Category Archives: Art

Art

Canaletto’s The Mouth Of The Grand Canal Looking West Towards The Carità (1730)

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If you vis­it London’s Nation­al Gallery’s Room 38 you will see a fine col­lec­tion of paint­ings by Canalet­to (Gio­van­ni Anto­nio Canal, 1697–1768), the Ital­ian artist famed for his vedute of Venice (a vedu­ta is a high­ly detailed, usu­al­ly large-scale paint­ing or print of a cityscape or some oth­er vista). He was born in Venice, the son of anoth­er painter, Bernar­do Canal, hence his mononym Canalet­to, or “lit­tle Canal” (and noth­ing to do with the Venet­ian canals that he lat­er depict­ed). Canalet­to was appren­ticed to his father whose main career was in the­atre set design, so he got to work on paint­ing the­atri­cal scenes for operas by the likes of Vival­di, Scar­lat­ti and oth­ers. How­ev­er, it was when, in around 1723, he began to paint the dai­ly life of Venice and its peo­ple, that he found his true call­ing.

Canalet­to sold many of his grand scenes of the canals of Venice and the Doge’s Palace to Eng­lish­men on their Grand Tour, and his career real­ly took off when he began his asso­ci­a­tion with Joseph Smith, an Eng­lish busi­ness­man and col­lec­tor liv­ing in Venice who was to become British Con­sul in Venice in 1744. Smith became the artist’s prin­ci­pal agent and patron, and was instru­men­tal in intro­duc­ing Grand Tourists to his work and arrang­ing com­mis­sions. He also acquired near­ly fifty paint­ings and one hun­dred fifty draw­ings from Canalet­to, the largest and finest sin­gle group of the artist’s works, which he sold to King George III in 1762.

In the 1740s, the War of the Aus­tri­an Suc­ces­sion led to a reduc­tion in the num­ber of British vis­i­tors to Venice (war can do that) and thus dis­rupt­ed Canaletto’s mar­ket, and so in 1746 he moved to Lon­don, liv­ing in Lon­don’s Soho dis­trict and suc­cess­ful­ly pro­duc­ing views of Lon­don and of his patrons’ hous­es and cas­tles. He remained in Eng­land until 1755 and returned to Venice where he con­tin­ued to paint until his death in 1768. His con­nec­tion with Britain had been sealed, how­ev­er, and now you can find his paint­ings not only in the Nation­al Gallery but in Buck­ing­ham Palace, the Wal­lace Col­lec­tion and indeed there’s a fine set of 24 in the din­ing room at Woburn Abbey.

Here is just one from the Roy­al Col­lec­tion, The Mouth of the Grand Canal look­ing West towards the Car­ità (1729–30), and then a view of the exquis­ite Woburn Abbey din­ing room.

Canalet­to, The Mouth of the Grand Canal look­ing West towards the Cari­ta, c.1729–30,
Woburn Abbey
Canalet­to
Art

Jacques-Louis David’s Oath Of The Horatii (1784)

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A gen­er­a­tion or two before the Impres­sion­ists, French artists didn’t have the lux­u­ry of lolling about fields paint­ing haystacks and gen­er­al­ly hav­ing a wheeze of a time. At a time of seis­mic social and polit­i­cal change, an artist had to box clever to stay on the right side of dan­ger­ous polit­i­cal forces. Jacques-Louis David (1748–1825) was one such painter who man­aged to suc­cess­ful­ly nav­i­gate his way — and his art — from the final years of the Ancien Régime through the French Rev­o­lu­tion and the rise and fall of Napoleon.

David was con­sid­ered to be the pre­em­i­nent painter of the Neo­clas­si­cal era, that return to the high-mind­ed sever­i­ty of the arts of ancient Greece and Rome in con­trast to the friv­o­li­ty of the late Baroque. David’s his­to­ry paint­ing matched the moral cli­mate of the final years of Louis XVI and he was favoured by the Court. How­ev­er, David lat­er became an active sup­port­er of the French Rev­o­lu­tion and friend of Robe­spierre, and his Death of Marat (1793) became one of the most famous images of the era.

