art history

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Behold the Man

30 July 2007 in art history, artists by David | 4 comments

I didn’t see the Mel Gib­son movie, “The Pas­sion of the Christ.” I was dis­ap­pointed, how­ever, by a small moment in the pre­view. The mak­ers made a big point of hav­ing the movie be in the orig­i­nal Latin and Ara­maic. When Pon­tius Pilate parades the tor­tured Jesus before the Jew­ish crowds, he says, “ecce homo,” which means, “behold the man.” He is attempt­ing to demon­strate to the potentially-rebellious Jews that Jesus is no divine Mes­siah, only a mor­tal man who can bleed, suf­fer, and be made to sub­mit to Roman author­ity like any­one else.

My pedan­tic quib­ble is this: Pilate pro­nounces “ecce” wrong. He says, “eche.” I’m no Latin scholar, but it is my under­stand­ing that there are no soft “C” sounds in clas­si­cal Latin. It should be pro­nounced “eke,” just as Cae­sar would have been pro­nounced “kaisar,” not “seesar” the way we say it today. The soft “C” pro­nun­ci­a­tion is from Medieval Church Latin, which did not exist circa 33 A.D. Any real schol­ars should feel free to cor­rect me on this. Read the rest of this entry »

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History of the frame

28 May 2007 in art history by David | 1 comment

At this site. Judg­ing from some of the badly-framed work I some­times see in gal­leries, some artists and gallery own­ers don’t real­ize how impor­tant good fram­ing is.

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Details of a Van Eyck painting

15 April 2007 in art history, artists by David | 2 comments

Check out these details of “The Madonna and Can­non Van Der Paele” by Jan Van Ecyk. What’s par­tic­u­larly amaz­ing to con­sider is how new this “Ars Nova” move­ment was when Van Eyck was paint­ing. Almost no one had done any­thing like it before. And yet Van Eyck’s work is so stun­ningly fluent.

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Art books I’m reading

24 February 2007 in art books, art history by David | No comments

From Flan­ders to Flo­rence: The Impact of Nether­lan­dish Paint­ing, 1400–1500 This is a book on the influ­ence of the Nether­lan­dish “Ars Nova” move­ment on Flo­ren­tine art. In the early 15th cen­tury, a new style of art, using new com­po­si­tional devices, new themes, new vir­tu­oso ren­der­ing meth­ods, and a new use of an old medium (oil paint) began to dom­i­nate paint­ing in the Nether­lands. Within a decade or so, artists such as Jan van Eyck and Rogier van der Wey­den came to be well-known and highly regarded in Italy, includ­ing the city of Flo­rence, which was at that time a great cen­ter of Renais­sance paint­ing. Locally-produced paint­ings in the Nether­lan­dish style soon became pop­u­lar and, over the next decades, many painters began to excel at this new style of work. This is a big book, full of won­der­ful illus­tra­tions, that exam­ines this phe­nom­e­non in great detail.

Art in the Mak­ing: Rem­brandt I don’t know enough about 17th cen­tury paint­ing, so I blew a cou­ple of Bor­ders gift cards left over from Christ­mas on this book. It’s a detailed tech­ni­cal analy­sis of paint­ings by Rem­brandt (and fol­low­ers) in the National Gallery in Lon­don. I just got it, but it seems quite good so far. The folks at the National Gallery seem to really know their stuff; I’ve very much enjoyed two of their other books in the “Art in the Mak­ing” series. The other major book on the sub­ject (in Eng­lish) is Rem­brandt: The Painter at Work, which I have not read.

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Disegno and colore

9 January 2007 in art history, painting by David | No comments

His­tor­i­cally, two of the impor­tant words that Ital­ians used to describe the act of paint­ing were “dis­egno” and “col­ore.” As I under­stand them, the words had broad mean­ings that I’d like to dis­cuss a bit.

Dis­egno meant both “design” and “draw­ing.” It referred to the whole process of plan­ning and lay­ing out a paint­ing, up to and includ­ing any under­draw­ing. It also referred to what we think of as draw­ing, inde­pen­dent from painting.

Col­ore meant both “color” and the process of apply­ing paint. It included select­ing which col­ors would be used where, lay­er­ing paint, blend­ing paint, shad­ing, brush strokes, and so on.

