Born Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi in 1445, the Florentine better known as Sandro Botticelli would become a leading painter in the humanist circles of Lorenzo the Magnificent. His painting Primavera (seen above) became a symbol of Lorenzo’s court, and became one of his most famous and recognized works, along with The Birth of Venus, both of which are arguably the most notable works of Renaissance Florentine art.
Taking ideas from classical secular texts, the two paintings are in true humanist form. Venus, the goddess of Love, appears as the center of attention in both paintings- the main subject in the Birth of Venus, and as part of a larger scene in Primavera. The Primavera or Allegory of Spring was painted for the cousin of Lorenzo the Magnificent, Lorenzo di Pierfransesco de’ Medici. It is designed as an appreciation of beauty and an encouragement of virtue. It is rich in complex symbolism, and can be read in part as a scene unfolding. The light characters contrast heavily against the dark background of a forest, although the idealized characters themselves show little contrast, with soft shadows characteristic of Botticelli’s style.
In the center we see an emphasized Goddess of Love, with a hovering cupid above ready to shoot an arrow of passion. The Venus is the most highly contrasted with a light gown and light red robe standing in front of a dark green bush, which contrasts with the blue midday sky beyond. This sequence of contrast is reminiscent of Leonardo’s early Florence paintings. To the far left we see a scantily clad Mercury who guards the garden with helmet, sword, and winged shoes, while pointing to touch the clouds. Next to Mercury are the three dancing figures of the three Graces, nearly naked save for transparent robes. Such garments as these, painted with very thin layers of paint mixed with linseed oil, would be considered profane and the reason many of Botticelli’s paintings were burned. The Graces are meant to be fairly seductive, and dance a rondel, while in the sights of Cupid’s bow. The Grace on the right is clearly Caterina Sforza, who appears in the portrait Catherine of Alexandria. On the right side of Venus we see a group of three figures. Zephyrus, the god of the winds, lusts after and pursues the nymph Chloris, who stumbles to the left and is transformed into Flora, the Goddess of Spring, who spreads flowers across the garden.
The highly detailed Primavera (about 150 botanical species are accurately portrayed) painted with beautiful precision and style, along with The Birth of Venus and other religious works, put Botticelli as the leader of the Florentine school. His fame at the time called for the commissions of many prominent patrons of the Medici circle including big name such as Arnolfini, Tanis, and Portinaris. He was commissioned for panels on the Sistene Chapel’s walls, which would unfortunately be shadowed by Michelangelo’s magnificent ceiling.
Botticelli’s fortune and fame would not last forever as was evident with the death of Lorenzo the Magnificent. Lorenzo’s death would affect many painters besides Botticelli and turned the Florentine culture on its head. Troublesome speakers such as the monk Girolamo Savonarola would rouse political unrest in the city. The recent years were deemed improper and immoral and the people were called on to be penitent and meditative. This resulted in the burning of books and artwork, which included several of Sandro Botticelli’s works which were deemed improper and profane. Savonarola was eventually burned at the stake himself, and his followers eventually dispersed, but the ordeal would have a profound effect and cause a nervous breakdown for our Florentine master. Still painting, though not as much, his later years show a desperation in his work. He eventually died in May, 1510.
Widely considered to have expressed the most of the ideals of the High Renaissance, Raphael’s talent was truly a force to be reckoned with, and competed with his much older contemporaries Leonardo and Michelangelo. Like the other men, Raphael was trained in several disciplines to include painting as well as sculpting, and receiving a humanist education.
The delicate grace with which he portrays the Madonna in the Madonna of the Chair shows a mastery of painterly skill. It shows Mary, the Mother of Jesus who she holds, with Jesus’ cousin Saint John the Baptist wearing contemporary clothes in an elegant chair. It depicts a mother and child well at ease and comfortable, and invites the viewer to feel the same. This is different from Leonardo who often portrayed people with a deep complexity, and Michelangelo whose powerful subjects were far from at ease. He also differed in personality. While the other two artists were solitary people, Raphael was known to be quite sociable and well liked.