Impris­oned briefly after Robe­spier­re’s fall from pow­er, he aligned him­self with yet anoth­er polit­i­cal regime upon his release: that of Napoleon, the First Con­sul of France. As well as his suit­ably hero­ic ren­der­ing of Napoleon in his Napoleon at the Saint-Bernard Pass (1801), he also cre­at­ed the mon­u­men­tal The Coro­na­tion of Napoleon (1806). Final­ly, after Napoleon’s fall from pow­er and the Bour­bon revival, David exiled him­self to Brus­sels, where he remained until his death.

How­ev­er, let’s return to David’s ori­gins with a paint­ing con­sid­ered a Neo­clas­si­cal mas­ter­piece, Oath of the Hor­atii (1784). It depicts a scene from a Roman leg­end about a sev­enth-cen­tu­ry BC dis­pute between two war­ring cities, Rome and Alba Lon­ga. Instead of the two cities send­ing their armies to war, they agree to choose three men from each city; the vic­tor in that fight will be the vic­to­ri­ous city. From Rome, three broth­ers from a Roman fam­i­ly, the Hor­atii, agree to fight three broth­ers from a fam­i­ly of Alba Lon­ga, the Curi­atii.

The three Hor­atii broth­ers, will­ing to sac­ri­fice their lives for the good of Rome, are shown salut­ing their father who holds their swords out for them. There could be no more evoca­tive a scene of patri­ot­ic duty and, although paint­ed four years before the Rev­o­lu­tion, it nonethe­less became a sym­bol of loy­al­ty to State and a defin­ing image of the time.

Of the three Hor­atii broth­ers, only one will sur­vive the con­fronta­tion and he will kill each Curi­atii broth­er in turn, seiz­ing vic­to­ry for Rome. Aside from the three broth­ers depict­ed, David also rep­re­sents, in the bot­tom right cor­ner, a woman cry­ing. She is Camil­la, a sis­ter of the Hor­atii, who hap­pens to be also betrothed to one of the Curi­atii fight­ers, and thus she weeps in the real­i­sa­tion that, what­ev­er hap­pens, she will lose some­one she loves.

Art

Edwin Landseer’s The Monarch Of The Glen (1851)

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Sir Edwin Land­seer (1802–1873) was a Lon­don-born painter and sculp­tor whose artis­tic tal­ents were recog­nised ear­ly on: at age thir­teen he exhib­it­ed works at the Roy­al Acad­e­my as an “Hon­orary Exhibitor” and was elect­ed as an Asso­ciate there at the min­i­mum age of twen­ty four. He was able to paint extreme­ly quick­ly and per­haps these days would have attract­ed a cool nick­name like snook­er play­ers Hur­ri­cane Hig­gins and Whirl­wind White (Light­ning Land­seer, per­haps); he was also reput­ed to be able to draw simul­ta­ne­ous­ly with both hands. One biog­ra­ph­er wrote:

…upon the occa­sion of a large par­ty assem­bled one evening at the house of a gen­tle­man in Lon­don, the con­ver­sa­tion hav­ing turned upon the sub­ject of feats of skill with the hand, one of the ladies present remarked that it would be impos­si­ble for any­one, how­ev­er skil­ful, to draw two things at once.
“Oh, I can do that,” said Land­seer qui­et­ly; “give me two pen­cils and I will show you.” The pen­cils were brought, and Land­seer, tak­ing one in each hand, drew simul­ta­ne­ous­ly and unhesi­tat­ing­ly the pro­file of a stag’s antlered head with one hand, and with the oth­er the per­fect out­line of the head of a horse.

Cer­tain­ly, Landseer’s renown stemmed from his paint­ings of ani­mals, par­tic­u­lar­ly hors­es, dogs and stags, although his most famous work is undoubt­ed­ly the set of four bronze lion sculp­tures at the base of Nelson’s Col­umn in Trafal­gar Square. Today’s sub­ject is prob­a­bly his next most famous work, though, being, as it is, the ulti­mate bis­cuit tin image of Scot­land: The Monarch of the Glen.

