|
Books > Arts & Architecture > History of art / art & design styles > 1600 to 1800 > Baroque art
Why is something a masterpiece? Art History 101 . . . Without the
Exams is about revisiting famous works of art that we may have
studied in an art history class or seen in a textbook. Each
discussion delves into one great masterpiece and asks the questions
that help us understand how it has shaped history. What is the
piece about? How did the original owner look at this piece? Where
was it originally placed? Why is it in this museum now? How did it
get famous? From the sixth-century mosaics of Ravenna and the
painted bulls of Altamira, Spain, dated 12,500 BCE, to an incense
burner from twelfth-century Seljuk Iran, frescoes from a Late
Byzantine funerary chapel, and masterworks by Botticelli,
Caravaggio, Monet, and Sargent, this book shows readers how to look
closely. It welcomes us to the joy of art history-but without the
papers, notes, and exams.
Focusing on the interrelationship between Jacob van Loo's art,
honor, and career, this book argues that Van Loo's lifelong success
and unblemished reputation were by no means incompatible, as art
historians have long assumed, with his specialization in painting
nudes and his conviction for manslaughter. Van Loo's iconographic
specialty - the nude - allowed his clientele to present themselves
as judges of beauty and display their mastery of decorum, while his
portraiture perfectly expressed his clients' social and political
ambitions. Van Loo's honor explains why his success lasted a
lifetime, whereas that of Rembrandt, Frans Hals, and Vermeer did
not. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, this book reinterprets
the manslaughter case as a sign that Van Loo's elite patrons
recognized him as a gentleman and highly-esteemed artist.
The second largest city in 17th-century Europe, Naples constituted
a vital Mediterranean center in which the Spanish Habsburgs, the
clergy, and Neapolitan aristocracy, together with the resident
merchants, and other members of the growing professional classes
jostled for space and prestige. Their competing programs of
building and patronage created a booming art market and spurred
painters such as Jusepe de Ribera, Massimo Stanzione, Salvator
Rosa, and Luca Giordano as well as foreign artists such as
Caravaggio, Domenichino, Artemisia Gentileschi, and Giovanni
Lanfranco to extraordinary heights of achievement. This new reading
of 17th-century Italian Baroque art explores the social, material,
and economic history of painting, revealing how artists, agents,
and the owners of artworks interacted to form a complex and
mutually sustaining art world. Through such topics as artistic
rivalry and anti-foreign labor agitation, art dealing and forgery,
cultural diplomacy, and the rise of the independently arranged art
exhibition, Christopher R. Marshall illuminates the rich
interconnections between artistic practice and patronage, business
considerations, and the spirit of entrepreneurialism in Baroque
Italy.
Accompanying an exhibition of drawings by Guercino from the
collection of the Morgan Library & Museum, Guercino: Virtuoso
Draftsman offers an overview of the artist's graphic work, ranging
from his early genre studies and caricatures, to the dense and
dynamic preparatory studies for his paintings, and on to highly
finished chalk drawings and landscapes that were ends in
themselves. Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, known as Guercino
(1591-1666), was arguably the most interesting and diverse
draftsman of the Italian Baroque era, a natural virtuoso who
created brilliant drawings in a broad range of media. The Morgan
owns more than twenty-five works by the artist, and these are the
subject of a focused exhibition, supplemented by a handful of loans
from public and private New York collections, to be held at the
Morgan in the autumn of 2019. This volume accompanies that
exhibition. It includes an introductory essay on Guercino's work as
a draftsman followed by entries on the Guercino drawings in the
Morgan's collection. These include sheets from all moments of the
artist's career. His early awareness of the work of the Carracci in
Bologna is documented by figures drawn from everyday life as well
as brilliant caricatures; two drawings for Guercino's own drawing
manual are further testament to his interest in questions of
academic practice. Following his career, a range of preparatory
drawings includes studies made in connection with his earliest
altarpieces as well as his mature masterpieces, including multiple
studies for several projects, allowing the visitor to see
Guercino's mind at work as he reconsidered his ideas. The Morgan's
holdings also include studies for engravings as well as highly
finished landscape and figure drawings that were independent works.
Guercino: Virtuoso Draftsman continues a series of exhibition
catalogues focused on highlights from the Morgan's collection.
Previous volumes include Power and Grace: Drawings by Rubens, Van
Dyck, and Jordaens and Thomas Gainsborough: Experiments in Drawing,
also published by Paul Holberton. While some of the Morgan's
Guercino drawings are well known, they have never been exhibited or
published as a group, and the selection includes a number of new
acquisitions.