Pope Julius II would call on Raphael to come to Rome in 1508, where he stayed for the rest of his life. There he was commissioned to decorate the walls of the Stanze in the Vatican, and he completed his most prized work, “The School of Athens” (see above). The popularity of the work in the Vatican put Raphael’s work in such high demand that many of his paintings from then on were executed by assistants. In his later years, he was wholly responsible for many of his portraits, with subtle beauty that rivals those of Leonardo. His work after the Vatican “Raphael Rooms” would later lay the foundations for Mannerism, depicted the ideals of Christianity with the grace of Classical times. Raphael is one of the most influential Renaissance artists and is considered by many to be the greatest painter of all time.
It is impossible to calculate the exact influence this Florentine Renaissance Man has had on the art world in the centuries since his death. He was a painter, sculptor, architect, draughtsman, and poet, and was a master in all these trades. Few painters or sculptors have matched his grace and attention to detail when it came to the human body. His David as well as the Ignudipainted around the ceiling of the Sistene Chapel show a mastery of human anatomy as well as an insight into humanity rarely achieved. While previous artist represented humans as being ideally crafted, Michelangelo chose rather to emphasize the real beauty of the body. Man was created in God’s image, and his true form should be depicted in all its glory.
He was born near Tuscany in 1475, and moved to Florence as a young boy. There he studied with the humanist scholar Fransesco da Urbino but showed little interest in his studies, preferring to copy famous paintings and work on his art. Soon he would take an apprenticeship for sculpting as well as painting. He left the apprenticeship after a short period and was drawn to the humanist circles of Lorenzo de Medici. After the death of Lorenzo, Michelangelo left Florence for Rome where he completed his first sculpture Bacchus. By the time he was thirty, he had already sculpted the Pieta and the David.
In 1505 Michelangelo met and received patronage from Pope Julius II, and would receive two commissions which would take years of his life, and cause much hardship and turmoil. Two monumental jobs were given around the same time by the Pope, one of which would never be completed. The gigantic tomb for Julius was to be designed and completed with forty figures to be sculpted by the artist. Also Julius had desired the ceiling of his chapel, the Sistene, named for Pope Sixtus IV. The latter would finally be completed after four years but resulted in several serious health problems for the painter, including eye infections from the paint dripping while he was on his back on the scaffolding. The Pope was unyielding with his deadlines and nagging, but Michelangelo, though working mostly alone, finally completed one of the most famous frescoes in art history.
Michelangelo never even considered himself a painter and had begrudgingly accepted the commission at the insistence of Pope Julius. He wrote, while working on the project, “I am not in a good place, nor am I a painter,” which pretty well sums up his thoughts at the time. He even considered his frescoes to be “dead paintings.” Nonetheless, his mastery as a painter is unmatched by contemporaries, save perhaps by Leonardo and Raphael, which, of course, is subjective and debatable. Though most of his art was commissioned by the Church, it was he himself, not the subjects of his artwork, who his contemporaries called “Divine.”
If there was one word to describe Leonardo, it is “Versatile.” Unlike Michelangelo, whose genius, though various, was mostly limited to the arts, Leonardo excelled at not only painting, and sculpting, but also in engineering, mathematics, and science. He is considered to be one of the greatest artists, as well as thinkers of the Renaissance. His contributions are enormous, helping to advance the fields of physics, philosophy and anatomy, among others. He was always pondering the secrets of the universe and making his own experiments. His ideas were way ahead of his time, even predicting airplanes, helicopters and other machines which would not be thought of for centuries.
Leonardo was born in Tuscany in 1452 and received a wide range of education, with training for decorative arts, sculpture and techniques of painting. He considered painting to be the sum of all the sciences, which led to a knowledge of the world from a recreation of it. From a very young age he was observing the world around him, in all its peculiarities and composed ways of expressing it with paint.
