Art Details: 6 to 10

 

Image Credits: All images taken by bklynbiblio/Roberto C. Ferrari. Top to bottom:

1. Dying soldier from east pediment, Temple of Aegina, Greece, late 5th century BCE, marble, Glyptothek, Munich.
2. Frederic, Lord Leighton, The Music Lesson, 1877, oil on canvas, Guildhall Art Gallery, London.
3. Jean-Léon Gérôme, Moorish Bath, 1870, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
4. Claude Monet, Boulevard des Capucines, 1873-74, oil on canvas, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City.
5. Botticelli, Madonna of the Magnificat, late 15th century, oil on canvas, Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

Art Details: 1 to 5

About a year and a half ago, I started taking detail shots using my iPhone (now 6, then 4S) of paintings and sculptures in museums that I found particularly fascinating. Although I am an advocate of always seeing art in person to fully appreciate it, admittedly it is not always possible to do that. Thus, images can help supplement the live experience of art to some extent. Art details in particular arguably give us an opportunity to hone in on a work of art, to examine aspects of it so as to attempt to see deeper into the artist's intent or vision. Admittedly, these details also give the photographer (in this case me) an opportunity to be creative in interpreting these masterful works of art. After all, in seeing these, you are experiencing my detail, my interpretation, of these paintings and sculptures. Beauty, indeed, is in the eye of the beholder. I typically post these on my Instagram account, which you can see by clicking here. (Warning: fun, personal images are there too.) Below these 5 images, I've provided some metadata about each. Enjoy!

Image Credits: All photographs taken by bklynbiblio/Roberto C. Ferrari. Top to bottom:

1. Albrecht Durer, The Paumgartner Altarpiece: The Birth of Christ, 1498-1504, oil on panel, Alte Pinakothek, Munich.
2. Auguste Rodin, The Three Shades, originally designed for The Gates of Hell before 1886, 20th-century cast, bronze, Rodin Museum, Philadelphia.
3. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, La Ghirlandata, 1873, oil on canvas, Guildhall Art Gallery, London.
4. Paul-Albert Bartholomé, Congiunti al di là, 1891-99, marble, Galleria Nazionale dell'Arte Moderna, Rome.
5. Sarah Miriam Peale, Still Life with Watermelon, 1822, oil on canvas, Harvard Art Museums, Boston.

MWA XXXVI: Botticelli's Nativity

Here in New York City, we are having record-high temperatures for Christmas. It is supposed to reach 74 degrees (23 Celsius)! I thought I was staying in NYC, not going to Florida, for Christmas! Today AA and I happily will spend our first official Christmas together on the actual Eve & Day (rather than before or after the holiday) in Jersey City. Tomorrow we are scheduled to meet up with the nephew and nieces to ice skate in Bryant Park...in 64-degree weather...assuming the ice doesn't melt beforehand.

With another Christmas upon us, it seems only appropriate to share another beautiful and important Monthly Work of Art suited to this time of year. The picture you see here is by the Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli and this painting, from about 1500, is called the Mystic Nativity. While the central portion of it celebrates the birth of Christ in a traditional manner--albeit with Botticelli's usual sinuous forms, as best exemplified by the Virgin Mary--and with humans and angels paying homage to the newborn, above them a group of angels celebrate his birth in a rondo dance, and below angels embrace humans as an extension of God's love. These two parts of the painting elevate it to the esoteric.

This painting was likely a private devotional work commissioned by a wealthy merchant in Florence. Today it is in the collection of the National Gallery in London. On their website, here is what the curators say about it: "Botticelli's picture has long been called the Mystic Nativity because of its mysterious symbolism. It combines Christ's birth as told in the New Testament with a vision of his Second Coming as promised in the Book of Revelation. The Second Coming--Christ's return to earth--would herald the end of the world and the reconciliation of devout Christians with God. The picture was painted a millennium and a half after the birth of Christ, when religious and political upheavals prompted prophetic warnings about the end of the world."

Merry Christmas to you all!

Art Exhibitions of 2014

Yesterday, I had an opportunity to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a few hours so I could finally see a number of exhibitions they have on at present. I confess I felt rather nostalgic walking through the galleries, remembering fondly my 7 years of having worked there, reinforced by lunch with my curatorial friend JD and coffee with my former library colleagues and friends CD & SP. The current exhibitions are all excellent. The Renaissance tapestry show of the work of Flemish artist Pieter Coecke van Aelst will blow your mind when you turn the corner and see all the gorgeous tapestries installed down a long corridor. Death Becomes Her: A Century of Mourning Attire is luxurious and fascinating for what could be a morbid topic. The room-installation of Thomas Hart Benton's 1930-31 mural America Today is amazing--you can almost hear jazz playing as the characters sway from one American scene to another. But the greatest part of my day was the exhibition on the Venetian sculptor Tullio Lombardo's Adam, seen here, fully restored. In 2002 the pedestal for the sculpture collapsed and, horrifyingly, the ca.1490-95 sculpture shattered. After 12 painstaking years of intensive study, and utilizing new technologies, the object conservators were able to restore this life-sized statue to near-perfect condition. The sculpture is an exquisite piece, clearly an influence on Michelangelo's David, and important as an early idealized male nude sculpture in Renaissance art. The videos on the website and in the gallery amaze you to see how they successfully conserved and restored the sculpture.

