In the last class of this semester, we learned a new notion that began to emerge in the late 15th century–the creation of art for only art’s sake. Giambologna’s Rape of the Sabines is one of the earliest examples. In order to show people that his skill and talent weren’t limited to small sculptures, Giambologna decided to create a complex life-size statue with three bodies twining with each other. The rape of the Sabines thus doesn’t contain any story or moral lesson. The artist creates it just for making an amazing sculpture–the “art’s sake”. What else stood out to me was Michelangelo’s Waking Slave, a sculpture that hasn’t been finished. It really gives me the idea that Michelangelo gives life to perfect figures coming out of stone. This unfinished artwork reminds people where his other great sculptures, such as David, come from, and thus people admire him more. At the end of the 15th century and the beginning of the 16th century, there was a prevailing tradition for artists to sign their name to their artwork, corresponding to the increasing emphasis on artists themselves. This is an important shift in the Renaissance as in the previous time people pay more attention to patrons and artworks themselves rather than the creators of art. There is also an emergence of “Mannerism”, and artworks in this style have somehow ambiguity in their content. One example is Jacopo da Pontormo’s Pietà, where we are unsure what the man at the lower middle is wearing.
Author: Sophie (Page 1 of 3)
In this class, we first discussed a lot about the spatial organization of our campus. It is interesting to notice that the new Athletic Center and Gordon Center are located at the two “entrances” of campus, which shows visitors our commitment and emphasis on both sports and art. It is also good to learn that the tower of Miller is the highest one, even higher than the chapel, which contains symbolic meanings like Colby is an educational institution and we value knowledge more than religion.
Then we move to the city of Florence. The region that is Italy today is not a country in Renaissance but consists of many towns and cities that speak the same language. The city hall in Florence is impressive, as it looks like a fortress and its building stones are all rough–a design called rustication. Such a design stands for the victory of Guelphs, the supporters of the Pope, in the power competition with Ghibellines, the supporters of Emperor. It is thus an overall defensive architecture built for more symbolic meanings than practical use. The “Competition panels” for the Florence Baptistery are also interesting, where artists compete with each other in creating a sculpture with the theme “the sacrifice of Issac”. Filippo Brunelleschi and Lorenzo Ghiberti are the finalists, and Lorenzo wins eventually. I prefer Lorenzo’s artwork as well for he chooses the scene that the angel has not yet arrived so that spectators could have their own imagination of what will be going on.
In this class, we first took a look at the city Antwerp and talked about the rise of the market there and how that influences artists’ creations. Without the commission by patrons, artists obtain more freedom in their works. But also because of the absence of commission, they need to compete to ensure their works have a market. The consequence is that variety of artworks appear, and artists are forced to find their own specialized niche. The name of the artist is more emphasized and recognizable as well. We then talked a lot about the works by the artists Pieter Bruegel. In his painting Fall of Icarus, there is a moral lesson from the depiction of the falling Icarus–being hubris, i.e., having too much ambition and pride, will let you fall down eventually. What’s amazing is that, in his Netherlandish Proverbs, Bruegel presents 126 proverbs in such a single artwork. For example, the guy in the lower right who hits his head towards walls represents foolishness and an “ambitious idiot”. Because his paintings are so popular, Bruegel himself, his workshop, his son, and other artist make copies of his works, which reveals that people at that time have no problem at all on copies and copyright issues. There’s also a humanistic feature embedded in his paintings, where harmony between nature and humans is depicted and humans look so small in proportion to nature.
The term genre painting refers to paintings that depict scenes of everyday life. The moral genre is those where a moral agenda is contained. Some examples include Quentin Massys (Metsys)’s The Money Changer and His Wife, which warns people that the growing business may distract people’s attention so that they may not value religion as they should. Johannes Vermeer’s Woman with a balance also makes an interesting comparison and juxtaposition between the weighting of jewels by the woman and the weighting of souls in Last Judgement in the background painting.
What’s stood out to me finally is the skulls in mirrors, an element that appears in several paintings such as Hans Baldung Grien’s Three Ages of Woman and Death, Baldung Grien’s Vanitas, and Lukas Furtenagel’s Hans Burgkmair and his wife. This shows the metaphor of mirror–self-reflection–as well as the metaphor that “no matter what’s your status in society you are going to die eventually.”
In this class, we first took a look at the technic called Intarsia, which uses varied shapes, sizes, and species of wood fitted together to create a mosaic-like picture with an illusion of depth. By adding a sense of depth to the walls, the room is visually enlarged, and the application of lines in mathematical and geometric rules makes the scene looks real. Notice the objects inside the cabinet are all for measurement and are depicted proportionally following the mathematical truth. It is also interesting to learn that the scene is depicted from a perspective of a 175cm tall male–the height of the dude, which shows how the patron and the artwork are connected.
Then we moved to Sandro Botticelli’s Primavera. A pattern of fire is depicted both on the clothing of Venus and Mercury. Some domestic objects are also introduced, such as cassone, an elaborately decorated piece of furniture of the Renaissance, which appears in Titian’s Venus of Urbino. The birth trap is also an interesting domestic object, where people’s hope for a healthy male baby from the bride is embedded. In Bartolomeo di Fruosino’s Birth tray with seated nude boy, the baby depicted wears a coral necklace, a symbolic object to avoid the demo. That the boy is peeing reminds spectators of the narrative that “a child pees silver and gold” for a Renaissance family, as a newborn male child will continue the family line and inherit the family’s wealth. In Lorenzo Ghiberti’s Madonna and Child, the Virgin is depicted more and more like a mother with tenderness, and the Jesus Child also behaves like a normal cute babe, so that audiences will erose their emotion to connect with the sculpture. In short, from the study of Renaissance artworks so far, we learn that marriage in Renaissance is more like a business arrangement with a huge emphasis on reproduction. We see that social life and contemporary notions can be revealed by such an art study and investigation.
