Author: Spencer Krysinski (Page 2 of 3)

Our first class back from break was a nice one. We kept our discussion simple by just looking at the style of the Rococo as it manifested itself in interior decoration and painting.

I thought the Rococo salons the French kept in their townhouses were nice. I like the complex molding but the gilding really isn’t for me. I wonder if the lacy/organic/flowery molding in the Parisian homes was a Rococo addition or if it had its roots in Gothic art? I think what I find most interesting about the Salons and Salon culture is that it seems like it housed the type of intellectual discussion (at least amongst the nobility) that spawned the Enlightenment and Enlightenment ideals that really found their moment in the following decades.

I think Watteu Fragonard and Boucher’s light airy paintings are cool. I think the theme of amorous love and the not-so-subtle eroticism is nice to view in a museum and whatnot, but I can see how the Bourgeoisie found the images offensive. I will say I think I stand in the Rubenist camp, I love the pastel palette the blending of the colors, and the warm fuzzy haze that covers French Rococo paintings. I like genre scenes in general, so it was nice to hear that artists like Chardin were able to elevate the reputation of the genre by making such sentimental and impressive works.

In our last class before spring break we talked about the Baroque in France and England. These were cool chapters to read and discuss in class, as we hadn’t spent much time in France since the start of the semester and this is only our second time reading about art in England (though we didn’t discuss it in class).

We started off with talking about one of the most magnificent palatial compounds in the world – Versailles. Obviously I had heard of Versailles before we talked about but I knew practically nothing about its construction. It certainly takes inspiration from High Renaissance architectural forms with the balance and repeating temple-like figures – but the sheer size and opulence of the compound convey Baroque ideals about the magnanimity of the French Crown. I knew Louis XIV was called the Sun King but I didn’t realize how seriously he took that moniker, and how he wove solar imagery into the layout and motifs of his humongous gardens.

We then talked a bit about the French Academy of Painting and Sculpture. It seems as though the school was established to help French artists catch up to the artistic advances made in the Italian peninsula over the past hundred or so years. In my opinion, I think the school overstated the importance of design in creating beautiful works of art, and I’m not personally a fan of how they decided to tier particular genres of art. I think artists like Poussin, who was a great influence on the curriculum of the Academy, use drawing and Hellenistic styles well in their work (and given Poussin’s background in archaeology it would make sense that his paintings are very sculptural) but if every artist coming out of France decided to do so it would just sterilize the individual styles that artists might develop.

As we did with our discussion of the Renaissance, we started our discussion off in Italy than slowly made our way up North. For today’s class, we focused specifically on the seventeenth century art of the Low Countries.

We started off with some historical context, focusing on how the reformation and subsequent counter reformation affected the Catholic Belgium (particularly Flanders) and the Protestant Dutch. It’s hard to imagine how culturally significant the Protestant Revolution was, and how it had humongous ripple effects in everything from geopolitics to art.

We started off with a discussion of the Flemish master Pieter Paul Rubens. I like when Professor Plesch gives us short biographies of the artists we discuss. Like the Baroque ideals, it really brings their identities into the classroom in a way that makes it easier for us to understand their works and the influences on their style. I think Rubens’ paintings look a lot like any other Baroque painter, but I saw some aspects of Northern tradition like the detail-oriented Naturalism visible in the depictions of Roman soldiers in the Raising of the Cross. Rubens’ Marie de Medici Landing in France didn’t do much for me, though I appreciate the creativity required for the allegorical representations of France and showing mythical figures at the service of the queen.

We then moved on to discussing the United Provinces of the modern day Netherlands. It was cool that the growing middle class were the primary patrons of Dutch artists — it really seems to have opened the door for many more secular images that I personally prefer to religious ones. I think Frans Hals is a really good painter, his visible brushstrokes and colorful images capture the feelings and personalities of figures in a less literal, yet certainly more impactful way.

Today we went to a private room in the Art Museum to go see some of the interesting prints, etchings, and engravings in the Museum’s inventory. It was really cool, I had no idea we had such an extensive and varied collection of European prints. We tracked the development of printmaking technologies, starting with examples of woodblock prints and finishing with etchings. I didn’t really realize that there was a difference between etching and engraving, as the book’s explanation of the practice was a bit hard to follow. Professor Plesch’s explanation of the two practices were very helpful though, and it was cool to actually be able to see and hold the tools that people used to make etchings. It was also really cool to learn that etching was seen as an inferior art to engraving, and that a lot of early etchings tried to imitate engravings. We also went a bit beyond the book as well, particularly with the last piece on our pseudo ‘timeline’ of printing. Professor Plesch told us that the parts of metal plate intended to be the background had varnish baked onto it, allowing the ink to absorb into the bubbly ridges of the plate which created this super deep and murky blackness that I thought was really cool. All in all it was a great class, a nice change of pace from our regular lectures and a nice way to interact with art.

