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0501_T

Early Evening Landscape

Focus on Early Evening Landscape and analyze the abstract.

Early Evening Landscape (Hungarian: Kora esti táj) is a painting by Hungarian artist Sándor Brodszky from about 1850.

0501_NT

Early Evening Landscape

Focus on this artwork and analyze the abstract.

Early Evening Landscape (Hungarian: Kora esti táj) is a painting by Hungarian artist Sándor Brodszky from about 1850.

0502_T

Early Evening Landscape

In Early Evening Landscape, how is the Description discussed?

The picture is painted in oil on canvas and has dimensions of 23 x 33.3 cm. The picture is part of the collection of the Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava.

0502_NT

Early Evening Landscape

In this artwork, how is the Description discussed?

The picture is painted in oil on canvas and has dimensions of 23 x 33.3 cm. The picture is part of the collection of the Slovak National Gallery, Bratislava.

0503_T

Early Evening Landscape

Focus on Early Evening Landscape and explore the Analysis.

Hungarian landscape painter Sándor Brodszky with another landscape painter of the second half of the 19th century, Antal Ligeti, were able to depict Hungarian landscapes giving them romantic resonance. He is the father of landscape painting and photography in Hungary. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and from 1845 lived in Munich. Brodszky was influenced in his landscape painting by Albert Frederick Zimmerman. Famous landscapes were created in Upper Hungary. His successful creative work was based on a good knowledge of the countryside and rural areas. The effect of light is important. Evening landscape depicts a combination of light with nature, along with a small group of animals. In his work he was particularly fond of portraying trees.

0503_NT

Early Evening Landscape

Focus on this artwork and explore the Analysis.

Hungarian landscape painter Sándor Brodszky with another landscape painter of the second half of the 19th century, Antal Ligeti, were able to depict Hungarian landscapes giving them romantic resonance. He is the father of landscape painting and photography in Hungary. He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, and from 1845 lived in Munich. Brodszky was influenced in his landscape painting by Albert Frederick Zimmerman. Famous landscapes were created in Upper Hungary. His successful creative work was based on a good knowledge of the countryside and rural areas. The effect of light is important. Evening landscape depicts a combination of light with nature, along with a small group of animals. In his work he was particularly fond of portraying trees.

0504_T

John the Baptist (Caravaggio)

Focus on John the Baptist (Caravaggio) and explain the abstract.

John the Baptist (sometimes called John in the Wilderness) was the subject of at least eight paintings by the Italian Baroque artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610). The story of John the Baptist is told in the Gospels. John was the cousin of Jesus, and his calling was to prepare the way for the coming of the Messiah. He lived in the wilderness of Judea between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, "his raiment of camel's hair, and a leather girdle about his loins; and his meat was locusts and wild honey." He baptised Jesus in the Jordan, and was eventually killed by Herod Antipas when he called upon the king to reform his evil ways. John was frequently shown in Christian art, identifiable by his bowl, reed cross, camel's skin and lamb. The most popular scene prior to the Counter-Reformation was of John's baptism of Jesus, or else the infant Baptist together with the infant Jesus and Mary his mother, frequently supplemented by the Baptist's own mother St Elizabeth. John alone in the desert was less popular, but not unknown. For the young Caravaggio, John was invariably a boy or youth alone in the wilderness. This image was based on the statement in the Gospel of Luke that "the child grew and was strengthened in spirit, and was in the deserts until the day of his manifestation to Israel." These works allowed a religious treatment of the partly clothed youths he liked to paint at this period.Apart from these works showing John alone, mostly dated to his early years, Caravaggio painted three great narrative scenes of John's death: the great Execution in Malta, and two sombre Salomes with his head, one in Madrid, and one in London.

0504_NT

John the Baptist (Caravaggio)

Focus on this artwork and explain the abstract.

John the Baptist (sometimes called John in the Wilderness) was the subject of at least eight paintings by the Italian Baroque artist Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571–1610). The story of John the Baptist is told in the Gospels. John was the cousin of Jesus, and his calling was to prepare the way for the coming of the Messiah. He lived in the wilderness of Judea between Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, "his raiment of camel's hair, and a leather girdle about his loins; and his meat was locusts and wild honey." He baptised Jesus in the Jordan, and was eventually killed by Herod Antipas when he called upon the king to reform his evil ways. John was frequently shown in Christian art, identifiable by his bowl, reed cross, camel's skin and lamb. The most popular scene prior to the Counter-Reformation was of John's baptism of Jesus, or else the infant Baptist together with the infant Jesus and Mary his mother, frequently supplemented by the Baptist's own mother St Elizabeth. John alone in the desert was less popular, but not unknown. For the young Caravaggio, John was invariably a boy or youth alone in the wilderness. This image was based on the statement in the Gospel of Luke that "the child grew and was strengthened in spirit, and was in the deserts until the day of his manifestation to Israel." These works allowed a religious treatment of the partly clothed youths he liked to paint at this period.Apart from these works showing John alone, mostly dated to his early years, Caravaggio painted three great narrative scenes of John's death: the great Execution in Malta, and two sombre Salomes with his head, one in Madrid, and one in London.

0505_T

John the Baptist (Caravaggio)

Explore the John the Baptist, Toledo of this artwork, John the Baptist (Caravaggio).

The ascription of this painting to Caravaggio is disputed – the alternative candidate is Bartolomeo Cavarozzi, an early follower. It is in the collection of the Museo Tesoro Catedralicio, Toledo (Spain), and John Gash speculates that it may have been one of the paintings done by Caravaggio for the prior of the Hospital of the Consolation, as Caravaggio's early biographer Mancini tells us. According to Mancini the prior "afterwards took them with him to his homeland"; unfortunately, one version of Mancini's manuscript says the prior's homeland was Seville, while another says Sicily. There was a Spanish prior of the hospital in 1593, and he may not have left until June 1595. Gash cites scholar A.E. Perez Sanchez's view that while the figure of the saint has certain affinities with Cavarozzi's style, the rest of the picture does not, "and the extremely high quality of certain passages, especially the beautifully depicted vine leaves...is much more characteristic of Caravaggio." Gash also points to the gentle chiaroscuro and the delicate treatment of contours and features, and similar stylistic features in early works by Caravaggio such as The Musicians and Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy. If this and other paintings by Caravaggio were indeed in Seville at an early date they may have influenced Velázquez in his early works. However, the arguments in favour of Cavarozzi are strong, and he is known to have travelled to Spain about 1617–1619.Peter Robb, taking the painting to be by Caravaggio, dates it to about 1598, when the artist was a member of the household of his first patron, Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte. Robb points out that the Baptist is evidently the same boy who modelled for Isaac in the Sacrifice of Isaac, which would date both paintings to around the same period. Unfortunately this Sacrifice of Isaac is also disputed, and so the problem of authorship is not solved. John is shown against a background of green grape vines and thorny vine stems, seated on a red cloak, holding a thin reed cross and looking down at a sheep lying at his feet. The red cloak would become a staple of Caravaggio's works, one with many precedents in previous art.John the Baptist carries over many of the concerns which animated Caravaggio's other work from this period. The leaves behind the figure, and the plants and soil around his feet, are depicted with that careful, almost photographic sense of detail which is seen in the contemporary still life Basket of Fruit, while the melancholy self-absorption of the Baptist creates an atmosphere of introspection. The grape leaves stand for the grapes from which the wine of the Last Supper was pressed, while the thorns call to mind the Crown of Thorns, and the sheep is a reminder of the Sacrifice of Christ. Caravaggio's decision to paint John the Baptist as a youth was somewhat unusual for the age: the saint was traditionally shown as either an infant, together with the infant Jesus and possibly his own and Jesus's mother, or as an adult, frequently in the act of baptising Jesus. Nevertheless, it was not totally without precedent. Leonardo had painted a youthful and enigmatically smiling Baptist with one finger pointing upwards and the other hand seeming to indicate his own breast, while Andrea del Sarto left a Baptist which almost totally prefigures Caravaggio. Both Leonardo and del Sarto had created from the figure of John something which seems to hint at an entirely personal meaning, one not accessible to the viewer, and Caravaggio was to turn this into something like a personal icon in the course of his many variations on the theme.

0505_NT

John the Baptist (Caravaggio)

Explore the John the Baptist, Toledo of this artwork.

The ascription of this painting to Caravaggio is disputed – the alternative candidate is Bartolomeo Cavarozzi, an early follower. It is in the collection of the Museo Tesoro Catedralicio, Toledo (Spain), and John Gash speculates that it may have been one of the paintings done by Caravaggio for the prior of the Hospital of the Consolation, as Caravaggio's early biographer Mancini tells us. According to Mancini the prior "afterwards took them with him to his homeland"; unfortunately, one version of Mancini's manuscript says the prior's homeland was Seville, while another says Sicily. There was a Spanish prior of the hospital in 1593, and he may not have left until June 1595. Gash cites scholar A.E. Perez Sanchez's view that while the figure of the saint has certain affinities with Cavarozzi's style, the rest of the picture does not, "and the extremely high quality of certain passages, especially the beautifully depicted vine leaves...is much more characteristic of Caravaggio." Gash also points to the gentle chiaroscuro and the delicate treatment of contours and features, and similar stylistic features in early works by Caravaggio such as The Musicians and Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy. If this and other paintings by Caravaggio were indeed in Seville at an early date they may have influenced Velázquez in his early works. However, the arguments in favour of Cavarozzi are strong, and he is known to have travelled to Spain about 1617–1619.Peter Robb, taking the painting to be by Caravaggio, dates it to about 1598, when the artist was a member of the household of his first patron, Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte. Robb points out that the Baptist is evidently the same boy who modelled for Isaac in the Sacrifice of Isaac, which would date both paintings to around the same period. Unfortunately this Sacrifice of Isaac is also disputed, and so the problem of authorship is not solved. John is shown against a background of green grape vines and thorny vine stems, seated on a red cloak, holding a thin reed cross and looking down at a sheep lying at his feet. The red cloak would become a staple of Caravaggio's works, one with many precedents in previous art.John the Baptist carries over many of the concerns which animated Caravaggio's other work from this period. The leaves behind the figure, and the plants and soil around his feet, are depicted with that careful, almost photographic sense of detail which is seen in the contemporary still life Basket of Fruit, while the melancholy self-absorption of the Baptist creates an atmosphere of introspection. The grape leaves stand for the grapes from which the wine of the Last Supper was pressed, while the thorns call to mind the Crown of Thorns, and the sheep is a reminder of the Sacrifice of Christ. Caravaggio's decision to paint John the Baptist as a youth was somewhat unusual for the age: the saint was traditionally shown as either an infant, together with the infant Jesus and possibly his own and Jesus's mother, or as an adult, frequently in the act of baptising Jesus. Nevertheless, it was not totally without precedent. Leonardo had painted a youthful and enigmatically smiling Baptist with one finger pointing upwards and the other hand seeming to indicate his own breast, while Andrea del Sarto left a Baptist which almost totally prefigures Caravaggio. Both Leonardo and del Sarto had created from the figure of John something which seems to hint at an entirely personal meaning, one not accessible to the viewer, and Caravaggio was to turn this into something like a personal icon in the course of his many variations on the theme.

0506_T

John the Baptist (Caravaggio)

Focus on John the Baptist (Caravaggio) and discuss the John the Baptist (Youth with a Ram), Musei Capitolini, Rome, and Doria Pamphilj Gallery, Rome.

The model for Amor Vincit was a boy named Cecco, Caravaggio's servant and possibly his pupil as well. He has been tentatively identified with an artist active in Rome about 1610–1625, otherwise known only as Cecco del Caravaggio – Caravaggio's Cecco – who painted very much in Caravaggio's style. The most striking feature of Amor was the young model's evident glee in posing for the painting, so that it became rather more a portrait of Cecco than a depiction of a Roman demi-god. The same sense of the real-life model overwhelming the supposed subject was transferred to Mattei's John the Baptist. The youthful John is shown half-reclining, one arm around a ram's neck, his turned to the viewer with an impish grin. There's almost nothing to signify that this indeed the prophet sent to make straight the road in the wilderness – no cross, no leather belt, just a scrap of camel's skin lost in the voluminous folds of the red cloak, and the ram. The ram itself is highly un-canonical – John the Baptist's animal is supposed to be a lamb, marking his greeting of Christ as the 'Lamb of God' come to take away the sins of mankind. The ram is as often a symbol of lust as of sacrifice, and this naked smirking boy conveys no sense of sin whatsoever. Some biographers have tried to depict Caravaggio as an essentially orthodox Catholic of the Counter-Reformation, but Cecco the Baptist seems as irredeemably pagan as his previous incarnation as Cupid. The Mattei Baptist proved immensely popular – eleven known copies were made, including one recognised by scholars as being from Caravaggio's own hand. It is today held in the Doria Pamphilj Gallery on the Roman Corso. (The gallery also houses his Penitent Magdalene and Rest on the Flight into Egypt). The collectors ordering the copies would have been aware of a further level of irony: the pose adopted by the model is a clear imitation of that adopted by one of Michelangelo's famous ignudi on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (painted 1508-1512). The role of these gigantic male nudes in Michelango's depiction of the world before the Laws of Moses has always been unclear – some have supposed them to be angels, others that they represent the Neo-Platonic ideal of human beauty – but for Caravaggio to pose his adolescent assistant as one of the Master's dignified witnesses to the Creation was clearly a kind of in-joke for the cognoscenti. In 1601/02 Caravaggio was apparently living and painting in the palazzo of the Mattei family, inundated with commissions from wealthy private clients following the success of the Contarelli chapel where in 1600 he had displayed The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew and The Inspiration of Saint Matthew. It was one of the most productive periods in a productive career. Ciriaco Mattei's notebook records two payments to Caravaggio in July and December of that year, marking the beginning and completion of the original John the Baptist. The payment was a relatively modest 85 scudi, because John was a single figure. The copy may have been made at the same time or very soon after. In January of that year Caravaggio received a hundred and fifty scudi for Supper at Emmaus. For Vincenzo Giustiniani there was The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, and in January 1603 Ciriaco paid a hundred and twenty-five scudi for The Taking of Christ. Each of these increased the immense popularity of Caravaggio among collectors – twenty copies survive of the Supper at Emmaus, more of the Taking of Christ. But for all this success, neither the Church itself, nor any of the religious Orders, had yet commissioned anything. The paintings in the Contarelli Chapel had been commissioned and paid for by private patrons, although the priests of San Luigi dei Francesi (which contains the chapel) had had to approve the result. Caravaggio's problem was that the Counter-Reformation Church was extremely conservative – there had been a move to introduce an Index of Prohibited Images, and high-ranking cardinals had published handbooks guiding artists, and more especially the priests who might commission artists or approve art, on what was and was not acceptable. And the playful crypto-paganism of this private John the Baptist with its cross-references to the out of favour Classicising humanism of Michelangelo and the High Renaissance, most certainly was not acceptable.

0506_NT

John the Baptist (Caravaggio)

Focus on this artwork and discuss the John the Baptist (Youth with a Ram), Musei Capitolini, Rome, and Doria Pamphilj Gallery, Rome.