Disliking the art scene of the Tuscan workshops, Leonardo moved away and sought patronage from Ludovico the Moor in Lombardy, where he would spend the next twenty four years of his life. As a risk taker he was constantly trying new things, so when he received a commission by Ludovico he decided to disregard conventional methods of fresco in an attempt at a more subtle effect. Unfortunately this would result in the recent deteriorating of the Last Supper, which luckily has been recently restored. Besides using a new technique, other conventionalities were dropped as well. Traditionally the scene of the Last Supper was painted with a wall behind the table with Judas seated separately from the others. Here, Leonardo chose an open space with receding perspective, leading to windows, behind the group of apostles sitting in groups of three. The scene is the moment when Christ announces one of their betrayals. The instant we observe is the variety of emotions of the disciples ranging from shock, anger, disbelief, pain, dismay and fear, which Leonardo called, “The emotions of the soul.”
Besides being an inventor in the sciences, Leonardo was an innovative painter. His technique of sfumato comes from the Italian, “smoky,” and describes the effect of layers upon layers of thin paint added subsequently. This way subjects, particularly people, can be portrayed how they truly appear, without hard lines and borders. One of the best examples of this is the Mona Lisa, with as much as 40 layers of paint indicating what could or may not be a subtle smile.
His ideas toward portraying a sitter in a psychological way created the idea that a painter can be a thinker more than just a simple artisan. The Mona Lisa, as well as other portraits such as Lady With an Ermine (seen above), along with the Last Supper, are revolutionary in the sense that human emotion was not previously a selling point in a painting. Rather than simply painting people, Leonardo painted the passions of their inner souls.
Andy Warhol helped turned the art world upside down with his consumerist pop art of the 1950s and ’60s. His ingenious use of making consumer products art forced the public to think about what art really was, and made fun of our consumer society. Boxes of Brillo pads became something to put in a museum. The mass produced soup cans of Campbell’s became mass produced examples of masterpiece pop art. What was going on in the art world?
Pop art got its origins from the Dada movement of the early 20th century. Dada and its anti-art messages led to a new movement of non-elitist culture centered on giving an alternative to upper crust avant garde styles. Pop art essentially is art from popular culture. It can be Lichetenstein’s comic book paintings, or the American flag of Jasper Johns, or mimicking the advertisements the world was seeing with increased intensity and frequency.
Warhol’s Factory in Manhattan, besides being a hot spot for socialite jet-sets, was first and foremost his studio. There he recruited many assistants to help churn out consumer art which was meant to be produced in high volumes the same way everyday products were. It was there he also made his movies with their purposeful low-budget indie poppish qualities. He also accomplish his silkscreen portraits there, which demanded quite a high price tag from celebrities who weren’t anybody unless they had a Warhol portrait.
Who would have thought a can of pepper pot soup would be art? Why not?
Yesterday you saw how the casting of bronze sculptures is done on the How Is A Sculpture Made? post. Today I want to show you who made them, namely one of the most famous bronze sculptors of the nineteenth century.
The French artist Auguste Rodin was considered one of the most important sculptors in his time for bringing the art back after it had taken a backstage importance to the public. At around that time sculpture was largely for decoration only, but he succeeded in turning the art into a form of expression. His attention to detail to human anatomy and his great skill have given us a mastery of human portrayal in sculpture which to this day has not been surpassed.
Like many of the best artists in history, Rodin was born into the lower class and had a rough and tumble early career, barely making ends meet. For over twenty years he performed menial sculpting tasks just to pay the bills. There is a sculpture of a head at the Philadelphia Rodin Museum with the back of it missing, due to the artist not being able to afford heat, thus causing the clay to break off in the freezing cold. He kept trying to get somewhere but suffered rejection after rejection.
Finally his big break came when he escaped from Paris, thus liberating him from academic art. He moved to Italy, where he got a healthy dose of some of the fine sculptures and statuary there. It was there where he was inspired by the works of Michelangelo Bounarotti, particularly Dying Slave, and created his first major work, The Age of Bronze. This statue had caused controversy because it was so lifelike that critics said he had cast a mold of a live model. This helped his rise to fame. In 1880 the statue was purchased by the State.