The Monarch of the Glen is an oil-on-can­vas paint­ing depict­ing a red deer stag, set against the steamy rugged hills of the Scot­tish High­lands. It was com­plet­ed in 1851 as part of a series of three pan­els intend­ed to hang in the Refresh­ment Rooms of the House of Lords, although that com­mis­sion nev­er came off due to some dis­pute or oth­er and it was sold into pri­vate own­er­ship. It also, how­ev­er, sold wide­ly in repro­duc­tions and became one of the most pop­u­lar paint­ings of the 19th cen­tu­ry. It prob­a­bly helped that Queen Vic­to­ria was a big fan.

The paint­ing was pur­chased in 1916 by the Pears soap com­pa­ny and this kicked off the Monarch’s career in adver­tis­ing. It was sold on to John Dewar & Sons dis­tillery and became their trade­mark before sim­i­lar­ly being used by Glen­fid­dich on their whisky bot­tles. A deriv­a­tive of the Monarch graced the shelves of Har­rods and Fort­num & Mason via the cans of Bax­ter’s Roy­al Game Soup, and of course, as implied, it adorned many a tin of short­bread bis­cuits. In 2017, the paint­ing was final­ly sold by its last own­er Dia­geo to the Nation­al Muse­um of Scot­land in Edin­burgh, where it can now be viewed by the pub­lic in all its majesty.

The stag has twelve points on his antlers, which in deer ter­mi­nol­o­gy makes him a “roy­al stag” not a “monarch stag”, for which six­teen points are need­ed, but let’s not quib­ble; he’s a mag­nif­i­cent beast.

The Monarch of the Glen
Art

Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above The Sea Of Fog (1818)

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Back in 2016 when I intro­duced this blog (here) and the sense of the “sub­lime” as some­thing of excel­lence “occa­sion­al­ly glimpsed” here­in, I men­tioned that the con­cept of the sub­lime was one with a long his­to­ry of being debat­ed by artists and writ­ers over the cen­turies. I can pad that idea out a bit now, since it has a direct con­nec­tion to the sub­ject of this week’s blog, and so for fun and edi­fi­ca­tion, here’s a lit­tle pot­ted his­to­ry or mini-essay on the con­cept of the sub­lime.

The first known study of the con­cept was the 1st cen­tu­ry AD trea­tise On The Sub­lime, ascribed to Long­i­nus and which talks about the use of great or lofty lan­guage, intend­ed to inspire awe or ven­er­a­tion, in the field of rhetoric. This trea­tise was redis­cov­ered in the 16th cen­tu­ry and trans­lat­ed into Eng­lish and French in the fol­low­ing decades, and it had a sig­nif­i­cant influ­ence on lit­er­ary crit­i­cism and the phi­los­o­phy of aes­thet­ics in the 17th and 18th cen­turies.

The con­cept was devel­oped in Britain in the ear­ly 18th cen­tu­ry and came to describe an aes­thet­ic qual­i­ty in nature dis­tinct from beau­ty, brought into promi­nence by the writ­ings of John Den­nis (1693), Joseph Addi­son (1705) and Antho­ny Ash­ley-Coop­er (1709). All three of these authors had under­tak­en a cross­ing of the Alps, as part of that famil­iar Enlight­en­ment pas­time the “Grand Tour”, and all three inde­pen­dent­ly expressed their con­trast­ing feel­ings of fear and plea­sure at the awe­some­ness of nature and derived, as Addi­son described it, “an agree­able kind of hor­ror”.

Edmund Burke more for­mal­ly devel­oped this con­cep­tion of sub­lim­i­ty in A Philo­soph­i­cal Enquiry into the Ori­gin of Our Ideas of the Sub­lime and Beau­ti­ful in 1756, and Ger­man philoso­phers Kant, Schopen­hauer, Hegel and Rudolf Otto each added their aca­d­e­m­ic heft to the sub­ject. Soon, the con­cept would be realised in the art move­ment known as Roman­ti­cism and we would see the por­tray­al of land­scape in an entire­ly new man­ner: not just a visu­al­i­sa­tion of the sim­ple enjoy­ment of a beau­ti­ful view, as in the clas­sic con­cep­tion, but rather an exam­i­na­tion of a reunion with the spir­i­tu­al self through the con­tem­pla­tion of nature and its majes­tic pow­er.

