a distant landscape, into which the eyes can plunge. We should take care sometimes to place our figures in the middle of the foreground, and let one see over them for many miles. (quoted in Hollander, An Entrance for the Eyes: Space and Meaning in Seventeenth-Century Dutch Art, 8
In my Humanities class on Wednesday, I spent a little time talking about doorsien in relation to this painting
by Pieter de Hooch, The Linen Closet. Those of you who actually click on the "Read More" buttons you see in the posts here might remember my having blogged about this painting not long ago.More below the fold.
Velazquez, Venus at Her Mirror
I have been surrounded by art these past few days. On Friday, I led the discussion on the topic "The 'Work' of Art" that I mentioned a couple of posts below this one. Mrs. Meridian and I have begun to frame some posters that I've had for a couple of years and were threatening to become permanent cylinders. And a couple of days ago, Mrs. Meridian and I spent an enjoyable couple of hours at Bookaholic, a local used bookstore in Wichita. Among my finds was this Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition catalogue of its 1989 Velazquez exhibition. Sorry, no pic available at Amazon, but the cover is a close-up of this painting, 
Prince Baltasar Carlos as a Hunter. This catalogue is absolutely beautiful: great pictures, very informative text. And, hey: $12.
Long-time readers of this blog know that one painting in particular that I return to again and again (and not just in this blog, either) is Velazquez's Las Meninas. But, aside from Foucault's famous chapter on that painting in The Order of Things and a less-than-half-remembered biography of Velazquez for children that I read when I was in elementary school, I know very little about Velazquez. So, rather than remain like the "admirer" of someone's work who actually just knows the song that ALWAYS gets played on the radio, I snatched up the catalogue and have been reading through the introductory essays.
More below the fold.
First post
Greetings.
I think this blog's title is self-explanatory as regards what its purpose is. The goal, though, may be less obvious. I hope this place will attract readers and (even better) contributors who know a little something about the subject and are willing to join in whatever conversations might emerge here.
The first few posts will be from my "home" blog, Blog Meridian, where I've shared some unlearned observations about, in particular, Vermeer and Velázquez in past posts. I hope someone will see them and say, "Heck--I can do better than that," and will drop me a line to that effect. I'll happily sign you up as a contributor.
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