Soon after Rodin received other commissions by the State to include the monumental Gates of Hell. This project would obsess the artist for the rest of his life, and it would never be fully completed. Many of the figures on the Gates were reproduced in greater size, including The Kiss, and the famous Thinker.
Another great work by Rodin is the Burghers of Calais. The story goes that when the French city of Calais was besieged by Edward III in the Hundred Years War, the whole town was ordered to be slaughtered. An agreement was made however that the townspeople would be spared if six of the prominent citizens offered their heads instead. So six volunteered to save the population, but were pardon when the Queen convinced Edward to let them live. Rodin was commissioned to commemorate these six heroes. His sculpture shows the men with ropes around their necks, holding the keys to the city, separate from each other and walking in a circle, uneasy about their fates. The statue weighs two tons, and is meant to be placed at ground level so the viewers can walk around it and “penetrate to the heart of the subject.”
These statues, as well as the Gates themselves have been reproduced by the artist himself numerous times and can now be seen in Philadelphia, Paris, and many other places across the globe. There are at least 60 Thinkers known. If you’re ever in Philadelphia and make it to the Philadelphia Museum of Art, don’t forget to stop by the Rodin museum just up the street. It’s the largest and most important Rodin collection outside of Paris, and has all the sculptures I talked about above.
Looking at the vince’s ear Artists page, an obvious pattern can be seen- it’s all Western art. A couple American, but mostly European artists have been talked about here which include many of my favorite artists, such as the Italian Baroque painter Caravaggio. A wealth of great art can be found in the histories of other parts of the world, and it’s about time we explored some of the artists of the Eastern Hemisphere. Tonight’s spotlight is on Japanese painter Katsushika Hokusai.
You can’t say “Katsushika” without saying “sushi,” which happens to be my favorite food but that’s not why I like him so much. He is, among many other things, the creator of one of my favorite pieces of Japanese art which you might recognize, “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa,” also known as the “Well of the Great Wave,” seen above. This is part of a series called the 36 views of Mount Fuji. That’s it in the background, barely visible under the monstrous tidal wave about to engulf the helpless sailors.
This series is done in traditional ukiyo-e, or woodblock painting and printing, a style that had been around since the 17th century. It actually consists of 46 woodcuts, the last 10 added after publication, and shows views of the mountain in varying weather and seasons, and from different vantage points. Hokusai created this series in response to an international tourist boom of the early 19th century and also because he loved Mount Fuji so much. Regardless of reason, the 36 Views would give him international recognition and fame.
Aside from the Fuji paintings, which he did a second series called the 100 views of Mount Fuji, another of his important works is the Hokusai Manga. This is the largest of his works and spans across 15 volumes with over 4,000 illustrations. Some consider it the beginning of modern manga, or comics, but in actuality Hokusai’s illustrations are mostly simply depictions of random people and animals, and not storylines with words as manga is today.
Another famous work by the Japanese master is the Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife, an example or erotica which introduced the tentacle eroticism found so often in hentai. But that, folks, is another story.
Good words to live by, it seemed Joan Miro thought as he picked up the broken sign he found near a train station. He put it up in his studio kind of as a “program,” something to keep him motivated. I suppose this metaphor imitated the Catalan artist’s desire to constantly move forward, to grow in life and art, and stop for no one or thing, as time indeed stops for no one.
His career is proof that he lived up to his rusty train sign’s advice. Throughout his career he kept growing and embracing change. He leapt from idea to idea, some influenced by other contemporary artists of early 20th century Paris, most his own. He loathed conventional art methods and strived to constantly innovate and learn new forms of expression. His techniques ranged from painting and sculpture to a blending of the two, to collage, and to wild new ideas such as fog and gas sculptures.
Miro’s art has been classified as Surrealist, especially seeing that he sometimes unofficially called himself one. He met with some Surrealists and Dadaists when he moved to Paris in 1919, where he also met Picasso, also from Catalonia. Yet no matter what group he belonged to (at some stretches none at all), his art was always his own unique creations.
