Virgin and Child with Angels, Bernaert van Orley

Oh, good choice! I see some lovely details here. (I notice that I am beginning to give a lot more credit to the details than just the overall subject of the painting, since that (i.e., the details) seems to be where the creativity is. I suppose some people might say this belated realization is somewhat ironic for me because I have often commented on precisely this fact in literature, but the same thing being true in painting wasn’t really obvious to me.)

Which should I look at first? Oh, the choices!

First, I guess, I’m delighted with the scene in the clouds. I can’t make out exactly what it’s supposed to be, but connecting finding pictures in the clouds with their actually being pictures in the clouds and then linking that Heaven being in the sky… it’s a charming conceit.

Also at the top of the painting, there’s the tree and the building on the right actually breaking the frame, they’re so tall, putting them higher (via perspective) than the actual heavens. Oh, the things you could do with that symbolically regarding the growth of humanism in the early modern period!

Then there’s the city estate on the hill. (Sorry; I had a colleague who studied and taught the Puritans, and I heard a lot about Winthrop and the City on the Hill.) There’s a guy working his way up the hill; I have a hard time not imagining that as the “steep and thorny way to Heaven” symbolically.

I don’t think I’ve commented on trees with this style of leaves before; I always feel a lot of sympathy for the painters with these stylized leaves because hell if ~I~ could ever get drawings of leaves to look right either. (I don’t often get a chance to feel a lot of fellow feeling for people with artistic talent. I usually label even my stick figures so people can tell what they are.)

The angels? My first impression was that they were both talking about the book, which would be funny; if you put two kids together, sure, both of them might talk at the same time, but you expect angels to have better manners. However, when I zoomed in more, it looks like the book is a hymn book, so they’re singing, which makes a lot more sense, even if it’s not as funny.

I have to admit I was a little thrown by the peacocks, so I went so far as to look up (i.e., Google) Virgin Mary and peacocks, and discovered that peacocks were supposed to have incorruptible bodies (that wouldn’t rot in death, e.g.) and symbolize regalness. Given that, it’s not hard to understand how they came to have a Marian association. (If you zoom in on the peacock’s tail, I think it’s kind of cool that the cobblestones echo the eye pattern.)

What else? Oh, the fastenings in the wood planks in the foreground around the garden patch! They look kind of like staples, and the concept of staple goes back farther than the Renaissance, but I’m not sure that’s how they were used. Anyhow, I love that you can see that the wood was linked together with craft.

As for the clothing and accoutrements, did you notice that Mary gets to rest her feet on a pillow? It never occurred to me to have a garden pillow for my feet so they wouldn’t get cold; on the other hand, I probably have better insulated footwear than she does, though you can see that the sole of her gold toe (whether of a slipper or a boot or what, I don’t know) is pretty thick. There’s also a strawberry, which (another symbol I looked up) signifies a number of righteous qualities. I think I’ve seen better depictions of transparency than the scarf here, but I know that can’t be easy.

I like the expression on Mary’s face, but I’m not going to deny that the infant Jesus freaks me out a little here. I’m not going to comment further on his body, and I know that the depiction of children has changed throughout the centuries as attitudes regarding them have changed, etc., but still.

I almost forgot the archicture of Mary’s house! I love it. I love the portico. I love its marble columns. I love the way the arches are sideways. The ornaments on its roof make me smile. I love the color of the stone garden wall. I love the round windows and the frilly stonecarving bits I don’t know the names of. I love the fan shape of the stones over the window. I particularly love the barred window that’s pretty much at ground level because that looks functional. (“Down here, we have the cellar, where Mary kept her root vegetables to keep them cool,” I imagine a guide saying.)

Overall, I had fun appreciating this picture.

Thanks, Michael5000! (And thanks, Met (www.metmuseum.org)).

Artist
Bernaert van Orley (Netherlandish, born about 1488, died 1541/42)

Title
Virgin and Child with Angels

Date
ca. 1515

Medium
Oil on wood

Dimensions
33 5/8 x 27 1/2 in. (85.4 x 69.9 cm)

Credit Line
Bequest of Benjamin Altman, 1913

Accession Number
14.40.632

Christ Bearing the Cross

This Michael5000 suggestion has much to recommend it, I think, though in some ways it’s (obviously) kind of a lot like other paintings on the same theme.

First, I guess we all know by know how I feel about the style of painting that has as much going on in the background as the foreground, which is that I’m fond of it. (Sometimes, the painting feels a little crowded, but I do like that, like a play, it conveys the impression of multiple stories intersecting, any of which could be traced, rather than a single story being narrated.)

I’m going to start from the top with this one. Gorgeous clouds, and I may say that this is the first time that the sentence “Lovely weather for a crucifixion!” has crossed my mind. The clouds make it look like it’s sunny but maybe with a little bit of a breeze in the afternoon. The interleaving of dark clouds superimposed over white clouds and white clouds superimposed over dark clouds is, logically, a little puzzling to me, but it creates a nice effect.

