 |
Here is a sample Gallery Guide prepared by Art History Professor Lisa DeBoer and reproduced with her permission. Please note: this is only one of many ways to approach your task. You might, for example, compare and contrast several paintings or artists in your gallery. And you are not required to have a handout; much of this could be done orally. Note how Professor DeBoer encourages thoughtful, personal observation but she has also provided valuable background information on the artist and his historical setting. I've added the image at the bottom, so you can better understand Professor Deboer's comments. Return to Gallery Guide instructions.
1. Look: Take five minutes to look at this painting. Just look! Don’t talk or write.
2. Reflect: Take a few minutes to sit down and write about how your eye moved around the picture, about what you noticed about the painting, and about your response.
3. Check in with a partner and compare notes and looking experiences.
4. Summarize: Take a moment to record your sense of the key visual features of this painting, and the key experiential features.
With your looking experiences in mind, consider…..
Social Setting: At that time this image was painted, the Catholic Church was in the midst of a reformation which, beginning with the Council of Trent (1549-1563) sought to reconsider the place of art in the church. On the one hand the council condemned paintings that represented false doctrine or lascivious subject matter, fearing that they would mislead or corrupt the viewers. On the other hand, it recognized the power of the painted image. More immediate in its impact than the spoken word, a painting was an effective tool for inspiring devotion and teaching doctrine. In a similar way, devotional handbooks of the period encouraged readers to enter wholeheartedly into the stories of the scriptures. The most influential handbook was Saint Ignatius Loyola’s Spiritual Exercises, which advised readers to employ all five senses to help them imagine the experiences of Christ and the saints both emotionally and even physically. Do you think this would have been an acceptable painting for early 17th century Church fathers? Why or why not?
Artistic Setting: At the turn of the seventeenth century, heeding the new demands of the church and their own desire for re-definition, several prominent artists re-directed the practice of painting in Italy. Annibale and Lodovico Carracci emphasized a return to the classical norms of the high renaissance. Caravaggio emphasized a brutal and rigorous naturalism. And, arriving on the scene a little later, Pietro da Cortona and Bernini introduced an exuberant, dynamic compositional style.
The Artist: It is hard to underestimate the immense impact of Caravvagio on his contemporaries in Rome, as well as on successive generations of artists as far afield as Spain and northern Europe. Born in Lombardy, he traveled to Rome in 1592 at the age of twenty-one, and soon attracted the attention of some of the most influential members of Roman society. The paintings are marked by an intense realism, and combine elevated religious scenes with the immediacy of the everyday. They were also renowned for their dramatic intensity, achieved through bold contrasts of light and shade (known as chiaroscuro) and through the immediacy of his compositions. They usually feature close-up or cropped figures set against a plain, dark background that pushes them abruptly toward the spectator. Look around these 17th century galleries. How does this work compare to the other contemporary pieces here? Can you see C’s influence? Where? How?
The Painting: Painted in Rome in 1602, this painting was thought to have disappeared in the late 1700’s. In 1990 it was rediscovered hanging in the dining room of the Dublin Jesuit house, where it had been since the early 1930s. It had long been considered a copy of the lost original by Gerard van Honthorst, one of Caravaggio’s Dutch followers. This erroneous attribution had been made while the painting was still in the possession of the Mattei family in Rome, whose ancestors had originally commissioned it. The family sold it, as a work by Honthorst, in 1802 to William Hamilton Nisbet. Later, the painting was sold to an Irish pediatrician who eventually donated it to the Jesuit Brothers in Dublin. The Taking of Christ remained in their possession for about sixty years, until the decision was made in the early 1990s to have it cleaned and restored. As layers of dirt and discolored varnish were removed, the supreme technical quality of the painting was revealed, and it was identified as Caravaggio’s lost painting. It is now on long-term loan to the National Gallery of Ireland. A small minority of individuals have disputed the attribution of this painting. Would it make a difference to you to find out that this was not by Caravaggio? If so, why? How? If not, why not?
Sources: www.nga.gov/; www.nationalgallery.ie/; Michelin Green Guide for Ireland
|
|