Today we started off class by diving into the spectacular works of Gianlorenzo Bernini. He thought of himself as Michelangelo’s successor, but I think it can be a bit hard to compare the two considering how different their works are. Bernini’s works are certainly more theatrical and engaging, while Michelangelo’s work create distance between the viewer and the sculpture by being incredible paradigms of mathematical proportion and heavenly serenity. Given Bernini’s extensive background in set design and the performing arts, it makes sense that his work is a bit more theatrical and certainly emotionally charged. We can literally see the physical effort Bernini’s David is making to hurl the stone, and the design for the Cornaro Chapel with The Ecstasy of St. Teresa resembles the architecture of a theatre. Bernini’s works draw us into moments, and help us visualize biblical scenes so we cultivate our own emotional and spiritual reaction to them.

We talked about a few different pieces of Italian Architecture before moving into a discussion of the Spanish Baroque. I think this period is really interesting because the Spaniards (being so religiously conservative) found very subtle ways to pack Christian imagery in paintings that one might assume are secular. With Ribera’s The Club–Footed Boy, for example, on the surface the painting just seems to be a beggar standing on top of a hill with a bucolic Neapolitan landscape behind him. It was interesting to learn that Ribera dove deeply into Counterreformation literature and motifs (smiling as a means of warding off unholy things, holding cane as a musket shows the boy as a “Soldier of God,” charity as an important alm, etc.) to underscore the holiness of the poor and destitute.

Today we finally made the leap from the Renaissance to the Baroque in Italy. I think it’s interesting that the Baroque sort of distills everything that was revolutionary and praiseworthy from the Renaissance while eliminating the psychological distance between the viewer and the artwork. I appreciate the visible emotion of Baroque figures, and the emotions expressed by the dynamism and movements of figures like in Caravaggio’s The Calling of Matthew. One interesting thing about Caravaggio is that we don’t have any drawings of his. I don’t know if he was a student of Annibale Carracci’s, whose art school in Bologna hammered home the importance of drawings in response to the unproportionality and unevenness of the Mannerist period, but I would assume given Carracci’s influence on the Baroque style itself Caravaggio would also see the importance of making drawings.

Speaking of Carracci, I think his quadri riportati work is absolutely astounding. His understanding of a whole laundry list of artistic skills like grisaille, trompe-l’oeil, and of course fresco painting make his patchwork ceilings like the one in the Palazzo Farnese amazing feats.

I thought today was really awesome, the Northern Renaissance is one of my favorite periods of art history. First, however, we finished up the Late Renaissance by discussing some of Branzino’s works as a way of discussing the important features of Late Renaissance allegory and portraiture. After that we jumped right into the Northern Renaissance, starting off with Dürer. I didn’t realize that his father was a goldsmith and that at least in a poetic sense, engraving and woodcutting were in Dürer’s blood. His prints and sketches are spectacular, and his ability to bring what is essentially chiaroscuro to his prints through deep and shallow hatching shows his understanding of both woodcarving and the Italic artistic vocabulary.

It was cool to discuss how Dürer also capitalized on fears of the Last Judgement coming in the year 1500 through his Apocalypse prints, perhaps he was the first artist-capitalist. His paintings don’t do it for me, they seem somehow blander than those of the Italian Renaissance. It was cool to learn, however, that the idea that artists should be members of the elite intelligentsia (as depicted by Dürer’s humanist pursuits and his Salvador Mundi self-portrait) made its way to Northern Europe alongside, of course, Renaissance pictorial ideals.