Ger­man artist Cas­par David Friedrich (1774–1840) was instru­men­tal in cre­at­ing this notion of a land­scape full of roman­tic feel­ing: die roman­tis­che Stim­mungs­land­schaft. Friedrich’s paint­ings com­mon­ly employed the Rück­en­fig­ur, a per­son seen from behind, con­tem­plat­ing the land­scape and invit­ing the view­er to sim­i­lar­ly place him­self in that medi­um and expe­ri­ence the sub­lime poten­tial of nature. The Friedrich paint­ing that is above all used to char­ac­terise this con­cept is his 1818 oil on can­vas, Wan­der­er above the Sea of Fog.

It depicts a man stand­ing upon a rocky precipice and gaz­ing out across a land­scape cov­ered in a thick sea of fog through which oth­er ridges, trees, and moun­tains pierce. It is con­sid­ered one of the mas­ter­pieces of the Roman­ti­cism move­ment and to suc­cess­ful­ly evoke the sub­lime or Addis­on’s “agree­able hor­ror”.

Cas­par David Friedrich, Wan­der­er above the Sea of Fog
Art

Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Ceiling (1512)

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Well, I sup­pose it had to hap­pen soon­er or lat­er, what with the Cre­ation of Adam being astride the top of these blogs week in, week out: it’s time to look at that apex preda­tor of the Renais­sance art world, and num­ber one cause of vis­i­tors’ neck strain, the Sis­tine Chapel. No vis­it to Rome is com­plete with­out it, and per­haps no blog on the sub­lime can afford to omit it.

First, a whis­tle-stop his­to­ry tour: Sis­tine Chapel 101, if you like. Meet Pope Six­tus IV, pope between 1471 and 1484:

Pope Six­tus IV

It was Six­tus (adjec­tive “Sis­tine” in case you need that mansplained) who com­mis­sioned the build­ing of the chapel, which was com­plet­ed in 1481 and has served ever since as the Pope’s offi­cial res­i­dence. Six­tus is also known for found­ing the Span­ish Inqui­si­tion, but that’s anoth­er sto­ry, let’s stick with the chapel. He arranged for a team of painters (not Michelan­ge­lo yet — he comes lat­er — but includ­ing two oth­er famous names, Bot­ti­cel­li and Ghirlan­diao) to cre­ate a series of fres­coes on the walls, depict­ing the lives of Moses and Jesus.

Fast for­ward to 1508 and Pope Julius II is in charge (Julius was a rel­a­tive of Six­tus: nepo­tism was anoth­er of Sixtus’s strong suits):

Pope Julius II

Julius com­mis­sioned Michelan­ge­lo to com­plete the dec­o­ra­tion of the chapel by paint­ing the ceil­ing, which he com­plet­ed four years lat­er in 1512. This was a project that changed the course of West­ern art and is right­ly regard­ed as one of the crown­ing artis­tic accom­plish­ments of human civil­i­sa­tion. Replete with bib­li­cal scenes,  sto­ries and char­ac­ters, the ceil­ing is a riotous col­lec­tion of limbs and draperies, at first glance, and indeed a pho­to of the ceil­ing does­n’t real­ly do it jus­tice — but giv­en time to appre­ci­ate (whilst not bump­ing into fel­low tourists), it is an artis­tic tour de force that war­rants its fame. Click on these images to expand; the first to spot the Cre­ation of Adam wins a prize…

Art

James McNeill Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1 (1871)

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With Mother’s Day immi­nent it seemed appo­site to take a look at an image that has been endur­ing­ly asso­ci­at­ed with moth­er­hood, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the US, since the Vic­to­ri­an era: the famous Whistler’s Moth­er. James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) was an Amer­i­can painter, based pri­mar­i­ly in Eng­land, and a lead­ing pro­po­nent of “art for art’s sake”, that cre­do which con­sid­ered art to have intrin­sic val­ue quite sep­a­rate from any moral or didac­tic func­tion. He was all about tonal har­mo­ny and saw par­al­lels between paint­ing and music, even enti­tling many of his paint­ings as “arrange­ments”, “har­monies”, and “noc­turnes” — his Whistler’s Moth­er is only col­lo­qui­al­ly so-called and was real­ly called Arrange­ment in Grey and Black.