I absolutely love how these words bring together con­cepts that are sep­a­rate in Eng­lish. If in paint­ing I make a mis­take in place­ment, I might say that I made a “draw­ing” error. But unless I did an actual under­draw­ing that doesn’t quite make sense. In Ital­ian, how­ever, it is exactly cor­rect to say that the dis­egno was not right. It’s also great to have a word for the appli­ca­tion of paint and its rela­tion­ship to color. One can say that, in his later life, Tit­ian paid less atten­tion to dis­egno than he had pre­vi­ously and put most of his empha­sis on col­ore. Impres­sion­ism is all about col­ore and less about dis­egno. In the 15th cen­tury, Nether­lan­dish paint­ing impressed Ital­ians with their colore—their won­der­ful and pre­cise appli­ca­tion of paint. These words just make incred­i­ble sense to me.

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Jan Gossaert

24 December 2006 in art history, artists by David | No comments

Danawas one of the great North­ern painters of the late Renais­sance. Gos­saert was born about 1478 and died in 1532. He was also called Jan Mabuse and Jen­nyn Van Hene­gouwe. In 1508 he trav­eled with his patron Phillip of Bur­gundy to Italy. His mature style became a bril­liant syn­the­sis of tra­di­tional Flem­ish tight real­ism, Ital­ian Renais­sance styles, and the inno­va­tions of Albrect Dürer. He was one of the first North­ern artist to paint large-scale sec­u­lar nudes as dec­o­ra­tion for an Italian-style palace for his human­ist mas­ter Phillip.

This paint­ing is his last. It depicts Danaë as she is approached by Zeus as a beam of sun­light, just before the god impreg­nates her with the hero Perseus (Greek myths are like that). The sub­ject was also painted by Tit­ian and Rem­brandt, but I am par­tic­u­larly fond of Gossaert’s version.

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Rogier van der Weyden

22 December 2006 in art history, artists by David | No comments

Van der Weyden, Lady Wearing a Gauze Headdresswas one of the great real­ist painters of all time. Born in 1400, he was one of the pio­neers of early oil paint­ing in North­ern Europe, along with his teacher Robert Campin and con­tem­po­rary Jan van Eyck. Most of his career as a mature painter (he lived until 1464) was spent in Brus­sels. His work was renowned in his own time and when he vis­ited Italy in 1450 he was wel­comed, given sev­eral promi­nent com­mis­sions, and appar­ently asked to tutor Ital­ian artists in the meth­ods of Flem­ish oil paint­ing. Despite his great influ­ence on later artists, after his death his name fell into rel­a­tive obliv­ion, and it was a mat­ter of schol­ar­ship in later cen­turies to iden­tify his (invari­ably unsigned) work, rec­og­nize his amaz­ing skill at high real­ism, and clar­ify his role in the devel­op­ment of mod­ern painting.

This paint­ing, “Lady Wear­ing a Gauze Head­dress,” was prob­a­bly painted around 1445. It is thought by some to be a por­trait of his wife, Eliz­a­beth Gof­faerts. This the­ory is given sup­port by the (then quite unusual) direct gaze of the sit­ter and a slightly softer style than was usual for van der Weyden.

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The classical palette

7 December 2006 in art history, art materials, color, oil painting, painting, tempera by David | 1 comment

Before the 19th cen­tury, painters didn’t have to worry about select­ing a palette of paints from a huge array of those avail­able. There were only a few pig­ments avail­able, so painters had to make do with what they could get. If you wanted an opaque red, you had ver­mil­ion and, well, ver­mil­ion. So you learned how to get every­thing you could out of that pig­ment. You didn’t com­plain that it was a bit too orange for your taste, because your choices were ver­mil­ion and noth­ing. In addi­tion, you had a cou­ple of bright blues (both of which were incred­i­bly expen­sive), a cou­ple dull blues, a trans­par­ent violet-red, a green that had to be used care­fully or it would turn black, an orange, a dull-ish yel­low, one white, some vari­a­tions on car­bon black, and some earth col­ors. That’s mostly it, and you only had that many col­ors if you could afford them and lived some­place where there was enough trade to obtain them.

Go to a museum some time and look at some paint­ings from the Renais­sance. Notice any absence of color? Dull­ness? Inabil­ity to obtain mix­tures that con­vey a sense of real­ity? Mud­di­ness? Poor color har­mony? Unre­al­is­tic flesh tones? No? Many of those paint­ings were done with six or seven total pig­ments. Not pig­ments care­fully selected to cre­ate an opti­mal palette from among hun­dreds of col­ors avail­able in in an art store, but six or seven pig­ments selected from maybe ten or twelve that the artist could get. And yet they made some of the most gor­geous paint­ings ever created.