This year the best exhibitions for me were all on sculpture. In addition to the Adam just mentioned, the Met put on two excellent sculpture exhibitions. One was on the works of Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux (1827-1875), who reinvigorated French sculpture during the Second Empire with a Baroque-style energy that excited and scandalized people of the day. Running earlier in the year at the Met was another sculpture exhibition, The American West in Bronze, 1850-1925, an excellent show that aesthetically changed one's mind about works you once might have considered to be little more than living room kitsch. At Columbia's Wallach Art Gallery, a great sculpture show was put on about Anna Hyatt Huntington (1876-1973), about which I blogged here. Finally, at the Yale Center for British Art, the long-awaited Victorian sculpture exhibition there brought together about 130 works that changed one's mindset about what defines sculpture and how it can be made. The show also demonstrated the power of the curatorial eye with a fine selection of finely-crafted statues, reliefs, and decorative objects in an array of media. The first work one encountered in the exhibition, as seen in my photo here, exemplifies the surprises of the show. This is a Minton ceramic elephant measuring 84 inches in height, part of a pair, that was first exhibited at the 1889 Exposition Universelle. I have a review of this exhibition being published in the spring, so I will share more when it comes out, but for now, here is what I wrote about this gorgeous majolica elephant: "The elephant reveals a high degree of craftsmanship that demonstrates the successful union of man and industry, but it also has a deeper meaning. Displayed as part of a cultural parade, its empty howdah decorated in Mughal textile designs and awaiting a royal occupant, the tamed elephant represents the jewel in Queen Victoria’s crown: India and all its riches. This work in the foyer thus foreshadowed others in the galleries of Sculpture Victorious: masterpieces of human and industrial design, and socio-political symbols of the British Empire."

If I had to choose my favorite exhibition of the year, however, it would be, without a doubt, Kara Walker's sugar-sculpture installation at the Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg, Brooklyn: A Subtlety: or, the Marvelous Sugar Baby. Walker is one of my favorite contemporary artists, and in this work she went beyond anything she had done before. Commissioned by Creative Time as a temporary installation, before the building was scheduled to be demolished, Walker designed a massive, sugar-coated, sphinx-like creature with the body and facial features of an "Aunt Jemima" type, to remind visitors of the intricate ties between the West's love of sugar and its intertwined history of slavery. The work was powerful and had lines of people waiting to get in. A group of friends of mine all went together to see it in June, and we were mesmerized. There are numerous images online that people took, so I'm only sharing here one I took to show the scale of the sculpture in the warehouse and the diminutive nature of the people around it. As time passed, the sugar gradually changed color, and the surrounding molasses "little black Sambo" boys melted and fell apart. After you were in the warehouse a while, the smell of the sugar and molasses became so sickeningly sweet you had to leave and get fresh air. This was all part of the artist's intent, to create a temporal, multi-sensory sculptural environment. When the show closed, most of the sculpture was destroyed (what had not disintegrated on its own already), although there is at present at Sikkema Jenkins an after-show that exhibits her sketches and designs, and an arm Walker kept as her own personal souvenir. This sculptural installation was truly a tour de force of artistic achievement, for the artist and the audience.

Aside from sculpture exhibitions, one major art exhibition highlight for me was Golden Visions of Densatil: A Tibetan Buddhist Monastery at the Asia Society. This historical monastery and its Buddhist treasures was constructed in the 12th century but destroyed during China's Cultural Revolution. The installation included discovered and recovered treasures alongside historical photos, but the most amazing part of this exhibition was having the opportunity to witness the monks make a sand mandala. This was an ongoing event for 5 days with 5 monks. You would expect it to be solemn, quiet, and peaceful. On the contrary, the monks were very engaging with visitors, including taking photos with them. They often laughed too, but then quickly would return to their back-breaking, eye-straining work of constructing this mandala. The most amazing moments were when they would help one another, knowing that one had more expertise than another, and they could share in the responsibility of building this sand mandala together. Their humanity made this a very spiritual experience. You can watch a great time-lapse video of them making the sand mandala here.