The sub­ject of the paint­ing is, unsur­pris­ing­ly, Whistler’s moth­er, Anna McNeill Whistler, who was liv­ing with the artist in Lon­don at the time. The sto­ry goes that Anna Whistler was only act­ing as a sub­sti­tute because the orig­i­nal mod­el couldn’t make the sit­ting, and although Whistler had envi­sioned his mod­el stand­ing up, his moth­er was just too uncom­fort­able to pose upright for long peri­ods of time so insist­ed on sit­ting down.

The work was shown at the 104th Exhi­bi­tion of the Roy­al Acad­e­my of Art in Lon­don in 1872, after nar­row­ly avoid­ing rejec­tion by the Acad­e­my (a bone of con­tention for Whistler for many years after). It seems that all these weird ideas Whistler held about “arrange­ments” and so on just didn’t sit well with the stuffed shirts of the Acad­e­my, and they insist­ed on adding an explana­to­ry adjunct, “Por­trait of the Painter’s moth­er”, to Whistler’s title. Whistler even­tu­al­ly sold the paint­ing, which was acquired in 1891 by Paris’s Musée du Lux­em­bourg and  is now housed in the Musée d’Or­say.

In 1934, the US Post Office Depart­ment issued a stamp engraved with the por­trait detail from Whistler’s Mother, bear­ing the slo­gan “In mem­o­ry and in hon­or of the moth­ers of Amer­i­ca”. In that spir­it, this blog is writ­ten in mem­o­ry and hon­our of my own love­ly mum, and to moth­ers every­where!

Whistler’s Moth­er
Art

George Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières (1884)

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One of the great trea­sures in the trove that is London’s Nation­al Gallery is this mas­ter­piece of Neo-Impres­sion­ism, George Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières. It’s actu­al­ly one of a pair of Seu­rat mas­ter­pieces, along­side A Sun­day After­noon on the Island of La Grande Jat­te (held at the Art Insti­tute of Chica­go), with each sis­ter paint­ing depict­ing one side of the Seine riv­er and por­tray­ing the dif­fer­ent lev­els of French soci­ety that fre­quent­ed them in their leisure time: the wealthy soci­ety relax­ing at La Grande Jat­te and the work­ing-class res­i­dents hang­ing out on the left bank at Asnières.

The two paint­ings are lead­ing exam­ples of the tech­nique devel­oped by Seu­rat and known as pointil­lism, involv­ing the use of thou­sands of small, dis­tinct dots of colour and rely­ing on the abil­i­ty of the eye and the mind of the view­er to blend the indi­vid­ual dots into a fuller range of tones. The term was actu­al­ly first used in a pejo­ra­tive sense to mock Seu­rat (a reac­tion com­mon­ly expe­ri­enced by art pio­neers of course) but it stuck, and the tech­nique is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the hunt by artists in the 1880s for inter­est­ing new meth­ods.

Here, we’re focus­ing on the work­ing-class res­i­dents of the city. They line this pic­turesque spot by the riv­er as they enjoy the sun­shine. There are around five fig­ures in the fore­ground and down the bank we see oth­er peo­ple and boats in the back­ground, plus a cityscape behind that. All of the build­ings are low lev­el and don’t take too much atten­tion from the fig­ures near­est us. There are no trees (unlike at La Grande Jat­te where the bour­geoisie enjoy the shade) and the char­ac­ters are flood­ed with sun­light.

