Still getting my land-legs from the upheaval of getting the new half-semester started. In the meantime, though, have a look at this: a zoomable image of Andrea Pozzo's magnificent 1685 ceiling painting, La Gloria di Sant'Ignazio.
Hat-tip: Clusterflock.
Sunday, October 28, 2007
Pozzo, (very) up close
Thursday, October 4, 2007
Hiatus
It indeed has been a while. I'm flattered by the rather directly-expressed hopes for new content here, and a bit embarrassed that I just haven't had a real chance to oblige. I want to, though.
Mid-semester tests and grades are next week here. Then a--wait for it--four-day weekend for us. I'll have plenty of time then to look at some pictures and books and think up something to say about them.
Until then, then. And thank you again, loyal visitors.
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Asparagus and Broad Foreheads: Lost Codes, Sensuality, and "Art"
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Adriaen Coorte (c. 1663-after 1707), Still Life (Asparagus) (1697), Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.
Well. A couple of weeks has turned into almost a month, as Robert was kind enough to remind me in comments on the last post--and I am flattered that even one person has missed my posting here. I am not sure that this post will make up for my hiatus from here, but at times one has to work with what one has at hand.
The image you see above appeared a couple of days ago on my computer monitor via the Rijksmuseum's desktop widget, which I've mentioned here before and which rarely disappoints. Coorte is a lesser-known painter, but there is something about this painting that made me want to remember to post it here just for what I found to be its attractiveness--not to mention learning from the museum's website that asparagus were (and still is, apparently) thought to be an aphrodisiac.
But it was Robert's comment at my post on grail geometry that prompts something more from me than a bit of bemusement (and I also have in mind some general observations on deliberately-created mysteries that Conrad makes in his most recent post over at Varieties of Unreligious Experience). The questions I have are these: once we've lost the ability to read an artwork as it was apparently intended to be read, are we still able to read it--but just according to a different sort of code? And the corollary: does this new code have its own value? That is, down the road here I'll be saying that what holds my attention as I look at Coorte's painting is its sensual appeal. It is "pretty." But is its prettiness enough to make it "art"?
My first thought when I saw this image that day was, "Hmm--what an odd choice for a still-life subject." But I was drawn to its rich depiction of the spears' surfaces, and that, combined with my not having heard Coorte's name before, caused me to click on the "More" link. It was thus through the Rijksmuseum's discussion of the painting that I learned of asparagus's presumed aphrodisiac qualities. But more surprising to me was that it took that discussion to make me notice that, yes, asparagus are also phallic in their shape. Lots of things in the world resemble penises and vaginas, I recognize, and I note those resemblances on what I would regard as a sexually-"healthy" frequency, not a sexually-stunted or -obsessed one (your mileage may vary, of course). Even so, I felt a bit dense when I read that particular bit in the description, and it was then that I noted the angle of the asparagus as well: a simple horizontal or vertical positioning of the spears would have, to my eye, de-emphasized their phallic-ness.
Enough of that. I'll take myself off the couch now.
Now I know/have been made aware of all this; I now know a Why for Coorte's choice of subject. But does it "do" only what its description says it does? Does it still have something to say to us other than or besides that description? I'll go out on a limb and say that most of today's visitors to the Rijksmuseum who stand in front of this painting aren't suddenly, or even gradually, filled with the desire to Do the Dirty as they gaze upon it. So/But, what do they see or read there, if anything? Another way to put it: in the comment I linked to above, Robert asks, "If you wanted to put some sort of secret code in a painting, what would you do to insure the right person found it and wrong person didn’t?" Yes. And a corollary to that, it would seem, is: what would/could an artist do to ensure that his/her work were still "readable" ages and ages hence--assuming, of course, that sort of thing interested him/her?
Chaucer's Wife of Bath has a broad forehead. It took my going to graduate school to learn that in Chaucer's time a woman's broad forehead was a symbol indicating a rather broad knowledge, shall we say, of sexual matters. Other things in Chaucer's description of her and in her own Prologue confirm that pretty explicitly, so in some sense we today don't need to know what a broad forehead signified for his contemporaries. She remains "readable" for us, at least as regards that aspect of her character. As for Coorte's asparagus, even knowing what I know now about them, I'm still drawn to its skilfully-lit and -rendered surfaces. A different sort of stirring fills me as I look at them: I happen to love asparagus, and so as I look I wonder why my store's asparagus never look anywhere close to this good. But that has to do with sensuality and not with sexuality. The former is ideally a large part of what makes so pleasurable the indulging-in of the latter, of course, but they obviously aren't equivalents.
