Renaissance
Jasper Rees
Some time in the late 1280s, the artist Cimabue was wandering in the Tuscan countryside when he chanced upon a boy shepherd. According to Vasari, whose Lives of the Artists is the source for most such stories, the boy was “portraying a sheep from nature on a flat and polished slab, with the stone slightly pointed, without having learnt any method of doing this from others, but only from nature.” The young untrained artist was Giotto, who would be taken to Florence as Cimabue's apprentice and soon outstrip his master.Posterity has been deprived of the sheep scratched in stone. But Giotto would Read more ...
Sarah Kent
At first sight Piero della Francesca’s The Nativity appears to be a simple picture, especially when compared with more flamboyant depictions of the scene by artists such as Gentile de Fabriano, Botticelli and Rubens. Like a director staging a play on a limited budget, Piero has been sparing with his cast, props and scenery. Only 10 actors are included: Mary kneels on the ground gazing at her newborn son who lies on a corner of her cloak, five angels celebrate Christ’s birth in song and Joseph sits on a saddle beside two shepherds who seem to have just arrived on the scene. In addition, there’ Read more ...
Jasper Rees
There’s a lot of breathless frontloading in television documentaries. The headlines promising shock and awe coming up are posted in the opening edit as a way of hooking in the remote-wielding viewer. Very often as presenters stump around history’s muddy digs or leaf through dusty old tomes, the revelations vouchsafed turn out to be a bit iffy, a bit yeah but no but so what? The hyperventilation is often a precursory guarantee of bathos. You’d be better off reading the book. So Andrew Graham-Dixon had to draw on an extra reserve of superlatives to sell Secrets of the Mona Lisa.“These Read more ...
Florence Hallett
The strikingly architectural space that forms the upper portion of Botticini’s Palmieri altarpiece is well-suited to an entrance, forming as it does a sort of triumphal arch heralding great things beyond. And so it is that for years this painting hung over the entrance to the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing, oddly well-placed, but in truth of course, entirely out of place. In its new, albeit temporary position, we have a better sense of how this painting might have been seen some 500 years ago, when it adorned the altar of the funerary chapel dedicated to the humanist scholar, poet, Read more ...
fisun.guner
Unlike Venice, where colour reigned supreme among artists such as Titian and Veronese, Florence was the city where drawing – disegno – was held up as the cornerstone of the artist’s education. Think of the well-defined musculature of Michelangelo’s figures. Florentine artists of the Renaissance practiced an art of detailed precision, mastering clarity of line and structural rigour. Metalpoint, or what is often called silverpoint, since silver was the favoured metal – prized not for its monetary value but its plasticity – was the drawing tool that best displayed artistic virtuosity: an Read more ...
Marina Vaizey
The young, rather homely yet grand gentleman is lounging under a tree, behind him a formal knot garden. His costume is extravagant and rich, and his hat is charming. This exquisite 1590s miniature by Isaac Oliver, watercolour on vellum, titled indeed A Young Man Seated Under a Tree, is the first depiction in art of a knot garden; flowers and plants by the tree are meticulously detailed, and in the background is the classic Renaissance knot garden. It is but one among many almost unimaginable treasures, all from the Royal Collection, which tell us the history of the landscaped garden from Read more ...
Florence Hallett
If the idealised human body forms the heart of the classical tradition in Western art, the close study of nature is its lifeblood. It is inevitable then that artists have sought better to understand anatomy, and there are many examples of artists whose knowledge of the human body was more than skin deep. A century or so ago, Henry Tonks’ early career as a surgeon was essential to the character of his work as a painter and draughtsman, while the corpse in The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp, 1632, is sufficiently accurate to suggest that Rembrandt had first-hand knowledge of a Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Viewed through an arch designed to evoke a dimly lit chapel, Lorenzo Costa and Gianfrancesco Maineri’s The Virgin and Child with Saints, 1498-1500, is strikingly legible (pictured below right). The Virgin sits on a marble throne beneath a richly decorated arch, the throne’s fictive architecture covered with panels depicting Biblical scenes, the infant Christ standing precariously on his mother’s knee. By mimicking the poor lighting conditions for which this altarpiece was designed, painted architectural features are revealed as so much more than mere scenery, serving instead to punctuate Read more ...
Matthew Wright
The miscellany, a varied collection of works on different topics, was originally a Renaissance concept, an opportunity to bulk up a single volume with a diverse assortment of topics. The concept kept coming back to me, watching this peculiar programme, in places coherent and persuasive, in others curiously perverse, as if form and content had been devised by different people. The concept of a miniseries about the arrival of the Renaissance in Britain and its effect on our damp archipelago is most worthwhile, and presenter Dr James Fox, a young Cambridge don who already has a BAFTA nomination Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Georg Baselitz might seem an unlikely connoisseur of 16th-century prints, but since the Sixties the controversial German artist has amassed a collection of chiaroscuro woodcuts to rival that of any museum. His interest in Renaissance prints emerged while on a scholarship to Florence, where he studied the work of Mannerist painters like Parmigianino, one of the earliest artists to realise the full potential of chiaroscuro woodcut, both as a highly expressive medium and as a means of transmitting his ideas. Supplemented by loans from the Albertina, Vienna, Baselitz’s extraordinary Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Sadly, the name may not mean much. Jacopo Pontormo is a Florentine painter whose fate it was to come of age in the years after the high tide of the High Renaissance. Its vast shadow has left him languishing in second-division obscurity. Every day in Paris thousands of tourists turn their backs on his Madonna and Child with Saints to gawp at the Mona Lisa. No one visiting Florence lingers in front of his Venus and Cupid, c. 1533 (pictured below) in the same room as the statue of David. The National Gallery has stuck its small stash of Pontormos in a little side room. He has the Mafia to thank Read more ...
Florence Hallett
Strange Beauty: Masters of the German Renaissance finds the National Gallery in curiously reflective mood. Taking as its subject the gallery’s own mixed bag of German Renaissance paintings, the exhibition sets about explaining – and excusing – the inadequacies of its collection, suggesting that it simply reflects the disdain with which German painting was once regarded. Certainly, in 1824, when the gallery was founded, the collection mainly comprised Italian and Netherlandish art, and the only German artists admitted were those who could imitate the jolly rustic scenes of Adriaen van Ostade, Read more ...