The Harlequin’s Carnival (seen above) marks a change from the figurative to the abstract. In it we see many colorful characters dancing and floating around with a “jack in the box” harlequin in the center playing guitar. Miro was a fan of automatism, or automatic writing and/or drawing, which might explain the haphazard array of fantastical subjects all around.
The funny thing about this painting and others like it is the artist claims to sometimes see these happy little characters in reality. For instance, he explains the Harlequin’s Carnival by saying he came home one day very hungry and laid down. As he looked at the ceiling, these creatures appeared before his very eyes in a hallucinatory display.
Other paintings include his Constellation series, where patterns and images, often connected by lines are shown against a solid background, like the stars.
I’ve mentioned before how a painting can change your mood, and I particularly noted Frans Hals and his ability to be a mood uplifter though his portraits. You can read a little more about him in Have Fun With Art part 1, and part 2. There’s something magical about his paintings with their quick brush strokes and vibrant expressions and colors. Even his more serious group portraits are full of life and seem to have captured a moment in time.
Life And Work
Frans Hals was born in Antwerp and lived and painted in the Baroque era in the early to mid seventeenth century. Most of his work includes high society portraits including the rich and powerful such as mayors (burgomasters) and the like, group portraits of militias and soldiers, and my favorite of his subjects singers and theatrical players.
He is known for the use of “timing” in his informal portraits, where a tavern goer is caught the instant he raises a glass, or a lute player in the process of strumming rather than posing. This style was used heavily by the Italian Caravaggio, who preceded Hals by some years.
Very few Hals paintings exist today and little is known about the man or his work early in his life and career. The first known success which put him in the art scene was The Banquet of the Officers of the St George Militia Company. This came when he was in his mid thirties, years after he was admitted into the group of artists in the Guild of Saint Luke.
Hals and Rembrandt
He is considered to be second only to Rembrandt in terms of great Dutch painters. While Rembrandt used mellow lighting and worked with chiaroscuro, Hals preferred strong daylight.
There is something to be said about the figures of each of the two Dutch masters. Rembrandt’s faces mainly seem idealized and all look alike in many paintings. The people in a Frans Hals painting, whether they be a couple or a large group all have distinguishable faces and personalities.
Lively Brush Strokes and Lively Subjects
Art historians look at Hals’ paintings and gather that although the brush strokes look quick, they are probably well planned and thought out. So the vivid and quick appearance is purposeful, while there are no mistakes with the strokes.
Some of his best paintings are the singular random subjects such as the Laughing Cavalier. Clearly not laughing in the pose, one can feel that a laugh may come at any moment, perhaps the very next instant after the moment caught in time that we see. Or the gypsy woman seen above. What could she be smirking at?
Pablo Picasso. Is there any other artist so versatile? The man felt it a tragedy if a person stayed the same, with the same style their whole life. The world changes all around, and one must constantly change along with it. The co-inventor of Cubism (along with Georges Braque) had a long, successful, and prolific career as a painter, sculptor, and potter. Nine of his paintings are in the list of the 25 most expensive paintings sold at auction. He is truly one of the most well known artists of the 20th century.
Early Art: Shades of Blue and Red
Pablo Picasso was the son of Jose Ruiz y Blasco, a painter and art professor, perhaps influencing young Pablo into a life of art. But according to his mother, Maria Picasso y Lopez, Pablo’s first word was “pencil,” thus the boy was born to be an artist. Picasso would reflect, “My mother said to me, ‘If you are a soldier, you will become a general. If you are a monk, you will become the Pope.’ Instead, I was a painter, and became Picasso.” He received his first formal training under his father and began with academic realism. Slowly, being influenced by El Greco and Edvard Munch, he developed a more modernist style.
His career can be broken down into several periods. His Blue Period (1901- 1904), is rightly named for the characteristic somber hues and sad subjects that dominate these canvasses. Often poor mothers with undernourished children, sad lower class families, and overall just depressed people in desolate surroundings were the main subjects. His bleak outlook on life at this juncture was probably the result of losing a friend to suicide.