The model for Amor Vincit was a boy named Cecco, Caravaggio's servant and possibly his pupil as well. He has been tentatively identified with an artist active in Rome about 1610–1625, otherwise known only as Cecco del Caravaggio – Caravaggio's Cecco – who painted very much in Caravaggio's style. The most striking feature of Amor was the young model's evident glee in posing for the painting, so that it became rather more a portrait of Cecco than a depiction of a Roman demi-god. The same sense of the real-life model overwhelming the supposed subject was transferred to Mattei's John the Baptist. The youthful John is shown half-reclining, one arm around a ram's neck, his turned to the viewer with an impish grin. There's almost nothing to signify that this indeed the prophet sent to make straight the road in the wilderness – no cross, no leather belt, just a scrap of camel's skin lost in the voluminous folds of the red cloak, and the ram. The ram itself is highly un-canonical – John the Baptist's animal is supposed to be a lamb, marking his greeting of Christ as the 'Lamb of God' come to take away the sins of mankind. The ram is as often a symbol of lust as of sacrifice, and this naked smirking boy conveys no sense of sin whatsoever. Some biographers have tried to depict Caravaggio as an essentially orthodox Catholic of the Counter-Reformation, but Cecco the Baptist seems as irredeemably pagan as his previous incarnation as Cupid. The Mattei Baptist proved immensely popular – eleven known copies were made, including one recognised by scholars as being from Caravaggio's own hand. It is today held in the Doria Pamphilj Gallery on the Roman Corso. (The gallery also houses his Penitent Magdalene and Rest on the Flight into Egypt). The collectors ordering the copies would have been aware of a further level of irony: the pose adopted by the model is a clear imitation of that adopted by one of Michelangelo's famous ignudi on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (painted 1508-1512). The role of these gigantic male nudes in Michelango's depiction of the world before the Laws of Moses has always been unclear – some have supposed them to be angels, others that they represent the Neo-Platonic ideal of human beauty – but for Caravaggio to pose his adolescent assistant as one of the Master's dignified witnesses to the Creation was clearly a kind of in-joke for the cognoscenti. In 1601/02 Caravaggio was apparently living and painting in the palazzo of the Mattei family, inundated with commissions from wealthy private clients following the success of the Contarelli chapel where in 1600 he had displayed The Martyrdom of Saint Matthew and The Inspiration of Saint Matthew. It was one of the most productive periods in a productive career. Ciriaco Mattei's notebook records two payments to Caravaggio in July and December of that year, marking the beginning and completion of the original John the Baptist. The payment was a relatively modest 85 scudi, because John was a single figure. The copy may have been made at the same time or very soon after. In January of that year Caravaggio received a hundred and fifty scudi for Supper at Emmaus. For Vincenzo Giustiniani there was The Incredulity of Saint Thomas, and in January 1603 Ciriaco paid a hundred and twenty-five scudi for The Taking of Christ. Each of these increased the immense popularity of Caravaggio among collectors – twenty copies survive of the Supper at Emmaus, more of the Taking of Christ. But for all this success, neither the Church itself, nor any of the religious Orders, had yet commissioned anything. The paintings in the Contarelli Chapel had been commissioned and paid for by private patrons, although the priests of San Luigi dei Francesi (which contains the chapel) had had to approve the result. Caravaggio's problem was that the Counter-Reformation Church was extremely conservative – there had been a move to introduce an Index of Prohibited Images, and high-ranking cardinals had published handbooks guiding artists, and more especially the priests who might commission artists or approve art, on what was and was not acceptable. And the playful crypto-paganism of this private John the Baptist with its cross-references to the out of favour Classicising humanism of Michelangelo and the High Renaissance, most certainly was not acceptable.

0507_T

John the Baptist (Caravaggio)

How does John the Baptist (Caravaggio) elucidate its John the Baptist, Kansas City, Missouri?

Bellini's Baptist is depicted within a conventional framework that his audience would know and share; Caravaggio's is almost impenetrably private. In 1604 Caravaggio was commissioned to paint a John the Baptist for the papal banker and art patron Ottavio Costa, who already owned the artist's Judith Beheading Holofernes and Martha and Mary Magdalene. Costa intended it for an altarpiece for a small oratory in the Costa fiefdom of Conscente (a village near Albenga, on the Italian Riviera), but liked it so much that he sent a copy to the oratory and kept the original in his own collection. It is now held in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.Stark contrasts of light and dark accentuate the perception that the figure leans forward, out of the deep shadows of the background and into the lighter realm of the viewer's own space...The brooding melancholy of the Nelson-Atkins Baptist has attracted the attention of almost every commentator. It seems, indeed, as if Caravaggio instilled in this image an element of the essential pessimism of the Baptist's preaching, of the senseless tragedy of his early martyrdom, and perhaps even some measure of the artist's own troubled psyche. The saint's gravity is at least partly explained, too, by the painting's function as the focal point of the meeting place of a confraternity whose mission was to care for the sick and dying and to bury the corpses of plague victims. Caravaggio biographer Peter Robb has pointed out that the fourth Baptist seems like a psychic mirror-image of the first, with all the signs reversed: the brilliant morning light which bathed the earlier painting has become harsh and almost lunar in its contrasts, and the vivid green foliage has turned to dry dead brown. There is almost nothing in the way of symbols to identify that this is indeed a religious image, no halo, no sheep, no leather girdle, nothing but the thin reed cross (a reference to Christ's description of John as "a reed shaken by the wind"). The painting demonstrates what Robb calls Caravaggio's "feeling for the drama of the human presence." This adolescent, almost adult, John seems locked in some private world known only to his creator. Caravaggio's conception of the saint as a seated, solitary figure, lacking almost any narrative identity (how do we know this is the Baptist? What is happening here?) was truly revolutionary. Artists from Giotto to Bellini and beyond had shown the Baptist as an approachable story, a symbol understandable to all; the very idea that a work should express a private world, rather than a common religious and social experience, was radically new.

0507_NT

John the Baptist (Caravaggio)

How does this artwork elucidate its John the Baptist, Kansas City, Missouri?

Bellini's Baptist is depicted within a conventional framework that his audience would know and share; Caravaggio's is almost impenetrably private. In 1604 Caravaggio was commissioned to paint a John the Baptist for the papal banker and art patron Ottavio Costa, who already owned the artist's Judith Beheading Holofernes and Martha and Mary Magdalene. Costa intended it for an altarpiece for a small oratory in the Costa fiefdom of Conscente (a village near Albenga, on the Italian Riviera), but liked it so much that he sent a copy to the oratory and kept the original in his own collection. It is now held in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.Stark contrasts of light and dark accentuate the perception that the figure leans forward, out of the deep shadows of the background and into the lighter realm of the viewer's own space...The brooding melancholy of the Nelson-Atkins Baptist has attracted the attention of almost every commentator. It seems, indeed, as if Caravaggio instilled in this image an element of the essential pessimism of the Baptist's preaching, of the senseless tragedy of his early martyrdom, and perhaps even some measure of the artist's own troubled psyche. The saint's gravity is at least partly explained, too, by the painting's function as the focal point of the meeting place of a confraternity whose mission was to care for the sick and dying and to bury the corpses of plague victims. Caravaggio biographer Peter Robb has pointed out that the fourth Baptist seems like a psychic mirror-image of the first, with all the signs reversed: the brilliant morning light which bathed the earlier painting has become harsh and almost lunar in its contrasts, and the vivid green foliage has turned to dry dead brown. There is almost nothing in the way of symbols to identify that this is indeed a religious image, no halo, no sheep, no leather girdle, nothing but the thin reed cross (a reference to Christ's description of John as "a reed shaken by the wind"). The painting demonstrates what Robb calls Caravaggio's "feeling for the drama of the human presence." This adolescent, almost adult, John seems locked in some private world known only to his creator. Caravaggio's conception of the saint as a seated, solitary figure, lacking almost any narrative identity (how do we know this is the Baptist? What is happening here?) was truly revolutionary. Artists from Giotto to Bellini and beyond had shown the Baptist as an approachable story, a symbol understandable to all; the very idea that a work should express a private world, rather than a common religious and social experience, was radically new.

0508_T

John the Baptist (Caravaggio)

Focus on John the Baptist (Caravaggio) and analyze the John the Baptist, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome.

This is one of two John the Baptists painted by Caravaggio in or around 1604 (possibly 1605). It is held in the Palazzo Corsini collection of the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica. Like the John done for Ottavio Costa, the figure has been stripped of identifying symbols - no belt, not even the "raiment of camel's hair", and the reed cross is only suggested. The background and surrounds have darkened even further, and again there is the sense of a story from which the viewer is excluded. Caravaggio was not the first artist to have treated the Baptist as a cryptic male nude - there were prior examples from Leonardo, Raphael, Andrea del Sarto and others – but he introduced a new note of realism and drama. His John has the roughened, sunburnt hands and neck of a labourer, his pale torso emerging with a contrast that reminds the viewer that this is a real boy who has gotten undressed for his modelling session – unlike Raphael's Baptist, who is as idealised and un-individualised as one of his winged cherubs. Ask who this model actually is (or was), and the realism of the individual spills over as a record of Rome itself in the age of Caravaggio. Biographer Peter Robb cites Montaigne on Rome as a city of universal idleness, "...the envied idleness of the higher clerics, and the frightening idleness of the destitute...a city almost without trades or professions, in which the churchmen were playboys or bureaucrats, the laymen were condemned to be courtiers, all the pretty girls and boys seemed to be prostitutes, and all wealth was inherited old money or extorted new." It was not an age which welcomed an art that emphasised the real.

0508_NT

John the Baptist (Caravaggio)

Focus on this artwork and analyze the John the Baptist, Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome.

This is one of two John the Baptists painted by Caravaggio in or around 1604 (possibly 1605). It is held in the Palazzo Corsini collection of the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica. Like the John done for Ottavio Costa, the figure has been stripped of identifying symbols - no belt, not even the "raiment of camel's hair", and the reed cross is only suggested. The background and surrounds have darkened even further, and again there is the sense of a story from which the viewer is excluded. Caravaggio was not the first artist to have treated the Baptist as a cryptic male nude - there were prior examples from Leonardo, Raphael, Andrea del Sarto and others – but he introduced a new note of realism and drama. His John has the roughened, sunburnt hands and neck of a labourer, his pale torso emerging with a contrast that reminds the viewer that this is a real boy who has gotten undressed for his modelling session – unlike Raphael's Baptist, who is as idealised and un-individualised as one of his winged cherubs. Ask who this model actually is (or was), and the realism of the individual spills over as a record of Rome itself in the age of Caravaggio. Biographer Peter Robb cites Montaigne on Rome as a city of universal idleness, "...the envied idleness of the higher clerics, and the frightening idleness of the destitute...a city almost without trades or professions, in which the churchmen were playboys or bureaucrats, the laymen were condemned to be courtiers, all the pretty girls and boys seemed to be prostitutes, and all wealth was inherited old money or extorted new." It was not an age which welcomed an art that emphasised the real.

0509_T

John the Baptist (Caravaggio)

In John the Baptist (Caravaggio), how is the John the Baptist (St John the Baptist at the Fountain), MUZA, Valletta discussed?

St John the Baptist at the Fountain, kept in a private collection in Malta, had been difficult to study. Since 2022 it is in the MUŻA in Valletta, Malta. John Gash treats it as by Caravaggio, pointing out the similarity in the treatment of the flesh to the Sleeping Cupid, recognised as by the artist and dating from his Malta period. The painting has been badly damaged, especially in the landscape. The work is known in two other variants, each slightly different.The theme of the young John drinking from a spring reflects the Gospel tradition that the Baptist drank only water during his period in the wilderness. The painting displays typically Caravaggist extreme chiaroscuro (use of light and shadow), and is also typical in taking a young John the Baptist as its subject, this time set in a dark landscape against an ominous patch of lighter sky. "The mechanics of drinking and the psychology of thirst are beautifully conveyed through the artful manipulation of limbs and the carefully constructed head".If it is in fact by the artist, it would have been painted during his approximately 15 months in Malta in 1607–1608. His recognised works from this period include such masterpieces as the Portrait of Alof de Wignacourt and his Page and The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist. The latter, in the oratory of the Co-Cathedral of Saint John, is the only work that the artist signed. In Malta Caravaggio was accepted into the Order of Saint John (the Knights of Malta) and became in effect their official artist, but his stay ended with a mysterious offense and his expulsion from the Order "as a foul and rotten limb". The crime on Malta has been the subject of much speculation, but seems to have been extremely serious, possibly even involving the death penalty. Most modern writers believe that it was a crime of violence. His earliest biographer, Giovanni Baglione, said that there had been a "disagreement" with a knight of justice (i.e., a knight drawn from the European nobility); Giovan Pietro Bellori, who visited Malta to see the Beheading of John the Baptist some fifty years after the event, wrote that Caravaggio "had come into conflict with a very noble knight", as a result of which he had incurred the displeasure of the Grand Master and had to flee. It is possible that the offence involved a duel, which was regarded very seriously – but the penalty for duelling was imprisonment, not death. The death penalty was imposed for murder – and a death in a duel or brawl equated to murder – but the wording used by both Baglione and Bellori implied that the knight Caravaggio offended had survived. Peter Robb, in his popular biography M, (1998), makes the case for a sexual misdemeanour, but his argument is speculative.

0509_NT

John the Baptist (Caravaggio)

In this artwork, how is the John the Baptist (St John the Baptist at the Fountain), MUZA, Valletta discussed?

St John the Baptist at the Fountain, kept in a private collection in Malta, had been difficult to study. Since 2022 it is in the MUŻA in Valletta, Malta. John Gash treats it as by Caravaggio, pointing out the similarity in the treatment of the flesh to the Sleeping Cupid, recognised as by the artist and dating from his Malta period. The painting has been badly damaged, especially in the landscape. The work is known in two other variants, each slightly different.The theme of the young John drinking from a spring reflects the Gospel tradition that the Baptist drank only water during his period in the wilderness. The painting displays typically Caravaggist extreme chiaroscuro (use of light and shadow), and is also typical in taking a young John the Baptist as its subject, this time set in a dark landscape against an ominous patch of lighter sky. "The mechanics of drinking and the psychology of thirst are beautifully conveyed through the artful manipulation of limbs and the carefully constructed head".If it is in fact by the artist, it would have been painted during his approximately 15 months in Malta in 1607–1608. His recognised works from this period include such masterpieces as the Portrait of Alof de Wignacourt and his Page and The Beheading of Saint John the Baptist. The latter, in the oratory of the Co-Cathedral of Saint John, is the only work that the artist signed. In Malta Caravaggio was accepted into the Order of Saint John (the Knights of Malta) and became in effect their official artist, but his stay ended with a mysterious offense and his expulsion from the Order "as a foul and rotten limb". The crime on Malta has been the subject of much speculation, but seems to have been extremely serious, possibly even involving the death penalty. Most modern writers believe that it was a crime of violence. His earliest biographer, Giovanni Baglione, said that there had been a "disagreement" with a knight of justice (i.e., a knight drawn from the European nobility); Giovan Pietro Bellori, who visited Malta to see the Beheading of John the Baptist some fifty years after the event, wrote that Caravaggio "had come into conflict with a very noble knight", as a result of which he had incurred the displeasure of the Grand Master and had to flee. It is possible that the offence involved a duel, which was regarded very seriously – but the penalty for duelling was imprisonment, not death. The death penalty was imposed for murder – and a death in a duel or brawl equated to murder – but the wording used by both Baglione and Bellori implied that the knight Caravaggio offended had survived. Peter Robb, in his popular biography M, (1998), makes the case for a sexual misdemeanour, but his argument is speculative.

