The Great Art Debate

[mrkint]

Tango, if you like there's is a documentary here about Turner, focusing around that very painting. So it may be quite illuminating.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kB_CdhU3 ... Qi3W6GYKeJ" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

[Montreal Wanderer]

It is in Boston, Tango, and yes I have seen it. Although you have only given us half the canvas.

[TANGODANCER]

Gee thanks Mr Kint. Watched the first Turner programme but missed that. I'll watch it all later.
Monty, what's the painting like in its live form, and yes, my pic is just the ship part. ?

[Montreal Wanderer]

Gee thanks Mr Kint. Watched the first Turner programme but missed that. I'll watch it all later.
Monty, what's the painting like in its live form, and yes, my pic is just the ship part. ?

It was some years ago and I did not linger long. This was one of half a million art works in the Museum of Fine Arts. As I recall it was rather unpleasant as it included drowning slaves who had been thrown overboard still shackled - and I think there were sharks in the water. I didn't like the theme....

[mummywhycantieatcrayons]

Highlight of a good weekend was a trip to the closing day of the Murillo exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. He really was a very fine painter. The exhibition itself was exceptionally well curated and had some unbelievable loans from the Prado and the Louvre, amongst other places. I later learned that the exhibition had started out in Prado, which went some way to explaining the quality on show - Dulwich is lucky enough to have maybe 3 important works by Murillo, and these obviously proved to be sufficient leverage to make their loan to the Prado contingent on the whole lot coming here for a while. A great bit of cultural diplomacy by whomever was responsible for that one.

[William the White]

Highlight of a good weekend was a trip to the closing day of the Murillo exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. He really was a very fine painter. The exhibition itself was exceptionally well curated and had some unbelievable loans from the Prado and the Louvre, amongst other places. I later learned that the exhibition had started out in Prado, which went some way to explaining the quality on show - Dulwich is lucky enough to have maybe 3 important works by Murillo, and these obviously proved to be sufficient leverage to make their loan to the Prado contingent on the whole lot coming here for a while. A great bit of cultural diplomacy by whomever was responsible for that one.

Beautiful gallery that, lovely grounds as well.

Saw a lot of Murillo in Sevilla a while ago - their fine Art Museum is lie a shrine to their favourite son... He didn't get under my skin, unlike the Zurbaran and Valdes Leal.

[thebish]

ok - as I have been to florence I guess I'd better say summat about art!!

we went to two places deliberately to encounter art - the Uffizi and the Galleria dell'Accademia

first... the Galleria - obv to see David... we had a guided tour so as to try to get the most out of it - and that was WELL worth it!

I am not a huge sculpture fan - largely leaves me cold - BUT... wow!! the David, close up, in real life is simply staggeringly beautiful and awe-inspiringly fabulous... I have seen photos and thought, meh! - but "in the flesh" - worth the trip to Florence on its own... simply amazing!

didn't really look at much of the rest - but the plaster room was interesting - where they have a huge collection of the plaster models for the final statues with little pin-holes all over them so that they could get their perspective and anatomy right...

also - quite moved by the hall of unfinished Michelangelo sculptures (some because the person commissioning changed their mind) but others - apparently - deliberately unfinished (some say) to represent the human figure constantly struggling and striving to emerge from the weight of "sin" (the stone block) and find freedom...

second - the Uffizi

well - this is massive and overwhelming! again - thankful to have booked a guided tour which not only jumped the queues but also gave us the highlights and so much more information and background and history to what we were looking at...

main disappointment was the Birth of Venus... I have seen pictures of this with very vivid colours and it looks ace - but the real thing has faded and looks pale and a little lifeless compared to the paintings around it... that was a shame...

my highlights?

this Madonna and Child by Filippo Lippi



which is important for all sorts of reasons to do with background landscape and perspective - but caught my interest because she is quite simply the prettiest Madonna in a painting that I have ever seen... turns out that Lippi was a monk of some sort but fell in love with a novice from a nunnery called Lucrezia Buti - and she is his model for Mary... the baby is possibly his son by her... she appears in several of his paintings...

then there's Michelangelo’s Doni Tondo



which is just stunning!

then there's the Adoration of the Magi by Gentile da Fabriano



there is just so much detail in this and so much going on that we were dragged away looooooong before i would have got bored exploring it! it gleams... why? because the whole thing is painted on gold!

(of course there's lots more!)

[William the White]

Thank you, thebish.

The wave of jealousy will eventually pass...

[mummywhycantieatcrayons]

Highlight of a good weekend was a trip to the closing day of the Murillo exhibition at the Dulwich Picture Gallery. He really was a very fine painter. The exhibition itself was exceptionally well curated and had some unbelievable loans from the Prado and the Louvre, amongst other places. I later learned that the exhibition had started out in Prado, which went some way to explaining the quality on show - Dulwich is lucky enough to have maybe 3 important works by Murillo, and these obviously proved to be sufficient leverage to make their loan to the Prado contingent on the whole lot coming here for a while. A great bit of cultural diplomacy by whomever was responsible for that one.

Beautiful gallery that, lovely grounds as well.

Saw a lot of Murillo in Sevilla a while ago - their fine Art Museum is lie a shrine to their favourite son... He didn't get under my skin, unlike the Zurbaran and Valdes Leal.

I can't help but wonder how many of his best works you saw in Seville, seeing as most were scattered around Europe. Most left the city when the Napoleonic troops withdrew in 1813.

I think maybe two paintings in the exhibition I saw yesterday had come from Seville - one that is usually too elevated in Seville cathedral to be seen properly has been cleaned and brought down for the first time for this exhibition.

