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Category: Renaissance Painting

Italy Through the Russian Eyes: The Bay of Naples

Alexander Ivanov, The Bay of Naples near Castellmare (1846)

 

Alexander Ivanov, On the Shore of the Bay of Naples (1850s)

The Bay of Naples has traditionally been a favourite with painters. Peter Breugel the Elder’s view was rather “flat”, but in the 19th c. artists showed the Bay from many angles and in many weathers. The Russian painters particularly liked it, especially Alexander Ivanov. The Bay of Naples, as seen in Ivanov’s works, is an epitome of serenity and the heat of Southern Italy, even when Vesuvius lurks in the background. Another artist of Armenian origin, who became a well-known Russian marine painter, Ivan Aivazovsky, shows this area in the moonlight, when it acquires a purely Romanticist feel.

Pieter Breugel the Elder, The Bay of Naples (1556)

 

Alexander Ivanov, Torre del Greco near Pompeii and Naples (1846)
Alexander Ivanov, View of Naples from the Road in Pozilippe

 

Ivan Aivazovsky, The Bay of Naples by Moonlight (1842)

Italy Through the Russian Eyes: Alexey Tyranov – A Portrait of an Italian Lady

Alexey Tyranov was born in 1801. Prior to going to the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg he worked alongside his brother as an icon painter. At the Academy he studied under Alexey Venetsianov, and from 1836 he studied under Karl Brullov.

A Portrait of an Italian Lady gently combines the Russian modesty and the sensuality of the Italian Renaissance, e.g. Titian’s Flora. The woman is pictured either before or after having a bath.

 

The Types of Cinematic Shots According to Mikhail Romm

As I was reading Mikhail Romm‘s book on directing in cinema, I came across a chapter on shots and framing, in which Romm illustrates different types of shots through the well-known paintings. I found the idea marvellous and thought I’d translate the passage, using the same illustrative method.

1. Long (or the most generic) shot. This means that in this shot we have either a very large room in its entirety, or such an expanse of landscape that it can be seen far and wide. A human figure in such shot will be barely noticeable. Say, for example, if it is a crowd of people storming the Winter Palace, then individual figures in such long shot will fuse into a moving mass.

Karl Brulloff – The Delphi Valley (1835)
Ilya Repin – Krestny Khod in Kursk Gubernia (1880-1883)

2. Generic shot. This is either a large room, but not as huge as before, or, if we are filming outside, a part of the street or a part of landscape, yet not as expansive. As you can see, there is no critical difference between the long shot and the generic one. When we say “the long shot” or “the most generic shot”, we merely want to highlight the scale of the view. As for a man, it will still be a small figure. The prominence will belong to either the architecture of the room, or to Nature, or a street.

Ivan Aivazovsky – On the Island of Rhodes (1861)

3. Middle shot. This is a part of the room, a part of the street, a Nature spot. If we are filming at the theatre, these will be two or three boxes, or a few rows of the stalls, or a part of stage. People are better seen in the middle shot. Architecture or Nature no longer dominate a person, and the person’s image is clearer. Say, if “The Religious Procession” by Ilya Repin is the long shot, then “Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan”, also by him, is the middle shot.

Ilya Repin – Ivan the Terrible and His Son Ivan (1885)

4. The next shot, according to the scale of viewing, we may call the group shot. People dominate this shot, while the room or an outside space are less prominent. Repin’s painting “The Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mahmoud IV” may be regarded as a group shot.

Ilya Repin – The Reply of the Zaporozhian Cossacks to Sultan Mahmoud IV

The next few shots do not require much explanation. In all these shots the person acquires more and more prominence, while the surroundings become less important. The latter is practically non-present in the close shots.

5. Knee-long shot. 

Henri Fantin-Latour – Charlotte Dubourg (1882)

6. Waist-long shot. 

Sir Joshua Reynolds – Mrs Abington (1771)

  7. Portrait shot (the head and a part of chest).

Pierre Paul Prudhon – Annunciation (detail) (1881)
8. Close-up (only head). 
Vincent van Gogh – A Peasant Woman (1885)

And, finally, the closest shot, scale-wise, is:

9. A detail. It can be an inanimate object (spectacles or a block of cigarettes shot to fill the entire screen), or animate, i.e. belonging to a human body (a fist, a person’s eyes).

Claude Monet – Still Life: A Piece of Beef (1864)

Christmas in Painting: Titian

Titian, The Adoration of the Shepherds, 1533, Galleria Palatina, Florence, Italy

A rather sombre interpretation of the subject of Adoration by Titian directs the viewer to the bottom right corner of the painting where the cloth and the baby Jesus emit light on the hands and face of Mary. Joseph is making a silencing gesture to the visitors, indicating that the newborn is asleep.

