The Founder
Top left: The Adoration of the Magi, Giotto di Bondone, c. 1320, gallery 644.
Top right: The Adoration of the Magi (detail), Giotto di Bondone,1305-06, Arena Chapel, Italy.
Bottom right: Halley’s Comet, 1986, ESA’s Giotto Spacecraft photograph.
Bottom left: c. 1100, Fresco, The Cloisters, New York City.
Center: The Virgin and Child (detail), Giotto di Bondone, 1320-30, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
As I wind up the galleries of European Painting, I must touch on a few last painters before proceeding on to Musical Instruments (680-684).
At least a nod to Giotto, the founder of European painting: “Real” space was his contribution. He created a sense of depth, by simply placing the figures in tiers, one behind another. Big steps to naturalism and perspective. Compare to the earlier fresco on a similar theme at the Cloisters.
Compare also his Halley's Comet — the model for his “Star of Bethlehem” — to a spacecraft photo of it. The European Space Agency named its mission to Halley's Comet “Giotto”, because, although the comet was noted much earlier, he made the first “scientific'” drawing of it in recorded history.
And what a punim on that Madonna.
"For pictures formed by his brush follow nature’s outlines so closely . . . so realistically that they appear to speak, weep, rejoice and do other things.” - Filippo Villani, De origine civitatis Florentiae et euisdem famosis civibus.
Trade, Tronies and DINKs
Left to right:
Study: Head of a Young Woman, Anthony van Dyck, 1618-20, not on view.
Bearded Man with a Velvet Cap, Govert Flinck, 1645, gallery 964.
Study of a Young Woman, Johannes Vermeer, 1665-67, gallery 964.
Study of an African Man with a Turban, Peter Paul Rubens, 1608, present location unknown.
The four oils above are all technically tronies, not portraits. “Tronie” comes from an informal Dutch word for face, like “mug” in English (from the Old French troigne). Unlike the portrait — a commissioned piece with a known sitter — the tronie is an “intriguing” but anonymous face to be sold in the art market. First used as studies and as storehouses of expressions and facial types for history paintings, the tronie developed into its own genre.
Van Dyck was directed toward the genre by Rembrandt, who painted many tronies and used them to advance his reputation as a master of rugged human experience. Flinck, a pupil of Rembrandt’s, had so internalized his teacher’s method that, within a year, his paintings were sold as the master’s own. Here he captures the “sitter’s craggy physiognomy”. The Vermeer, in a 1696 auction, was described as “a tronie in antique dress, uncommonly artful”. Rubens painted Study of an African Man with a Turban (his earliest surviving Black tronie) while observing other artists making head studies in Rome. All tronies; no names, no stories.
The mercantile class wanted faces from their own societies on their walls, not Heracles, Aristotle, or Marie Antoinette. I was never particularly interested in the museum plaque hypotheses, such as “possible cousin of . . . likely the shopkeeper next to . . . ” But I was equally uninterested in the characters in most history paintings.
It’s sobering when one discovers the accuracy of one’s own market demographics; I do purchase as a DINK (dual income, no kids). And now I must accept my merchant class predilection for anonymous heads. I intend to enjoy many a craggy physiognomy, with no concern for origin, lineage or identification.
Advertising has modernized the tronie — “models that don’t exist” — anonymous “expressive” faces generated by algorithm. Cheap, no copyright fees, no model releases. Rembrandt kept 300 plus tronies in his studio as virtual models.
Foot Notes
Left: Entries 298, Theologia, and 212, America, Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, 1593.
Top Right: The Allegory of Faith, Johannes Vermeer, 1670-72, gallery 964.
Bottom right: America, Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo, 1750s, gallery 600.
Vermeer and Tiepolo (two of my all-time favorites) reference Cesare Ripa’s Iconologia — a massive illustrated encyclopedia of allegorical “guidelines” for the arts. I recommend adding him to your library, https://warburg.sas.ac.uk/pdf/noh390b2714105.pdf.
“Ripa describes Faith as ‘having the world under her feet’, and Vermeer used the symbol quite literally, showing a globe of the earth under the woman's right foot”. — MetText.
“Sitting upon the Globe fhews that Divinity repofes in no inferiour thing”. — Cesare Ripa.
“The monochrome allegorical figure of America is accompanied by her standard attributes . . . She wears a feathered headdress, while sitting on a crocodile and holding a palm branch”. — MetText.
“The Lizard, they are fo big here, that they devour Men”. — Cesare Ripa.
“If music be the food of love, play on.”
Top left: Venus and the Lute Player, Titian and Workshop, ca. 1565-70, gallery 638.
Top center: Archlute, David Tecchler, 1725, Austria, gallery 684.
Top right: The Musicians, Caravaggio, 1597, not on view.
Bottom left: Ūd, son of Gamil Georges, 1977, Egypt, gallery 681.
Bottom center: Allegory of Music, Laurent de La Hyre, 1649, gallery 684.
Bottom right: Lute, Sixtus Rauchwolff, 1596, gallery 684.
The de La Hyre painting explicitly follows Cesare Ripa’s allegory on Music and Love. The Caravaggio does not. His only concession to the conventional terms of allegory is the “winged cupid with grapes”, and the X-rays show he painted out his wings and quiver. This, despite the dedication of the Iconologia to Cardinal Del Monte who was Caravaggio’s patron and commissioned The Musicians. The controversy was part of the plan.
The Titian alludes to a typical humanist debate between "seeing" and "hearing". Which is the better means of perceiving beauty? Classical hierarchy of the senses (Aristotle, Plato, etc.) deems "sight" the highest. Martin Luther goes for sound — because of the all-important “word”. Taking a stand on these topics was critical. For top dollar, paintings had to inspire intense discourse in the owners’ great rooms.
“There is no sense that has not a mighty dominion, and that does not by its power introduce an infinite number of knowledges. If we were defective in the intelligence of sounds, of harmony, and of the voice, it would cause an unimaginable confusion in all the rest of our science; for, besides what belongs to the proper effect of every sense, how many arguments, consequences, and conclusions do we draw to other things, by comparing one sense with another?” - Montaigne
My German meetings often ended auf Wiedersehen (literally, see you again). But phone calls ended (naturally) with auf Wiederhören (literally, hear you again), which I love and found myself using in English. I fear that logical extension auf Wiederzoom. For now, I say auf Wiederblog, LOL (Lots Of Lutes).
Wonderful! Titian, Venus, and the food of love.
Posted by: Lucas Florida | August 22, 2020 at 10:45 AM