My favourite, The Dream of the Patrician and his Wife, was painted for the church of Santa Maria la Blanca in Seville, but has long been in the Prado, for example.

I can imagine that some of his stuff is a bit saccharine for your taste, having said all that, however.

[mummywhycantieatcrayons]

Bish - I know what you mean about the Birth of Venus - the problem is partly that that room is poorly lit and partly that the Uffizi, like the Louvre, is fairly conservative in its conservation methods. Contrast this with Venus and Mars, the only one of the 4 non-religious paintings by Botticelli that isn't in that room, in the National Gallery in London.

I love the Lippi, an awesome painting for its date, as you say, and the Michelangelo tondo - as ever with him you can imagine that grouping being carved from a single block of marble.

The Fabriano is another amazing painting for its date - anticipating the Renaissance by several years as I think it does. The thing I read when I saw it is that little scene in the middle of the predella is one of the earliest examples of a painted blue sky in post classical painting. One small comment is that it's not quite right to say the painting is 'painted on gold', I think. The gold leaf will have been stuck on either adjacent too or over the painting, for certain details. One thing I would definitely do, if appointed Director of the National Gallery, is have one night a year on which the gilded late gothic and early Renaissance paintings could seen as they are supposed to be - by candlelight (or some safe equivalent).

[Lost Leopard Spot]

I don't 'get' the Botticelli Birth of Venus... ugly ugly ugly. Ugly style, ugly composition, ugly Venus. I don't think restoration would help its cause.

[mummywhycantieatcrayons]

I don't 'get' the Botticelli Birth of Venus... ugly ugly ugly. Ugly style, ugly composition, ugly Venus. I don't think restoration would help its cause.

Come on - you must at least see that in its attempt to paint love and beauty for its own sake (the first female nude in European painting if you exclude some illustrations of Adam and Eve?) it's a big moment in the history of art.

And she has some slightly mannerist proportions, but do you really think she is ugly?

[Bruce Rioja]

Is that the one with a woman that's stood in the nip on a giant shell? It's horrible!

[Lost Leopard Spot]

There you go mummy. Two of us.
To address the second point first - she has a dog ugly body with a mildly pretty face stuck on a goitered neck at a ridiculous angle.
Secondly, I had no idea it was the first nude in Western art - although I'd argue that there were nudes in Egyptian art and there certainly were in the very first stone age art, so I'm comfortable enough not having realised that aspect.

[thebish]

There you go mummy. Two of us.
To address the second point first - she has a dog ugly body with a mildly pretty face stuck on a goitered neck at a ridiculous angle.
Secondly, I had no idea it was the first nude in Western art - although I'd argue that there were nudes in Egyptian art and there certainly were in the very first stone age art, so I'm comfortable enough not having realised that aspect.

I'm not sure about Boticelli who was slightly earlier - though they did overlap slightly... but it has often been pointed out that Michelangelo could not paint nude women - they look like men with breasts...

now - some have said that this was because it was hard to get women to pose nude - but, poppycock, I say - if Michelangelo could break the law and dissect bodies - he could certainly procure a lady to take her kit off for him...

nor can it have been that he was bad at drawing...

our guide suggested that the reason was that in them there days the male form was considered to be the perfect form - the ideal form - and all of his virtuous characters had to look heroic - hence they look like men with breasts - heavily muscled... michelangelo wasn't trying to portray what he actually saw... he was into summat else... it's symbolic.

[thebish]

also..

I'm not sure Boticelli's aim is to paint "beauty" as in phwoooaarrrrr - she's a bit of alright... he's trying to paint spiritual beauty and love... whether or not he succeeds is, of course, up for argument - but i doubt he's after a response of lust and doesn't intend the viewers all to get raging hard-ons...

[mummywhycantieatcrayons]

There you go mummy. Two of us.
To address the second point first - she has a dog ugly body with a mildly pretty face stuck on a goitered neck at a ridiculous angle.
Secondly, I had no idea it was the first nude in Western art - although I'd argue that there were nudes in Egyptian art and there certainly were in the very first stone age art, so I'm comfortable enough not having realised that aspect.

Sure, and there were nudes all over the place in Roman art - I went to the Pompeii and Herculaneum exhibition at the British Museumn recently, and there were several paintings in domestic settings there that might be considered somewhat more explicit than soft porn by today's standards.

However, the history of Western European painting since the Renaissance is a discrete area of interest for lots of us and in that sense Botticelli's Venus is a hugely significant moment in that story. She might not be the first (in fact, she almost certainly isn't) but she is a very important early example of painting for the sake of pleasure and beauty (i.e. without a devotional element) in the Renaissance.

[Lost Leopard Spot]

I can understand that ideals of beauty can change - you only have to see that Indian woman are fighting against artificial forms of fattening while English lasses have to dissuaded against anorexic habits. But, I'm of the (is this controversial?) opinion that Boticelli couldn't paint the human form for toffee.
In fact his waves were shit, his trees were shit, his puttos were shitter: the only thing he seem to be able to paint well were fabrics.

[Lost Leopard Spot]

So my reasons for not liking Boticelli are aesthetic. His place in the history of European painting is assured despite my opinion of his ability and technique.

[mummywhycantieatcrayons]

So my reasons for not liking Boticelli are aesthetic. His place in the history of European painting is assured despite my opinion of his ability and technique.

Fair enough!

For what it's worth, I am a big fan of our Venus and Mars in London - again, possibly the first painting to use some fairly slapstick as well as sexual humour. And a very elegant composition.

An interesting irony is what a strong, composed, authoritative image of feminity Venus is in that picture, before the bland objectifying of women set in - a trend that can arguably trace its roots in art back to the Birth of Venus.