0510_T

John the Baptist (Caravaggio)

Focus on John the Baptist (Caravaggio) and explore the John the Baptist, Galleria Borghese, Rome.

The date of the John the Baptist in the Galleria Borghese is disputed: it was long thought to have been acquired by Cardinal Scipione Borghese some time between his own arrival in Rome in 1605 and Caravaggio's flight from the city in 1606, but Roberto Longhi dated it to the artist's Sicilian period (a date post-1608) on the basis of similarities in handling and colour. Lonhi's view has gained increasing acceptance, with a consensus in favour of 1610 emerging in recent years. The painting shows a boy slumped against a dark background, where a sheep nibbles at a dull brown vine. The boy is immersed in a reverie: perhaps as Saint John he is lost in private melancholy, contemplating the coming sacrifice of Christ; or perhaps as a real-life street-kid called on to model for hours he is merely bored. As so often with Caravaggio, the sense is of both at once. But the overwhelming feeling is of sorrow. The red cloak envelopes his puny childish body like a flame in the dark, the sole touch of colour apart from the pale flesh of the juvenile saint. "Compared with the earlier Capitolina and Kansas City versions...the Borghese picture is more richly colouristic - an expressive essay in reds, whites, and golden browns. It also represents a less idealised and more sensuous approach to the male nude, as prefigured in the stout-limbed figures of certain of Caravaggio's post-Roman works, such as the Naples Flagellation and the Valletta Beheading of John the Baptist".Borghese was a discriminating collector but notorious for extorting and even stealing pieces that caught his eye – he, or rather his uncle Pope Paul V, had recently imprisoned Giuseppe Cesari, one of the best-known and most successful painters in Rome, on trumped-up charges in order to confiscate his collection of a hundred and six paintings, which included three of the Caravaggios today displayed in the Galleria Borghese (Boy Peeling Fruit, Young Sick Bacchus, and Boy with a basket of Fruit). They joined the Caravaggios that the Cardinal already possessed, including a Saint Jerome and the Madonna and Child with St. Anne (the Grooms' Madonna). By 1610 Caravaggio's life was unravelling. It's always dangerous to interpret an artist's works in terms of his life, but in this case the temptation is overwhelming, and every writer on Caravaggio seems to surrender to it. In 1606 he had fled Rome as an outlaw after killing a man in a street fight; in 1608 he had been thrown into prison in Malta and again escaped; through 1609 he had been pursued across Sicily by his enemies until taking refuge in Naples, where he had been attacked in the street by unknown assailants within days of his arrival. Now he was under the protection of the Colonna family in the city, seeking a pardon that would allow him to return to Rome. The power to grant the pardon lay in the hands of the art-loving Cardinal Borghese, who would expect to be paid in paintings. News that the pardon was imminent arrived in mid-year, and the artist set out by boat with three canvasses. The next news was that he had died "of a fever" in Porto Ercole, a coastal town north of Rome held by Spain.

0510_NT

John the Baptist (Caravaggio)

Focus on this artwork and explore the John the Baptist, Galleria Borghese, Rome.

The date of the John the Baptist in the Galleria Borghese is disputed: it was long thought to have been acquired by Cardinal Scipione Borghese some time between his own arrival in Rome in 1605 and Caravaggio's flight from the city in 1606, but Roberto Longhi dated it to the artist's Sicilian period (a date post-1608) on the basis of similarities in handling and colour. Lonhi's view has gained increasing acceptance, with a consensus in favour of 1610 emerging in recent years. The painting shows a boy slumped against a dark background, where a sheep nibbles at a dull brown vine. The boy is immersed in a reverie: perhaps as Saint John he is lost in private melancholy, contemplating the coming sacrifice of Christ; or perhaps as a real-life street-kid called on to model for hours he is merely bored. As so often with Caravaggio, the sense is of both at once. But the overwhelming feeling is of sorrow. The red cloak envelopes his puny childish body like a flame in the dark, the sole touch of colour apart from the pale flesh of the juvenile saint. "Compared with the earlier Capitolina and Kansas City versions...the Borghese picture is more richly colouristic - an expressive essay in reds, whites, and golden browns. It also represents a less idealised and more sensuous approach to the male nude, as prefigured in the stout-limbed figures of certain of Caravaggio's post-Roman works, such as the Naples Flagellation and the Valletta Beheading of John the Baptist".Borghese was a discriminating collector but notorious for extorting and even stealing pieces that caught his eye – he, or rather his uncle Pope Paul V, had recently imprisoned Giuseppe Cesari, one of the best-known and most successful painters in Rome, on trumped-up charges in order to confiscate his collection of a hundred and six paintings, which included three of the Caravaggios today displayed in the Galleria Borghese (Boy Peeling Fruit, Young Sick Bacchus, and Boy with a basket of Fruit). They joined the Caravaggios that the Cardinal already possessed, including a Saint Jerome and the Madonna and Child with St. Anne (the Grooms' Madonna). By 1610 Caravaggio's life was unravelling. It's always dangerous to interpret an artist's works in terms of his life, but in this case the temptation is overwhelming, and every writer on Caravaggio seems to surrender to it. In 1606 he had fled Rome as an outlaw after killing a man in a street fight; in 1608 he had been thrown into prison in Malta and again escaped; through 1609 he had been pursued across Sicily by his enemies until taking refuge in Naples, where he had been attacked in the street by unknown assailants within days of his arrival. Now he was under the protection of the Colonna family in the city, seeking a pardon that would allow him to return to Rome. The power to grant the pardon lay in the hands of the art-loving Cardinal Borghese, who would expect to be paid in paintings. News that the pardon was imminent arrived in mid-year, and the artist set out by boat with three canvasses. The next news was that he had died "of a fever" in Porto Ercole, a coastal town north of Rome held by Spain.

0511_T

John the Baptist (Caravaggio)

Focus on John the Baptist (Caravaggio) and explain the John the Baptist (St John the Baptist Reclining), Munich.

This Reclining John the Baptist, is an oil painting by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, built in 1610 and is now kept in a private collection in Munich. This painting is one of the seven versions of the Lombard painter has dedicated to the theme of "Saint John", that John the Baptist as a child or as a teenager portrait. The canvas is identifiable with the painting that was at Palazzo Cellammare in Naples, at Costanza Colonna, Marchioness of Caravaggio, along with a work of the same subject (the San Giovanni Battista of the Borghese collection) and a Magdalene, as evidenced by the letter the Apostolic Nuncio in the Kingdom of Naples Deodato Gentile to Cardinal Scipione Caffarelli-Borghese in Rome, on July 29, 1610 (Pacelli 1994, pp. 141–155). The three paintings were commissioned by its Borghese and were on the felucca that was supposed to bring their author from Naples to Rome, just before he died. Also from the letter of 29 July that, when Caravaggio was imprisoned in Palo, the paintings were shown to Naples from Costanza Colonna. Scipione Borghese was able to regain possession of one of the two St. John (the one currently on display at the Galleria Borghese ), while St. John's lying seized almost certainly Pedro Fernandez de Castro, VII Count of Lemos and viceroy of Naples from 1610 to 1616.Il painting He arrived in Spain in 1616, when the Count of Lemos, finished the vice-regal office, left for Madrid . Through the steps hereditary within the family went to Don Pedro Antonio, tenth Earl of Lemos, who was appointed viceroy of Peru in 1667 and was certainly responsible for the transfer of St. John lying in Latin America. After being in a private collection of El Salvador and then to Buenos Aires, the painting was brought in Bavaria following a lady of Argentina, just before the Second World War (Marini 2001, p. 574). The canvas was announced by Marini as autograph after the restoration carried out in Rome by Pico Cellini in 1977-78 and dated 1610 (Marini 1978, pp. 23–25, 41-42 illus. 3–5, figs. 15-25 ; Marini 1981, pp. 82 note 117, 45 fig. 10). The chronological position in the very last phase of life of the painter was confirmed not only by zeros (1998, pp. 28–45), in written communications from Stroughton (1987), Pico Cellini (1987), Pepper (1987), Spike ( 1988), Slatkes (1992) and Claudio Strinati (1997), but it should be noted also that Bologna (1992, p. 342) considered the work a copy of a lost original by the Neapolitan church of Sant'Anna dei Lombardi . The hypothesis of the scholar (later ricredutosi Caroli in 1992 where he explicitly identified the painting of Monaco in San Giovanni that the Merisi was carrying on the felucca) is still unfounded, not knowing the original prototype of the Chapel Fenaroli, destroyed in ' old fire of the church, which were destroyed in the other two paintings by Caravaggio: The resurrection of Christ and St. Francis in the act of receiving the stigmata. This painting can not be confused with any other of St. John of Merisi, who have an origin and a commission documented; therefore its connection with the mentioned in the letters of Deodato Gentile to Scipione Borghese is certainly to be welcomed. In the languid pose of St. John are discernible Venetian memories: the reference is specifically to the Venuses and Danae of Giorgione and Titian, but also to the ancient representations of river gods and paintings of the same subject in the Neapolitan area. Writer (Pacelli 1994, pp. 150–151) has pointed out the similarities with the San Giovanni Borghese, the Adoration of Messina, the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula of Intesa Sanpaolo collection in Naples. I have also indicated a significant branch in a relaxed David (now preserved in a private collection in Naples) of unidentified artist, but certainly active in Naples in the first half of the seventeenth century, and in a St. John's Paul Finoglio private collection. At San Giovanni Battista lying was devoted to the recent exhibition at the Museum Het Rembranthuis of Amsterdam between 2010 and 2011: to report in this regard, the publication on exposure, interventions Strinati (2010-2011), Treffers (2010–2011), Pacelli (2010-2011), which traces back the historical and critical of the painting on the basis of the findings in 1994 (pp. 45–51), Marine (2010–11), and Giantomassi Zari (2010–11), which highlight, aspects of painting technique and to restoration.

0511_NT

John the Baptist (Caravaggio)

Focus on this artwork and explain the John the Baptist (St John the Baptist Reclining), Munich.

This Reclining John the Baptist, is an oil painting by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, built in 1610 and is now kept in a private collection in Munich. This painting is one of the seven versions of the Lombard painter has dedicated to the theme of "Saint John", that John the Baptist as a child or as a teenager portrait. The canvas is identifiable with the painting that was at Palazzo Cellammare in Naples, at Costanza Colonna, Marchioness of Caravaggio, along with a work of the same subject (the San Giovanni Battista of the Borghese collection) and a Magdalene, as evidenced by the letter the Apostolic Nuncio in the Kingdom of Naples Deodato Gentile to Cardinal Scipione Caffarelli-Borghese in Rome, on July 29, 1610 (Pacelli 1994, pp. 141–155). The three paintings were commissioned by its Borghese and were on the felucca that was supposed to bring their author from Naples to Rome, just before he died. Also from the letter of 29 July that, when Caravaggio was imprisoned in Palo, the paintings were shown to Naples from Costanza Colonna. Scipione Borghese was able to regain possession of one of the two St. John (the one currently on display at the Galleria Borghese ), while St. John's lying seized almost certainly Pedro Fernandez de Castro, VII Count of Lemos and viceroy of Naples from 1610 to 1616.Il painting He arrived in Spain in 1616, when the Count of Lemos, finished the vice-regal office, left for Madrid . Through the steps hereditary within the family went to Don Pedro Antonio, tenth Earl of Lemos, who was appointed viceroy of Peru in 1667 and was certainly responsible for the transfer of St. John lying in Latin America. After being in a private collection of El Salvador and then to Buenos Aires, the painting was brought in Bavaria following a lady of Argentina, just before the Second World War (Marini 2001, p. 574). The canvas was announced by Marini as autograph after the restoration carried out in Rome by Pico Cellini in 1977-78 and dated 1610 (Marini 1978, pp. 23–25, 41-42 illus. 3–5, figs. 15-25 ; Marini 1981, pp. 82 note 117, 45 fig. 10). The chronological position in the very last phase of life of the painter was confirmed not only by zeros (1998, pp. 28–45), in written communications from Stroughton (1987), Pico Cellini (1987), Pepper (1987), Spike ( 1988), Slatkes (1992) and Claudio Strinati (1997), but it should be noted also that Bologna (1992, p. 342) considered the work a copy of a lost original by the Neapolitan church of Sant'Anna dei Lombardi . The hypothesis of the scholar (later ricredutosi Caroli in 1992 where he explicitly identified the painting of Monaco in San Giovanni that the Merisi was carrying on the felucca) is still unfounded, not knowing the original prototype of the Chapel Fenaroli, destroyed in ' old fire of the church, which were destroyed in the other two paintings by Caravaggio: The resurrection of Christ and St. Francis in the act of receiving the stigmata. This painting can not be confused with any other of St. John of Merisi, who have an origin and a commission documented; therefore its connection with the mentioned in the letters of Deodato Gentile to Scipione Borghese is certainly to be welcomed. In the languid pose of St. John are discernible Venetian memories: the reference is specifically to the Venuses and Danae of Giorgione and Titian, but also to the ancient representations of river gods and paintings of the same subject in the Neapolitan area. Writer (Pacelli 1994, pp. 150–151) has pointed out the similarities with the San Giovanni Borghese, the Adoration of Messina, the Martyrdom of Saint Ursula of Intesa Sanpaolo collection in Naples. I have also indicated a significant branch in a relaxed David (now preserved in a private collection in Naples) of unidentified artist, but certainly active in Naples in the first half of the seventeenth century, and in a St. John's Paul Finoglio private collection. At San Giovanni Battista lying was devoted to the recent exhibition at the Museum Het Rembranthuis of Amsterdam between 2010 and 2011: to report in this regard, the publication on exposure, interventions Strinati (2010-2011), Treffers (2010–2011), Pacelli (2010-2011), which traces back the historical and critical of the painting on the basis of the findings in 1994 (pp. 45–51), Marine (2010–11), and Giantomassi Zari (2010–11), which highlight, aspects of painting technique and to restoration.

0512_T

John the Baptist (Caravaggio)

Explore the John the Baptist feeding the Lamb (Private collection, Rome) of this artwork, John the Baptist (Caravaggio).

End of the first decade of the 17th Century, oil on canvas, 78x122 cm.

0512_NT

John the Baptist (Caravaggio)

Explore the John the Baptist feeding the Lamb (Private collection, Rome) of this artwork.

End of the first decade of the 17th Century, oil on canvas, 78x122 cm.