And then there are the buildings, which continue the blue and white (or off-white) color scheme, like the colors are coming down from the sky — or are they bleeding up into the sky from the city, perhaps? That might work better symbolically. At any rate, that big roundish building with the blue roof in the middle of the city to the right is gorgeous. I want to build it with architectural blocks. After that one, I look at the building (gate house, I guess) that seems to be part of the city walls. Such lovely archest and windows and little details! I love the little angles on the peak high over the gate. Then, in the back left of the picture, there’s another building that’s hard to see because it’s in the distance, but it gives the effect of being, perhaps, a cathedral. (We’d have to ignore the fact that it would be anachronistic, naturally, but I think this painting is living pretty happily in Ye Olde Lande of Anachronisme.)

(And, yes, I do have a lively appreciation of the fact that the somewhat idyllic setting is ironic.)

The thing about the painting I was just looking at is that it looks like it’s propping up the cross as it’s raised, and I think that is a nice effect. My eyes travel down the cross, then, to the guy who is literally holding up the cross. This part of the scene reminds me of the last time I looked at a crucifixion scene (here), where part of the impact on me came from the message that the people who were the hands-on crucifiers were just guys doing their jobs. Heave ho, work as a team, we can get this cross up. And I can’t quite get at the right words for it, but it’s both chilling and something else.

The length of the procession is disturbing too. Jesus isn’t the first one to get to Golgotha; he’s not even the first of the condemned. (There’s that other guy who doesn’t even have any — or many — clothes on ahead of him, and the guy with few clothes on ahead of him too.) And of course you can see the difference between the guys on their horses with the shiny gold armor who are in charge of the event; it suggests an interesting implicit critique of power, at least from a much later perspective.

The location of the women is also interesting. Aside from the one in the foreground, who is prominent because she has the most direct contact with Jesus, there’s a knot of women pretty much dead center in the painting, it looks like to me. Unfortunately, they can’t do much but mourn, I guess. And there’s the last woman, I think — I can’t see the details clearly, but in the bottom left corner, there’s a woman holding a baby, perhaps? Clearly symbolic, if so. Of something.

Verdict: I’m a lot plussier on this than I would have been before starting this project.

The documentation:

Credit to the Met: www.metmuseum.org

Artist
North Netherlandish (Utrecht?) Painter, about 1470

Title
Christ Bearing the Cross

Medium
Oil on wood

Dimensions
42 3/8 x 32 3/8 in. (107.6 x 82.2 cm)

Credit Line
Bequest of George D. Pratt, 1935

Accession Number
43.95

Amphibologista Goes to the Met

I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art (the Met — not the opera) for the first time yesterday. It was both a lovely experience and a rather frustrating one.

First, I’m delighted to report that my program of study has paid off. As is so often the case, knowing even a little bit more about the subject makes it that much more enjoyable to experience. I recognized some of the works and a pretty decent proportion of the artists (not as many as somebody who really knew her stuff, but enough so that I was proud of myself); more than that, I knew a little something about some of them. To my utter delight and astonishment, I’d even written about some of them, and those were the best to see in real life.

Also, and I’m probably stating the obvious and preaching to the choir here simultaneously, but it is absolutely stunning how much different it is to see a painting or a sculpture in real life than to see even the best computerized scan. (Computerized scans have their advantages too, I would note; they let you get in really close, and even if you were allowed to get really close to the paintings in real life, I’m not tall enough to see what’s up high without climbing on a bench or something, and the benches in the Met look pretty hard to move.)

The frustrating part? Well, ironically, despite my recent pointed comments about not getting to go to museums with my friends, I wasn’t by myself, so I wasn’t free to determine my own agenda. Worse, I wasn’t able to set my own pace, so there was a lot of art that I got to glance at but not really look at, which was unsatisfying, to say the least. Since I have clear memories of whizzing through museums at roughly the same pace in previous years, I have to assume that my education has slowed me down.

That’s education for you — clearly impractical and inconvenient.

What’s the point of a post without a picture, you ask? I’ve run into a copyright problem. Picasso only died in the ’70s, so his works are still protected by copyright, and my assistant curator michael5000 has put a Picasso work on my Met list. Please feel free to google Head of a Woman; that’s the one we’re looking at. And please feel free to think I’m nuts for being the only person left who doesn’t want to infringe copyright; I’m used to that.

First off, going out on a limb, I’m going to guess that this is from what they call Picasso’s “blue period.” The painting is of (another real stretch here) the bust of a woman, by which I suppose I should specify (since this is modern art we’re talking about) that I mean the traditional definition of a head, shoulders, and upper torso of a woman, not just a woman’s chest. She’s in what I’m thinking of as a half-profile pose, head tilted slightly down, but eyes looking directly at the viewer. Her hair is long, wavy, and black with blue highlights; her eyes are blue; the background is blue with a kind of dark awning outline at the top, and her skin is blue-tinted as well. Basically, if you took a normal picture and washed it all over with blue, you’d get this look.

