Pietro and The Marriage of the Virgin

This is going to be a bit of a comparison post, between Perugino's Marriage of the Virgin, and the version painted by his pupil, Raphael.

This is Perugino's piece, and here we see many standard Perugino staples. As with previous pieces, the setting in this is very serene, which again reflects Perugino's state of being at the time. One thing that we see him doing, as he does in many other pieces, is placing all the characters together in a flat, linear fashion in the foreground. While this doesn't make for the most dynamic format, it does also contribute to the serene nature of the painting. Everything is again very harmonious and united, and again the use of aerial perspective shines through. the soft background serves to de emphasize the drama, as does the static nature of the figures.

Now, for Raphael's rendition. A significantly more dynamic and richer piece than Perugino's, but it's easy to see where he drew his influence when we look at the previous version of the piece. There's stronger 1 point perspective, characters depicted in deeper, richer colors, stronger depictions of the building in the background, and more dynamic poses for the players involved in the marriage in the foreground. But every strong element in this piece is in fact derived from Perugino's version. Which is pretty neat. We see Raphael woring to push the drama, and the dynamic figures and the engaging dramatic aspect of the scene, which is only different in the previous version because the point of the thing was to remove the drama. Raphael paints a more dramatic  picture because he wants to instill drama and movement and excitement. Perugino is serene because his whole shtick is removing that. We see it in the use of pastel colors to depict the scene, the gentle slope of the perspective tricks used to lead up to the building in the background, the harmony between the scenery and the characters in the foreground, their static nature. It's all about serenity and loss of drama.

The Pazzi Crucifixion

At the recommendation of Harvey, The next research entry will be about Pietro Perugino's piece, The Pazzi Crucifixion! Get excited, kids.

So, the Pazzi Crucifixion. This was commissioned by Giovanna Pucci, a rich Florentine, in 1493. It looks like this;

This honker takes up a whole wall, and is divided into thirds by the ceiling vaults and painted architectural elements. It's honestly kind of hard to even tell that the painted elements aren't real, as the tromp l'oeil is extremely effective and convincing. The true architectural elements and the painted ones blend together extremely well.

The fresco depicts Christ's crucifixion, with the Virgin Mary mourning him underneath the cross. This is pretty standard religious imagery for the time, of course, and the surrounding saints were all chosen because of the meaning the held for the monks who inhabited the convent where the Pazzi Crucifixion was frescoed. St. Maddalena, for example, is the saint to which the church was originally dedicated. 

Another spectacularly successful element of this piece is the scenery, which I've discussed as a strong suit of Perugino's in the past. We see this strength coming out in full in this piece particularly. The background in this piece is luminous, and the emphasis on the harmonious scenery in the background really serves the purpose of de-emphasizing the drama of the scene. We see the serene and meditative nature of Perugino come through in this piece. 

Perugino part deux; Adoration of the Magi

Perugino traveled pretty frequently from Perugia to Florence and back again, and the influences of one town always showed in the work he created in the other.

A good example of his Florentine influence shows in his depiction of The Adoration of the Magi.

The layout of the scene is fairly standard again, with the Virgin and lil baby Jesus hanging out on the right and the visitors' procession developing on the left. One of the really cool elements we see Perugino developing in this piece is the use of aerial perspective in the landscape behind the nonsense in the front. Aerial perspective, for those of you not in the know, is the effect that atmosphere has on objects viewed at different distances. Trees from thirty feet away would look less saturated, and tend to gravitate towards the blue tonalities of the sky, as opposed to a tree right next to you, which would look crisp and clear and contrast more clearly with the background. You'll see da Vinci utilize aerial perspective quite a bit in paintings like The Mona Lisa and the Last Supper. This is a technique that Perugino utilizes very successfully, in my mind. 

FUN FACT! The man on the extreme left is a portrait of Perugino himself. neat.

Anyways, the posturing of the procession of visitors on the left is very robust, echoing Fiorenzo di Lorenzo, Perugino's first painting master. Around this time, he was commissioned to paint some of the walls of the Sistine Chapel, all of which were later destroyed to make room for Michelangelo's Last Judgement. (Which INFURIATES me, but okay. It seems like such a devaluing of a master's work.)