0513_T

Portrait of an Army Doctor

Focus on Portrait of an Army Doctor and discuss the abstract.

Portrait of an Army Doctor (in French Portrait d'un médecin militaire) is an oil-on-canvas painting created during 1914–15 by the French artist, theorist and writer Albert Gleizes. Painted at the fortress city of Toul (Lorraine) while Gleizes served in the military during the First World War, the painting's abstract circular rhythms and intersecting aslant planes announce the beginning of the second synthetic phase of Cubism. The work represents Gleizes's commanding officer, Major Mayer-Simon Lambert (1870–1943), the regimental surgeon in charge of the military hospital at Toul. At least eight preparatory sketches, gouaches and watercolors of the work have survived, though Portrait of an Army Doctor is one of Gleizes's only major oil paintings of the period.As other wartime works by Gleizes, Portrait of an Army Doctor represents a break from the first phase of Cubism. These wartime works mark "the beginning of an attempt to preserve specific and individual visual characteristics while experimenting with a radically different compositional treatment in which broad planes, angled from the perimeter, meet circles." (Robbins, 1964) Rather than based on the analysis of volumetric objects, the artist strove toward synthesis; something that originated in unity.Portrait of an Army Doctor—earlier forming part of the collection of art dealer Léonce Rosenberg—was purchased by Solomon R. Guggenheim at an important Gleizes exhibition at René Gimpel Galerie in New York City, December 1936 to January 1937 (no. 8). The work forms part of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection. It was gifted to the museum by Solomon Guggenheim in 1937 (the year of the formation of the foundation). The painting is in the permanent collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

0513_NT

Portrait of an Army Doctor

Focus on this artwork and discuss the abstract.

Portrait of an Army Doctor (in French Portrait d'un médecin militaire) is an oil-on-canvas painting created during 1914–15 by the French artist, theorist and writer Albert Gleizes. Painted at the fortress city of Toul (Lorraine) while Gleizes served in the military during the First World War, the painting's abstract circular rhythms and intersecting aslant planes announce the beginning of the second synthetic phase of Cubism. The work represents Gleizes's commanding officer, Major Mayer-Simon Lambert (1870–1943), the regimental surgeon in charge of the military hospital at Toul. At least eight preparatory sketches, gouaches and watercolors of the work have survived, though Portrait of an Army Doctor is one of Gleizes's only major oil paintings of the period.As other wartime works by Gleizes, Portrait of an Army Doctor represents a break from the first phase of Cubism. These wartime works mark "the beginning of an attempt to preserve specific and individual visual characteristics while experimenting with a radically different compositional treatment in which broad planes, angled from the perimeter, meet circles." (Robbins, 1964) Rather than based on the analysis of volumetric objects, the artist strove toward synthesis; something that originated in unity.Portrait of an Army Doctor—earlier forming part of the collection of art dealer Léonce Rosenberg—was purchased by Solomon R. Guggenheim at an important Gleizes exhibition at René Gimpel Galerie in New York City, December 1936 to January 1937 (no. 8). The work forms part of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Founding Collection. It was gifted to the museum by Solomon Guggenheim in 1937 (the year of the formation of the foundation). The painting is in the permanent collection of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City.

0514_T

Portrait of an Army Doctor

How does Portrait of an Army Doctor elucidate its Description?

Portrait of an Army Doctor is an oil painting on canvas with dimensions 119.8 cm × 95.1 cm (47.2 in × 37.4 in) inscribed Alb. Gleizes, Toul 1914, lower right. An early photograph of the work shows the inscribed date as 1914–15.Gleizes's works from this period, just as those of the early 1920s, are "characterized by dynamic intersections of vertical, diagonal, horizontal and circular movements", writes art historian Daniel Robbins, "austere in touch but loaded with energetic pattern." Gleizes brings into practice an effect reminiscent of Divisionist theory via the incorporation of colored squares within three sections of the canvas, one of which is composed of alternating pigments of contrasting blues and reds. The use of blue, white and red in the overall composition recall the colors of the French flag. Such a display of patriotism was not uncommon among the Cubists, even leading up to the war. French flags can be seen in the works of Roger de La Fresnaye; Fourteenth of July, 1913–14 (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX), and The Conquest of the Air, 1913 (Museum of Modern Art, New York). The Cubo-Futurist Gino Severini, too, included the French flag in his 1913 painting Train of the Wounded, 1913. While not depicting the flag itself, wartime works by Jean Metzinger dominantly exhibit blues and reds, along with army green, in such works as Soldat jouant aux échecs (Soldier at a Game of Chess), 1914–15, Smart Museum of Art, and Femme au miroir (Lady at her Dressing Table), April 1916.In 1915 Gleizes published an article in Jean Cocteau's patriotic review, Le Mot in which he attacks critics who accuse the new tendencies in art of being unpatriotic. The final issue of Le Mot includes a sketch by Gleizes based on wounded soldiers returning from a battle at Bois le Prêtre.Despite its descriptive title, the subject matter of Portrait of an Army Doctor has practically disappeared. The canvas is no longer analyzed or structured geometrically according to the golden ratio, though the armrest of the chair is treated as the beginning of a Fibonacci spiral. The masses of the composition are arranged in quasi-equilibrium. The center of the sitter face is the superior vertex of a triangular construct that extends toward the outer edges of the canvas.The intersection of the two arcs that compose the shoulders is centered on the vertical axis. The source of light is undetermined, or omnidirectional, just as the vantage point of the artist, in accord with the Cubist principle of 'simultaneity' (or multiple perspective): "a succession of descriptive aspects of the external world... by giving a multiple series of appearances, each one seen in its own perspective", writes Gleizes, "a succession of descriptive states. Waking up, this eye lurched from one point of view to the other, jumped back again, and was again thrown into a state of excitement." Cubism, with its new geometry, its dynamism and multiple view-point perspective, not only represented a departure from Euclid's model, but it achieved, according to Gleizes and Metzinger, a better representation of the real world: one that was mobile and changing in time. For Gleizes, Cubism represented a "normal evolution of an art that was mobile like life itself". Multiple perspective was in itself a protest against painting defined as an art based on space, that is to say, static. An aspiration towards mobility begins to appear and to appeal to the eye. The eye is required to enter into that collaboration which is necessary if it wishes to emerge from the torpor to which it had been reduced at the insistence of the single point perspective of the Renaissance; painting makes a legitimate claim to be regarded as an art of time ... Breaking up the plane into surfaces of different sizes reduced to geometrical forms. Sometimes certain indications of figures appear in this assemblage, obtained with the help of a few lines and several suggestive points. (Gleizes, 1927) While depth perception and perspective have been subdued to a large extent, the primary structural lines appear to recede or converge toward a multitude of vanishing points located at infinity. Though, unlike those of classical perspective, these vanishing points are not placed on a given horizon (a theoretical line that represents the eye level of the observer), nor do they allow the viewer to reconstruct the relative distance of parts or features of an object. Rather, they are placed on various horizons. The viewer is observing a non-linear scene where the picture plane is not parallel to any of the scene's multiple axes, giving the appearance of different forms of calculated perspective. Surfaces appear to overlap creating a sense of occlusion, but the resulting information is insufficient to allow the observer to recreate depth of field. By removing these optical cues, the geometrical method of perspective used to create the illusion of form, space and depth since the Renaissance, the artifice of an illusionistic trickery as Metzinger called it, Gleizes's aim was to arrive at what he perceived as 'truth', the constructive essence of the physical world. So, now that we are in possession of the means (and I firmly believe that we are) we must pitilessly reject the image of the Renaissance that is addressed exclusively to the senses, but, at the same time, we should not fear, should the occasion present itself, an image determined by geometry, by the square, the right angle, because it, in its nature, corresponds to the higher stages. The Renaissance image, I repeat, bears no, or too little, relation to them; the new image will give more meaning and variety to the space. (Gleizes) We are in the age of synthesis. An hour in the life of a man today raises more levels, insights, actions, than a year of that of any other century. That is what I try to say in my art. The rapid sketch of an Impressionist crystallised the fragility of a sensation; it was immobilized in his picture. The painting of today must crystallise a thousand sensations in an aesthetic order. And I see that for that there is no need to reveal other laws, other theorems with definitive forms. A beauty achieved through a mathematical order can only have a relative life; the universal kaleidoscope cannot be fitted into the framework of a system..." (Gleizes, c.1916, letter addressed to Henri-Martin Barzun) From 1914 to the end of Gleizes's New York period—however nonrepresentational—works by the artist continued to be shaped by his personal experience, by the conviction that art was a social function, susceptible to theoretical formulation, and imbued with optimism. Gleizes's nonrepresentational paintings and those with an apparent visual basis existed side by side, differing only, writes Daniel Robbins, in "the degree of abstraction hidden by the uniformity with which they were painted and by the constant effort to tie the plastic realization of the painting to a specific, even unique, experience."

0514_NT

Portrait of an Army Doctor

How does this artwork elucidate its Description?

Portrait of an Army Doctor is an oil painting on canvas with dimensions 119.8 cm × 95.1 cm (47.2 in × 37.4 in) inscribed Alb. Gleizes, Toul 1914, lower right. An early photograph of the work shows the inscribed date as 1914–15.Gleizes's works from this period, just as those of the early 1920s, are "characterized by dynamic intersections of vertical, diagonal, horizontal and circular movements", writes art historian Daniel Robbins, "austere in touch but loaded with energetic pattern." Gleizes brings into practice an effect reminiscent of Divisionist theory via the incorporation of colored squares within three sections of the canvas, one of which is composed of alternating pigments of contrasting blues and reds. The use of blue, white and red in the overall composition recall the colors of the French flag. Such a display of patriotism was not uncommon among the Cubists, even leading up to the war. French flags can be seen in the works of Roger de La Fresnaye; Fourteenth of July, 1913–14 (Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX), and The Conquest of the Air, 1913 (Museum of Modern Art, New York). The Cubo-Futurist Gino Severini, too, included the French flag in his 1913 painting Train of the Wounded, 1913. While not depicting the flag itself, wartime works by Jean Metzinger dominantly exhibit blues and reds, along with army green, in such works as Soldat jouant aux échecs (Soldier at a Game of Chess), 1914–15, Smart Museum of Art, and Femme au miroir (Lady at her Dressing Table), April 1916.In 1915 Gleizes published an article in Jean Cocteau's patriotic review, Le Mot in which he attacks critics who accuse the new tendencies in art of being unpatriotic. The final issue of Le Mot includes a sketch by Gleizes based on wounded soldiers returning from a battle at Bois le Prêtre.Despite its descriptive title, the subject matter of Portrait of an Army Doctor has practically disappeared. The canvas is no longer analyzed or structured geometrically according to the golden ratio, though the armrest of the chair is treated as the beginning of a Fibonacci spiral. The masses of the composition are arranged in quasi-equilibrium. The center of the sitter face is the superior vertex of a triangular construct that extends toward the outer edges of the canvas.The intersection of the two arcs that compose the shoulders is centered on the vertical axis. The source of light is undetermined, or omnidirectional, just as the vantage point of the artist, in accord with the Cubist principle of 'simultaneity' (or multiple perspective): "a succession of descriptive aspects of the external world... by giving a multiple series of appearances, each one seen in its own perspective", writes Gleizes, "a succession of descriptive states. Waking up, this eye lurched from one point of view to the other, jumped back again, and was again thrown into a state of excitement." Cubism, with its new geometry, its dynamism and multiple view-point perspective, not only represented a departure from Euclid's model, but it achieved, according to Gleizes and Metzinger, a better representation of the real world: one that was mobile and changing in time. For Gleizes, Cubism represented a "normal evolution of an art that was mobile like life itself". Multiple perspective was in itself a protest against painting defined as an art based on space, that is to say, static. An aspiration towards mobility begins to appear and to appeal to the eye. The eye is required to enter into that collaboration which is necessary if it wishes to emerge from the torpor to which it had been reduced at the insistence of the single point perspective of the Renaissance; painting makes a legitimate claim to be regarded as an art of time ... Breaking up the plane into surfaces of different sizes reduced to geometrical forms. Sometimes certain indications of figures appear in this assemblage, obtained with the help of a few lines and several suggestive points. (Gleizes, 1927) While depth perception and perspective have been subdued to a large extent, the primary structural lines appear to recede or converge toward a multitude of vanishing points located at infinity. Though, unlike those of classical perspective, these vanishing points are not placed on a given horizon (a theoretical line that represents the eye level of the observer), nor do they allow the viewer to reconstruct the relative distance of parts or features of an object. Rather, they are placed on various horizons. The viewer is observing a non-linear scene where the picture plane is not parallel to any of the scene's multiple axes, giving the appearance of different forms of calculated perspective. Surfaces appear to overlap creating a sense of occlusion, but the resulting information is insufficient to allow the observer to recreate depth of field. By removing these optical cues, the geometrical method of perspective used to create the illusion of form, space and depth since the Renaissance, the artifice of an illusionistic trickery as Metzinger called it, Gleizes's aim was to arrive at what he perceived as 'truth', the constructive essence of the physical world. So, now that we are in possession of the means (and I firmly believe that we are) we must pitilessly reject the image of the Renaissance that is addressed exclusively to the senses, but, at the same time, we should not fear, should the occasion present itself, an image determined by geometry, by the square, the right angle, because it, in its nature, corresponds to the higher stages. The Renaissance image, I repeat, bears no, or too little, relation to them; the new image will give more meaning and variety to the space. (Gleizes) We are in the age of synthesis. An hour in the life of a man today raises more levels, insights, actions, than a year of that of any other century. That is what I try to say in my art. The rapid sketch of an Impressionist crystallised the fragility of a sensation; it was immobilized in his picture. The painting of today must crystallise a thousand sensations in an aesthetic order. And I see that for that there is no need to reveal other laws, other theorems with definitive forms. A beauty achieved through a mathematical order can only have a relative life; the universal kaleidoscope cannot be fitted into the framework of a system..." (Gleizes, c.1916, letter addressed to Henri-Martin Barzun) From 1914 to the end of Gleizes's New York period—however nonrepresentational—works by the artist continued to be shaped by his personal experience, by the conviction that art was a social function, susceptible to theoretical formulation, and imbued with optimism. Gleizes's nonrepresentational paintings and those with an apparent visual basis existed side by side, differing only, writes Daniel Robbins, in "the degree of abstraction hidden by the uniformity with which they were painted and by the constant effort to tie the plastic realization of the painting to a specific, even unique, experience."

0515_T

Portrait of an Army Doctor

Focus on Portrait of an Army Doctor and analyze the Background.