Seu­rat was just 24 when Bathes at Asnières marked his arrival into the art world. The paint­ings are mon­u­men­tal­ly sized (15 by 6.5 feet) and Seu­rat knew that size would need to be met with tech­ni­cal bril­liance and so he pre­pared very care­ful­ly with thir­teen oil sketch­es and ten draw­ings before embark­ing on the real thing. In the end, he achieved a stun­ning lumi­nos­i­ty and plen­ty of inter­est to hold the view­er’s atten­tion. Sad­ly, Seu­rat died at just 31 and so we will nev­er know what sort of direc­tion his style might have tak­en in the next decades.

Bathers at Asnières
Art

William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s Bacchante (1894)

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The art world is a fun­ny old fish when it comes to “what’s hot and what’s not” and it was ever thus; unless you’re a bolt­ed-on, world-renowned big name like your Rem­brandts and your Van Goghs, you might find your­self in or out of fash­ion. Take William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905). Many peo­ple out­side (and prob­a­bly inside) of France have nev­er heard of him, and yet he was one of France’s pre­em­i­nent aca­d­e­m­ic painters in the lat­ter half of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry.

Bouguereau exe­cut­ed some 822 known paint­ings dur­ing his career, often por­tray­ing quin­tes­sen­tial­ly clas­si­cal and mytho­log­i­cal sub­jects: Cupid and Psy­che, the Birth of Venus, nymphs and satyrs and so on, as well as a large body of slick reli­gious works, pas­torals, and coy­ly erot­ic nudes. His por­traits were ren­dered with near-pho­to­graph­ic verisimil­i­tude and with a con­sum­mate lev­el of skill and craft. Giv­en that a high per­cent­age of his works are life-size, it is one of the largest bod­ies of work ever pro­duced by any artist. So what went wrong?

Well, Bouguereau rep­re­sent­ed the “old guard”, an uphold­er of tra­di­tion­al val­ues and indeed one who con­trived to exclude avant-garde work from the Salon ( the offi­cial art exhi­bi­tion of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris). Cézanne once expressed regret at being reject­ed by the ‘Salon de Mon­sieur Bouguereau’. In oth­er words, he was a dinosaur and des­tined to be over­shad­owed by the Impres­sion­ists and the mod­ernists of the dawn­ing new cen­tu­ry; his rep­u­ta­tion sank after his death and for many years his work was regard­ed as irre­deemably passé. He has, how­ev­er, recent­ly achieved some­thing of a reha­bil­i­ta­tion, and these days his works fetch huge prices at the auc­tion room. Quite right too, he was bril­liant.

A rep­re­sen­ta­tive work is this 1894 piece, Bac­cha­nte. A bac­cha­nte was a priest­ess or fol­low­er of Bac­chus, the god of wine and intox­i­fi­ca­tion, and, whilst in the Greek myths they are often depict­ed as wild women, run­ning through the for­est, tear­ing ani­mals to pieces, and engag­ing in oth­er acts of fren­zied debauch­ery, Bouguereau here choos­es to por­tray his Bac­cha­nte ‘before the par­ty’!

 

Art

Raphael’s The School Of Athens (1511)

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Back in 2006 I went to Rome, vis­it­ed the tombs of Keats and Shel­ley, sat on the Span­ish Steps, had my cam­era stolen on the sub­way (hol­i­days are often mixed affairs, after all), dis­cov­ered a pen­chant for liquorice liqueur, mar­velled at the Col­i­se­um, got a sore neck look­ing up at St Mark’s Cathe­dral and the glo­ri­ous Sis­tine Chapel…and spent some time in con­tem­pla­tion of the famous fres­co that is the sub­ject of today’s blog. The School of Athens is one of four wall fres­coes in the Stan­za del­la Seg­natu­ra, the apart­ment in the Vat­i­can palace whose walls and ceil­ing were paint­ed by Raphael between 1508 and 1511.

Raphael (Raf­fael­lo Sanzio da Urbino) was com­mis­sioned by Pope Julius II, the same man who also com­mis­sioned Michelan­ge­lo to paint the near­by Sis­tine Chapel (this Pope clear­ly knew his painters), and, like that work, the Stan­za del­la Seg­natu­ra is an embod­i­ment of all that was great about the clas­si­cal spir­it of the Renais­sance. It’s hard to think of a bet­ter sym­bol for the mar­riage of art, phi­los­o­phy, and sci­ence that was the hall­mark of the Ital­ian Renais­sance than The School of Athens.