But despite what you may be thinking, I really don’t mind about the blue. (I probably would’ve when I was younger.) This one’s tricky because while it doesn’t really speak to me, I like some things about it. Specifically, I’m entertained by the motif of the slightly bow-shaped line, which recurs, at least arguably, in her hair, eyebrows, nose, lips, ear, shoulder, and collarbones.

Verdict: I’m not sure which way to go with these ones. If I’m all “meh” about something, is that a + or a -? This one would get a default + for my not hating it, but I wouldn’t seek it out if I were going to the Met, or spend much time looking at it if I wandered past, so maybe it’s a -.

Faustine Léo, Henri Lehmann

Now, I have two opposite reactions to this painting, and those responses shouldn’t really be seen as reflecting on each other.

The first is that her limpidness is a bit too exaggerated. Her head is really that size? Maybe I’m missing something, but I’m surprised that her head and her entire torso are the same size. An obvious explanation for this would be if she’s much younger than I’m thinking.

As for the rest of it — the sky looks like that? Man, how long did they have to wait for a perfectly clear day to pose her in front of?

And this is probably silly of me, but I can’t help thinking that the proportions of sky and land aren’t what I would expect. I guess it’s bugging me that the middle of the picture is virtually right at her waist, so you get a really strong visual divide without really any reason for it…. I mean, it’s not as though she changes at her waist and has a scaly tail or something.

The second thing probably appears to be very nearly a total contradiction of the first, but I don’t believe it really is: the young woman portrayed here bears a strong resemblance to one of my good friends (when she takes off her glasses). That doesn’t mean that any of the above criticisms could be made of my friend’s appearance, though; the similarity is despite the misporportionate head, etc., and so I kind of end up liking the painting. Plus, in a way, the painting itself does strike me as beautiful.

Overall, I dunno. The picture looks sweet and pretty, but some of those elements throw me off enough that I find it a little disconcerting. I think what I like best is the way the colors balance each other from top to bottom, and I like the vine curling in front of her skirt. Being a nice person (or so I like to think), I have trouble saying that I don’t like something unless I really don’t like it, so I’d probably end up giving this one a lukewarm nod.

Artist
Charles-Ernest-Rodolphe-Henri Lehmann (French, 1814–1882)

Title
Faustine Léo (1832–1865)

Date
1842

Medium
Oil on canvas

Dimensions
39 3/8 x 32 in. (100 x 81.3 cm)

Credit Line
Purchase, Wolfe Fund and Mr. and Mrs. Frank E. Richardson Gift, 2004

Accession Number
2004.243

credit: www.metmuseum.org

http://www.metmuseum.org/works_of_art/collection_database/all/faustine_leo_1832_1865_charles_ernest_rodolphe_henri_lehmann/objectview_enlarge.aspx?page=5079&sort=0&sortdir=asc&keyword=&fp=1&dd1=0&dd2=0&vw=1&collID=0&OID=110003445&vT=1

Shepherd's Idyll, François Boucher

With this painting, we’re starting a new series, which I’m thinking of as Well Met at The Met. For those not in the know, that’s an ironic title, in a way, since you’d think that perhaps, for instance, I went to the Met and “met” these paintings or met a friend there and looked at these images or something.

Instead, my friend and assistant (or possibly associate at this point) curator of this blog michael5000, who was visiting the east coast, went to the Met. Without me. I mean, that’s fine; I had other stuff to do anyhow, and I’ve been told by several friends now (who haven’t tried it) that I would be a distracting person to go to a museum with, so they couldn’t focus on the art, which would be a shame.

I take it as a compliment, or I try to.

At any rate, michael5000 was kind enough to make a long, long list of pieces of art he looked at, along with assessments of whether he liked them and whether he thought ~I~ would like them, so I kind of feel like I was there after all, especially since The Met is kind enough to a) provide excellent, zoomable (if small) pictures of at least most of them on their website, and b) allow us amateurs to put their pictures on our sites as long as we aren’t doing it for profit (not accepting sponsors or selling anything here), provide the entire caption, and credit them properly, like so: www.metmuseum.org. (I’ve placed the caption info at the bottom, along with the whole URL for reference, though it is a bit bulky.)

At any rate, there is a picture here to discuss, too, and I haven’t even really looked at it yet because I spent a bunch of time this morning rearranging the list I received into spreadsheet form (trust me, it was absolutely necessary), and then I sorted by period to find something in the 18th century, whose turn it is, and this is what came up first.

I know I used Boucher before, with his Fontaine d’Amour, which I am fond of, so seeing that I “had” to visit another Boucher painting this morning was a hardship not at all.