Many of the leading Cubists were mobilized at the outset of the First World War: Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Duchamp-Villon, Roger de La Fresnaye, and Jean Metzinger, yet despite the radical interruption, they were able to continue producing styles of Cubism that extended beyond pre-war attitudes. Cubism evolved as a result of both nationalistic pressures and from the evasion of the atrocities of war. There came the need to diverge further away from the representation of things. As the divide between art and life grew, the need for a process of distillation (a process of purification) became increasingly ubiquitous across the spectrum of Cubist activity. Orderly qualities and autonomous purity became a prime concern. This tendency toward wholesale geometric abstraction from 1914 through the mid-1920s has been linked to broader ideological shift towards conservatism in both French society and culture.Metzinger served very close to the front during World War I, as a medical aide, and was possibly with his surgical automobile when he painted Soldier at a Game of Chess (though evidence suggests the work may have been painted prior to his mobilization). However, very few of his works represent scenes associated with war. And rather than delving into the actual carnage of war, this painting evokes an idealized theory of war. Instead, his interest is captured by mathematical rationality, order, his faith in humanity and modernity. The war, however, is very present in this work, by the presence of the soldier and his engagement with chess, simultaneously an intellectual game and a battle. This period of profound reflection contributed to the constitution of a new mindset; a prerequisite for fundamental change. The flat surface became the starting point for a revaluation of the fundamental principles of painting. Rather than relying strictly on the intellect, the focus placed on the immediate experience of the senses, on the idea according to Gleizes, that form, 'changing the directions of its movement, will change its dimensions', while revealing the "basic elements" of painting, the "true, solid rules - rules which could be generally applied".Fernand Léger was mobilized in October 1914, and served as a sapper close to the front in Forest of Argonne. He drew the various activities of his comrades during his free time, with virtually no possibility of working on canvas. Between the autumn of 1914 and 1917 he was able to produce only one work on canvas, Soldier with a pipe (Le Soldat à la Pipe).Unlike the "Impressionism of form" and dissection of the subject by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, Gleizes attempted to create a synthetic art that incorporated social values. He strove to capture the absolute 'order' and 'truth' of his subject, believing in the Universality and superiority of rhythmic harmonies over subjective responses. These values had preoccupied the artist since his years at the Abbaye de Créteil, a self-supporting collective of artists and writers he co-founded during the fall of 1906 with Alexandre Mercereau, René Arcos, Henri-Martin Barzun, and Charles Vildrac.

0515_NT

Portrait of an Army Doctor

Focus on this artwork and analyze the Background.

Many of the leading Cubists were mobilized at the outset of the First World War: Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, Duchamp-Villon, Roger de La Fresnaye, and Jean Metzinger, yet despite the radical interruption, they were able to continue producing styles of Cubism that extended beyond pre-war attitudes. Cubism evolved as a result of both nationalistic pressures and from the evasion of the atrocities of war. There came the need to diverge further away from the representation of things. As the divide between art and life grew, the need for a process of distillation (a process of purification) became increasingly ubiquitous across the spectrum of Cubist activity. Orderly qualities and autonomous purity became a prime concern. This tendency toward wholesale geometric abstraction from 1914 through the mid-1920s has been linked to broader ideological shift towards conservatism in both French society and culture.Metzinger served very close to the front during World War I, as a medical aide, and was possibly with his surgical automobile when he painted Soldier at a Game of Chess (though evidence suggests the work may have been painted prior to his mobilization). However, very few of his works represent scenes associated with war. And rather than delving into the actual carnage of war, this painting evokes an idealized theory of war. Instead, his interest is captured by mathematical rationality, order, his faith in humanity and modernity. The war, however, is very present in this work, by the presence of the soldier and his engagement with chess, simultaneously an intellectual game and a battle. This period of profound reflection contributed to the constitution of a new mindset; a prerequisite for fundamental change. The flat surface became the starting point for a revaluation of the fundamental principles of painting. Rather than relying strictly on the intellect, the focus placed on the immediate experience of the senses, on the idea according to Gleizes, that form, 'changing the directions of its movement, will change its dimensions', while revealing the "basic elements" of painting, the "true, solid rules - rules which could be generally applied".Fernand Léger was mobilized in October 1914, and served as a sapper close to the front in Forest of Argonne. He drew the various activities of his comrades during his free time, with virtually no possibility of working on canvas. Between the autumn of 1914 and 1917 he was able to produce only one work on canvas, Soldier with a pipe (Le Soldat à la Pipe).Unlike the "Impressionism of form" and dissection of the subject by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, Gleizes attempted to create a synthetic art that incorporated social values. He strove to capture the absolute 'order' and 'truth' of his subject, believing in the Universality and superiority of rhythmic harmonies over subjective responses. These values had preoccupied the artist since his years at the Abbaye de Créteil, a self-supporting collective of artists and writers he co-founded during the fall of 1906 with Alexandre Mercereau, René Arcos, Henri-Martin Barzun, and Charles Vildrac.

0516_T

Portrait of an Army Doctor

Describe the characteristics of the Mobilization in Portrait of an Army Doctor's Background.

Gleizes had been conscripted at the outset of the war (August 1914) and sent to the garrison town of Toul, close to the Eastern front (120 km from Sainte-Menehould, where his close friend Jean Metzinger was mobilized) to serve in the 167e régiment d'infanterie (from which the 367e régiment d'infanterie was formed). He was stationed in the Caserne Maréchal-Ney (Plateau Saint-Georges), attached to the Service de Santé des Armées, in the infirmary of the unit. Upon giving his name to the receiving sergeant he was asked if he had any relation to the Cubist painter. When Gleizes answered that he was the Cubist painter he was told to step aside. Sergeant Raymond Vaufrey (soon to become a well-known paleontologist) happened to be an avid enthusiast of modern art. Shortly thereafter Gleizes was assigned the role of providing entertainment for the troops. His experience with artistic and literary activities at the Abbey of Créteil and the Association Ernest Renan, along with his connection to the distinguished author and actor Maxime Léry, may have helped secure the post. His close associates at the garrison included Carlos Salzedo, a harpist responsible for musical activities; the dentist Théo Morinaud, and early childhood friend from Courbevoie and possibly the subject of several pairings by Gleizes, including l'Homme au Balcon (Man on a Balcony), Philadelphia Museum of Art. Also stationed at Toul were the painters Georges Valmier, Paul Colin, and the composer Florent Schmitt. Gleizes activities as artistic and literary impresario at the fortress included monologues reciting classical, romantic and Symbolist poetry by Paul Fort, Jules Laforgue, Tristan Corbière, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé. Gleizes' mobilization was an obstacle to his production of artwork, though he was able to work on small scale, and ultimately produced one relatively large piece, Portrait of an Army Doctor. The painter Gleizes, who wrote a book on Cubism, writes to a friend: "From Toul, advanced outpost on the Eastern border, I am sending you this card. There is no question of Cubism at the moment or simultanism. When will we speak of it again? When will we do it again? Soon I hope, and with the glory of having crushed the German felony, having extirpated the Prussian Hydra and to be able to return freely in French Alsace-Lorraine forever. I have absolute confidence in your effort, your mission." (Gleizes, L'Intransigeant, August 1914) An admirer of his work, his commanding officer—the regimental surgeon portrayed by Gleizes in this painting—made arrangements so that Gleizes could continue to paint while mobilized at Toul. This work, painted at the outset of the Crystal Cubist period, was a precursor to Gleizes's abstract paintings of 1915–16. Portrait of an Army Doctor consists of broad, overlapping planes of brilliant color, dynamically intersecting vertical, diagonal, horizontal lines coupled with circular movements. This painting, along with his Portrait de Florent Schmitt, Le Chant de guerre (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), according to Gleizes, represented a break from both 'Cubism of analysis', and from the representation of volume undertaken during the first period of Cubism. He was now on a path that lead to 'synthesis', with its starting point in 'unity'.This unity, and the highly crystalline geometricized materialization consisting of superimposed constituent planes, ultimately referred to by the French poet and art critic Maurice Raynal as Crystal Cubism, would soon be described by Gleizes in La Peinture et ses lois (1922–23), as 'simultaneous movements of translation and rotation of the plane'. The synthetic factor was taken furthest of all from within the Cubists by Gleizes. Basing himself on his 1915 abstractions, Gleizes sought to clarify his methods further in La Peinture et ses lois, deducing the fundamental principles of painting from the picture plane, its proportions, the movement of the human eye and the universal physical laws. These theoretical postulates, later referred to as translation-rotation, according to Robbins, rank "with the writings of Mondrian and Malevich as one of the most thorough expositions of the principles of abstract art, which in his case entailed the rejection not only of representation but also of geometric forms".Many drawings, gouaches and watercolors were realized by the artist in and around Toul. He kept the landscapes and portrait sketches in a drawer, until one day they were discover by a private (a miner) who removed them all only to tack them on the wall with toothpicks for an exhibition. Gleizes remarked that educated or cultured soldiers had more difficulty with his paintings than those with little or no intellectual pretensions. Portrait d'un médecin militaire generated mixed responses. The Professor of Physiology from the Faculty of Nancy in charge of the infirmary at Toul, Dr. Lambert, was more enthusiastic about his portrait by Valmier than that of Gleizes:The portrait that he [Valmier] made of the Doctor was excellent, a very good likeness that remained in the classical idiom. But for myself, I wanted to remain faithful to Cubism and not to play games with my own convictions. So the portrait I envisaged was a little surprising for the good doctor's habits of mind. He did not conceal his way of thinking, but he let me do what I wanted. I made of him, from memory, a large number of drawings in pencil, in pen and ink, in ink wash. I made a series of watercolors and gouaches. When he saw them, the model was pretty shaken. When my studies seemed to be ready, I did the oil painting. I painted the portrait in the Marshall Ney's room. I nailed a canvas I had ordered from Nancy to the wall and got down to work. When it was finished, it received the approval of my friends, the unsophisticated ones, who were all able to recognise Dr. Lambert perfectly well. The others were divided. As for the interested party, he refused, definitely, but amicably, to take possession of it. To please me, he only accepted the final little gouache which I had used for the execution of the canvas. (Albert Gleizes, Souvenirs, c. 1942) The Portrait d'un médecin militaire, commissioned by Dr. Lambert, is "impressive" writes art historian Peter Brooke: "Although Gleizes tells the story lightheartedly, it is a serious, almost tragic painting, in which the subject (the poor Dr. Lambert) has almost disappeared—reduced to a presence rather than a likeness—in a construction in which vertical parallel lines, and therefor a static, monumental character, prevail. Together with the second Portrait of Florent Schmitt (the Chant de guerre), it could be described as the furthest point reached by this Cubism striving towards the laws of the 'object'—the properties of the picture space itself—but still taking the 'subject'—the thing represented—as its starting point." (Brooke, 2001, p. 46)Shortly thereafter, Jean Cocteau asked Gleizes to design the set and costumes for the William Shakespeare play, A Midsummer Night's Dream, along with Valmier.

0516_NT

Portrait of an Army Doctor

Describe the characteristics of the Mobilization in this artwork's Background.

Gleizes had been conscripted at the outset of the war (August 1914) and sent to the garrison town of Toul, close to the Eastern front (120 km from Sainte-Menehould, where his close friend Jean Metzinger was mobilized) to serve in the 167e régiment d'infanterie (from which the 367e régiment d'infanterie was formed). He was stationed in the Caserne Maréchal-Ney (Plateau Saint-Georges), attached to the Service de Santé des Armées, in the infirmary of the unit. Upon giving his name to the receiving sergeant he was asked if he had any relation to the Cubist painter. When Gleizes answered that he was the Cubist painter he was told to step aside. Sergeant Raymond Vaufrey (soon to become a well-known paleontologist) happened to be an avid enthusiast of modern art. Shortly thereafter Gleizes was assigned the role of providing entertainment for the troops. His experience with artistic and literary activities at the Abbey of Créteil and the Association Ernest Renan, along with his connection to the distinguished author and actor Maxime Léry, may have helped secure the post. His close associates at the garrison included Carlos Salzedo, a harpist responsible for musical activities; the dentist Théo Morinaud, and early childhood friend from Courbevoie and possibly the subject of several pairings by Gleizes, including l'Homme au Balcon (Man on a Balcony), Philadelphia Museum of Art. Also stationed at Toul were the painters Georges Valmier, Paul Colin, and the composer Florent Schmitt. Gleizes activities as artistic and literary impresario at the fortress included monologues reciting classical, romantic and Symbolist poetry by Paul Fort, Jules Laforgue, Tristan Corbière, Arthur Rimbaud and Stéphane Mallarmé. Gleizes' mobilization was an obstacle to his production of artwork, though he was able to work on small scale, and ultimately produced one relatively large piece, Portrait of an Army Doctor. The painter Gleizes, who wrote a book on Cubism, writes to a friend: "From Toul, advanced outpost on the Eastern border, I am sending you this card. There is no question of Cubism at the moment or simultanism. When will we speak of it again? When will we do it again? Soon I hope, and with the glory of having crushed the German felony, having extirpated the Prussian Hydra and to be able to return freely in French Alsace-Lorraine forever. I have absolute confidence in your effort, your mission." (Gleizes, L'Intransigeant, August 1914) An admirer of his work, his commanding officer—the regimental surgeon portrayed by Gleizes in this painting—made arrangements so that Gleizes could continue to paint while mobilized at Toul. This work, painted at the outset of the Crystal Cubist period, was a precursor to Gleizes's abstract paintings of 1915–16. Portrait of an Army Doctor consists of broad, overlapping planes of brilliant color, dynamically intersecting vertical, diagonal, horizontal lines coupled with circular movements. This painting, along with his Portrait de Florent Schmitt, Le Chant de guerre (Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum), according to Gleizes, represented a break from both 'Cubism of analysis', and from the representation of volume undertaken during the first period of Cubism. He was now on a path that lead to 'synthesis', with its starting point in 'unity'.This unity, and the highly crystalline geometricized materialization consisting of superimposed constituent planes, ultimately referred to by the French poet and art critic Maurice Raynal as Crystal Cubism, would soon be described by Gleizes in La Peinture et ses lois (1922–23), as 'simultaneous movements of translation and rotation of the plane'. The synthetic factor was taken furthest of all from within the Cubists by Gleizes. Basing himself on his 1915 abstractions, Gleizes sought to clarify his methods further in La Peinture et ses lois, deducing the fundamental principles of painting from the picture plane, its proportions, the movement of the human eye and the universal physical laws. These theoretical postulates, later referred to as translation-rotation, according to Robbins, rank "with the writings of Mondrian and Malevich as one of the most thorough expositions of the principles of abstract art, which in his case entailed the rejection not only of representation but also of geometric forms".Many drawings, gouaches and watercolors were realized by the artist in and around Toul. He kept the landscapes and portrait sketches in a drawer, until one day they were discover by a private (a miner) who removed them all only to tack them on the wall with toothpicks for an exhibition. Gleizes remarked that educated or cultured soldiers had more difficulty with his paintings than those with little or no intellectual pretensions. Portrait d'un médecin militaire generated mixed responses. The Professor of Physiology from the Faculty of Nancy in charge of the infirmary at Toul, Dr. Lambert, was more enthusiastic about his portrait by Valmier than that of Gleizes:The portrait that he [Valmier] made of the Doctor was excellent, a very good likeness that remained in the classical idiom. But for myself, I wanted to remain faithful to Cubism and not to play games with my own convictions. So the portrait I envisaged was a little surprising for the good doctor's habits of mind. He did not conceal his way of thinking, but he let me do what I wanted. I made of him, from memory, a large number of drawings in pencil, in pen and ink, in ink wash. I made a series of watercolors and gouaches. When he saw them, the model was pretty shaken. When my studies seemed to be ready, I did the oil painting. I painted the portrait in the Marshall Ney's room. I nailed a canvas I had ordered from Nancy to the wall and got down to work. When it was finished, it received the approval of my friends, the unsophisticated ones, who were all able to recognise Dr. Lambert perfectly well. The others were divided. As for the interested party, he refused, definitely, but amicably, to take possession of it. To please me, he only accepted the final little gouache which I had used for the execution of the canvas. (Albert Gleizes, Souvenirs, c. 1942) The Portrait d'un médecin militaire, commissioned by Dr. Lambert, is "impressive" writes art historian Peter Brooke: "Although Gleizes tells the story lightheartedly, it is a serious, almost tragic painting, in which the subject (the poor Dr. Lambert) has almost disappeared—reduced to a presence rather than a likeness—in a construction in which vertical parallel lines, and therefor a static, monumental character, prevail. Together with the second Portrait of Florent Schmitt (the Chant de guerre), it could be described as the furthest point reached by this Cubism striving towards the laws of the 'object'—the properties of the picture space itself—but still taking the 'subject'—the thing represented—as its starting point." (Brooke, 2001, p. 46)Shortly thereafter, Jean Cocteau asked Gleizes to design the set and costumes for the William Shakespeare play, A Midsummer Night's Dream, along with Valmier.