If, though, we make the case that Coorte's painting also participates in what we might consider the Caravaggesque version of the Baroque--its attention to the world's surface appearances (poorly-put, I know)--then on those grounds we don't need to know about asparagus' sexual attributes or resemblances to enjoy this painting. Above and beyond those matters, it still communicates an aesthetic approach to thinking about and depicting the things of this world, one that we can still read and that, moreover, still holds a broad appeal. Even humble asparagus spears merit the same rigorous attention of the artist as the human form or, for that matter, a "sexy" painting's thematic opposite, a memento mori.
Friday, July 27, 2007
Caravaggio, The Fortune-Teller
(click the image to enlarge it)
From Peter Robb's M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio:In the Fortune teller the dynamic . . . was something going on between the boy and the girl inside the picture and left you free to enjoy it. What made the picture delightful, made it sharp as well as sweet, was the poise between the ingenuous boy and the shy girl--the sweet but silly boy with his plumes and his gloves and his pleased sense that she was finding him pretty attractive, and the girl who was slipping the ring from the boy's finger with such delicacy that she seemed to deserve it. The two were distributed evenly on the canvas, a pair of opposites linked in the play of their hands and the switch of sexual roles--the boy being pretty, dressed up, passive and duped, while the girl controlled and orchestrated the exchange. The play of the glances was marvellous, especially the girl's. Her role was the painter's--holding things in balance, not being too obvious, keeping it playful. . . .
Everyone remembered this painting. Real life and delicate eroticism weren't what people were used to in art and the novelty was startling. (49-50)
More regular posting here to resume in a couple of weeks.
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
Velázquez, Juan Martínez Montañés
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Martínez Montañés (1568-1649) was the greatest Spanish sculptor of the Baroque era. His medium was wood; in fact, he was known as "el dios de madera" (the god of wood) because of his skill. Here and here are examples of his work.
Velázquez has among his paintings several portraits in which the subject stands before a background so neutral that it very nearly takes on the quality of a void--see, for example, his portrait of Don Pedro de Barberana y Aparregui. What is striking about this painting is that Velázquez, in his depiction of Martínez Montañés at work, makes it appear as though the sculptor has reached into that void, shaping out of it the rough form of the bust in the lower right.
Like a painter with brushes and paints before a blank canvas, the sculptor and his knives and chisels stands before the blank canvas that is a piece of wood; each coaxes an image from a blankness. I admit to not having thought this through too much, but it would seem that this take on the artistic process isn't that far removed from Milton's notion, in Paradise Lost, of God's having shaped the universe out of unformed matter (Chaos).
Monday, July 2, 2007
Another visit with Velázquez' Christ in the House of Martha and Mary
Visitors here may remember this post from a while back. This morning, while perusing how people found their way to this blog, I learned about an article on it from two years ago, in which two researchers recreate Velázquez's famous and puzzling painting and come to a surprising conclusion:[T]he image of Christ in the background scene is a mental image in the mind of the servant girl. Previous scholars believe this scene is either a mirror or a window, but Esler and Boyd disagree.
Professor Esler explained: "We suggest that the girl is from the painter's time and that she is a distressed servant with the unhappy memory and mental image of Jesus devaluing another serving- woman, Martha. To further this, the old woman in the painting appears to be telling her to 'get on with it' as Martha might have felt when Jesus rebuked her. Here we have an interpretation of the Bible text in which a 17th century servant-girl feels devalued because of what Jesus said in a biblical narrative. The artist is subtly criticising the Bible in this work."
Without wanting to pull a muscle from patting myself on the back--because, after all, I don't quite say it in my post--I had considered the image of Christ with Mary and Martha as functioning as a sort of thought balloon for the distraught woman in the foregrounded scene. More significant, though, is the researchers' conclusion that the painting is a quiet critique of the Biblical text. Without arguing that this isn't the case, another possibility not addressed in the article is that Velázquez is offering a critique of a certain reading of that text.
