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Showing posts with label raphael. Show all posts
Showing posts with label raphael. Show all posts

Tuesday, 3 December 2024

Artlyst: Michelangelo Leonardo Raphael At The Royal Academy Review

My latest exhibition review for Artlyst is on Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael: Florence, c.1504, at the Royal Academy of Arts:

'Ultimately, from the ‘Taddei Tondo’ through the Sala del Gran Consiglio commissions, this is an exhibition of unfinished yet hugely influential works. The exhibition includes an edition of Cicero’s letters annotated by Agostino Vespucci, a Florentine man of letters and scribe. Vespucci is struck by Cicero’s description of how the painter Apelles fully finished the head of Venus but left the rest of her body roughed out. In his margin note, he states that Leonardo did the same in all his paintings.

While works in this period can be left unfinished for a whole host of pragmatic reasons, from political upheavals to lack of time through competing commissions and to flaws in materials or the untimely death of the artist, there does also seem to be an appreciation of the aesthetic beauty of the un- or partly finished work. Given the amount of time required for the detailed realism of these artists, as shown by the sketches, preparatory drawings, and cartoons here, it is no surprise that, combined with the other factors noted, they left much unfinished. It is a true sign of their genius that their unfinished works could also be among their most influential.'

For more of my writing on the art of the Renaissance see here, here, here, here, here, and here.

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Posted by Jonathan Evens at 11:50 0 comments
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Monday, 11 April 2022

Artlyst: Raphael The Human And Divine – National Gallery

My latest review for Artlyst is of Raphael at the National Gallery:

'... by focusing on the range of his work and commitments, this exhibition provides us with a much fuller and deeper picture of the artist and person Raphael was; one who is a Renaissance man alongside Leonardo and Michelangelo and one whose qualities were such that, on his death, he was compared to Christ. Shaped as we all are – however isolated and individual, we might become – by our relationships with others, it was his experience of friendship and humanity that, combined with his natural talent, enabled him to create a vision of all that humanity could become.

While being predominantly a vision of harmony, serenity, and beauty, meaning that the critique of Ruskin cannot simply be dismissed, sufficient of the energy and emotion which is found more readily in the drawings seeps into his paintings to ensure they combine execution and thought; beauty and veracity. In this way, he captures in his art, the human and the divine, love, friendship, learning, and power. This year in Holy Week and Eastertide, given the degree of turmoil, conflict and anxiety to be found within our world, we could do far worse than to immerse ourselves in Raphael’s vision of all we can potentially become, and be inspired.'

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

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Bob Chilcott - Christ, My Beloved.
Posted by Jonathan Evens at 21:05 0 comments
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Wednesday, 12 December 2012

Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant Garde



The Pre-Raphaelites combined realism with symbolism, the developments of early photography with the myth of an idealised medievalism, the hyper-real with fantasy, morality with sensuality, truth to nature with spirituality. These are odd combinations which in the early phase of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood were held together in creative tension but which separated, more often than not, in the later work.

The Pre-Raphaelite process of intense looking, as the Tate’s room guide notes, "resulted in a new, distinctively modern, style which absorbed photography’s precision of focus, flattening of forms, composition and radical cropping of the visual field." Modern forms of narratives taken from the Bible, classical mythology, literature or world history were developed in paintings and sculptures by using a realist style which emphasised accuracy of dress and accoutrements.

"As a result, the Pre-Raphaelites painted scenes from the Bible with unprecedented realism. Millais made studies for Christ in the House of his Parents in a real carpenter’s shop, and painted the Holy Family as everyday figures rather than ideal types. This shocked viewers such as Charles Dickens, who found Millais’s Virgin Mary to be ‘horrible in her ugliness’."

"Hunt was so committed to truthful representation that he made the arduous voyage to the Holy Land, where he could paint the actual settings of biblical events." While there he began painting The Scapegoat using a real goat beside the Dead Sea. The painting, while a marvellous tour-de-force, comes up against the limits of a strict naturalism to convey the aspects of the symbolic. Without knowledge of Old Testament laws regarding the scapegoat and of the way in which these inform understandings of Christ’s crucifixion, the redemptive intent of the image is entirely lost in place of, in the words of Peter Fuller, "a terrible image […] of the world as a god-forsaken wasteland, a heap of broken images where the sun beats."