0517_T

Portrait of an Army Doctor

In the context of Portrait of an Army Doctor, explore the Demobilization of the Background.

Gleizes was demobilized, with the help of his soon to be wife Juliette Roche, in September 1915. Gleizes published an article in Ricciotto Canudo's Montjoie entitled Cubisme et la tradition. It was through the intermediary of Cuando that Gleizes met the artist Juliette Roche. She was a childhood friend of Jean Cocteau and the daughter of an influential politician of the 3rd Republic, Jules Roche.During the months of autumn, following his demobilization in 1915, Gleizes married Juliette Roche and moved to New York. There they were met by Carlos Salzedo, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Jean Crotti (who would eventually marry Suzanne Duchamp). Marcel Duchamp had emigrated to New York several months earlier after being judged physically unfit for his service in the military. Shortly after his arrival, Gleizes, accompanied by Salzedo, frequented jazz clubs in Harlem. With all it had to offer, New York had a strong impact on the artist's production, leading to abstract works virtually free of visual subject matter.Many works by Gleizes painted at Toul between 1914 and 1915 were auctioned in New York, for the occasion of the late John Quinn exhibition and sale of modern and ultra-modern art at the American Art Galleries, conducted by Bernet and Parke, with a catalogue published by American Art Association, New York, 1927.

0517_NT

Portrait of an Army Doctor

In the context of this artwork, explore the Demobilization of the Background.

Gleizes was demobilized, with the help of his soon to be wife Juliette Roche, in September 1915. Gleizes published an article in Ricciotto Canudo's Montjoie entitled Cubisme et la tradition. It was through the intermediary of Cuando that Gleizes met the artist Juliette Roche. She was a childhood friend of Jean Cocteau and the daughter of an influential politician of the 3rd Republic, Jules Roche.During the months of autumn, following his demobilization in 1915, Gleizes married Juliette Roche and moved to New York. There they were met by Carlos Salzedo, Francis Picabia, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, and Jean Crotti (who would eventually marry Suzanne Duchamp). Marcel Duchamp had emigrated to New York several months earlier after being judged physically unfit for his service in the military. Shortly after his arrival, Gleizes, accompanied by Salzedo, frequented jazz clubs in Harlem. With all it had to offer, New York had a strong impact on the artist's production, leading to abstract works virtually free of visual subject matter.Many works by Gleizes painted at Toul between 1914 and 1915 were auctioned in New York, for the occasion of the late John Quinn exhibition and sale of modern and ultra-modern art at the American Art Galleries, conducted by Bernet and Parke, with a catalogue published by American Art Association, New York, 1927.

0518_T

Portrait of an Army Doctor

Focus on Portrait of an Army Doctor and explain the Recent exhibitions.

Le cubisme, 17 October 2018 to 25 February 2019, Centre Pompidou, the first large-scale exhibition devoted to Cubism in France since 1973, with over 300 works on display. The 1973 exhibition, Les Cubistes, included over 180 works and was held at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Galerie des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux. The motivation for the Pompidou exhibition resides in broadening the scope of Cubism, usually focused on Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, to include the major contributions of the Salon Cubists, the Section d'Or, and others who participated in the over-all movement. The exhibition is held at Kunstmuseum Basel, from 31 March to 5 August 2019.

0518_NT

Portrait of an Army Doctor

Focus on this artwork and explain the Recent exhibitions.

Le cubisme, 17 October 2018 to 25 February 2019, Centre Pompidou, the first large-scale exhibition devoted to Cubism in France since 1973, with over 300 works on display. The 1973 exhibition, Les Cubistes, included over 180 works and was held at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Galerie des Beaux-Arts, Bordeaux. The motivation for the Pompidou exhibition resides in broadening the scope of Cubism, usually focused on Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, to include the major contributions of the Salon Cubists, the Section d'Or, and others who participated in the over-all movement. The exhibition is held at Kunstmuseum Basel, from 31 March to 5 August 2019.

0519_T

Progress of Civilization Pediment

Explore the abstract of this artwork, Progress of Civilization Pediment.

The Progress of Civilization is a marble pediment above the entrance to the Senate wing of the United States Capitol building designed by the sculptor Thomas Crawford. An allegorical personification of America stands at the center of the pediment. To her right, a white woodsman clears the wilderness inhabited by a Native American boy, father, mother, and child. The left side of the pediment depicts a soldier, a merchant, two schoolchildren, a teacher with her pupil, and a mechanic. When it was originally completed, the pediment received positive reactions in the press. However, it has attracted more critical commentary from scholars since the 1990s.The US Capitol building underwent a restoration program in 2016 which led to new discoveries about the pediment.

0519_NT

Progress of Civilization Pediment

Explore the abstract of this artwork.

The Progress of Civilization is a marble pediment above the entrance to the Senate wing of the United States Capitol building designed by the sculptor Thomas Crawford. An allegorical personification of America stands at the center of the pediment. To her right, a white woodsman clears the wilderness inhabited by a Native American boy, father, mother, and child. The left side of the pediment depicts a soldier, a merchant, two schoolchildren, a teacher with her pupil, and a mechanic. When it was originally completed, the pediment received positive reactions in the press. However, it has attracted more critical commentary from scholars since the 1990s.The US Capitol building underwent a restoration program in 2016 which led to new discoveries about the pediment.

0520_T

Progress of Civilization Pediment

Focus on Progress of Civilization Pediment and discuss the Historical context.

In 1850, Congress legislated the expansion of the Capitol building. Before design and construction began, there were several administrative changes which made it unclear who was in charge of the project. In 1851, President Filmore reinstated the position of the Architect of the Capitol and named Thomas U. Walker for the role. However, in 1853, administrative responsibilities were taken over by the Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis. Davis then selected Montgomery Meigs as the supervisor of the project. From this point, Meigs would make decisions and then forward them to Davis and the president for approval. Although he was in control, Meigs had to carefully navigate public opinion, particularly opposition to foreign artists. Meigs reached out to Edward Everett who recommended Hiram Powers and Thomas Crawford. Powers refused the offers because of previous disagreements with the government, so Crawford became the primary sculptor for the Capitol extension. In his letters to both Crawford and Powers, Meigs began to refine his vision for the pediment. He envisioned a building that "rivaled the Parthenon." He also had the theme of racial conflict in mind. He recognized that conflict with Native Americans was an ongoing issue at the time and wanted the pediment to reflect that.

0520_NT

Progress of Civilization Pediment

Focus on this artwork and discuss the Historical context.

In 1850, Congress legislated the expansion of the Capitol building. Before design and construction began, there were several administrative changes which made it unclear who was in charge of the project. In 1851, President Filmore reinstated the position of the Architect of the Capitol and named Thomas U. Walker for the role. However, in 1853, administrative responsibilities were taken over by the Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis. Davis then selected Montgomery Meigs as the supervisor of the project. From this point, Meigs would make decisions and then forward them to Davis and the president for approval. Although he was in control, Meigs had to carefully navigate public opinion, particularly opposition to foreign artists. Meigs reached out to Edward Everett who recommended Hiram Powers and Thomas Crawford. Powers refused the offers because of previous disagreements with the government, so Crawford became the primary sculptor for the Capitol extension. In his letters to both Crawford and Powers, Meigs began to refine his vision for the pediment. He envisioned a building that "rivaled the Parthenon." He also had the theme of racial conflict in mind. He recognized that conflict with Native Americans was an ongoing issue at the time and wanted the pediment to reflect that.

0521_T

Progress of Civilization Pediment

How does Progress of Civilization Pediment elucidate its Figures?

Art historian Kirsten Pai Buick argues against reading the pediment from left to right, suggesting instead that is anti-linear and should be viewed as two halves. Buick suggests that the right is the side of the damned (the Native Americans) and the left is the side of the saved (White Americans).

0521_NT

Progress of Civilization Pediment

How does this artwork elucidate its Figures?

Art historian Kirsten Pai Buick argues against reading the pediment from left to right, suggesting instead that is anti-linear and should be viewed as two halves. Buick suggests that the right is the side of the damned (the Native Americans) and the left is the side of the saved (White Americans).

0522_T

Progress of Civilization Pediment

In the context of Progress of Civilization Pediment, analyze the America of the Figures.

The central figure is a personification of America. She stands in contrapposto and is clothed in classical drapery. Her Phrygian cap and shawl are decorated in stars. The cap is a representation of liberty. Her right arm holds a laurel and oak wreath which represent civic and military merit while her left hand is outstretched in an appeal to heaven. Her head is also tilted heavenwards. An eagle is to her left and the sun rises at her feet.

0522_NT

Progress of Civilization Pediment

In the context of this artwork, analyze the America of the Figures.

The central figure is a personification of America. She stands in contrapposto and is clothed in classical drapery. Her Phrygian cap and shawl are decorated in stars. The cap is a representation of liberty. Her right arm holds a laurel and oak wreath which represent civic and military merit while her left hand is outstretched in an appeal to heaven. Her head is also tilted heavenwards. An eagle is to her left and the sun rises at her feet.

0523_T

Progress of Civilization Pediment

Describe the characteristics of the Backwoodsman in Progress of Civilization Pediment's Figures.

To the right of America is a portrayal of a backwoodsman. He holds an ax and cuts down a tree. During the period, the tree stump, ax, and woodcutter were recognized as symbols of the progress of civilization. This symbolism is also present in Andrew Melrose's Westward the Star of Empire Takes Its Way–Near Council Bluffs Iowa and George Inness's Lackawanna Valley.

0523_NT

Progress of Civilization Pediment

Describe the characteristics of the Backwoodsman in this artwork's Figures.

To the right of America is a portrayal of a backwoodsman. He holds an ax and cuts down a tree. During the period, the tree stump, ax, and woodcutter were recognized as symbols of the progress of civilization. This symbolism is also present in Andrew Melrose's Westward the Star of Empire Takes Its Way–Near Council Bluffs Iowa and George Inness's Lackawanna Valley.

0524_T

Progress of Civilization Pediment

In the context of Progress of Civilization Pediment, explore the Indian boy of the Figures.

The next figure, the Indian boy, stands in contrast with the backwoodsman. The boy has just returned from hunting, as indicated by the game hanging over his right soldier. Art historian Vivien Green Fryd observes that some white Americans regarded hunting as uncivilized at the time, making the Indian boy the embodiment of primitive behavior.: 115  Fryd further notes that the contrast with the white school children on the other side of the pediment "suggests the uneducated, uncultured, and wild native is symbolically replaced by educated, cultured, and civilized whites.": 123

0524_NT

Progress of Civilization Pediment

In the context of this artwork, explore the Indian boy of the Figures.

The next figure, the Indian boy, stands in contrast with the backwoodsman. The boy has just returned from hunting, as indicated by the game hanging over his right soldier. Art historian Vivien Green Fryd observes that some white Americans regarded hunting as uncivilized at the time, making the Indian boy the embodiment of primitive behavior.: 115  Fryd further notes that the contrast with the white school children on the other side of the pediment "suggests the uneducated, uncultured, and wild native is symbolically replaced by educated, cultured, and civilized whites.": 123

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Progress of Civilization Pediment

In the context of Progress of Civilization Pediment, explain the Indian chief of the Figures.

The rest of the Indian boy's family is to the right, beginning with his father, the Indian chief. The father rests on a rock in a position of melancholy. He wears a feathered headdress and a cloth that covers only his groin. His clenched left fist and bent right leg contrast with his relaxed right side. His ax rests across the rock and is covered by animal skin. Fryd describes this covering as "a sign of the Indian's inability to employ force.": 116  In Crawford's words, the Indian chief is meant to "embody all the despair and profound grief resulting from the conviction of the white man's triumph.": 116

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Progress of Civilization Pediment

In the context of this artwork, explain the Indian chief of the Figures.

The rest of the Indian boy's family is to the right, beginning with his father, the Indian chief. The father rests on a rock in a position of melancholy. He wears a feathered headdress and a cloth that covers only his groin. His clenched left fist and bent right leg contrast with his relaxed right side. His ax rests across the rock and is covered by animal skin. Fryd describes this covering as "a sign of the Indian's inability to employ force.": 116  In Crawford's words, the Indian chief is meant to "embody all the despair and profound grief resulting from the conviction of the white man's triumph.": 116

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Progress of Civilization Pediment

Explore the Indian mother and child about the Figures of this artwork, Progress of Civilization Pediment.

The final figures on the right side of the pediment are the Indian mother and child reclining next to a grave. These figures follow the mood of melancholy and despair of the Indian chief. An art journal from the time described the figures with the following statement: "The mother, with prophetic fear, grasps her infant to her bosom, she reclines her cheek on its tiny face as though, in her great love, she would shroud it from the inevitable fate awaiting its race, its name, its very land; a fate sadly imaged forth by a heaped-up grave before her."

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Progress of Civilization Pediment

Explore the Indian mother and child about the Figures of this artwork.

The final figures on the right side of the pediment are the Indian mother and child reclining next to a grave. These figures follow the mood of melancholy and despair of the Indian chief. An art journal from the time described the figures with the following statement: "The mother, with prophetic fear, grasps her infant to her bosom, she reclines her cheek on its tiny face as though, in her great love, she would shroud it from the inevitable fate awaiting its race, its name, its very land; a fate sadly imaged forth by a heaped-up grave before her."

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Progress of Civilization Pediment

In the context of Progress of Civilization Pediment, discuss the Soldier of the Figures.

The first figure to the left of America is the soldier. He is a reference to the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the ongoing war against Native American tribes. This symbolism is in line with the rhetoric of President Buchanan and Senator Davis who were prominent proponents of the Mexican War and the war against the tribes.: 121

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Progress of Civilization Pediment

In the context of this artwork, discuss the Soldier of the Figures.

