Art History IIInstructor Dustin M Price

Quiz 4:

Answer the Following question:

In spite of holding power and control for centuries the Roman Catholic Church lost its absolute grip on Europe in the 16th century. This stormy, often brutal, conflict separated the Christians of Western Europe into Protestants and Catholics This “conflict” is referred to as the _____________________.

The Subsection The Spanish InquisitionMannerismThe Reformation

What did we cover last time?

- Mannerism

-Pontormo’s masterpiece The Entombment (left)

-Bronzino Allegory with Venus and Cupid

- Michelangelo’s Last Judgment

- Fig-Leaf Campaign

- The Reformation

- Martin Luther/John Calvin

- Albrecht Dürer

- We discussed Exam One and where to locate the Lectures and Study Guide

The Reformation:

-During the 15th century there were very few landscape paintings, most often the landscape would just be an environmental frame for more figural compositions

-Landscape paintings with or without people became increasingly popular in the 16th century

- Remember that as Protestantism and the Reformation spread many turned away from religious art

- Portraiture and landscape painting then thrived

-Albrecht Altdorfer was among the most popular German landscape painters of the time

- his Danube Landscape can be seen left

El Greco “The Greek” (Doménikos Theotokópoulos)

- was a painter, sculptor, and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. "El Greco" (The Greek) was a nickname, a reference to his Greek origin

- He normally signed his paintings with his full birth name in Greek letters, Δομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος

- El Greco was born in Crete

- was trained as an icon painter

- Studied under Titian in Venice in 1566

- In 1570 he moved to Rome, where he opened a workshop and executed a series of works. During his stay in Italy, El Greco enriched his style with elements of Mannerism and of the Venetian Renaissance.

examples of Byzantine Icons

El Greco “The Greek” (Doménikos Theotokópoulos)

-His intention must have been to pursue a Roman career, but after six years he had not received a single commission for an altarpiece; his reputation was based on occasional commissions for portraits and small-scale devotional paintings.

- El Greco had ill-advisedly criticized Michelangelo's abilities as a painter, an opinion that generated little confidence in his abilities and may have served to ostracize him from the Roman art establishment (Michelangelo had died in 1564, but his prestige in Rome was undiminished).

- Frustrated he moved to Toledo, Spain joining a circle of Humanist scholars.El Greco A Lady in a Fur Wrap

El Greco

- In this ancient city, which El Greco immortalized in one of the most celebrated landscapes in Western art—the View of Toledo (next slide) he found a sympathetic circle of intellectual friends and patrons and forged a highly profitable career.

- among El Greco's most ambitious masterpieces we find Espolio (Left)

- all of the various styles with which he had experimented in Italy: the naturalism that characterized his portraits; the painterly technique he had learned in Venice; the audacious compositional ideas of the late Michelangelo

-and a Mannerist emphasis on hyper-elegance and refinement. A dispute over the price El Greco demanded for the Espolio led to litigation and left a mark on the artist's subsequent career.

-

Espolio (The Disrobing of Christ)

El Greco View of Toledo

El Greco

-The Burial of Count Orgaz (Left) is perhaps El Greco’s most celebrated piece

- commissioned in 1586

- depicts the funeral of Count Orgaz (a great benefactor of the church)

- The two gold laden Saints are Saint Augustine and Stephen who were said to have appeared and lowered his body in to his tomb

- he placed his 8 year old son and a possible self portrait into the work

- Notice the Mannerist qualities: ambiguous environment, swirling composition, odd color combinations, odd proportions etc.

Lets watch a short video on El Greco’s Adoration of the Shepherds

Bosch

-His work is known for its use of fantastic imagery to illustrate moral and religious concepts and narratives

- Little is known of Bosch’s life or training Nothing is known of his personality or his thoughts on the meaning of his art.

- Dating from between 1490 and 1510, when Bosch is thought to be 50 or 60 years old, Garden of Earthly Delights (next slide) is his best-known and most ambitious work

- The triptych is painted in oil and comprises a square middle panel flanked by two rectangular wings that can close over the center as shutters. These outer wings, when folded shut, display a grisaille painting of the earth, (term for painting executed entirely in monochrome or near-monochrome) (After next slide)

Bosch

- Art historians and critics frequently interpret the painting as a didactic warning on the perils of life's temptations. However the intricacy of its symbolism, particularly that of the central panel, has led to a wide range of scholarly interpretations over the centuries

- Lets just start briefly with the left panel, (left) it depicts a scene from the paradise of the Garden of Eden commonly interpreted as the moment when God presents Eve to Adam.

- The figures of Adam and Eve are rather doll like, highly stylized

- There is an owl in the center fountain thought to symbolize wisdom and folly

- Folly had become an important Humanist concept, who believed in the power of education and that once taught the right way people would choose it

Bosch

- Eve chastely avoids Adam's gaze, although, according to art historian Walter S. Gibson, she is shown "seductively presenting her body to Adam“

- The surrounding landscape is populated by hut-shaped forms, some of which are made from stone, while others are at least partially organic. Behind Eve, rabbits symbolizing fertility play in the grass, and a dragon tree opposite is thought to represent eternal life

- The background reveals several animals that would have been exotic to contemporaneous Europeans

- many of the animals in the mid and background are drawn from contemporary travel literature, and here Bosch is appealing to "the knowledge of a humanistic and aristocratic readership"

Bosch

- The center image depicts the expansive "garden" landscape which gives the triptych its name. The panel shares a common horizon with the left wing, suggesting a temporal and spatial connection between the two scenes

- The garden is teeming with male and female nudes, together with a variety of animals, plants and fruit

- The numerous human figures revel in an innocent, self-absorbed joy as they engage in a wide range of activities: some enjoy sexual pleasures, others play unselfconsciously in the water, and yet others cavort in meadows with a variety of animals, seemingly at one with nature.

- The huge fruits represent fertility and sexual abandon

Alchemy:a medieval chemical science and speculative philosophy aiming to achieve the transmutation of the base metals into gold, the discovery of a universal cure for disease, and the discovery of a means of indefinitely prolonging life

- The right panel (left) illustrates Hell, the setting of a number of Bosch paintings. Bosch depicts a world in which humans have succumbed to the temptations of the devil and reap eternal damnation.

- In a single, densely detailed scene, the viewer is made witness to cities on fire in the background; war, torture chambers, infernal taverns, and demons in the midground; and mutated animals feeding on human flesh in the foreground. The nakedness of the human figures has lost all its eroticism, and many now attempt to cover their genitalia and breasts with their hands.

- Many elements in the panel incorporate earlier iconographical conventions depicting hell. However, Bosch is innovative in that he describes hell not as a fantastical space, but as a realistic world containing many elements from day-to-day human life.

Vocab:

grisailleAlchemy

Artist/Artwork:

El Greco Burial of Count Ograz 21-16

Bosch Garden of Earthly Delights 21-17

Pages to Read by Friday 699 - 708