It was interesting to learn, however, that the Northern Renaissance saw both the influx of the Italian artistic vocabulary alongside the resurgence of local artistic traditions. We mentioned this briefly in class as it related to naturalism; specifically how the Northern artists we more concerned with faithfully depicting details of a natural scene while Italian artists were interested in how the systems of nature interacted with each other. The Isenheim Altarpiece is a perfect example of an artist sticking to a traditional, almost Medieval, artistic style. The center panel depicts a grotesque and contorted Christ bleeding out on the cross in a bleak landscape. The suffering of Christ is at the forefront of the image, an important moral message for the intended audience of the altarpiece (i.e. those afflicted by ergotism). The gloomy and gut-wrenching scenes of the closed altarpiece are contrasted nicely with the joyous scenes of the open altarpiece, particularly the ethereal Resurrection. The many colors that emanate from Christ’s body cast him (in his resurrected form) as a wholly heavenly being. Considering that ergotism typically causes hallucinations, I wonder what it might have been like for the patients to see such a uniquely colorful and textured altarpiece. In any case, the panel suggests a hopeful message, a reminder of the pure and holy forms the patients could assume after death.

Today we began class by discussing the mother of all ceiling frescoes, Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Ceiling. Having seen the ceiling in person, I can speak to its utter magnificence and structural grandeur. I had no idea, however, that the scenes Michelangelo depicted correspond to different Christian epochs. That is to say, I didn’t know much about the order of the ceiling which I think adds a whole lot of significance to the work overall. Starting at the top with the Ante Legem period, and then moving into the period during/after the life of Christ allows us as viewers to move from the far biblical past to where we stand in the present. I think the brolic figures of Michelangelo’s frescoes speak to his refined understanding of human musculature, and his ability to faithfully contort the forms (particularly those of the sibyls) speaks to his magnificent skills as a painter.

We used this discussion of the contortion of Michelangelo’s figures as a jumping-off point into Mannerism. I think the shift from the serene and balanced compositions of the High Renaissance to the fluid (and perhaps, turbulent) compositions of Mannerism is closely tied to the Sack of Rome in 1527, and perhaps the wider political and social instability of the Italian peninsula at this time, but we didn’t really touch on this in class. Anyway, I’m quite ambivalent towards Mannerist art. I think Pontormo’s Pietà is really beautiful and an emotionally charged and expressively colorful image that uses the serpentine form to its compositional benefit, while Parmigianino’s Madonna of the Long Neck is just straight-up weird to me. Long Neck is a bit abstract, which I don’t necessarily think is a bad thing (in fact, I think it is cool that the painting continues the tradition of the Nativity being paralleled with the Lamentation), but the exaggeration and intense lengthening of the figures’ limbs (particularly Jesus’) just seems to me like a poor understanding of proportions on behalf of Parmigianino.

Today we started by talking about Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus. I think it is a nice painting, displaying Botticelli’s humanistic education with its mythological content and use of antiquated motifs (the modest Venus) and his interactions with Neoplatonist thinkers. I like it when we talk about more abstract and technical artistic concepts like arrangement and framing, and how it brings meaning and significance to a painting.

We then moved on to a broad discussion of the many works of Leonardo da Vinci. He is a compelling figure, someone who must’ve really let his curiosity run wild. I liked his anatomical sketches, and how he accurately detailed the shape and functions of many muscles and ligaments. He was also in many ways a philosopher; writing dictums for the functions and purpose of painting. All in all a very interesting guy, somebody that I’d like to learn more about.

We finished off the day by starting our discussion of some of the big pieces of art commissioned in the Papal States. We looked at Bramante’s Tempietto and how it built on both Early Christian and Roman architectural traditions to make an equally innovative and antiquated structure. Then, we started our discussion of Raphael’s The School of Rome, but we ran out of time so we’ll probably pick up there on Wednesday.

Today we continued our discussion of the early Renaissance in and around Florence.

We started off by discussing Masaccio’s frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel. It was cool to see all the interesting narrative and subtextual layers of The Tribute Money in particular. I like that we spend time in class discussing important artistic concepts like color warmth and perspectives, as well as discussing the technical nature of mediums like painting in fresco. It was really neat to learn about the thought and care that Masaccio had to employ when working with the fresco, and the careful work it took to hide the contours of the pieces of the fresco. It was also interesting to learn about the political message embedded in the fresco, and how art can be a tool of personal expression even as it serves as a religious decoration.

We then moved on to a discussion of some of the most famous paintings and sculptures the Medici family commissioned. Donatello’s David is pretty interesting to me, considering that he was a symbol of the Medici family that, upon the Medici’s expulsion, became a symbol of Florence. Again, it is interesting to see the political rhetoric that pervades the arts at this time, and how religious imagery was important outside of its primary devotional functions.