 

Christmas in Painting: Alessando Botticelli

Alessandro Botticelli, Adoration of the Magi, 1475/76
(Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy)

This painting was commissioned to Botticelli by a Florentine Gaspar di Zanobi del Lama for the church of Santa Maria Novella. Quite in line with the tradition of the time, the real-life characters were incorporated in this pictorial adaptation of the Biblical story: the three Magi are the Medicis, Cosimo (as Melchior, presenting the gift to the Virgin), Piero (in red mantle, as Balthasar), and Giovanni (next to Piero, as Gaspar). Curiously enough, all three were dead by the time the painting was made; but this also explains why Balthasar who by 1475 had already been sometimes painted as the black king appears distinctly European (or even Florentine, perhaps).

The commissioner of the painting is pictured on the right, he is an old man in light blue mantle behind the man in black and red costume, pointing at the observer. And the solitary figure on the right wearing golden mantle is Botticelli himself.

Giorgio Vasari thus described the painting in his Lives of the Artists:

The beauty of the heads in this scene is indescribable, their attitudes all different, some full-face, some in profile, some three-quarters, some bent down, and in various other ways, while the expressions of the attendants, both young and old, are greatly varied, displaying the artist’s perfect mastery of his profession. Sandro further clearly shows the distinction between the suites of each of the kings. It is a marvellous work in colour, design and composition.

Before and after this painting, Botticelli would return to the topic in other works, and it is interesting to observe the similarities and differences in composition between all three paintings. In the 1475 work we only see a part of the stables. Undoubtedly, this allowed the artist to bring the “human” component of the painting into the focus, whereby we are looking at people, rather than contemplating the symbolic or religious meaning of the scene. There are also no strict horizontal divisions, although the figures are still “assembled” in a triangular mode.

Before that date, in a tondo painted between 1470 and 1474, Botticelli applies the perspective to his composition, as well as horizontal divisions. The stables vividly evoke the structure of the church, and the artist deftly manipulates the effect to create an impression of the depth of space. The divisions allegorically takes us from the world of people (the foreground populated with both people and horses) to the world of spirit (the elongated walls of the stables).

Finally, the 1481-82 painting does not boast too many figures, but the structure of the stables comes to the fore with its elaborate design. Perspective, but also landscape, play an equally important role. Mary now appears to be accepting the gifts of the Magi in the ruins of a classical temple or a Renaissance mansion, and the landscape that is visible through the aisle conveys the sense of idyll and peace. The sudden introduction of classical elements into the painting will become less unusual if we bear in mind that in the same years – 1481-1482 – Botticelli travelled to Rome and worked at the Vatican.

Alessandro Botticelli, Adoration of the Magi, 1470-74
(National Gallery, London, UK)

 

Alessandro Botticelli, Adoration of the Magi, 1481-82
(National Gallery of Art, Washington DC, USA)

How Apollo Was Flaying Marsyas

The origins of this post date back to July 2008. I went to London and visited Victoria and Albert Museum. I spent most of my time there admiring sculptures by Rodin, Canova and Lord Leighton, and it was there that I came across the group by Antonio Corradini, Apollo Flaying Marsyas. The group dated back to 1719-1723 and was originally at the royal gardens in Dresden. It was not unusual to see such group in the place where the high and mighty would walk: in the Summer Garden in St. Petersburg one of the sculptures depicted Uranus devouring his child – hardly a pleasant composition to behold during a lazy afternoon promenade. Yet Corradini’s sculpture was disturbing in a very peculiar way. Apollo, armed with this huge garden knife, skins Marsyas’s leg, while watching a poor satyr with the most curious expression: the god is either surprised by the satyr’s reaction, or he is gently reminding Marsyas that such was supposed to be the punishment, so “no sulking now!” I was particularly impressed by the contrast of the scene’s brutality and by Apollo’s gentle musical fingers holding Marsyas’s leg as if it was a cello’s body.

When I looked around for representations of this story by other artists, my surprise grew even bigger to some extent. As you can see in the presentation below, artists were not unanimous on how to depict Marsyas. According to some variants of the legend, he was a satyr; in other cases he was a peasant. This may explain why in some paintings Marsyas appears as a man, and not as half-goat. Neither were they unanimous in showing Apollo’s involvement. Although the majority of painters or sculptors showed the god heavily involved in punishing the satyr, some, like Titian, gave Apollo a Nero-esque look, putting him almost in the background, giving him the lyre and making him the onlooker.

