In this recorded class, we were first introduced to the concept of Sfumato, meaning the boundary between character and background landscape is in the form of smoke without clear lines or borders. This term is presented by Leonardo’s Mona Lisa. It is interesting to realize that there’s also manipulation in the painting, which is similar to modern days photoshop. Titian’s Isabella d’Este, for example, depicts a pretty woman at a young age, but Isabella was already in her sixties at the time she was portrayed. We also took a look at Albrecht Dürer’s Self-portrait, and what stood out to me is that, instead of using a three-quarter angle, the artist chooses the frontal position in this portrait, a pose preserved for God. The implying meaning can be the analogy between an artist, a creator of artworks, and the Christ Jesus the creator.
Then we moved to Jan van Eyck’s Giovanni Arnolfini and His Wife and talked a lot about the symbolism within. This is a scene of a marriage ceremony. Some domestic items that contain symbolic meanings include the dog that represents fidelity, peaches near the window that represent fertility, the dressing of the wife implying pregnancy even though she is not pregnant, the burning candle implying the ongoing ceremony, etc. I was amazed by the fascinating details in Jan van Eyck’s work and his great skills to incorporate sacred symbolic meanings into a secular scene.
The symbolism applied in Hans Holbein’s The Ambassadors is also fantastic. The objects in the upper and lower layers of the shelf represent heaven and earth respectively, and many details refer to the contemporary tension in society. Cruxication behind curtain refers to the current division of the church, the broken fluent refers to the political disharmony, and the book of mathematic opened on the chapter of division refers to the split at the time. What’s the most interesting part is the skull and the special demanding way to see it. A skull always acts as a comment to earthy pursue–all these tensions and divisions are meaningless, and people will ultimately arrive the death.