As I learned while doing a bit of reading for this post, during these decades of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, the Lucan story was a favorite of Protestants as they made the case for Luther's argument that Christians are saved not by works but by grace through faith. Here, I note that Arthur Wheelock notes that Vermeer's close grouping of Mary and Martha is his attempt to be more affirming of Martha--that is, his is a more "Catholic" reading of that story. In my humble opinion, one could read the Velázquez in a similar way.
Seen in this way, then, for me the question shifts to the old woman in the foreground. Is she offering comfort to the young woman (the Catholic take), or, as Esler and Boyd suggest, is she a surrogate for the young woman's social superiors? And, for that matter, just who is "thinking" the painting-within-a-painting? How should we understand that, in that painting, Martha has set down the pitcher and bowl on the distant table? (In the Vermeer, Martha, positioned closer to Christ than Mary is, offers him a loaf of bread on a platter.) It would seem that how we answer that question would depend on who is "thinking" it.
For me, at least, Esler and Boyd's conclusions actually open up the painting to still further questions that I hadn't had before. That's not a criticism; rather, it's an implicit warning to my reader(s) that we here might be revisiting this painting yet again on down the road.
Friday, June 8, 2007
Grail geometry and Baroque painting: Is there any "there" there?
An image from Robert A diCurcio's discussion of The Allegory of Painting at Vermeer's Riddle Revealed
This morning while checking the site stats for this blog, I saw that someone from Argentina found us via a Google search for "Baroque Painting Blog." That would be (partly) us, of course, so I went there as well to, yes, see how highly we rank (nicely, by the way, thanks for asking), but also to see if there are other like-minded blogs out there and link to them.
Anyway, that search also turned up an article from January of this year, "Stop the code conspiracies" by Martin Kemp. The title is a plea; as the article makes clear, no evidence has yet emerged that Renaissance and Baroque painters encoded secret messages into their works. We have, of course, The Da Vinci Code to thank for the recent uptick in this sort of thing; it also reminds me of Michael Drosnin's 1998 Holy-Writ-as-Seek-n-Find book, The Bible Code. This blog has also linked a couple of times to Robert A diCurcio's Vermeer's Riddle Revealed, which argues that Vermeer was a member of a Masonic guild and thus encoded grail geometry into many of his paintings.
My opinion on all this is that, even if these geometries are compositional elements in the paintings, what of it? What do they signify?
Not much, apparently.
Before going on, I will confess that Mr. diCurcio has obviously spent much more time on this than I will spend in offering friendly criticism of it, and I don't wish to be understood as saying that his efforts are entirely for naught. My real question is this: apart from speculation that is at the very least unprovable and certainly in part unfounded, what does all this reveal to us about the paintings and the man who painted them, apart from his, likely, fanatical attention to their composition?
At his website, diCurcio offers no explanation as to how he became interested in applying grail geometry to Vermeer, but it's fair to say that he doesn't appear to have stumbled onto his subject by chance. Consider, for example, this parenthetical aside in his discussion of The Allegory of Painting as he describes his search for a line that will lead to his finding what he calls the Tilted Triangle:(If you're wondering how I know to do this right away -- let me say right away -- that I spent weeks doing trial-and-error lines before arriving at STEP 2 as I shall present it -- sparing you from going through all that!)
Well, thank you. But this--and, indeed, the tone of most of his site, is that of someone who, given a theory and the tools for applying it, goes off in search of a likely candidate to try them out on, and who better than someone mysterious like Vermeer? I will grant diCurcio this: his discussion of Lady Standing at a Virginal does indeed appear to have its origin in a peculiar feature of the painting--Cupid's bow appearing to grow out of the Lady's head. But once past a point like that, the theory and the geometry take over; the painting becomes something other than (as opposed to something besides) what it depicts.
Or, it just leads us, pretty much, to what is the pretty standard reading of the painting, as with this passage from diCurcio's discussion of The Allegory of Painting:The intersection point of the diagonals A--N and M--O is the objective of the whole exercise. It is hard to say exactly what symbolism Vermeer had in mind for the 'X Marks the Spot' , which falls on the open book on the table. Since experts contend that the female model represents Clio, the Muse of History, and since Vermeer painted Clio looking down at that open book, we may speculate that his message is that the artist was making history by painting masterpieces that would bring credit to his native land -- and fame for himself. Note that he is shown at work on the crown of laurel leaves, symbolic of victory and fame. Holland at the time had emerged victorious in a struggle with Spain. This could well have been in Vermeer's mind -- and satisfactory it must have been to him, even though this and many other of his riddles would have to wait for centuries to be revealed. (emphases in the original)
Well, okay. But it seems that, apart from the reference to the Netherlands' defeat of Spain, all that is already available in the painting, without the projection of the lines and triangles and squares and such.