It may be tempting to reflect on the social undertone of the legend. The god of Sun whose power was challenged by a peasant takes to punish the offender most severely… and if the peasant was in fact a satyr, half-goat that is to say, so the “social” component of the story was even more prominent. As much as this social undertone cannot be denied (which may explain why Antonio Corradini’s sculpture had been gracing the royal gardens), what is probably more interesting is the opportunity the story of Apollo and Marsyas was giving to showcase the awareness of human anatomy, emotions, and the developments in medical science. Apollo in the paintings by Jordaens, de Ribera and Carpioni strikes the pose that would normally be seen in the anatomical theatre – that of an experienced surgeon and anatomist. Marsyas wriggling his body in agonising pain, his face distorted, was once again a great opportunity to put to work the knowledge gained in hospitals, battlefields, and prisons. And not once do we see the artist meticulously showing us the process of skinning the poor satyr. It was about bones, meat, and tissues rather than politics – let alone mythology.

Links:

Marsyas “biography” at Wikipedia.
Marsyas: Satyr of Lydia (with quotations from primary sources) at Theoi.
Apollo myths at Yahoo! Geocities.

And Once Again About Leonardo’s Portraits

Update: a National Geographic video report about Nicola Barbatelli’s discovered portrait of Leonardo.

Yes, again on the subject of Leonardo’s portraits, for there is an exhibition currently at Manchester Art Gallery showing ten drawings by Leonardo da Vinci that are kept at the Royal Library at Windsor Castle. The exhibition marks the 60th birthday of His Royal Highness Prince of Wales, and I will be coming back to it as a subject, although I shall duly express my commendations to MAG for treating Manchester residents and visitors to what can easily be compared to Raphael’s first exhibition in England back in 2004 at the National Gallery.

In addition to the ten drawings by Leonardo, there are two more reproductions. One is a binding of the artist’s disegni (drawings), and another is a red chalk portrait by Francesco Melzi, apparently completed around 1515, just four years before Leonardo’s death in 1519 (left). And it is the latter that got me standing in front of it for several minutes thinking….

… about the personality of the sitter, for example, as well as the artist’s skill. Melzi is known as the pupil of Leonardo, and had become the artist’s heir. Leonardo’s influence cannot be denied either when we look at Melzi’s own paintings, or when we consider certain similarities between Melzi’s chalk portrait of his master and Leonardo’s Portrait of a Young Woman (right). The attention to detail (hair, particularly) and the conveyance of eye expression are present in works of both master and student. The transition of a sitter’s character onto canvas is also impressive. The young woman’s contemplative regard shows her in the state of day-dreaming. In Melzi’s sitter, on another hand, we discover a truly intelligent man; Leonardo seems either to have been caught while turning around (=looking for something/at something, being curious, or responding to something or someone), or to have had his mind sparked by something of interest.

… and I was also thinking of how similar Melzi’s sitter is to the recently discovered portait of Leonardo (left). In spite of the obviously different depiction (which most likely means that the discovered picture isn’t a self-portrait by Leonardo), the main features are the same. But rather than helping with the puzzle, the portrait by Melzi only complicates it. For Melzi’s drawing is dated to be around 1515; and this well-known self-portrait by Leonardo (right; in Turin) is dated between 1512 and 1515, and the two men portrayed could hardly be any more different. It is possible, however, to conjure that what is kept at the Biblioteca Reale in Turin may be Leonardo’s self-caricature, much in the spirit of the drawing from the Royal Library at Windsor (below, left). Or perhaps, Turin holds the great man’s contemplation of himself as an old man, which may very well link Leonardo’s work to today’s techniques of aging an image.

In general, 2009 seems so far to be the year of Leonardo da Vinci related discoveries. After Nicola Barbatelli’s victorious visit to the village of Acerenza on which The Times reported, Telegraph has had its own share of news-making. The paper has reported that

the journalist, Piero Angela, enlisted the help of art historians, Carabinieri police forensic experts and graphic artists to tease out more detail from the ghostly image (right).

The image is thought to date back to 1480s and was found in da Vinci’s Codex on the Flight of Birds, composed between 1490 and 1505.

All the above conjectures can be faint and may even collapse, and then there’ll be a thunderstorm caused by Leonardo’s having a hearty laugh upstairs. It must really be good when you conjure your own legend in such way that 500 years after your death people still twist their brains trying to figure you out. The point is not that we shall never succeed at understanding Leonardo, at unlocking all of his mysteries. The point is that, whether willingly or not, he did create this legend. Some Mancunian folk can recall the framed quote from the late Tony Wilson that we can see at The Northern in Tib St: “when people ask me whether to choose the truth or the legend, I say: choose the legend“. As for me, I like to bring up The Last Temptation of Christ by Nikos Kazantzakis (and Martin Scorsese). In one particular scene Jesus, already on the Cross, has a feverish vision of himself being saved from death, returning to life as a simple man, and one day walking in the market and seeing one of his pupils telling people about the Saviour who had died on the Cross and then resurrected. In Jesus’s vision, he was alive, so he called the pupil and asked, why he was telling the lie about Jesus, for Jesus hadn’t died. The answer of the pupil was short but clear: “they don’t need you alive“. The greatest thing about Jesus was that he resurrected after death; and even it had indeed been a lie, it wouldn’t have mattered for as long as it fed hopes and illusions.