The essays in this volume show that Versailles was not the static
creation of one man, but a hugely complex cultural space; a centre
of power, but also of life, love, anxiety, creation, and an
enduring palimpsest of aspirations, desires, and ruptures. The
splendour of the Château and the masterpieces of art and design
that it contains mask a more complex and sometimes more sordid
history of human struggle and achievement. The case studies
presented by the contributors to this book cannot provide a
comprehensive account of the Palace of Versailles and its domains,
the life within its walls, its visitors, and the art and
architecture that it has inspired from the seventeenth century to
the present day: from the palace of the Sun King to the Penthouse
of Donald Trump. However, this innovative collection will
reshape—or even radically redefine—our understanding of the
palace of Versailles and its posterity.
Featuring major works from Caravaggio and his circle and the
Italian Baroque period, this lavishly illustrated book looks at
Rome as the center of European culture in the 17th century. The
National Galleries Barberini Corsini in Rome host one of the major
collections of Italian Baroque paintings. This art has been admired
all over Europe. The monarchs aimed to transfer the glamour of
Roman Baroque to their courts. In the 18th century Frederick II of
Prussia modeled the Palais Barberini in Potsdam, Germany, after the
Barberini Palace in Rome. In January 2017 the newly founded Museum
Barberini moved into the recently reconstructed Palais Barberini in
Potsdam. This book accompanies an exhibition in Potsdam of splendid
17th century works from the National Galleries Barberini Corsini in
Rome. It provides not only a fitting background to Museum
Barberini's fascinating architectural history but also highlights
the important role of the Barberini family and Pope Urban VIII as
patrons and art collectors.
The subject of writing and receiving letters, which recurs
frequently in the work of Johannes Vermeer (1632-1675), is given
dramatic tension in this masterful painting of two women in a
mysterious moment of crisis. The artist seldom, if ever, surpassed
the subtly varied effects of light seen here as it gleams from the
pearl jewellery, sparkles from the glass and silver objects on the
table, and falls softly over the figures in their shadowy setting.
The Frick Diptych series sparks a dialogue between creative spirits
and art historians, promising new insights into some of the Frick's
most famous masterpieces. The third volume, to be published in
2019, will have a contribution by author Edmund de Waal on a pair
of porcelain and bronze candlesticks by the 18th-century French
metalworker Pierre Gouthiere.
Universally regarded as the father of French painting, Nicolas
Poussin is arguably the greatest of all painters of that school.
Yet Poussin's reputation has been founded more on the intellectual
and philosophical qualities of his art than its sheer visual
beauty. In Poussin as a Painter: From Classicism to Abstraction,
Richard Verdi redresses the balance, describing and analyzing
Poussin's outstanding gifts as a pictorial storyteller, designer
and colourist - in short, on the purely aesthetic (and often
abstract) aspects of his art that have inspired so many later
painters, from Cezanne to Picasso. The book features more than 220
fine illustrations, the majority in colour, and encompasses all
aspects of Poussin's art from the mid 1620s to his death in 1665.
This ground-breaking study gives new insight into Poussin, and is
essential reading for all who admire this seminal French painter.
Between 1667 and 1792, the artists and amateurs of the Acade mie
Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture in Paris lectured on the Acade
mie's 'confe rences', foundational documents in the theory and
practice of art. These texts and the principles they embody guided
artistic practice and art theory in France and throughout Europe
for two centuries. In the 1800s, the Acade mie's influence waned,
and few of the 388 Acade mie lectures were translated into English.
Eminent scholars Christian Michel and Jacqueline Lichtenstein have
selected and annotated forty-two of the most representative
lectures, creating the first authoritative collection of the 'confe
rences' for readers of English. Essential to understanding French
art of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, these lectures
reveal what leading French artists looked for in a painting or
sculpture, the problems they sought to resolve in their works, and
how they viewed their own and others' artistic practice.
Each masterpiece of the series is a fascinating art-history novella
and, at the same time, an invitation to the following tale, the
next chapter in this never-ending cycle of astonishing stories, of
which the museum has so many. This whole work is dominated by the
idea of the victory of love, goodness and charity. The event is
treated as the highest act of human wisdom and spiritual nobility,
and it takes place in absolute silence and stillness. The drama and
depth of feeling are expressed in the figures of both father and
son, with all the emotional precision with which Rembrandt was
endowed. This parable in Rembrandt's treatment is addressed to the
heart of everyone.