Other exhibitions from this year worth noting included:
** Pre-Raphaelite Legacy at the Met Museum, a small but groundbreaking show for them to finally acknowledge the accomplishments of these Victorian artists;
** Beauty's Legacy: Gilded Age Portraits in America at The New-York Historical Society, about which I blogged here;
** At the Guggenheim Museum, the fantastic multi-media exhibition on Futurism, Italy's modernist art movement, and the riveting photographs of African-American feminist artist Carrie Mae Weems;
** Florine Stettheimer at the Lenbachhaus in Munich (although I guess technically I have only seen it "in process" and will have to wait until early January to see the final, full exhibition!);
** And my dear friend and colleague Meera Thompson at Atlantic Gallery.

I would be remiss if I forget to mention my own two small, curated exhibitions--15 Minutes: Andy Warhol's Photographic Legacy and Off the Grid: Beyond the Noise--both of which I thought were rather well done...if I may say so myself.

UPDATE (12/14/14): One of the blockbuster exhibitions of the year, that previously had opened in London and is now on here in NYC is Henri Matisse: The Cut-Outs. Everyone I know who has seen it loves the show, and it has been on my "must see" list, but I dread going to MOMA because of the crowds so I wasn't sure what to expect. Fortunately, AA and I decided to make the trek there today and it actually wasn't as bad of a crowd as I anticipated. The exhibition is very good, demonstrating well how Matisse used paper cut-outs and collage as a form of painting unto itself. It is a smart show about materiality, color, composition, and artistic technique. We also had a chance to pop into the Robert Gober exhibition. He is one of those contemporary artists I typically don't appreciate much, but this retrospective helped change my mind a bit with his theme-and-variation sculptural objects and large-scale installation spaces. It was all rather tongue-in-cheek and clever, I must say, so I do have a better appreciation for Gober now.

MWA XXXI: Duccio's Madonna

Duccio di Buoninsegna (died 1318) is one of those significant artists about whom we know very little, but whose artistic sensibility changed the development of Western art. He lived and worked during a time when named individuality in the creation and attribution of Christian art was only just coming into acceptance. He lived at the dawn of what we now think of as the Renaissance, a time when ideas of humanism and the rediscovery of classicism challenged the stylistic representations crafted previously by medieval artisans. His contemporaries included the writers Boccaccio and Dante, and in painting he was rivaled only by Giotto. While Duccio was from Siena, Giotto was from Florence, and although tourists today think of these two cities as must-see sights when visiting Tuscany, at the time they were rival city-states. Art historians today name these two men as the "grandfathers" of Renaissance art. Giotto's art is typically more linear and narrative, but Duccio's paintings are characterized by more humanistic emotion. This is evident in the work you see here by Duccio, Madonna and Child, which has been dated to ca. 1290-1300 with scientific analysis and stylistic comparisons against other works attributed to him.

This work is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is rather diminutive in size, measuring about the size of a sheet of paper, and painted in tempera and gold on a wood panel. Unlike related works at this time, suggesting it should be part of an altarpiece, this panel in fact was intended to be an individual devotional piece. There is in fact evidence of candles burning the bottom edge, reinforcing its ecclesiastical intent. The gold surface and the subject of the Virgin Mary and the Christ Child suggest the influence of Byzantine art and religious icons on Duccio. Gold, then as now, was not cheap, so the use of it suggests it likely was a commission from a wealthy, private donor. The gold would have reflected candlelight and made for a serene object for personal devotion. This emphasis on gold is, perhaps, appropriate considering the painting's afterlife. This small work cost the Met a reported $45 million when they purchased it in a private sale in 2004. It was (and still is) the most money that museum ever spent on an acquisition. When one considers other works of art in recent years that have sold for record high prices, such as $135m for a Klimt and $250m for a Cézanne, the Met's purchase seems rather minimal, but at the time it was shocking news. It was quickly reported on in the press, The New York Times breaking the news in a November 2004 article by Carol Vogel, followed by Michael Kimmelman's assessment of its worth as a work of art the day, appearing the day before it was first shown to the public on December 21, 2004. Perhaps not surprisingly, the painting was declared a fake in 2006 by Columbia Professor James Beck, who said the museum should get its money back. Few, however, believed his assertions, and this masterpiece is still recognized as one of the Met's most important acquisitions.

Ultimately, it is irrelevant what the painting is worth, or even if it is genuinely by a specific man named Duccio. What is most beautiful about the painting is how it transcends its religious context and shows a very human scene. The infant Jesus reaches up toward his mother's face and moves aside her veil to gaze into her eyes, a sign of recognition and awareness that arguably only an infant and his/her mother can understand. Rather than smile, however, Mary is sad, symbolically aware of the suffering her son will endure when he is crucified at a later age. But her sadness transcends the Biblical story. Her face reveals a sense of sadness that every mother understands, the awareness that this innocence of childhood is the beginning of an adult experience. The innocence she holds in her arms is, indeed, very, very brief. That humanistic touch and that existential awareness make this painting a profound work of art.