In this lecture, we talked about the women in Renaissance appearing as painting objects, patrons, and artists. The images of women in the Renaissance are often depicted as totally or partially naked and thus contain erotic meaning to please patrons and customers, who were mostly men in the Renaissance. Some examples include Lucas Cranach the Elder and Titian’s Venus of Urbino. In the latter one, it is interesting to notice the dog that falls asleep. Because the dog is always characterized as a symbol of fidelity, its sleeping status reveals a “turn off” of the woman’s fidelity in the image, as she is naked and enticing. The room in the background is in contemporary adoration, so as the way the woman’s hair is done. These details indicate that the image may be the patron’s wife or mistress instead of Venus. In Marcus Gheeraerts the Younger’s Queen Elizabeth I, the queen looks young and huge and is standing on the map with sun and moon behind her figure. Such a design interestingly expresses the message that she is the ruler of anything (space of world) and anytime (day and night).
In this online lecture, we continued our discussion on the women in Renaissance. What stood out to me is Jean Pucelle’s The Betrayal of Christ and Annunciation, where the scene without a border creates a sense of floating, breaking the convention of manuscript illumination. It is also interesting to notice that the Virgin in this manuscript and that in the sculpture of Virgin of Jeanne d’Évreux have the same S-shape pose. In both artworks, Mary shifts her waist and inclines her head towards the opposite direction, a way of depicting balance. The dulls of nuns are also impressive. By adoring dolls and playing with them, nuns show their devotion. They also become the mother of the child Jesus because they will not have their own children.
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.
In this class, we first discussed selfies that are provided by our classmates. It is amazing to see how choices, such as pose, expression, background objects, color, etc, are chosen consciously or unconsciously when taking these selfies. Deconstructing the massage each selfie conveys is also interesting! When I took my selfie I didn’t realize that so much information, such as our intimacy, time and location information, etc, is presented from our pose and background settings.
Then we continued our class on portraits. We looked at Robert Campin’s Portraits of a Man and a Woman, where the amorphous background, i.e. totally dark black, is used to emphasize the character in the center. It’s also interesting that the difference in creating portraints between Notherners and Italians is alanogous to Aristotle and Plato, respectively, in the Raffaello Sanzio’s School of Athens. In the painting, Plato is pointing up to the sky, which implies that Italians prefer to create ideal portraits so they hide or exclude the imperfections in their works. On the other hand, Aristotle is pushing his hand down to ground, which refers to northerners’ preference of keeping all details, including imperfections, in their portraits.
In this class, we first encountered the concept of “aerial perspective”. This refers to the fact that when seeing something afar we cannot see them as well as if they are close, not because they are smaller when being afar (which is instead attributed to linear perspective), but because of the water in the atmosphere. Some examples of aerial perspective are the blurring of the outline/edges, loss of details (not that sharp) and color saturation, etc. We also discussed how the combination of rising perspective and the emergence of oil paintings allows northern artists to include a large amount of details in their artworks.
Then we moved to the idea of “disguised symbolism”, which means some domestic objects in a painting have symbolic meanings. Robert Campin’s Mérode Triptych provides us with many examples. Three lilies are a symbol of Mary’s virginity, and the number three represents Trinity. Two of them being bloomed refers to God Father and Holy Spirit respectively, while one being still a bud refers to the unburned Christ Jesus. What stood out to me is the candle and its metaphor for Christ (wax for his human nature, wick for his soul, and frame for his divinity). The three different explanations are so interesting! It can refer to the transform of the old testament to the new testament, the birth of the child of Jesus being so bright for our world, and the marital tradition. The mousetrap that Joseph is making also stood out to me, as it is a metaphor for the deception–the devil would be fooled by the imperfect, seemingly fully human-natured child of Jesus.
In this class, we were first introduced to the idea of “perspective”, the eye view on something. For example, in Leonardo’s The Last Supper, the point of view is slightly above the dining table. This painting applies the “one point perspective” (one vanishing point in the scene), so it places objects in space clearly and thus creates a sense of depth and locks audiences with the same position in the frame. What else stood out to me is the concept of “numerology”, i.e. how numbers convey a certain idea symbolically, and how it is applied in this artwork. For example, number three, which is a symbol of Trinity and Theological Virtues (faith, hope, and charity), is conveyed by the three windows in the background and that the apostles are grouped by three. The sense of animation revealed by the various vivid facial expressions of apostles, as well as the abandon of the halo of Jesus to mimic reality, is also interesting.
As a math major student, I must talk a little about Leon Battista Alberti’s On Painting, which is a great join of art and mathematics. I like how Alberti summarizes geometric rules so that artists can apply them to draw more natural space. A horizontal line, the line of the audiences’ eye view, being a collection of all possible vanishing points reminds me of the definition of line learned in math class–an infinite collection of points.
Then we moved to Masaccio’s The Holy Trinity with the Virgin, St. John, and Two Donors. In this artwork, attribute to the depiction of depth, we see that two donors are standing preceding, then is Virgin Mary and Saint John, then is Jesus, and finally is God Father. We thus realized that the artist introducing a sense of depth is not only for capturing reality but also for conveying certain meaning and information: the more preceding figures in the painting, the more human-natured they are!
Next, we encountered the idea of “rising perspective”, which means the scene and space in the painting are tilted up, which gives more visible space and allows artists to include more details. We then make a comparison between the Northerners, who prefer such kind of “beyond one point perspective” and are free/flexible about rules, and the Italians, who follow strict mathematics and geometric rules and pursue a coherent one point of view.