First off, I like that everything seems to be kind of attractively unkempt around here. Also, when I opened the image in Paint (to enlarge the whole thing at once, even though it made it pixellated), it gave the impression of flowing water: specifically, the path and the foliage along it seem to have all of the lines running downhill, if that makes sense, and the ground itself looks turbulent but smooth.

The gender imbalance in the scene is a little odd; does it really take three shepherdesses to idyll one shepherd? Or maybe it’s just two shepherdesses vying for the shepherd’s attention; the one on the left seems to be trying to keep the goat from eating the flowers the others are pressing on him. She, naturally, doesn’t seem to be getting any of his attention. (The style of her clothing is different from the other two, as well; it makes me wonder about a possible class differential there.)

I can easily imagine the kind of appeal of this tradition down to Norman Rockwell and Thomas Kinkade, what with the cute animals (sweet puppy! silly goat!) and adorable children (seriously, I think the kid in the center of the triangle is just about as cute as you can get without going over the top and making the eyes too big).

Verdict: I like it, with the caveat that this is getting about as sweet as I can take things getting. (And I think I like Fontaine d’Amour better, though it’s hard to tell without a good side-by-side comparison of them.)

Caption Information:

Artist
François Boucher (French, 1703–1770)

Title
Shepherd’s Idyll

Date
1768

Medium
Oil on canvas

Dimensions
94 1/2 x 93 1/2 in. (240 x 237.5 cm)

Credit Line
Gift of Julia A. Berwind, 1953

Accession Number
53.225.1

http://www.metmuseum.org/works_of_art/collection_database/european_paintings/shepherd_s_idyll_francois_boucher/objectview_enlarge.aspx?page=74&sort=0&sortdir=asc&keyword=&fp=1&dd1=11&dd2=0&vw=1&collID=11&OID=110000178&vT=1

A Collector's Cabinet, Frans Francken the Younger

Having browsed through a bunch of Frans Francken’s paintings, what I love about them (and what I suspect everybody else would love too, although I don’t remember seeing these before myself, but just maybe that’s not a good indication of popularity) is how chock-full of detail they are.

So, first off, we’ve got paintings of paintings here, including a painting of a painter painting (gotta love the meta-painting!) which also shows painting as being social, with numerous extra people hanging out in the room lookin’ good in their fancy clothes; of two people looking at a painting — and not with it hanging on the wall, but in front of them on a table, the way we might look at a photograph somebody handed us; of portraits that look like classical Dutch portraits to me; of impressionistic landscapes (or maybe they’re actually in really good detail but the scan’s lacking something); and a mythological scene (Venus with satyrs is what is suggests to me, but I’m not very good at translating my knowledge of myth into terms that work with paintings, so take that with a grain of salt).

Then, since I don’t actually want to just list everything in the painting, you have copia — the idea of aesthetic beauty in bounty. I notice the same (or very similar) shells showing up in other Francken paintings, which interested me because it suggests that he had them on hand (I mean, why wouldn’t he, but still), not one but two globes (one for each room), lots of coins and papers, and a really expressive statue. I like the statue, though I don’t know the subject; the woman’s anguish seems nicely wrought to me.

Plus, look! Glass windows in the background! Swanky.

Lion's Head

This is a 13th-century Tuscan ivory lion’s head, according to wikimedia.

It’s hard to say what I like about it. I guess I’d have to include that I never thought about people carving lion’s heads out of ivory for any reason (and I’m not sure what the reason would be here), that it has that charmingly grotesque air that’s just kind of cute, and that while being definitely lionish, it leaves something to be desired as an absolutely accurate depiction. (Was the artist looking at a Saint Bernard or something for the nose and mouth?)

Actually, until I was trying to figure out what didn’t work for me here, I hadn’t ever really thought about the fact that big cats have round pupils instead of slitted ones like domestic cats. Huh.

Late Archaic Relief

I suppose it’s wrong, very very wrong, to see these guys as dancing? ‘Cause I really have problems figuring out anything else they could be doing.

The only thing is, the guys in the middle ought to watch out for stepping on each other’s toes.

The Goat, Pavel Filonov

Another piece of art brought to you by Michael5000!

I’m glad he has sent me suggestions for the 20th century because that’s such a weak spot for me. Also, this piece is pretty well outside my comfort zone, and yet I don’t hate it!

In fact, I’m going so far as to say that I think it’s kind of fun. Besides the goat, I can see other shapes, probably only in the sense that people see shapes in clouds.

Unfortunately, it’s only fun for a few seconds before my eyes start to feel strained, so I don’t think I’d want it in my living room. I’m delighted that it exists somewhere, though. It comes across as a comment on traditional techniques of representation but without feeling pompous.

(Also, you could use this technique for quilting — at least if you didn’t mind using a million little pieces!)