If you like the way paint­ings from before 1800 look, one option is to select a palette of col­ors that repli­cates those avail­able then. So here is a sim­ple palette that is sim­i­lar to what was avail­able in West­ern Europe before the new syn­thetic pig­ments began to be dis­cov­ered in the late 1700’s. Read the rest of this entry »

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You say “sfumah-to,” I say “sfumay-to”

8 November 2006 in art history, art technique, artists, oil painting, painting by David | No comments

Leonardo, Virgin of the RocksIn the excel­lent Giotto to Durer: Early Renais­sance Paint­ing in the National Gallery, there is a descrip­tion of the paint­ing tech­nique Leonardo used for most of his later work, includ­ing the Mona Lisa. This tech­nique, which he called sfu­mato (“smoke-like”), cre­ates a sense of three-dimensional light and shade that is dif­fer­ent from that of his contemporaries.

I have seen ref­er­ences that said that the sfu­mato tech­nique was sim­ply to blend with the fin­gers. Leonardo cer­tainly did that, but you can find fin­ger­prints in oil paint­ings from before his birth, so fin­ger paint­ing is hardly unique to his style. Instead, it is based on his obser­va­tions of smoke. He noted that smoke. which is semi-opaque, looks white against a dark back­ground and dark against a light back­ground. So he decided to make use of the opti­cal prop­er­ties of lead white paint in a sim­i­lar man­ner. He would begin by apply­ing a very dark under­paint­ing in black, earth tones, and pos­si­bly a trans­par­ent bitu­mi­nous brown. This under­paint­ing was rather loose and thin, prob­a­bly diluted with naph­tha or oil of spike laven­der (almost no other 15th cen­tury painters appear to have used sol­vents for paint­ing, so Leonardo is prob­a­bly the inven­tor of the washy under­paint­ing). He would then apply velat­uras over the dark under­paint­ing in muted col­ors mixed with white. The method pro­duces smoky, opales­cent tran­si­tions from dark to light that are quite beau­ti­ful and quite unlike other paint­ing in that period.

By the way, I want this Leonardo t-shirt.

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Egg tempera

7 November 2006 in art history, painting, personal, tempera by David | 2 comments

is a type of paint made by mix­ing pig­ment with egg yolk.* This week I’ve been work­ing on an egg tem­pera study (sev­eral fig­ures copied from paint­ings by Fra Angelico), to use as a demo piece for the Renais­sance paint­ing work­shop I’m doing at Wet­can­vas and for an egg tem­pera class my wife and I will be teach­ing at a Soci­ety for Cre­ative Anachro­nism event this Sat­ur­day.

I hadn’t done much tem­pera in the last year. I for­got what a beau­ti­ful medium it is. The paint­ing process is to apply many fine hatch­ing strokes with a dry brush, build­ing up value slowly in a man­ner sim­i­lar to work­ing with a graphite pen­cil. The result is unlike any other medium. At first it’s frus­trat­ing, because I make a lot of lit­tle mis­takes. Drat! I have too much paint on the brush. Akk! There’s still too much paint. Gah! I’m paint­ing over an area that’s still wet and the paint is com­ing up. If you are try­ing to build tone, you grad­u­ally weave strokes back and forth, back and forth. You get into a kind of men­tal zone and sud­denly it looks exactly right.

I need to do more tem­pera painting.

*If you are unfa­mil­iar with paint­ing media, please don’t con­fuse egg tem­pera with “tem­pera” poster paints for chil­dren. Other than being kinds of paint, they have noth­ing at all to do with each other.

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I did a lot of complaining about bad use of chroma

1 November 2006 in art history, artists, color by David | No comments

Michelangelo, Doni Tondoin my last post. I was grous­ing about artists who use high chroma col­ors indis­crim­i­nately. So I thought I’d pro­vide an exam­ple of a good paint­ing with lots of intense color.

This is the Doni Tondo by Michelan­gelo. Notice the bright col­ors in the drap­ery, which dom­i­nate the paint­ing. Yet Michelan­gelo has care­fully pro­vided rests of dark dull col­ors and lighter tints. He uses chroma brilliantly.

So I don’t have a prob­lem with high chroma, just clue­less chroma.

It’s called the “Doni Tondo,” by the way, because it was com­mis­sioned for the daugh­ter of a guy whose last name was Doni. A tondo, of course, is a round paint­ing. It was painted circa 1506, when Michelan­gelo was 31 years old.