The first figure to the left of America is the soldier. He is a reference to the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, and the ongoing war against Native American tribes. This symbolism is in line with the rhetoric of President Buchanan and Senator Davis who were prominent proponents of the Mexican War and the war against the tribes.: 121

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Progress of Civilization Pediment

In Progress of Civilization Pediment, how is the Merchant of the Figures elucidated?

Next to the soldier is the merchant. He is seated and surrounded by symbols of commerce. His hand rests on a globe to reference the extensive American trade going on at this time.: 121

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Progress of Civilization Pediment

In this artwork, how is the Merchant of the Figures elucidated?

Next to the soldier is the merchant. He is seated and surrounded by symbols of commerce. His hand rests on a globe to reference the extensive American trade going on at this time.: 121

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Progress of Civilization Pediment

In the context of Progress of Civilization Pediment, analyze the School boys, schoolteacher, and child of the Figures.

Following the merchant is a group of schoolchildren and their teacher. Crawford stated that the two boys step forward "to the service of their country" while the schoolteacher instructs the third child.: 123

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Progress of Civilization Pediment

In the context of this artwork, analyze the School boys, schoolteacher, and child of the Figures.

Following the merchant is a group of schoolchildren and their teacher. Crawford stated that the two boys step forward "to the service of their country" while the schoolteacher instructs the third child.: 123

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Progress of Civilization Pediment

Describe the characteristics of the Mechanic in Progress of Civilization Pediment's Figures.

The mechanic is the final figure on the left side of the pediment. He is meant to symbolize industrial and agricultural accomplishments as the means of progress for America. His reclining position and the sheaf of wheat to his side establish a contrast with the Indian mother and child and the grave at their side. Fryd describes the final figures and the objects as representations of "civilization's future and the Indian's necessary destruction.": 122

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Progress of Civilization Pediment

Describe the characteristics of the Mechanic in this artwork's Figures.

The mechanic is the final figure on the left side of the pediment. He is meant to symbolize industrial and agricultural accomplishments as the means of progress for America. His reclining position and the sheaf of wheat to his side establish a contrast with the Indian mother and child and the grave at their side. Fryd describes the final figures and the objects as representations of "civilization's future and the Indian's necessary destruction.": 122

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Progress of Civilization Pediment

In the context of Progress of Civilization Pediment, explain the Early reactions of the Reception.

Upon completion, the pediment received praise from critics. The journal The Crayon complimented Crawford and his treatment of the pediment's subjects. The publication also includes an excerpt from the London Art Journal which states, "One can fancy the proud delight with which the arrival of this work will be welcomed in America." Two years later, The Crayon also praised Crawford's portrayal of the Indian Chief figure.

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Progress of Civilization Pediment

In the context of this artwork, explain the Early reactions of the Reception.

Upon completion, the pediment received praise from critics. The journal The Crayon complimented Crawford and his treatment of the pediment's subjects. The publication also includes an excerpt from the London Art Journal which states, "One can fancy the proud delight with which the arrival of this work will be welcomed in America." Two years later, The Crayon also praised Crawford's portrayal of the Indian Chief figure.

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Progress of Civilization Pediment

Explore the Later responses about the Reception of this artwork, Progress of Civilization Pediment.

The art historian Vivien Green Fryd argues that the pediment sends the message that "Native Americans must be removed and extirpated, if necessary, for the continued progress of the United States.": 124  Other sculptures with similar implications, such as Horatio Greenough's The Rescue, were removed from the U.S. Capitol in the twentieth century because of their depiction of the white displacement of Indigenous Americans. Crawford's pediment has not been subject to the same calls for removal.

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Progress of Civilization Pediment

Explore the Later responses about the Reception of this artwork.

The art historian Vivien Green Fryd argues that the pediment sends the message that "Native Americans must be removed and extirpated, if necessary, for the continued progress of the United States.": 124  Other sculptures with similar implications, such as Horatio Greenough's The Rescue, were removed from the U.S. Capitol in the twentieth century because of their depiction of the white displacement of Indigenous Americans. Crawford's pediment has not been subject to the same calls for removal.

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Progress of Civilization Pediment

Focus on Progress of Civilization Pediment and discuss the Analysis and Interpretations.

Art historian Kirsten Pai Buick argues for the importance of analyzing the pediment in relation to its physical context on the Senate building. Further, she says that traditional art history has impeded analysis of the pediment because the Senate is viewed as the 'patron' and Crawford as the 'artist.' Assigning the Senate this role, Buick indicates, removes it from its political function in funding the pediment. Throughout her essay, Buick aims to "reconnect [the Senate] as a governing body to the meaning of the sculpture relative to the Senate's power to advise and consent in treaty making with Native Americans."Klaus Lubbers argues for seeing the pediment in relation to Indian Peace Medals, which were gifts presented to chiefs during events such as treaty signings to “promote peace and friendship between Indians and their white neighbors.” Symmetry was a typical characteristic of the medals, symbolizing balance between Native Americans and their white counterparts. However, the white figures in these medals eventually were portrayed as crossing over the center and pushing Native Americans towards the edge, which Lubbers says symbolized the displacement and murder of Native Americans. Lubbers suggests that Crawford used symmetry on the pediment to be an element of "stabilization and justification." However, because the figures on either side are not portrayed equally, the symmetry has the effect of minimizing the significance of governmental and settler mistreatment of Native Americans.

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Progress of Civilization Pediment

Focus on this artwork and discuss the Analysis and Interpretations.

Art historian Kirsten Pai Buick argues for the importance of analyzing the pediment in relation to its physical context on the Senate building. Further, she says that traditional art history has impeded analysis of the pediment because the Senate is viewed as the 'patron' and Crawford as the 'artist.' Assigning the Senate this role, Buick indicates, removes it from its political function in funding the pediment. Throughout her essay, Buick aims to "reconnect [the Senate] as a governing body to the meaning of the sculpture relative to the Senate's power to advise and consent in treaty making with Native Americans."Klaus Lubbers argues for seeing the pediment in relation to Indian Peace Medals, which were gifts presented to chiefs during events such as treaty signings to “promote peace and friendship between Indians and their white neighbors.” Symmetry was a typical characteristic of the medals, symbolizing balance between Native Americans and their white counterparts. However, the white figures in these medals eventually were portrayed as crossing over the center and pushing Native Americans towards the edge, which Lubbers says symbolized the displacement and murder of Native Americans. Lubbers suggests that Crawford used symmetry on the pediment to be an element of "stabilization and justification." However, because the figures on either side are not portrayed equally, the symmetry has the effect of minimizing the significance of governmental and settler mistreatment of Native Americans.

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Progress of Civilization Pediment

How does Progress of Civilization Pediment elucidate its Recent findings?

In 2016, the US Capitol Building underwent a stone restoration project. This allowed for a closer look at the pediment and extensive photo documentation, which had been previously limited by the height of the pediment. The three-dimensionality of the sculpture was a surprising discovery. Through closer observation, it was revealed that the sides and backs of the sculptures were detailed despite not being visible from the ground.The other discoveries have to do with the Merchant figure. Scholars involved in the restoration discovered that the Merchant is actually a portrait of James Guthrie who was the Secretary of the Treasury under President Pierce in 1854. Additionally, the figure's index figure on the globe points at Europe, which may be a reference to the Treaty of Kanagawa. Finally, an inscription was found below the figure's right foot. It says "$28,000,000." This inscription was initially a mystery, but scholars discovered that it refers to the Treasury surplus in 1853.

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Progress of Civilization Pediment

How does this artwork elucidate its Recent findings?

In 2016, the US Capitol Building underwent a stone restoration project. This allowed for a closer look at the pediment and extensive photo documentation, which had been previously limited by the height of the pediment. The three-dimensionality of the sculpture was a surprising discovery. Through closer observation, it was revealed that the sides and backs of the sculptures were detailed despite not being visible from the ground.The other discoveries have to do with the Merchant figure. Scholars involved in the restoration discovered that the Merchant is actually a portrait of James Guthrie who was the Secretary of the Treasury under President Pierce in 1854. Additionally, the figure's index figure on the globe points at Europe, which may be a reference to the Treaty of Kanagawa. Finally, an inscription was found below the figure's right foot. It says "$28,000,000." This inscription was initially a mystery, but scholars discovered that it refers to the Treasury surplus in 1853.

0535_T

Ryūsei Kishida

Focus on Ryūsei Kishida and analyze the abstract.

Ryūsei Kishida (岸田 劉生, Kishida Ryūsei, June 23, 1891 – December 20, 1929) was a Japanese painter in Taishō and Shōwa period Japan. He is best known for his realistic yōga-style portraiture, but also for his nihonga paintings in the 1920s.

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Ryūsei Kishida

Focus on this artwork and analyze the abstract.

Ryūsei Kishida (岸田 劉生, Kishida Ryūsei, June 23, 1891 – December 20, 1929) was a Japanese painter in Taishō and Shōwa period Japan. He is best known for his realistic yōga-style portraiture, but also for his nihonga paintings in the 1920s.

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Ryūsei Kishida

In Ryūsei Kishida, how is the Noted works discussed?

A Road Cut Through a Hill (道路と土手と塀(切通之写生)), 1915, Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art, National Important Cultural Property [1] Portrait of Reiko, age 5 (麗子肖像(麗子五歳之像)), 1918, Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art [2] Reiko laughing (麗子微笑), 1921, Tokyo National Museum, National Important Cultural Property

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Ryūsei Kishida

In this artwork, how is the Noted works discussed?

A Road Cut Through a Hill (道路と土手と塀(切通之写生)), 1915, Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art, National Important Cultural Property [1] Portrait of Reiko, age 5 (麗子肖像(麗子五歳之像)), 1918, Tokyo National Museum of Modern Art [2] Reiko laughing (麗子微笑), 1921, Tokyo National Museum, National Important Cultural Property

0537_T

Federal Triangle Flowers

Focus on Federal Triangle Flowers and explore the abstract.

Federal Triangle Flowers is an outdoor 1998 sculptural work by Stephen Robin, installed in Woodrow Wilson Plaza, between the Ariel Rios Building and the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, in Washington, D.C., United States. The installation includes two pieces, one depicting a single stem rose and the other a lily. The cast-aluminum sculptures are set on limestone pedestals; both flowers measure approximately 10 feet (3.0 m) x 14 feet (4.3 m) x 7 feet (2.1 m).

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Federal Triangle Flowers

Focus on this artwork and explore the abstract.

Federal Triangle Flowers is an outdoor 1998 sculptural work by Stephen Robin, installed in Woodrow Wilson Plaza, between the Ariel Rios Building and the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, in Washington, D.C., United States. The installation includes two pieces, one depicting a single stem rose and the other a lily. The cast-aluminum sculptures are set on limestone pedestals; both flowers measure approximately 10 feet (3.0 m) x 14 feet (4.3 m) x 7 feet (2.1 m).

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Mojo (Moeller)

Focus on Mojo (Moeller) and explain the abstract.

Mojo is a public artwork, by Christian Moeller. It is located at the Centre Street Lofts, 285 West 6th Street, at the corner of West 7th and Centre Streets, Los Angeles, California.

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Mojo (Moeller)

Focus on this artwork and explain the abstract.

Mojo is a public artwork, by Christian Moeller. It is located at the Centre Street Lofts, 285 West 6th Street, at the corner of West 7th and Centre Streets, Los Angeles, California.

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Romeo and Juliet (Hebald)

Explore the abstract of this artwork, Romeo and Juliet (Hebald).

Romeo and Juliet is an outdoor bronze sculpture depicting Romeo and Juliet by American artist Milton Hebald, located in front of Delacorte Theater in Manhattan's Central Park, in the United States. It is one of two companion works at the theater sculpted by Hebald, the other being The Tempest (1966). Unveiled in 1977 and cast in 1978, Romeo and Juliet was donated by philanthropist George T. Delacorte, Jr. The sculpture is 7 feet (2.1 m) tall; the two figures, shown embracing, are set on a granite pedestal. A cast from the same mold appears in the rose garden at the Hollenbeck Palms retirement community in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles.

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Romeo and Juliet (Hebald)

Explore the abstract of this artwork.

Romeo and Juliet is an outdoor bronze sculpture depicting Romeo and Juliet by American artist Milton Hebald, located in front of Delacorte Theater in Manhattan's Central Park, in the United States. It is one of two companion works at the theater sculpted by Hebald, the other being The Tempest (1966). Unveiled in 1977 and cast in 1978, Romeo and Juliet was donated by philanthropist George T. Delacorte, Jr. The sculpture is 7 feet (2.1 m) tall; the two figures, shown embracing, are set on a granite pedestal. A cast from the same mold appears in the rose garden at the Hollenbeck Palms retirement community in Boyle Heights, Los Angeles.

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Annunciation (Antonello da Messina)

Focus on Annunciation (Antonello da Messina) and discuss the abstract.

The Annunciation is an oil-on-panel painting by the Italian Renaissance master Antonello da Messina, executed in 1474. It is housed in the Bellomo Palace Regional Gallery, in the historical center of Syracuse, Sicily.

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Annunciation (Antonello da Messina)

Focus on this artwork and discuss the abstract.

The Annunciation is an oil-on-panel painting by the Italian Renaissance master Antonello da Messina, executed in 1474. It is housed in the Bellomo Palace Regional Gallery, in the historical center of Syracuse, Sicily.

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Annunciation (Antonello da Messina)

How does Annunciation (Antonello da Messina) elucidate its Description?

The scene is set in a small room with a decorated beamed ceiling, supported by two columns which separate the right half of the painting (with the Virgin) from the left one (with the Angel). The background wall has two windows, with a third in another room visible on the right, according to an iconography derived from the Flemish painting, using different light sources and spatial openings also in interiors. The objects and the furnitures, as usually in Antonello's works, are finely detailed. They include the Virgin's bed in the background room, the prie-dieu on which she is kneeling, the vase with a blue and white decoration in the foreground (now damaged). Mary has crossed hands while being reached by the dove of the Holy Spirit, sent by God through the opened window. She wears a typical blue mantle above a red dress. The angel, who holds the traditional lily (which is however hidden by a column) and blesses the Virgin, has a rich damask decoration. The face, crowned by long blonde hair, is adorned with a blue diadem, pearls and a ruby, typical details of the Flemish school. Below is also the figure of a devout, the priest mentioned in the commission contract.

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Annunciation (Antonello da Messina)

How does this artwork elucidate its Description?

The scene is set in a small room with a decorated beamed ceiling, supported by two columns which separate the right half of the painting (with the Virgin) from the left one (with the Angel). The background wall has two windows, with a third in another room visible on the right, according to an iconography derived from the Flemish painting, using different light sources and spatial openings also in interiors. The objects and the furnitures, as usually in Antonello's works, are finely detailed. They include the Virgin's bed in the background room, the prie-dieu on which she is kneeling, the vase with a blue and white decoration in the foreground (now damaged). Mary has crossed hands while being reached by the dove of the Holy Spirit, sent by God through the opened window. She wears a typical blue mantle above a red dress. The angel, who holds the traditional lily (which is however hidden by a column) and blesses the Virgin, has a rich damask decoration. The face, crowned by long blonde hair, is adorned with a blue diadem, pearls and a ruby, typical details of the Flemish school. Below is also the figure of a devout, the priest mentioned in the commission contract.