MWA XXIX: Cranach's Salome

Northern Renaissance art is one of those areas in art history where, one day, I will give myself a crash course (recommendations on survey texts greatly appreciated!). Whenever I see works by masters such as Jan van Eyck, Petrus Christus, Gerard David, Lucas Cranach the Elder (ca.1472-1553), and others, I am astounded at their talent, their handling of oil paint, particularly on wood panels, and the often haunting beauty evident in their figures. But I always feel as if I'm missing something, as if there is more going on, beyond what you see, and I struggle to know what it is. I believe part of the challenge in understanding most Renaissance art from the German states has to do with the rise of Protestantism under Martin Luther and how that change altered the development of painting itself. Exquisite Madonnas and Nativities gradually gave way to peasant scenes and still life subjects, more acceptable forms of art that focused less on religious ritual and more on word and action. Cranach was one of those artists who successfully bridged the transition between the Catholic and the Protestant in art.

I've chosen for this Monthly Work of Art Cranach's painting of Salome, ca. 1530, oil on panel (Szépművészeti Múzeum, Budapest; image: Web Gallery of Art), in part because it's an eye-catching painting, but also because the rather disturbing image seemed appropriate for the upcoming Halloween season. The subject is from the New Testament (Mark 6:21-29 and Matthew 14:6-11). It is the story of Salome, the daughter of Herodias and step-daughter of Herod, who performed the so-called Dance of the Seven Veils and so entranced her step-father that he promised to give her anything she wanted. Her mother, angry at the accusations weighed against her by John the Baptist, made her ask for the prophet's head on a silver platter. Herod was forced to comply, and the cousin of Jesus was beheaded. The legend of Salome of course developed over time. In fact, she is not named in the Bible, but only given her name by Josephus, the first-century historian, decades later. Salome herself evolved over time in cultural history. Early references make her a naive child, but over time she became a femme fatale, a creature whose beauty is so powerful she destroys men. You can see that effect taking place in this painting. Cranach depicts with gore the decapitated head oozing blood while blank, dead eyes stare at the viewer. Salome seems almost devilish, grinning in delight at what she has accomplished. She has long golden braids and wears Renaissance finery (that feathered hat is incredible!), and she clutches with ease the heavy silver platter with the decapitated head as if it weighed nothing. For a Renaissance audience, this type of Salome was a daughter of Eve, a temptress and destroyer of man's innocence from the time of the Garden of Eden. But not every artist over time depicted Salome in this way. If you just do a Google Image search, you can quickly see the varying ways artists have depicted her holding the head of John the Baptist. In some, she looks away in horror (humility?), in others she seems to be in a daze (entranced?). But there are many others where Salome is depicted as in Cranach's painting, an active participant, one who kills, using her dancing and beauty to entrance mankind to her will, and to his demise.

MWA XXVI: Leonardo's Supper

Despite everything that has been happening in my life these days, I didn't want to forgo the Monthly Work of Art, in part because it seemed rather appropriate to share as this month's subject an Italian Renaissance masterpiece that was arguably my father's favorite work of art: Leonardo da Vinci's Last Supper (Il Cenacolo). Because Leonardo experimented with different media in the fresh plaster when he painted this work from about 1494 to 1498, it has suffered and degraded over time. Continuous restorations have attempted to preserve it as much as possible, so it hasn't always been available for public viewing. I saw it once with my father and Zia Marisa, and I remember more the experience of how the spotlight shines briefly then dims, so as not to expose the work to light for too long. It is beautiful in a subdued, peaceful way. It is a testament to Renaissance geometric and spatial practices in art, to create a more humanistic approach to the human form and to fool the eye into thinking a flat wall is a three-dimensional space. (So much has been written about this painting, I won't even bother commenting further. Readers are invited to post comments about their favorite texts that discuss this work though.)

When I think about why my father loved this work of art, I suspect it had less to do with all of that, however, and more to do with the fact that it is located in Milan, his hometown, at Santa Maria delle Grazie. With so many famous Renaissance and Baroque masterworks found in cities like Florence, Venice, and Rome, the placement of one of the greatest of these in Milan is rather unique. For my father I'm sure his love of this work of art was about civic pride, a constant reminder of the beauty of life, particularly during the dark days of World War II when his family struggled to find food and avoid bombings throughout the city. I choose Leonardo's Last Supper for this MWA, as a tribute to my father and to his Milanese cultural heritage.