The Rose Period (1904- 1906) marks a change into a happier era for the artist. “Boy With Pipe” which is the highest selling Picasso at auction, was painted during this period. This happier time was when Picasso met Fernande Olivier and is reminiscent of happier times earlier in his life before the Blue Period. You’ll see many acrobats and Harlequins in this period.
African Influences and Cubism
You begin to see a change in his style in the African Period of 1907 - 1909, away from more realistic representations of everyday people to much more expressive depictions. As the name of the period implies, this is when Picasso was influenced by African culture, particularly works of art in sculpture, which were being brought back to France during their expansion into the African continent. His most important work of this period is the “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.” Particular importance are the two figures to the right, whose faces resemble African masks, and show the first signs of Cubism.
The “Avignon” painting marked a transition into the Cubism periods, Analytic Cubism and Synthetic Cubism from 1909-1919. Collaborating with Georges Braque, the two men invented a new type of art where the artist would analyze the subject and break it down into its basic shapes. Objects can be depicted two dimensionally but from many different angles and viewpoints. All depth is removed, and the foreground object and background blend and mingle into each other. This style of painting would apply to sculpting and collage, the new method invented by Picasso, Braque and others, of cutting paper and arranging the shapes in a composition.
Later Art: Classical, Surrealist, and Sculpture
Around the time after World War I, Picasso switched to a more classical style, following in the Neoclassical footsteps of Giorgio de Chirico and others. Drawings and paintings of this period often include the minotaur, which would lead into more surrealistic artwork.
It was in the 1930s when Guernica was painted. Probably one of Picasso’s most famous works of art, it shows the horrors of war and the agony of the innocent in detail, as the Nazi bombs drop on the Spanish town.
Picasso got into sculpture and pottery and in the summer of 1949, he along with Jacques Lipchitz and 248 other sculptors exhibited at the 3rd Sculpture International at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In the 1950s he would move on to yet even different styles, doing versions of Velazquez’s Las Meninas, and other famous works by Goya and others. He was commissioned to do a 50 foot public sculpture for $100,000 for the city of Chicago. He refused the money and donated it to the people of the city.
Picasso died in 1973, leaving no will, but instead leaving his works, along with many Mastisse’s to France. These works form the collection of the Musée Picasso in Paris.
Picasso In Modern Culture
Pablo Picasso is probably the most well known artist of the 20th century. When people are asked to name an artist, any artist, Picasso most often comes to mind first. His innovative styles have been copied by professional and amateur artists alike.
One very good movie about him is “Surviving Picasso” with Anthony Hopkins as the artist. Shot in Paris and outlying areas, it’s about the relationship with the artist seen through the eyes of Francois Gilet, played by Natascha McElhone. The movie shows most of the women in the man’s life, often meeting one another in sometimes awkward and comical ways.
Toward the beginning of the film, Germany occupies France and a few soldiers are inquiring of the value of some of Picasso’s paintings. Picasso had a knack for dealing with people, and often got his way, as he tricks the soldiers into believing the better paintings were really junk, and the bad ones the more valuable. He even gives one of the worser ones to one of the soldiers to give to his wife.
Another scene shows a parlor full of art dealers and collectors impatiently waiting in line to see the great artist, who pays them very little mind. Every so often he will come out and give all attention to one art dealer while completely ignoring all the others, even the ones he knows very well. Once in, a certain groveling collector begs for the most recent “Picasso” so he can take it back to New York. Picasso knows the guy is just kissing up to him, so he has a little fun and asks, “How about this one, you interested?” The man joyously says, “Am I? Of course I’m…uh…” only to see a few lines drawn on a scrap paper.
You are reading a daily art blog with topics ranging from art, art history, painting, sculpture, drawing, illustration, animation, artists, galleries, museums, and plenty more. It is authored by Dan Kretschmer, who lives around Philadelphia. Dan Kretschmer is also the author of a book called "Masters of the Renaissance," which takes a look at 18 of the most important artists of the Renaissance in Europe.
The purpose of this art blog is to raise general awareness of art and to share knowledge and interests. The author's goal is to spark interest in as many people as possible, and to inspire them to pursue art to enrich their lives.