0542_T

María Ana de Pontejos y Sandoval, Marchioness of Pontejos

Focus on María Ana de Pontejos y Sandoval, Marchioness of Pontejos and analyze the abstract.

Doña María Ana de Pontejos y Sandoval, Marchioness of Pontejos (es: Doña María Ana de Pontejos y Sandoval, marquesa de Pontejos) (1762–18 July 1834) was a patron of the artist Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes. In 1786 at the age of twenty-four, she married the brother of the Count of Floridablanca (Conde de Floridablanca), King Charles III of Spain’s progressive prime minister. At that time, her husband served as Spain’s ambassador to Portugal. In the famous painting by Goya, painted shortly after the wedding, the marchioness is shown dressed in an attire inspired by Queen Marie Antoinette of France. Marie Antoinette was known to like to dress as a shepherdess. The elaborate coiffure, straw sun hat, and flower-trimmed gown imitate the attire at the French court in Versailles. This extravagant, foreign-influenced costume accentuates the marchioness’s tightly corseted waist, fashionable among Spanish noblewomen. Her erect, regal bearing and aloof gaze derive from Diego Velázquez' royal portraits. In her right hand, she delicately holds a pink carnation, an emblem of love that is often shown held by brides. The marchioness’s pug dog at her feet, with its ribbons and bells, echoes the stiff, doll-like pose of its mistress. Goya used the outdoors as a setting. In the background, green trees can be seen, which are not very detailed and contrast with the white dress of the marchioness.

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María Ana de Pontejos y Sandoval, Marchioness of Pontejos

Focus on this artwork and analyze the abstract.

Doña María Ana de Pontejos y Sandoval, Marchioness of Pontejos (es: Doña María Ana de Pontejos y Sandoval, marquesa de Pontejos) (1762–18 July 1834) was a patron of the artist Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes. In 1786 at the age of twenty-four, she married the brother of the Count of Floridablanca (Conde de Floridablanca), King Charles III of Spain’s progressive prime minister. At that time, her husband served as Spain’s ambassador to Portugal. In the famous painting by Goya, painted shortly after the wedding, the marchioness is shown dressed in an attire inspired by Queen Marie Antoinette of France. Marie Antoinette was known to like to dress as a shepherdess. The elaborate coiffure, straw sun hat, and flower-trimmed gown imitate the attire at the French court in Versailles. This extravagant, foreign-influenced costume accentuates the marchioness’s tightly corseted waist, fashionable among Spanish noblewomen. Her erect, regal bearing and aloof gaze derive from Diego Velázquez' royal portraits. In her right hand, she delicately holds a pink carnation, an emblem of love that is often shown held by brides. The marchioness’s pug dog at her feet, with its ribbons and bells, echoes the stiff, doll-like pose of its mistress. Goya used the outdoors as a setting. In the background, green trees can be seen, which are not very detailed and contrast with the white dress of the marchioness.

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Statue of Friedrich Wilhelm von Seydlitz

In Statue of Friedrich Wilhelm von Seydlitz, how is the abstract discussed?

The statue of Friedrich Wilhelm von Seydlitz is a bronze sculpture installed at Zietenplatz in Berlin, Germany.

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Statue of Friedrich Wilhelm von Seydlitz

In this artwork, how is the abstract discussed?

The statue of Friedrich Wilhelm von Seydlitz is a bronze sculpture installed at Zietenplatz in Berlin, Germany.

0544_T

Portrait of Madame Récamier

Focus on Portrait of Madame Récamier and explore the abstract.

Portrait of Madame Récamier is an 1800 portrait of the Parisian socialite Juliette Récamier by Jacques-Louis David showing her in the height of Neoclassical fashion, reclining on a Directoire style sofa in a simple Empire line dress with almost bare arms, and short hair "à la Titus." The work is unfinished.

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Portrait of Madame Récamier

Focus on this artwork and explore the abstract.

Portrait of Madame Récamier is an 1800 portrait of the Parisian socialite Juliette Récamier by Jacques-Louis David showing her in the height of Neoclassical fashion, reclining on a Directoire style sofa in a simple Empire line dress with almost bare arms, and short hair "à la Titus." The work is unfinished.

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Portrait of Madame Récamier

Focus on Portrait of Madame Récamier and explain the Description.

The work is notable for the distance that it establishes between viewer and subject. The setting is a sparsely decorated interior, featuring a tall bronze candelabrum fixed with an oil lamp, which has been extinguished and whose smoke drifts into the blackness of the space. A light from above provides some illumination, highlighting her perfectly spotless white dress. There is not much variation in color; only muted earthy tones of brown, green, and grey are present aside from the draperies of the model. Madame Récamier appears separate and distinct in her own space, a sparsely decorated setting with Classical furniture in the Pompeian style. The woman reclines on her French méridienne sofa, also known as a fainting couch, popular in the 19th century. Her pose suggest grace and elegance through the curvature delineated by the lines of her legs, back, and arm. The horizontal portrait format was innovative for its time, when vertical compositions were most common.The composition is unfinished, as indicated in the communications between the artist and Madame Récamier, as well as in undeveloped areas of the work. In letters that survive between Mme. Recamier and David, she says 'je serai à vos ordres pour la séance", meaning "I will be at your service for the session". However she was consistently late for her sittings and rather spoiled, leading to a quarrel between the model and artist, and the work was never retouched. Only Récamier's head is completely finished, with great detail given to each lock of hair, which has been finely styled and arranged, as well as her porcelain cheeks dabbed with rouge. Yet her dress lacks any highlights, and the accompanying furniture, floor, and background are rendered in loose brushstrokes. In some areas, the priming layer is visible.

0545_NT

Portrait of Madame Récamier

Focus on this artwork and explain the Description.

The work is notable for the distance that it establishes between viewer and subject. The setting is a sparsely decorated interior, featuring a tall bronze candelabrum fixed with an oil lamp, which has been extinguished and whose smoke drifts into the blackness of the space. A light from above provides some illumination, highlighting her perfectly spotless white dress. There is not much variation in color; only muted earthy tones of brown, green, and grey are present aside from the draperies of the model. Madame Récamier appears separate and distinct in her own space, a sparsely decorated setting with Classical furniture in the Pompeian style. The woman reclines on her French méridienne sofa, also known as a fainting couch, popular in the 19th century. Her pose suggest grace and elegance through the curvature delineated by the lines of her legs, back, and arm. The horizontal portrait format was innovative for its time, when vertical compositions were most common.The composition is unfinished, as indicated in the communications between the artist and Madame Récamier, as well as in undeveloped areas of the work. In letters that survive between Mme. Recamier and David, she says 'je serai à vos ordres pour la séance", meaning "I will be at your service for the session". However she was consistently late for her sittings and rather spoiled, leading to a quarrel between the model and artist, and the work was never retouched. Only Récamier's head is completely finished, with great detail given to each lock of hair, which has been finely styled and arranged, as well as her porcelain cheeks dabbed with rouge. Yet her dress lacks any highlights, and the accompanying furniture, floor, and background are rendered in loose brushstrokes. In some areas, the priming layer is visible.

0546_T

Portrait of Madame Récamier

Explore the Background of this artwork, Portrait of Madame Récamier.

Madame Juliette Récamier was a Neoclassical French icon, salon hostess, and influential Parisian socialite in elite French circles of the time. Wife of a French banker and daughter of a banker from Lyon, she was considered to be among the most beautiful socialites of her time. She was rarely seen without an entourage of male suitors. and was renowned for both her wit and romantic affairs. The esteemed French poet and dramatist Théophile Gautier wrote of her "indescribable attraction, like the poetry of the unknown". Prominent authors, such as Mme. de Stael, modeled some of her protagonists on Récamier. It was at the age of 23 that she began to model for various artists of the early 19th century in France, including David. Her likeness was captured in David's Neoclassical portrait, yet was abandoned, much to the subject's dismay. Originally, he intended to capture not only her appearance, but also the ideals of femininity and charm. David began the painting in May 1800 but may have left it unfinished when he learned that Récamier, having grown impatient with David, commissioned his student François Gérard to paint her portrait (Gerard's portrait was completed in 1805). David's painting was acquired by the Louvre in 1826, over twenty years after it was begun. Yet it was warmly welcomed, and according to Scottish painter and art critic, D.S. MacColl, "from 1826 his unfinished Madame Recamier has spoken for something better in the Louvre, and since then a whole series of portraits have accrued which will prove his lasting security when 'Horatii,’ 'Sabines,’ and the rest have gone the dusty way to respectable oblivion".In Creatures in an Alphabet, Djuna Barnes wrote of the subject as:The Seal, she lounges like a bride, Much too docile, there's no doubt; Madame Récamier, on side, (if such she has), and bottom out.

0546_NT

Portrait of Madame Récamier

Explore the Background of this artwork.

Madame Juliette Récamier was a Neoclassical French icon, salon hostess, and influential Parisian socialite in elite French circles of the time. Wife of a French banker and daughter of a banker from Lyon, she was considered to be among the most beautiful socialites of her time. She was rarely seen without an entourage of male suitors. and was renowned for both her wit and romantic affairs. The esteemed French poet and dramatist Théophile Gautier wrote of her "indescribable attraction, like the poetry of the unknown". Prominent authors, such as Mme. de Stael, modeled some of her protagonists on Récamier. It was at the age of 23 that she began to model for various artists of the early 19th century in France, including David. Her likeness was captured in David's Neoclassical portrait, yet was abandoned, much to the subject's dismay. Originally, he intended to capture not only her appearance, but also the ideals of femininity and charm. David began the painting in May 1800 but may have left it unfinished when he learned that Récamier, having grown impatient with David, commissioned his student François Gérard to paint her portrait (Gerard's portrait was completed in 1805). David's painting was acquired by the Louvre in 1826, over twenty years after it was begun. Yet it was warmly welcomed, and according to Scottish painter and art critic, D.S. MacColl, "from 1826 his unfinished Madame Recamier has spoken for something better in the Louvre, and since then a whole series of portraits have accrued which will prove his lasting security when 'Horatii,’ 'Sabines,’ and the rest have gone the dusty way to respectable oblivion".In Creatures in an Alphabet, Djuna Barnes wrote of the subject as:The Seal, she lounges like a bride, Much too docile, there's no doubt; Madame Récamier, on side, (if such she has), and bottom out.

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Portrait of Madame Récamier

Focus on Portrait of Madame Récamier and discuss the Influence.

Despite David's opinion, shared by most at the time, that portraiture was a lesser genre of painting, his works in the genre were widely celebrated among his contemporaries, many of whom posed as his subjects. Other portraits made in David's circle during the period exemplify the Neoclassical approach to portraiture. Portrait of a Young Woman in White depicts a fair, young Frenchwoman in Roman dress, adorned with a Roman pillar, sumptuous royal maroon draperies, and other historic elements offset by contemporary feminine qualities that would have been recognized by viewers. This piece is visually and thematically consistent with the techniques used in the 1800 painting of Madame Récamier. Because of her prominence in French society, Madame Récamier was painted by many artists. François Gérard created several portraits of her, including an 1805 portrait and an 1829 crayon noir. The 1805 portrait bears similarities to David's composition, yet is more saccharine and feminine, and emphasizes the Roman influences with a background of such architecture and garments.The work is not as coyly coquettish as David's; Récamier directly addresses her audience, gazing into the viewer's eyes with a downturned, sweet smile that radiates the gracefulness of her soft demeanor. Additionally, Antoine-Jean Gros produced a portrait of her later in life, from the year 1825, wherein she is depicted in the Romantic style in elaborate costume and coy position, consistent with previous portraits of her yet respecting her graceful aging. David, Gros, and Gerard were not the only artists to use Madame Récamier as a subject; the terracotta bust by Joseph Chinard of the Parisian socialite from 1801 similarly captures her elegance. Here, she conceals her left breast while exposing her right, evoking a coquettishly feminine demeanor. The juxtaposition established here between the figure of the classical nude and the suggestion of sexual behavior is the essence of this Neoclassical revival.

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Portrait of Madame Récamier

Focus on this artwork and discuss the Influence.

Despite David's opinion, shared by most at the time, that portraiture was a lesser genre of painting, his works in the genre were widely celebrated among his contemporaries, many of whom posed as his subjects. Other portraits made in David's circle during the period exemplify the Neoclassical approach to portraiture. Portrait of a Young Woman in White depicts a fair, young Frenchwoman in Roman dress, adorned with a Roman pillar, sumptuous royal maroon draperies, and other historic elements offset by contemporary feminine qualities that would have been recognized by viewers. This piece is visually and thematically consistent with the techniques used in the 1800 painting of Madame Récamier. Because of her prominence in French society, Madame Récamier was painted by many artists. François Gérard created several portraits of her, including an 1805 portrait and an 1829 crayon noir. The 1805 portrait bears similarities to David's composition, yet is more saccharine and feminine, and emphasizes the Roman influences with a background of such architecture and garments.The work is not as coyly coquettish as David's; Récamier directly addresses her audience, gazing into the viewer's eyes with a downturned, sweet smile that radiates the gracefulness of her soft demeanor. Additionally, Antoine-Jean Gros produced a portrait of her later in life, from the year 1825, wherein she is depicted in the Romantic style in elaborate costume and coy position, consistent with previous portraits of her yet respecting her graceful aging. David, Gros, and Gerard were not the only artists to use Madame Récamier as a subject; the terracotta bust by Joseph Chinard of the Parisian socialite from 1801 similarly captures her elegance. Here, she conceals her left breast while exposing her right, evoking a coquettishly feminine demeanor. The juxtaposition established here between the figure of the classical nude and the suggestion of sexual behavior is the essence of this Neoclassical revival.

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Madonna with Angel

How does Madonna with Angel elucidate its abstract?

Madonna with angel (Slovak: Madona s anjelom) is a painting by Ľudovít Fulla from 1929.

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Madonna with Angel

How does this artwork elucidate its abstract?

Madonna with angel (Slovak: Madona s anjelom) is a painting by Ľudovít Fulla from 1929.

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Madonna with Angel

Focus on Madonna with Angel and analyze the Description.

The picture was created in 1929. It has the dimensions 80.5 x 70.5 centimeters. It is in the collection of the Slovak National Gallery.

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Madonna with Angel

Focus on this artwork and analyze the Description.

The picture was created in 1929. It has the dimensions 80.5 x 70.5 centimeters. It is in the collection of the Slovak National Gallery.

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Madonna with Angel

In Madonna with Angel, how is the Analysis discussed?

Fulla incorporated Slovak folk art with avant-garde painting. Mother and child, Madonna was a theme in his work.

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Madonna with Angel

In this artwork, how is the Analysis discussed?

Fulla incorporated Slovak folk art with avant-garde painting. Mother and child, Madonna was a theme in his work.