The fres­coes depict the themes of phi­los­o­phy, the­ol­o­gy, lit­er­a­ture and jus­tice, and per­son­i­fi­ca­tions of the same four themes dec­o­rate the ceil­ing. The School of Athens, rep­re­sent­ing phi­los­o­phy, is notable for its accu­rate per­spec­ti­val pro­jec­tion, which Raphael learned from Leonar­do da Vin­ci (whose like­ness Raphael used for the cen­tral fig­ure of this paint­ing, Pla­to). The two cen­tral fig­ures are Pla­to and Aris­to­tle, each hold­ing a copy of one of their books (Plato’s Timaeus and Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics), and around them is an assort­ment of fig­ures from the worlds of phi­los­o­phy and the nat­ur­al sci­ences, includ­ing Socrates, Pythago­ras, Euclid and Ptole­my. If you’re ever in Rome, be sure to vis­it the Stan­za del­la Seg­natu­ra, but do look after your cam­era!

Art

Caravaggio’s The Calling of St Matthew (1600)

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For the arche­type of the dan­ger­ous­ly pas­sion­ate artist, go no fur­ther than Car­avag­gio. Car­avag­gio (full name Michelan­ge­lo Merisi da Car­avag­gio, 1571–1610) lived a tumul­tuous life in Rome in the late 16th cen­tu­ry, paint­ing mas­ter­pieces in between being locked away for var­i­ous offences usu­al­ly involv­ing brawl­ing and assault. Many records exist of his being sued for one infrac­tion or anoth­er: he was sued by a wait­er for throw­ing arti­chokes in his face; he was sued by his land­la­dy for not pay­ing his rent and then for van­dal­ism when he threw rocks through her win­dow. Usu­al­ly, Car­avag­gio was bailed out by wealthy patrons but when, in a duel in 1606, he actu­al­ly killed a local gang­ster, he was forced to go on the run and he spent the final four years of his life mov­ing between Naples, Mal­ta, and Sici­ly. Thus, Car­avag­gio, like none oth­er, com­pels us to sep­a­rate the artist from his art.

But what an art: Car­avag­gio employed close phys­i­cal obser­va­tion with a dra­mat­ic use of chiaroscuro (the use of strong con­trasts between light and dark) that came to be known as tene­brism. He used the tech­nique to trans­fix sub­jects in bright shafts of light between dark shad­ows, and since he often chose cru­cial moments and scenes from the Bible and lit­er­a­ture, his works were often vivid­ly expressed dra­ma. He worked rapid­ly, with live mod­els, pre­fer­ring to for­go draw­ings and instead work direct­ly onto the can­vas: if he had been a snook­er play­er he would have been Hur­ri­cane Hig­gins.

A case in point is The Call­ing of St Matthew, held in the Con­tarel­li Chapel, Rome, and depict­ing the sto­ry from the Gospel of Matthew: “Jesus saw a man named Matthew at his seat in the cus­tom house, and said to him, ‘Fol­low me’, and Matthew rose and fol­lowed Him.” Car­avag­gio depicts Matthew the tax col­lec­tor sit­ting at a table with four oth­er men. Jesus Christ and Saint Peter have entered the room, and Jesus is point­ing at Matthew. A beam of light illu­mi­nates the faces of the men at the table as they stare at the new arrivals. When you look at the pic­ture, you could be for­giv­en for won­der­ing which sit­ter is Matthew: is the beard­ed man point­ing to the slumped fig­ure (“Who, him?”) or at him­self (“Who, me?”). For­tu­nate­ly, two oth­er paint­ings sit along­side this one in the chapel (The Mar­tyr­dom of St Matthew and The Inspi­ra­tion of St Matthew) and they fea­ture the same beard­ed man unequiv­o­cal­ly play­ing Matthew.

Car­avag­gio, The Call­ing of Saint Matthew