Like most of us, I'd also like to know more about Vermeer's life, and it would be interesting to know if he was a Mason. Interesting, but not vital. DiCurcio's study of the paintings leads him to make the claim that Vermeer was "most likely" a member of the Priory of Sion; as to how likely that is, read for yourself.
None of this is to say that diCurcio is mistaken about Vermeer's reliance on grail geometry. In fact, I'd be surprised to learn that Vermeer hadn't employed something like it as a compositional aid. Nor do I claim that secrets don't remain about Vermeer or other painters that are somehow revealed through their art. Personally, I've wondered about the level of Vermeer's commitment to Catholicism and whether that can be discerned through thinking about his paintings. Questions like that, though, will get answered, if they can be answered, through a combination of reading the historical record and looking at the paintings.
Thursday, June 7, 2007
Caravaggio and the dangers of the life/art nexus
Caravaggio, David with the Head of Goliath, 1606
Today I just began reading Peter Robb's 1998 book, M: The Man Who Became Caravaggio. I read enough of the reviews to know that Robb's work's authority isn't exactly unquestioned; and, because of my near-ignorance of Caravaggio, I know to be a bit cautious in assessing it. But that's what bibliographies are for, and this book's is 15 pages long. In the meantime, I'm so far enjoying Robb's almost Raymond Chandler-like prose style; it seems appropriate, given its subject, and it has me wanting to read more than I have time for today.
In any event, as I go along in it I thought I would share from time to time passages from it that to my mind are especially provocative, for good or ill, and solicit commentary from those so inclined. I'll start today with his brief discussion of the mis-dating of the David and Goliath you see here. It had been customary to think of this painting as being from 1610, one of his very last, its poignancy full of the painter's self-knowledge that his life was approaching the end. But, Robb writes,[t]hat David was painted four years earlier.
The dating of this painting seems emblematic of how the writing of Caravaggio's story has gone over the years. We don't have much in the way of written records, and much of that--"hardly a word untainted by fear, ignorance, malice or self-interest," Robb says in his "Note to Readers"--is, well, less than completely objective. So there are the paintings. And just as it was once common to read Shakespeare's plays for clues about his life, so also have people done with Caravaggio's work. Robb will be no different in that regard. But he argues that his book is a hypothesis, to be proven or disproven as we learn more.
The wrong dating of this bleak and powerful painting matters a lot to anyone trying to make sense of M's life. The error's doubly false. It shifts the emotional gravity from M's tragic year of 1606, when he painted this David--in the time of lucid desperation that followed the killing in Rome. And the painting's own iconic power lends a falsely self-aware and tragic finality to his last months, or even years--as if M by 1610 were resigned and knowingly going to meet his death. It's a misreading that spills over into his other last paintings and throws everything awry. The four year switch is false about his art and false about his life at once. It feeds back into the old story. The old myth. (11)
Let's find out what he has to say, shall we?
Monday, June 4, 2007
Venuses: Three paintings
To compensate for not having posted the usual Two Paintings back on Friday, today I want to post Three--one of which, admittedly, is not of the Baroque era but which seems to belong here.
As always, I invite comments on correspondences and differences between/among the paintings; I also want to encourage the especially-inspired to write me about posting something here and, in so doing, begin to move this blog in the direction of what I've always conceived it of becoming: a multi-voiced site.
Titian, The Venus of Urbino, 1538
Rubens, Venus in Front of Her Mirror, c. 1613/1614
Velázquez, Venus at her Mirror (aka The Rokeby Venus), 1644-1648)
For what it's worth, the curious can find a discussion (continued in the comments) of the Velázquez here.
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Pacheco, his famous pupil, and some comments on "influence"
(cross-posted at Blog Meridian)
Yesterday I was surprised to learn that Peter Harrup, the administrator for the Facebook group "The Genius of Diego Velázquez," named me as an officer for that group: Francisco Pacheco. Wonderful, I thought . . . but, who is he? Way leads on to way in the Internets, and what follows are the results of that wandering, along with some speculation and musing.