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Jan van Eyck

24 October 2006 in art history, artists by David | 2 comments

Van Eyck, Man in Turbanwas cred­ited by the 16th cen­tury artist and biog­ra­pher Vas­sari as the inven­tor of oil paint­ing. That’s not the case, but in the early 15th cen­tury he was one of the pio­neers of the mod­ern use of oil paint­ing as a pri­mary paint­ing medium.

Appar­ently, he had a sense of humor. This paint­ing, which may be a self-portrait, was made with a frame carved as part of the panel. At the bot­tom, it’s inscribed (in Greek let­ters in the Flem­ish lan­guage) with what appears to be a pun. It can be read either as “As I can,” or “As Eyck can.”

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Heraldic contrast

12 October 2006 in art history, art technique, color by David | 3 comments

Tra­di­tional Euro­pean her­aldry (coats of arms) has a lot of rules regard­ing how designs can be con­structed. One of the fun­da­men­tal rules is this: no metal on metal or color on color. There are two met­als: gold (rep­re­sented as yel­low) and sil­ver (rep­re­sented as white). All the other hues that can be used are “col­ors.” The rule is that col­ors can’t be placed next to other col­ors, only met­als. Met­als can’t be placed next to other met­als, only colors.

This may seem like an anti­quated piece of trivia, use­ful only to those who are des­per­ate to be the fifth cousin twice removed of the Duke of Corn­wall or some­such, until you look at street signs. In the U.S. (and those parts of Europe and Canada I’ve vis­ited) almost all street signs fol­low the heraldic metal on color and color on metal rule. A U.S. stop sign is a metal (white/argent) on a color (red/gules). High­way direc­tion signs also (white/argent on green/vert). Speed limit signs? Black/sable on white/argent. Those few signs that don’t fol­low the heraldic con­ven­tion, such as con­struc­tion signs with black text on an orange field, are much less notice­able than the vast major­ity that do.

What’s going on here? Her­aldry was orig­i­nally designed so that painted shields and ban­ners would be clearly vis­i­ble at a great dis­tance on the bat­tle­field. For that to hap­pen, you need to have a lot of con­trast. As it turns out, with the pig­ments they had avail­able, white and yel­low had the best con­trast against the other pig­ments. Thus the avoid­ance of color con­trasted against color or metal con­trasted against metal. Even with mod­ern pig­ments and spe­cial reflec­tive sur­face treat­ments, the rule pretty much holds up, so sign design­ers fol­low it even if they don’t know where it came from. Next time you’re on the road, try to find signs that break this rule. If you do find one, note that the con­trast is poor com­pared to signs that fol­low the rule. Same with signs on buildings.

This rule can be use­ful when you are design­ing a color scheme and want to high­light a focal area of a paint­ing. If you fol­low this old heraldic rule, you will have all the con­trast you could need.

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Battle scenes

8 October 2006 in art history, artists by David | No comments

Uccello, Battle of San Romanoare uncom­mon in Renais­sance panel paint­ing. Here is one excep­tion, part of a series of three huge pan­els, done mostly in egg tem­pera, com­mem­o­rat­ing a minor Ital­ian bat­tle (the Bat­tle of San Romano) by Paolo Uccelo. This one is in the National Gallery in Lon­don. I’ve seen it’s sis­ter paint­ing in the Lou­vre. One impres­sive aspect is the gild­ing. All of the armor is done in sil­ver leaf, punched and scribed with three dimen­sional pat­terns of mail and plate, then glazed with thin lay­ers of asphal­tum ground in oil. Very impressive.

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Madonna with the Child and Two Angels

3 October 2006 in art history, artists by David | No comments

Lippi, Maddona with Child and Two Angelsby Fra Fil­lipo Lippi, tem­pera on panel, 95 × 62 cm (37 × 24” ). This gor­geous and del­i­cate paint­ing was done in 1465. Lippi was an inter­est­ing char­ac­ter, a Friar who had an affair with a nun. They were both allowed to resign from their respec­tive orders. She bore him a son (Fil­lipino, who also became a painter) and a daugh­ter (who was not artis­ti­cally inclined, so far as I am aware).

For all that, his style is beau­ti­ful and, I think, pos­sessed of a pro­found sense of the divine. He prob­a­bly taught the more famous San­dro Bot­ti­celli, whose style is clearly influ­enced by him.

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