"Around 1860, the Pre-Raphaelites began to turn away from this realist engagement with nature, society and religion to explore the purely aesthetic possibilities of picture-making. Beauty came to be valued more highly than truth, as Pre-Raphaelitism slowly metamorphosed into the Aesthetic movement. In 1855 Millais started creating compositions ‘full of beauty and without subject’, such as Autumn Leaves. But Rossetti was the dominant force in the era of ‘art for art’s sake’ after 1860. After his return to oil painting in 1859 his work became more sensuous in both style and subject. Rejecting sharp outlines and pure colours, he adopted the rich impasto and saturated hues of Venetian art from after the time of Raphael."

"This ‘poetic’ strand is exemplified in the work of Rossetti and Edward Burne-Jones where attention is focused on the human figure frozen in a drama." Burne-Jones’s work, in particular, rejects the modern external world in favour of idealised visions of the past. It is ironic that much of this later idealised classical or medieval inspired work was created as part of a socialist project (Morris & Co) which, through its anti-industrialisation stance, meant its work was essentially only affordable by the middle classes.

Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant Garde is a fascinating show with a wonderful selection of classic images. As with the Impressionists, work that was considered shocking, even ugly, in its day is now viewed as the very epitome of beauty. At the same time that this exhibition highlights the modern and avant-garde aspects of the PRB it also, inevitably, reveals the tensions which made their revolution unsustainable and which, as their contradictions unravelled, resulted in work that was sometimes unintelligible, sometimes sentimental, and sometimes hopelessly enmeshed in an idealised past.


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The Waterboys - The Big Music.

Posted by Jonathan Evens at 22:46 0 comments
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Saturday, 21 July 2012

Caravaggio: Sacred and Profane

Yesterday I heard Andrew Graham-Dixon speak at the Tokarska Gallery about the portrait of Caravaggio that he paints in his biography of the artist Caravaggio - A Life Sacred and Profane. Graham-Dixon gave a fascinating and entertaining two hour presentation of Caravaggio's life and work up until his escape from prison in Malta.

Among the most interesting aspects of the talk was Graham-Dixon's description of the cultural background in Milan from which Caravaggio came; Carlo Borromeo, Archbishop of Milan, had argued that the High Renaissance art of Raphael and Michelangelo had led the Church astray and that Catholic art needed to engage with the poor masses by means of a popular realism which could grab the attention, through its drama, of those who saw it thereby aiding their meditation and prayer.

Graham-Dixon argued that Caravaggio's paintings invite a profane reading but, for those able to see, the symbolism of the paintings allows a sacred reading meaning that, in a sense, the painting judges you through your response to it. As a example, he discussed Bacchus noting that Bacchus, who is a pre-figuration of Christ, is holding out to us the wine which is his salvific blood and that the rotting fruit symbolises the sinfulness of our lives from which Christ will save us.

Caravaggio became caught in a battle between the realist and baroque styles; a debate over the extent to which the Counter-Reformation should engage with the poor masses as Borromeo had argued. The baroque was essentially based on fear of the masses by emphasising submission to the majesty and authority of the Church. By contrast Caravaggio indicated inclusion of the masses by depicting the poverty of Christ's disciples.

The two styles were set against each other in the Cerasi Chapel at Santa Maria del Popolo, Rome where Caravaggio's Crucifixion of St. Peter and Conversion of St. Paul frames the altarpiece, the Assumption of the Virgin by Annibale Carracci. The rear of the horse in the Conversion of St. Paul is positioned to point directly at the Carracci. Yet Caravaggio is, in his time, ultimately the loser in this battle - despite regularly defending his honour with physical acts of violence - as two major commissions he had been awarded (The Madonna of the Palafrenieri and The Death of the Virgin) were both rejected as a result of profane readings of his realism.

The tragedy of Caravaggio's life then accelerated as a direct result of these rejections with the profane aspects of his life dominating although redemption was regularly offered through the protection of the Colonna family, Franciscan spirituality which valued his realism, and the offer of a pardon from the Pope. Although there was insufficient time on the night to complete the story, in the summary of the book on his website, Graham-Dixon concludes: "Caravaggio had lived much of his life surrounded by poor and ordinary people. He painted for them and from their perspective. In the end he died and was buried among them, in an unmarked grave. He was 38 years old."   

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Tom Jones - Bad As Me.
Posted by Jonathan Evens at 20:51 0 comments
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