MWA XXIV: Bronzino's Man

Over the past few years, I have posted news when some major museums began to release images of works of public domain art for free for academic use. Each year the number of institutions is increasing, and the number of high-quality, high-resolution images now available for free for downloading is in the millions, because of these open-access initiatives. The Metropolitan Museum of Art has just announced the release of over 400,000 high-resolution images now available for free as part of their Open Access for Scholarly Content initiative. They join the Getty Museum, the National Gallery of Art, the Rijksmuseum, the British Museum, and Yale University in making these images available for non-profit, academic use without charging any fees. This, I can tell you, is an incredible advancement, and makes the work of writers who need images so much easier to be able to discuss works without paying hefty fees. In celebration of the Met's announcement, I decided to share as the May Monthly Work of Art one of my favorite paintings in the European Paintings galleries: Bronzino's Portrait of a Young Man, oil on wood, dated to the 1530s. The elegance of this young man and Bronzino's Manneristic approach in painting his physique, beauty, and self-assurance make him a striking subject. And the odd quirkiness of his lazy eye unsettles you enough to make you question whether it is in fact an abnormality or Bronzino's attempt to fool you into wondering at what or at whom the young man is gazing.

The release of these images means that, for the first time, X-rays and conservation photos will be made available for some works as well. So in looking through images of this painting, one finds a number of technical details that X-rays reveal through the layers of paint. You can see here an X-ray of the painting, and how it shows great differences in the original design of the architectural background. His face also is thinner and more attenuated, and the hand on his hip is posed differently, but this is indeed the same subject. Rather than cite more information about the painting, here is what the curators and conservators have to say about the painting.

"This arresting portrait of an unidentified young Florentine is dated by most scholars to the 1530s. During that decade Bronzino was often engaged in painting members of a close-knit circle of acquaintances with whom he shared literary interests, and this sitter—who so conspicuously holds open a book—may be from among that group. Vasari mentions the names of several of these sitters early in his biography of the artist and it has recently been suggested that this panel may portray Bonaccorso di Pietro Pinadori (born 1502), mentioned by the author alongside Ugolino Martelli and Lorenzo Lenzi, both of whose portraits have been identified (an earlier hypothesis that the picture is a self-portrait has not been taken up in the literature).

"The elegant young man wears a black satin doublet, with fashionably slashed sleeves, over a white camicia with a ruffled collar, and with a brilliant blue belt. Both his hat and the ties supporting his codpiece are decorated with gold aglets, and he wears one ring. He stands between an elaborately decorated table and chair within an architectural setting meant to suggest a Florentine palace. Both pieces of furniture include grotesque masks; that of the remarkable table is stretched as if made of fabric rather than stone. A third "mask" is suggested in an insistent pattern resembling a face within the drapery of the lower part of the costume. The meaning of these grotesque masks is debated; it may be that they are in some way analogous to poetic ideas of the time and refer to identity as a kind of mask. Bronzino was himself a poet. It is clear that they are meant to provide a contrast to the sitter's refined facial features and bearing.

"The numerous and important changes made by the artist as he painted were documented in x-radiographs as early as 1930. These have been clarified, and Bronzino's artistic process further elucidated, through new x-radiography and infrared reflectography of 2009 revealing underdrawing. Most conspicuously, the architectural setting was transformed: initially a straight molding ran at a diagonal behind the sitter (the underdrawing includes a corbel below that visible now at the left to coincide with this first idea for the setting). Two types of underdrawing have been revealed. The more unusual was done, probably with the butt end of a brush, directly into the panel's thick white imprimitura, or preparation layer. It was used vigorously to describe the draped grotesque mask at the left, outlining contours but also indicating shadows with diagonal hatching. Many of the artist's original compositional ideas are indicated in this type of drawing (these can be seen as well in the x-radiograph): they include the first position of the proper right hand and book, with the hand in stricter profile and the book shown with its spine facing the viewer and covers splayed; the placement of the proper left hand with the thumb tucked behind the waist; different contours of the sleeves, collar, and cuffs of the costume; and an elaboration in the area of the codpiece, into which an article of clothing—almost certainly gloves—was originally tucked. More traditional underdrawing in black chalk or charcoal and carbon-based ink or paint applied with a brush is found throughout the head and the hands. As seen in the x-radiograph as well, drawing of the head shows its initial shape to have been much narrower but with the features identically placed (dispelling the possibility that the final version is of a second sitter). The x-radiograph also indicates changes in the furniture at right that are not easily decipherable. Because of the extent of these changes, it has sometimes been speculated that the painting was begun at one time and then finished later—perhaps years later."