I quickly learned via consulting my copy of the catalogue of the 1989 Velázquez exhibition at the Met (which, by the way, is well worth seeking out, especially if you a) love Velázquez and/but b) don't have a lot of money) that Pacheco was Velázquez' principle teacher and, eventually, his father-in-law. Pacheco was an agent of the Inquisition and thus very much a loyal adherent to the values propagated by the Counter-Reformation. Though well regarded as a teacher, his talent as a painter was never more than pedestrian1; however, unlike many other tutors whose pupils outshine them, it appears Pacheco wasn't jealous of Velázquez's abilities but taught him what he knew, especially with regard of the then-emerging tendencies toward realism, and then got out of the way. His book El arte de la pintura is still considered an authoritative source of information from the time.
I probably would not have begun to write this post, though, had it not been for going on to read the Wikipedia article on Pacheco--specifically, this sentence:Although Velázquez was a student in Pacheco's school for six years, and married Pacheco's daughter Juana in 1618, there is no trace of Pacheco's influence in the work of Velázquez.
"No trace"? That seemed to me a bold claim to make; consider Jackson Pollack, who, when asked what he learned when he studied under Thomas Hart Benton (an odd pairing, to say the least), replied, "How not to paint."2 So, I decided to do some looking around for more takes on Pacheco's influence on Velázquez, and I wound up in a surprising place--a post I wrote earlier this month.
In the course of Googling, I discovered a review of a book by Jane Boyd and Philip F Esler, Visuality and Biblical Text: Interpreting Velázquez' "Christ with Martha and Mary" as a Test Case. This was startling because, as readers of this blog know, I had just posted on this very painting. Anyway, in the course of listing some paintings that Velázquez might have seen that may have influenced his painting, the reviewer mentions
"St. Sebastian healed by St. Irene, 1616] by Francisco Pacheco (1564-1644, Velázquez's teacher and father-in-law) combining two episodes from the legend of St Sebastian, one seen through a window of the room in which the other occurs[.]"
(Here, by the way, is where I found this image.)
There is no denying the compositional similarities between the Pacheco and the Velázquez, especially if it's the case that, as with the Pacheco, the Velázquez depicts two chronologically-distinct moments. Having said that, though, the Velázquez is no mere copy. The Pacheco has an almost-medieval quality to it in its handling of perspective; as has often been noted, his pupil's painting is a fusion of the religious subject and the genre of the bodegón, itself influenced by Dutch paintings of domestic scenes. Also, the Pacheco lacks any tension between the painting and the painting-within-a-painting: the latter serves to explain the circumstances depicted in the former. The Velázquez, though, is another matter entirely, as I pointed out in my post on it.
So, then: "influence." As a teacher myself, I find my students wanting to give me credit for things they have learned when, in fact, all I had done was give them the opportunity to learn the things they were thanking me for. As it were, I supply the canvas and encouragement, and I have some things to say about the virtues of exploring, of being intellectually curious, but they still have to do the painting, and that they do on their own. What is striking to me about Velázquez's art, quite apart from the brush-wielding, is the intellectual curiosity that fuels it, the willingness to experiment with the tried-and-true. I cannot help but think that it's those qualities that Pacheco encouraged in his pupil; the rest of the time, though, I suspect he alternated between sizing up young Dieguito as a potential match for his daughter and marvelling at his talent, wondering--in a good way--as I myself have had to with some of my students, what he might possibly be able to teach him.
1The Spanish-language Wikipedia article, however, is more generous in its assessment, and indeed includes brief commentary on some of Pacheco's paintings.
2I just now realize that that statement will read differently, depending on one's opinion of Pollack or of Benton.
Monday, May 28, 2007
Yet more housekeeping
Velázquez, The Surrender of Breda, 1634
This still-young blog continues to attract visitors (most of them brought here via Google Images searches--which is fine) and/but more significant, some regular readers, too, as evidenced by the subscriptions to this blog's feeds via e-mail notifications and RSS feeds. Thank you, whoever you regular readers are. As this site increases its content and, yes, adds more images, I hope you'll remain regular readers . . . and, perhaps, consider becoming a co-author of this blog.
Below the fold, two quick surveys: a) changes to the gutter; b) a list of some Facebook groups associated with the Baroque.