This is a fascinating exploration of the mystery that surrounds of
Ruben's most well-known and intriguing drawings. Peter Paul Rubens
was one of the most talented and successful artists working in
17th-century Europe. During his illustrious career as a court
painter and diplomat, Rubens expressed a fascination with exotic
costumes and headdresses. With his masterful handling of black
chalk and touches of red, Rubens executed a compelling drawing that
features a figure wearing Asian costume - a depiction that has
recently been identified as Man in Korean Costume. Despite the
drawings renown - both during Ruben's own lifetime and in
contemporary art scholarship - the reasons why it was made and
whether it actually depicts a specific Asian person remain a
mystery. The intriguing story that develops involves a shipwreck,
an unusual hat, the earliest trade between Europe and Asia, the
trafficking of Asian slave, and Jesuit missionaries.
Men in stately black, women with huge ruffs, children with golden
rattles, old women with wizened faces, and self-satisfied
artists... These are the main players in just about every portrait
ever painted in the Southern Netherlands. From the15th to the 17th
centuries, the tract of land that we today call Flanders was the
economic, cultural, intellectual and financial heart of Europe. And
money flows - with everyone who could afford it investing in a
portrait. Today, these cherished status symbols of the past have
largely lost their original significance. But beyond their
functional and emotional aspects, these portraits turn their
subjects into gateways to the past. This book takes masterpieces
from the collection of The Phoebus Foundation and outlines the
broad context in which they came into being, peeling back levels of
meaning like the layers of an onion. Whether captured in an
impressive Rubens or Van Dyck, or an intimate portrait by a
forgotten artist, the persons portrayed were once flesh and blood,
each with their own peculiarities, hidden agendas and ambitions.
Some portraits are very personal and hyper-individual. Others are a
little dusty, the ladies and gentleman being children of their
time. In most cases, however, their dreams and aspirations are
surprisingly timeless and soberingly recognisable. The Bold and the
Beautiful is an appointment with history: a meeting through
portraiture with men and women from bygone centuries. But for those
willing to look closely, the border between the present and the
past is paper-thin. Published on the occasion of the exhibition
Blind Date. Portretten met blikken en blozen, Autumn 2020, in
Snijders&Rockoxhuis Antwerp, curated by Dr. Katharina Van
Cauteren & Hildegard Van de Velde with a scenography by Walter
Van Beirendonck.
This is the first-ever scholarly publication devoted to the art of
Francesco de Mura (1696-1782), one of the greatest painters of the
Golden Age of Naples. De Mura's refined and elegant compositions,
with their exquisite light and coloring, heralded the rococo, and
his later style was a precursor of Neo-Classicism. His ceiling
frescoes at Monte Cassino, destoyed in World War II, rivalled those
of his celebrated Venetian contemporary, Giambattista Tiepolo
(1696-1770). Yet today, he lacks his proper place in the history of
art. This volume demonstrates why it is now time to reevaluate this
once-celebrated artist.
Peter Paul Rubens was the most inventive and prolific northern
European artist of his age. This book discusses his life and work
in relation to three interrelated themes: spirit, ingenuity and
genius. It argues that Rubens and his reception were pivotal in the
transformation of early modern ingenuity into Romantic genius.
Ranging across the artist's entire career, it explores Rubens's
engagement with these themes in his art and biography. The book
looks at Rubens's forays into altarpiece painting in Italy as well
as his collaborations with fellow artists in his hometown of
Antwerp, and his complex relationship with the spirit of pleasure.
It concludes with his late landscapes in connection to genius loci,
the spirit of the place.
Italian Baroque painting is often discussed in terms of theatre and
the creation of powerful visual spectacle through the dramatic use
of light. Seventeenth-century painters pushed the limits of
artistic expression to reshape the relationship between the
illusionistic image and its audience with contrasting styles, new
techniques, and by deploying extraordinary optical effects.
Featuring some of Canada's foremost Baroque paintings,
"Illuminations" examines how the functional and symbolic
representation of light was the expression of a culture captivated
by theatrical display. Set in the context of Italy's dynamic and
international cultural capitals, "Illuminations" compares and
contrasts religious, mythological, and popular imagery. Through a
detailed examination of works by Nicolas Poussain, Luca Giordano,
Orazio Gentileschi and Guido Reni amongst others, the book explores
how 17th-century audiences were confronted with pictures that
frequently broke conventions by manipulating the sources and
meaning of light, while depicting all types of subjects; painters
were able to transform light, controlling its role as a signifier
of demeanour, emotion, or religious symbolism. The use of light
coloured the historical legends and social mythologies of this
extravagant world.
|
|