MWA XXII: Botticelli's Spring

This Winter has been incredibly cold, with record amounts of snow and below-normal temperatures, even this late in March. Needless to say, I am ready for Spring! So what better way to celebrate the start of the new season this week than to share as this Monthly Work of Art the Primavera (Spring), ca.1482, by the early Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli (images: Web Gallery of Art). This painting hangs at the Uffizi in Firenze. The first time I ever saw it in person (1991?) I was in awe. In fact, I was so much in awe, that my father took the photograph you see below, which admittedly is quite embarrassing because of my mullet, but you get the impression from my stunned look how awestruck I was to see this painting in person.

The fact is, Primavera is my favorite painting in the world. It's often not easy to narrow down one's ideas of what is a favorite anything, but I can say for sure that this painting seems to have always been, and remains, my favorite. The question is...why? The painting itself is an enigma. We know that it is intended to be an allegory of spring. We can identify the central figure as the goddess of love, Venus, here seen as a glorified wife and mother goddess, Venus Victrix, not a sexualized goddess. She gazes at the viewer and her raised hand offers a sign of welcome to her bower as if it were a mudra of peace. Behind her, among the trees, the branches form an arched niche, and the sky becomes like a halo around her head. She is Venus and Virgin Mary in one. Above her is her son Cupid, blind as is love, shooting an arrow. As for the other figures, they should be read right-to-left. The god of the wind Zephyrus chases after the nymph Chloris, ravishing her, symbolically transforming her into Flora, the goddess of flowers, who throws petals from her dress into the grass. Sexuality has been allegorized as fertility. On Venus's proper right are the 3 Graces (image here), who perform a dance of celebration, their hands gently touching one another, their diaphonous clothes floating around their nude bodies, commingled, dancing to music only they can hear. And beside them is the god Mercury, the messenger god who carries the souls of the dead to the underworld. Is this the finality to love and life for all humankind?

The painting is done in tempera (egg yolk with pigment), a favored medium in Florence at this time. Tempera paint helps reinforce linear structure, as the colors rarely blend, but Botticelli devises a way in his brush strokes to make the paint create motion, not only in each figure's positions and bodily forms, but in the way the clothes on each figure move, most notably the aforementioned dresses on the 3 Graces. These mythological figures all appear like a painted relief, presented to the viewer with no obvious subject, but at least with recognizable iconographic forms. It is said that the painting was commissioned from Botticelli for a cousin of the Medici family as a wedding present for the bride and groom, and that it hung in a main room in the couple's villa, just beside Botticelli's other masterpiece from this time, The Birth of Venus, a symbol of Venus as a idealized beauty and sexualized love.

I've actually written about this painting before on this blog, emphasizing Mercury in particular, albeit with some humor in that post. But it is true that this painting is my favorite. It has always struck me for its frozen beauty. It is timeless. It is the perfect Eden, populated by beauty and sound and nature, but represented only as a flat painting. It is Spring, a perpetual sense of new life and new love, and it offers viewers the hope of a future, one that leaves them peaceful and happy, in their own personal Arcadian bower. I have not seen this painting in person in almost a decade now, but the next time I return to Firenze, I will revisit my personal Spring once again.

MWA XX: David's Nativity

Although I've never had the opportunity to study in-depth "Northern Renaissance art" (i.e. paintings by Netherlandish painters such as Jan van Eyck and Hans Memling), like others I find them to be some of the most beautiful paintings in the history of art. The crisp linearity and precision of draftsmanship is complemented by rich jewel-like colors, making so many of these paintings among the most precious in European art. Many of the works are altarpieces and Catholic in nature, as they pre-date the spread of the Protestant Reformation and thus the removal of Christian imagery (idolatry as it was called) in favor of the Word (Bible) alone. The Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a number of these works, largely because they were collected by Gilded Age industrialists at a time when a number of these early painters were barely known. Gerard David (ca. 1455-1523), born in the Netherlands and active in the now-Belgian city of Bruges, was but one of these highly-respected and talented painters of their day.

His scenes, such as this work from the Met, The Nativity with Donors and Saints Jerome and Leonard, ca. 1510-15, focus on traditional Christian imagery, but often reveal the secrets of his own interest in landscape painting. Just look in this detail over the shoulder of Joseph and you can see the shepherds peering through the window with an exquisite landscape stretching into the distance. The birth of Christ is the subject of the triptych, but the angels positioned beside the open window together echo the connections between God and nature. It's a powerful image, with many layers of meaning. According to the curators, "despite the joyful moment depicted, the figures all wear somber expressions, foreshadowing Christ's eventual suffering and sacrifice." The saints on the two end panels are Jerome and Leonard, but the donors kneeling before them remain unidentified, reminding us how much more we have to learn about the history and reception of these gems in Western painting. Gerard David himself was lost to history and only rediscovered in the mid-1800s. For more about his extensive life and work, see the Met's Heilbrunn Timeline of Art History.

And to all my bklynbiblio readers, MERRY CHRISTMAS!!