Pietro Perugino! Some Research and stuff

Okay, so Perugino is really cool. He's a sort of precursory painter to the High Renaissance movement. He most likely began studying painting in Perugia, in local workshops around the town. He was apparently one of the first Italian practitioners of oil painting, though he also dabbled in cartooning, oddly enough. He is known to have excelled in perspective painting, which he learned from

An excellent example of some of his very early work is the piece Madonna with Child Enthroned Between Saints, painted early in his career in 1493, I believe.

This piece is interesting because we see Perugino pushing the "Holy Conversion" style that was sweeping Venice at the time. We see the Virgin Mary on an elevated platform above the saints, sort of elevating her status and cementing that holy iconography as the mother of Christ. Bellini does the same thing his his depictions of Mary and Christ on the throne, albeit in a stronger manner (I think, at least.) 

There's a pyramidal development of the composition overall, centering on Mary and creating a strong triangle with her as the focus. There is also an element of severity to Mary; she's been stripped of a bit of her elegance, and she is no longer portrayed as a delicate little maiden. She looks much more mature and somber, befitting her elevated status above John the Baptist and Saint Sebastian. The depiction of Saint Sebastian is fairly standard, showing him being martyred by arrows. 

We also see fairly standard depictions of the architecture echoing Gothic detail, with a pretty serene and detached landscape behind them. 

So yeah, early Perugino. More posts to come soon!

A Post-Raphael World (and more talk about "The Last Judgement")

And what a sad world that must have been. But it was still a world where work had to be done, and Michelangelo still had his own life to live and art to make for himself. He received a commission to pain the Last Judgement fresco, and his return to Rome and his innovative work on this piece were certainly signs that Rome was revitalizing and once again becoming a cultural hub.

I want to talk a little bit about how the Last Judgement was a departure from the previous Renaissance fare we see at the time, and how Michelangelo's beliefs about religion come into effect in this fresco in particular.

We see Michelangelo depart from tradition radically in his portrayal of figures. Instead of having a diverse group of bodies, in both age and race, we see them perfected, young and similar, in adherence to Paul's concept of the glorified body. We see St. Bartholomew (who was flayed as an act of martyrdom) portrayed with a face different than the one he holds in his left hand.

So why would St. Bartholomew not be revived and made whole and also be given his same face? 

Well, according to St. Paul, all who have died at the second coming are to be granted a new and perfect body, something idealized and better than the mortal flesh that came before. this notion of a new body being granted is particularly interesting because a lot of scholars think the discarded flesh (yeah, I know, it's gross.) is actually a self portrait of Michelangelo himself. So, why a sack of flesh for a self portrait? I'm glad you asked, reader! This was apparently his was of saying that he wasn't going to have to spend eternity in his own wrinkly old man's body. He would instead be given a beautiful, ideal body to spend eternity in. And to an artist like Michelangelo, to whom the personification of idealized and beautiful bodies was already so important, it was crucial to portray this in painting. 

Another fascinating thing we see him doing with this fresco in particular is eliminating the picture plane, and compartmentalizing the figures in front of it instead. By limiting the draperies and clothing of the figures, we are forced instead to contemplate the wall behind them instead. Why else would there be such restraint and coordination among the hues in the painting? By painting the walls without boundaries (something we see frequently in other large fresco works; see the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, which utilizes painted columns and architectural elements to block off different sections)

 the need to create a cohesive piece by other means arose. By having the hues match and the figures arranged just so, we get a sense of different areas during the Rapture, with Jesus and the Virgin right in the center. It's fascinating to think how revolutionary this was, and how it translates as a compartmentalized space despite the lack of substantial dividers within the fresco. 

REPOST: The Last Judgement as Merciful Heresy

Well, I saved one version of this and posted it, until Blogspot told me it didn't actually save and thus did not exist. So here we go for round two!

the Last Judgement. This thing sparked effing riots when it was revealed to the public in 1541 for the first time. And why shouldn't it? Take a look at the piece:

It's bloody gorgeous. A huge, elaborate fresco detailing, in case we hadn't picked up on the content of it by now, Judgement Day. Souls rising to heaven, being condemned and dragged to Hell, with Christ and the Madonna central to it all. Also, note how masterful the foreshortening of every single limb is in this. His friends and critiques all marveled at how spectacular the foreshortening was.