I've just finished reorganizing the links sections in the right gutter in hopes of making it easier for visitors (well, okay--for me) to find the sorts of things their looking for. As the number of links grows and I become more adept at adding widgets and HTML, I'll continue to include things that will improve its usefulness for the visitor. Also, I've noticed that a fair number of visitors search this blog via the Blogger labels, so I've also restored the Labels widget to the gutter.
Finally, for those of you with Facebook accounts, I want again to remind you that this blog has its own page (linked to over in the right gutter). Also, a quick survey of Facebook groups revealed the following groups devoted to Baroque artists and writers. Some of them, judging from their discussion boards, seem moribund, some not; all of them are worth your visiting and, if you're so inclined, worth livening up.
The Genius of Velázquez (which at the moment has a nice post up discussing the historical background of The Surrender of Breda).
Don Quixote de la Mancha, dedicated to lively discussions of Cervantes' great novel.
Caravaggio (whose discussion board reveals that even now, his manner of living can stir people up)
Rembrandt
Bernini
Half-Painted Walls and Pearl Earrings: Paint on, Vermeer, Paint on!
Thanks again to all of you for visiting.
Sunday, May 27, 2007
Two views of Delft, optical devices, and "art"
Over at this blog's Facebook group page (which, by the way, all of you with Facebook accounts are welcome to join), the matter of the camera obscura has risen in a couple of discussion threads; it is the topic of one, in fact. I figured, then, that via this week's Two Paintings post we could initiate a discussion of the implications the use of such devices may or may not have on the nature of the art that results.
As always, click on the images to enlarge them.
Carel Fabritius, View of Delft with a Musical Instrument Dealer, 1652
Vermeer, View of Delft, c. 1660-1661
I hope visitors will begin the discussion in the comments section.
Saturday, May 19, 2007
Women reading letters--two paintings
Dutch Baroque painters were drawn to the theme of letter-writing and letter-reading. Their evocation of intimate communication between sender and recipient makes the viewer simultaneously curious and, perhaps, a bit like an intruder as s/he enters the painting's space. Despite the sense of intimacy, though, the theme of letters also paradoxically expands the space depicted: in each of the paintings below, for example, the letters we see have writers, unseen by us but certainly seen in the respective minds' eyes of the recipients. The viewer, then, has not merely entered a room; s/he has entered an entire world as configured, oriented, by the envisioned writer or recipient of a letter.
As with the other pairings, I hope that passers-by will feel welcome to comment and, if the muse speaks especially strongly, even to write a post--just let me know, and I'll set things up for you.
Gerard ter Borch, Peasant Girl Reflecting on a Letter, 1650-1660
Johannes Vermeer, Woman in Blue Reading a Letter, c. 1662-1665
Friday, May 18, 2007
Exploring the ambiguities in Velázquez's Christ in the House of Martha and Mary
Click on the image to see a larger version of it.
Since posting this painting a while back, I've spent more time than is perhaps prudent thinking about it. Its title could not be more straightforward, but what is depicted in it is considerably less so. It is filled with ambiguities, as though it's an early proving ground for Velázquez's later, greater paintings and their ambiguities. And the source of its ambiguities is in its excesses.
What I mean by that is this: Luke 10:38-42 makes clear that Martha has no help in attending to her and Mary's guest (though John 11:1-44, which re-presents Mary and Martha as the sisters of Lazarus but within which the Lucan story isn't told, seems to imply that the family is rather better off and thus would likely have household help). The Wikipedia entry for the painting notwithstanding, I don't see how the two women in the foreground of this painting are Mary and Martha--or, if they are, they are not Mary and Martha as depicted in Luke. But it is crucial that we determine who they are if we're going to understand this painting.
I'll spoil for you what's below the fold: I'm not really sure who they are.
I'll begin, though, by stating what I think is not going on here.
In his painting of the supper at Emmaus that hangs in Dublin and which I talk about here, the woman in the kitchen is "excessive": that is, she's not directly accounted for in the story told in Luke 24:13-35; yet, Jesus' hosts being men, we can safely assume at least one woman was present to prepare the meal. In this painting, then, the woman's presence serves to give depth to the Gospel as well as to the space depicted in the painting. As Caravaggio's religious canvases' recurring figures with their dirty toenails and feet remind us, this woman in Velázquez's painting likewise reminds us that Jesus is revealed to all, even to the most humble of us.