MWA X: Lotto's Nativity

What better way to celebrate the holidays then with another beautiful Monthly Work of Art. This is The Nativity (image: NGA) by the Venetian Renaissance painter Lorenzo Lotto (ca. 1480-ca. 1557). This oil on panel work is dated to 1523. Lotto is seen by some art historians as a proto-Mannerist, and this is evident in the way that he contorts the bodies, especially that of the Christ child. The shimmering blue/pink of Mary's garments and her elongated body are other signs of early Mannerism at work. You'll notice, however, something strange in the picture, and I don't mean the naked flying babies at the top. In the upper left there's a crucifix. Its presence is clearly anachronistic (Jesus was just born in the picture), but it serves to foreshadow for the viewer his eventual death and the establishment of the Christian faith. My memories of growing up in the Catholic Church were that they always put more weight on his death and resurrection. Personally, I preferred the stories of his birth. So in that spirit I wish everyone a very Merry Christmas.

Doppelgänger?

This past week a story went viral online about a young man who found his doppelgänger in a portrait by an unknown 16th-century Italian artist at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. A doppelgänger (from the German meaning "double goer") is a ghostly double--not a spirit, but an actual person. The resemblance between him and the portrait is rather uncanny. Notice how people in the article speculate that he might have to lose the tie-dye shirt and wear a bigger codpiece though? But, like others, the story made me wonder if anyone else had ever seen their doppelgänger in art.


When I was younger, I thought I bore a striking resemblance to the messenger god Mercury in Botticelli's Primavera (Spring), ca. 1478, from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. You see a detail of Mercury here, but click here for the full picture. It's perhaps not a coincidence that this painting also just happens to be my all-time favorite in the history of art. Of course, the resemblance was perhaps much more true some twenty years ago when I was younger and had a mane of curly hair. Back then, people also used to think I looked like actor Kirk Cameron or singer/songwriter Richard Marx. But the weirdest thing lately is having heard a few people say I look like Derek Jeter! Doppelgänger to a baseball player? Hm...I think I'd rather look like someone in a Renaissance painting.

MWA IV: Leonardo's Ginevra

Back in March, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. announced they were releasing high-resolution digital images of more than 20,000 objects from their collection in an ongoing attempt to make these public domain works more widely available for both commercial and non-commercial purposes using the highest quality museum-produced photography. This is a tremendous coup for educators and the public alike, as the removal of specific fees for publishing and other uses inevitably will draw more people's attentions to the NGA's collection in support of their open access policy. You can read more about their open access policy here. bklynbiblio readers will recall that the Yale Center for British Art previously had done something very similar last year. Other museums will follow, for sure. In celebration of the NGA's move forward, I've selected Leonardo da Vinci's Ginevra de' Benci, ca. 1474-78, as June's Monthly Work of Art. Rather than give my own thoughts on the beautiful portrait, here's just a small piece of what the curators at the NGA have to say about it: "She was the daughter of a wealthy Florentine banker, and her portrait—the only painting by Leonardo da Vinci in the Americas—was probably commissioned about the time of her marriage at age 16. Leonardo himself was only about six years older. The portrait is among his earliest experiments with the new medium of oil paint; some wrinkling of the surface shows he was still learning to control it. Still, the careful observation of nature and subtle three–dimensionality of Ginevra's face point unmistakably to the new naturalism with which Leonardo would transform Renaissance painting. Ginevra is modeled with gradually deepening veils of smoky shadow—not by line, not by abrupt transitions of color or light." You can read more about the painting by clicking here. To search and download NGA images for your own use, click here.

Random Musings 12

What do you think when hear the names Don, Betty, Peggy, Joan, and Roger? If you're thinking Mad Men, then you're as excited as I am to see the 2-hour season 5 premiere on March 25 (image: Frank Ockenfels, AMC). I wasn't so sure about this show at first and didn't watch the first two seasons right away, but once I caught on, I was hooked. Matt Zoller Seitz has some interesting thoughts about why the show is so great in the latest issue of New York magazine. Last season had some great moments, like Don's elderly Jewish secretary, Ida "Are-ya-goin'-to-da-toilet?" Blankenship, who was so popular she got her own Facebook page. Tragically, even her death was a hoot. And of course there was episode #7 from last season, "The Suitcase," which ranks up there as one of the all-time best hours of television ever written and acted. The synergy between Don (Jon Hamm) and Peggy (Elisabeth Moss) was simply brilliant. Let's see if they can top it this season.

Last month, I posted about New York Public Library's disastrous plans to gut the main historic building and research library and make it mostly a circulating library and Internet computer zone. The project is going to cost upwards of $350 million. Meanwhile more than 80 branch libraries throughout NYC are completely falling into ruin and need to be completely overhauled. Yesterday, Leonard Lopate on WNYC radio interviewed Scott Sherman, who wrote the exposé published in The Nation this past December, and Caleb Crain, a former research fellow at NYPL. The radio program addresses both the potential positive and negative sides of this controversy, but truly drives home the nightmare of what is being planned.

