Category Archive: ART
John Martin
"Pandemonium'
(19 July 1789 – 17 February 1854) The great romantic painter of startling tableaux of the Apocalypse, John Martin passed from glazing plates to classical landscape painting until he found his mileu in fire and brimstone. Stories of the Old and New Testaments were his templates, and the vast (or small) canvasses and plates of destruction, panic and woe were wildly successful, although now out of fashion (for now). “Below the rational and sensuous surface of nineteenth-century painting, the bright skin of Impressionism, the solid material world of Courbet, or, further back, the ideal forms of neo-classicism, there ran a…
Continue Reading →Tintoretto
(Jacopo Robusti, late 1518 – 31 May 1594) The anxiety of the late Renaissance centred around how to improve on perfection as represented by Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael. Vasari thought that the Venetian Jacopo Robusti (‘Tintoretto’) could have entered the Pantheon had he not been so slapdash, too much in a hurry, a jester, lacking ‘finish.’ But ‘the little dyer’ didn’t want smooth or polished finishes to his painting: he worked fast and wanted urgent, dramatic, hectic, even chaotic pictures, with different types of light and a spurning of settled perspective. Even colouring for him was a dramatic device. Not…
Continue Reading →“Definitely a Vermeer”
(Johannes Vermeer, c. 31 October 1632 – c. 16 December 1675) The Master of the Domestic Interior Scene lit by a side window, akin to Trollope’s novels in their chronicling of ‘small beer,’ Jan Vermeer was the greatest Dutch painter along with Hieronymus Bosch, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Rubens, Frans Hals, Rembrandt, Jan Steen and Vincent van Gogh. The purity of his forms, figures, objects and in particular, light – the peerless and meticulous precision with which he rendered quiet goings-on in modest Dutch dwellings – make his imitation of created nature (natura naturata) by a complete encapsulation of a…
Continue Reading →Sandro Botticelli
(1 March 1445 (?) to 17 May 1510) The great Florentine painter of the early Renaissance, Botticelli was not as technically accomplished as either Leonardo or Michelangelo, but he often excelled those men in the sheer preternatural beauty of his works. Consider the Birth of Venus, with its anatomical eccentricity and stage-like rendering of form and nature: “The secret is this, that in European painting there has never again been an artist so indifferent to representation and so intent upon presentation.“^ While he painted plenty of religious pictures, he was also inspired to create by works of classical antiquity and…
Continue Reading →Rubens
(Peter Paul Rubens – 1577-1640) The voluptuous acres of flesh painted by the Grand Baroque artist, Rubens, over a long working life, would stretch to the Moon. He is not now regarded a master of colour (although he was), and some judge his work as facile, but the enormous body of bodies is unique: whether he deals with the religious, classical, pagan, personal, allegorical or purely decorative subject, he is always Rubens. Some people don’t like his success in life (Vincent is a more romantic story), but the man from Antwerp was no twerp: his massive, rich, exuberant canvasses –…
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