All this praise aside, one group disliked the masterpiece; the Catholic Orthodoxy. Where, they roared, were the classical, non heretical depictions of Christ and the Last Judgement? Why was Christ so...normal looking, why was the virgin mother so timorous, and why were all the cherubs and souls so naked? Blasphemy, they cried, and the work of Michelangelo was suddenly in danger.

His friends and admirers, those knowledgable in the ways of the arts, step up to protect him.  This was nothing but another classical interpretation if the source material! Citing Matthew 25:41 as a source, they claimed this was clearly a depiction of his righteous anger whilst Judgement Day whirled on around Him. And most scholars agree with them now. Except there's another school of thought on this fresco, one which I think really has some merit to it. 

This is the belief that his supporters and friends and benefactors, those who knew of Michelangelo's intent behind the work, skewed the public and the churches' understanding of it to protect it. A few examples of this:

1. Many of the bodies we see being drawn up to heaven for the Rapture are, well, gross. Some of them are decomposing, some are just bones, some have body language that reads as plain miserable. And all of them, the church argued are too corporeal and human looking, when the soul was clearly something more than that. Now, I would argue that it was the personification of bodies being made solid and non corruptable that made him depict them as solid, fleshy things as opposed to transparent souls. Another interesting point here, when referring to the gross souls still waiting for their turn at redemption are being over-emphasized and picked to pieces. This is something critics do with a lot of his work, I think; they tend to focus quite a bit on the morbid, and ignore things like the soul in his fresco drawn upward by two rosaries, literally carried to Heaven by the power of prayer. The hope and tenderness is still there, but nobody takes not of it. 

On Leonardo and Michelangelo

Apparently I've been publishing these readings out of order. Whoops. Well, anyways, Today we're gonna discuss The works and thoughts of Michelangelo and Leonardo, and differentiate a bit between their artistic trains of thought. Ready?
First, Leonardo. Our textbook renaissance man. He put a lot of value on scientific observation and experimentation, as documented in his journals.

Pictured: Not a ninja turtle.

 He was highly opposed to any train of scientific thought not rooted in experimentation; he despised speculation. This was also visible in his paintings; painting was science to him, because of how deeply rooted it was in mathematical perspectives and a focus on the study and observation of nature. To Leonardo, observation in art was something that had to occur in each stage of painting, and painting itself was, for Leo, an art to be exalted over sculpture. He considered sculpture limited in that it could not depict color, or arial perspective, or luminous forms. This is something we see echoed in his notes; nowhere in his journals is the exactness of his observations more apparent than when he looks at light, shade, and aerial perspective (things he claims raises painting on a pedestal above sculpture, remember. This'll apply to Michelangelo later). Leonardo is a complete innovator when it comes to aerial perspective; he was one of the first to notice that shadows cast on a white surface were blue, for example, or that hills in a background tend to get less distinct. We wouldn't see this kind of attention to aerial perspective until the 1900's, when the Impressionists started fiddling with it again.

So, we have Leonardo and his exact examinations of nature and how that applies to painting. SO what about Michelangelo?
Michelangelo had a great belief in the fundamental beauty of nature. We see him blend theology and Pagan philosophy pretty well in his depictions on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, but the motivations behind his sculptural figures are not reason and experimentation, as they are for Leonardo. Instead, Michelangelo is driven ferociously by a love of religion and Neoplatonism (which is a school of philosophy heavily influenced by the teachings of Plato).

That's not to say that Michelangelo put no stock in scientific observation or experimentation at all; he knew quite a bit about perspective, and studied human anatomy very carefully. He and Leonard differ in that Michelangelo did not bother to reproduce nature exactly. He pursued the beautiful, not the exact, which is something that is readily obvious his depictions of the sibyls among the Sistine ceiling. We see him distorting poses of figures to make them appear more beautiful, and his stylized figures often gesticulate and bend a little more dramatically than they would in real life. It is by means of imagination that Michelangelo perceives beauty and perfection, not strictly through scientific observation.