However, the present painting's broader theological point is, to put it kindly, harder to get at. Whereas the woman in The Supper at Emmaus works with a busy but otherwise calm demeanor, the same clearly can't be said about the young woman with the pestle in her hand. Perhaps, via her older companion, she hears some cheering words, but we don't see any sign that that cheering is imminent. Perhaps that is part of the point, though: after all, Luke doesn't report Martha's reaction to Jesus' gentle reprimand. Maybe, then, the older woman is meant to uncomplicate the painting.
All these maybes and perhapses. But they do lead me to conclude that the scene in the upper right corner is likelier a painting than a mirror or window into another room. The latter possibility would lead us to infer that the young woman is reacting as she is to something to do with Jesus' presence, which would seem a risky proposition no matter the painting's intended audience. If her unhappiness were in some way directed at Jesus' presence, that would introduce an unmitigated tension in the scene that Velázquez, so early in his career, would have been unwise to brook. My remark in my comment on the previous post to the effect that Martha's now having chosen the better part doesn't get the meal prepared seems now, in retrospect, to be risky as well: however earthily Baroque painters depicted their religious subjects as compared to Renaissance artists, the time had not yet arrived for them to offer up jokey commentaries on the Gospels.
No: what makes the young woman's expression safer in this painting is that she is neither Mary nor Martha and she is reacting to some domestic situation other than having to serve Jesus.
Unless, (again) maybe, she is Mary, and she is grieving Lazarus' death (see John 11:20-29) . . .
Friday, May 4, 2007
Christ in the House of Mary and Martha--two paintings
As with last week's pairing, the intent here is to invite commentary and, if you are so inclined, a full-blown post on these paintings (which I will be more than happy to post here), their similarities and differences.
Here is Luke's account of the scene depicted.
by Velázquez, 1618
by Vermeer, 1654-1656
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
Defining the Baroque I
From Ruth Gambles, "Redeeming the Sound . . . "The Baroque signifies an attempt to bridge the gap between man and things implemented by the mechanism of the scientific revolution[.]
The Baroque as a proto-Romanticism, then? Or, perhaps, a proto-Modernism? Either makes sense within the context of the passage quoted here.
But is this in fact true of the Baroque as a philosophy? Was there at that time a cultural anxiety regarding increased mechanization?
UPDATE: A basic principle behind the idea of mechanization is that people know how things work--not just machines, but the cosmos. Caribbean intellectual Edouard Glissant notes that the Baroque (as artistic expression) emerged as a response to Rationalism's claim to contain and codify all knowledge. Those with a greater knowledge of "the modern scientific view of reality" might have some questions about Glissant's claims (I myself know only enough to wonder if what he says is so):
Imitation of Nature as an objective assumes that, underlying outward appearance and inherent in it, there is a "profundity', an unassailable truth, artistic representations of which approximate more closely as they systematize their imitation of reality and discover its rules. The revolution represented by the introduction of perspective during the quattrocento can thus, perhaps, be seen as part of the search for this profundity.
It was against this current that the baroque "diversion' began to make itself felt. Baroque art was a reaction against the rationalist claim to penetrate the mysteries of the known in one single, incisive, uniform movement. The stone with which baroque art disturbed the rationalist pool was an affirmation that knowledge is never fully acquired, a fact that gives it all its value. Thus the techniques of baroque art were to favour "breadth' to the detriment of "depth'.
[snip]
The modern scientific view of reality coincides with and confirms this expansion of the Baroque. Science does, indeed, assert that reality cannot be defined in terms of outward appearances and that it has to be examined "in depth', but it also accepts that knowledge is never wholly acquired and that it would be absurd to claim that its essentials can be grasped at a single stroke. Science has entered the era of the uncertainty principle, retaining, nevertheless, a form of rationalism which henceforth abjures paralysing, mechanical, once-and-for-all dogmatism. Its conceptions of Nature are "expanding', becoming relative, problematical. It is moving, that is, in the selfsame direction towards which the Baroque tends.
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:
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.
Rembrandt's work is featured in three of these exhibitions: an in-depth study of the etching, Abraham Entertaining the Angels, and two larger exhibitions, Rembrandt's Late Religious Portraits and Strokes of Genius: Rembrandt's Prints and Drawings.
A collection of genre paintings and portraits by Gerard ter Borch
And two in-depth studies of individual works: Johannes Verspronck, Andries Stilte as a Standard-Bearer, and Vermeer's Woman Holding a Balance
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.
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