The question, of course, is: had it not been for all those mysteries, would we have really been interested in Leonardo da Vinci? I have already heard some critical comments about his drawings. A point to remember, of course, is that we often approach the past on our terms rather than on the terms of the past. The age of Renaissance showed great aptitude as in conveying one’s individual character, as in concealing it under the layers of symbols. The fact that we’re now trying to process all this kaleidoscope of meanings into something that can be easily digested in the age of celebrity gossip is, well, sad.

The previous post about Leonardo’s portraits on this blog (and many thanks to Sheila Lennon for findings it useful and including it in her report). Also, speaking of various representations of Leonardo, check out this article. It suggests, in particular, that the Turin self-portrait may be a portrait of Leonardo’s father or uncle. Without disputing this possibility, I think we may really have the situation when Leonardo had drawn his would-be self-portrait at the late age.

Images are the couresy of The Times, Telegraph, Wikipedia, Manchester Art Gallery, and About.com.

The Da Vinci Portraits: Facts, Mysteries, and Chances

The Arts world was all shook up on Monday 23rd of February 2009 with the news that a portrait of Leonardo da Vinci was discovered by historian Nicola Barbatelli in the village of Acerenza in Basilicata region in the south of Italy.

The portrait (left) was previously thought to be that of Galileo Galilei, but while this portrait or its copy (right) aren’t likely to be contemporary with the scientist, it hardly suggests much similarity between the sitters. Among the facts that helped to authenticate the portrait were the initial examination which stated that the picture was produced in the Renaissance period and wasn’t a later copy. Further, the back of the oil panel bears the inscription ‘pinxit mea’ written from right to left. This by far has been the strongest evidence that the painting depicted Leonardo and could even be by the artist himself. A possibility still exists that the portrait was executed by Cristofano dell’Altissimo who also mastered the Uffizi portrait of the great Renaissance man.

(if you read this article previously, skip to the end of the post for an update on the ‘pinxit mea’ inscription).

Either way, the region where the discovery was made shouldn’t surprise anyone: Leonardo had had some ties with the Segni family who owned property in Acerenza. If the investigation does prove that this IS Leonardo’s portrait, then, in the words of Alessandro Vezzosi of Museo Ideale Leonardo da Vinci, this will shed tons of light not only on Leonardo’s appearance, but also on his ties to Southern and Northern Italy. And, of course, as we know, Leonardo had spent his last years at the French court and died in the hands of the unconsolable Francis I de Valois. The story was commemorated by Giorgio Vasari and later pictorially eulogised by Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres (right).

What may be interesting to note, looking at Ingres’ painting, is Leonardo’s black beret and the kind of beard we’re used to see on his best-known self-portrait in red chalk (left). Leonardo’s portrait at the Uffizi gallery is by far the one that seems to seal the accuracy of identification of the sitter, in that there is the beard, but there is also a beret (right). Leonardo painted by Raphael in The School of Athens (where he is disguised as Plato, pointing to the sky and holding the book of Timaeus) once again depicts a bearded man (below, left). And so does the engraving that I found on Wiki Commons (below, right). Potentially quoting from the 1885 book, the image description states that the engraving was made after the painting by an unknown artist which in turn was based on the red chalk drawing. Chances are, thanks to the recent discovery, that the engraving was made precisely after the discovered painting, or its copy. Not without an interest is also the portrait by Francesco Melzi, the pupil, friend and heir of Leonardo, who around 1515 had drawn this portrait (left). Compared to the newly-discovered portrait, the similarity is rather striking, even though the angle at which the seater is portrayed is different.

Back in 2006, Victoria and Albert Museum in London hosted an extensive exhibition of Leonardo’s work. This year, on the occasion of the Prince of Wales’s 60th birthday, 10 Leonardo’s drawings from the Royal Collection are on display at Manchester Art Gallery until Monday 4th May 2009. I haven’t yet been to see them but per chance there may be more drawings that could support the seminal discovery?

Images in the post are courtesy of Times Online, Corbis, The University of Notre Dame, Wiki Commons, and the University of North Carolina Greensboro.

Update: I noticed that quite a few people were searching for the meaning of ‘pinxit mea’. Well, we probably got too carried away with the news of the discovery and not paid attention to the inscription itself. It is in medieval Latin and means, literally, ‘painted me’. This ‘me’, however, is a feminine pronoun; it refers to the word ‘pinctura’ (picture). The possibility of Leonardo’s being the painter still remains, and perhaps even becomes more probable. However, the inscription is akin to other similar autographs, and doesn’t point to the identity of the sitter or indeed, the painter.

Another interesting discussion about Leonardo’s self-portaits.

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