In the world of art, the Renaissance master Leonardo da Vinci has never gone out of style, so Dan Brown really had no need to try to make him more titillating than he already was. Over the past 2 months, the Mona Lisa (La Gioconda) has come back into the spotlight, not in her world-famous portrait at the Louvre in Paris, but in a copy made at the same time that belongs to the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid (their image). Having recently conserved and cleaned their copy of the Gioconda, the Prado's conservators have determined that it probably was painted about the same as the original. They're also claiming that the restored copy is closer to what the picture actually looked like when Leonardo painted it. Dirt, varnish, and aging have darkened the Louvre's original. I think it's rather interesting too that the copy artist probably was Andrea Salai, Leonardo's lover. You can read more about the painting in articles published in The Art Newspaper here, here, and here. And just when you thought that was big Leonardo news, yesterday it was announced that scholars believe they may have "found" his long-missing mural of The Battle of Anghiari beneath another painting.

I'm heading back to Florida this week. The Pater's mental health is degrading some more as Alzheimer's disease continues to affect him. I'll be doing a few more things to help make his life comfortable and manageable, including following up some doctor appointments. Our dear friend RM has been simply amazing in helping with so many things. I owe her a tremendous debt of gratitude and, knowing she reads these posts, I'm publicly making it known how much I appreciate all of her help. With managing health problems such as Alzheimer's in our lives, I've often found the British World War II slogan "Keep Calm and Carry On" to be quite useful at times, so I'll leave you with this delightful video of the story behind the slogan, the iconic posters, and a charming bookshop in the UK that I would love to go visit one day soon. Watch the video here if you can't see it below. You'll appreciate the message.
 

Random Musings 10

I'm heading to Florida for a dysfunctional family Christmas. If you're wondering if this is a picture of my relatives, it's not, but I swear if my lesbian cousins (the DG-JBs) were to ever really let loose, I'm convinced they would be just like Edina and Patsy (more on them below). I've been saving up a bunch of links and posts to blog about, so enjoy this Random Musing.

The Guardian has an interesting interactive guide that allows you to zoom in and find out more about drawings by Leonardo da Vinci, in conjunction with the National Gallery's current exhibition about his years at the court of Milan.

When I was at the YCBA, my co-visiting scholar was Georgina Cole, who received her PhD from Sydney University in Australia. She was there working on a project relating to the senses in 18th-century British painting. She's also started a new blog/website, Early Modern Art Network, which focuses on news relating to art from the 17th and 18th centuries. She's transcribed a funny 18th-century letter to the editor from an enraged parent about how having his children trained to be artists had made his life miserable: "When I the other Day found that Remonstrance was in vain, and rage exerted without Effect, and clasped my Hands and sighed with pure Vexation, my Daughter told me I looked like the Soldier in Belisarius; my eldest Son said I was more like West’s weeping Grenadier, and my youngest, a little Imp about ten Years of Age, got into a Corner of the Room with his Chalks and blue Paper to copy my Face, his own Father’s Face, Sir, for a Head of Despair."

I've blogged about the World of the Year in the past, but unfortunately we now have conflicts depending on the source as to what the actual word of 2011 is. Dictionary.com had declared "tergiversate" to be the annual word (huh?), but now Merriam-Webster claims the word of the year is "pragmatic," based on the number of people who searched for that word. Complicating matters is the Oxford English Dictionary, which apparently declared "squeezed middle" the word of the year, never mind that's a phrase, not a word.

Thanks to my dear friend SVH, my latest sci-fi obsession is Farscape. Yes, I'm a little late to this, as it's been off the air for a while, but it's fun. A pregnant bio-ship with a sexy lost human and escaped alien prisoners, none of whom know or trust one another? What a fun concept!

New York magazine has declared 2011 to be the year in which male bodies were exploited in the movies, such as Chris Evans here in Captain America. There is a rather lovely slideshow of images worth seeing on the site, although I do find it odd that they all look alike (never mind why  Evans insists on shaving his chest hair). Unfortunately, my fantasy boyfriend Ewan McGregor wasn't on the list, although I guess he didn't actually take his shirt off in any films this year (a first for him!). His film Beginners, with Christopher Plummer as his aging father who comes out of the closet late in life, was absolutely one of the best movies of the year. The Anglophenia blog put up a post earlier this year with video clips of all things Ewan, so check it out.

And unless you've been living under a rock I'm sure you've heard the news that--20 years after the first episodes premiered--Absolutely Fabulous is coming back with some new episodes with Edina and Patsy partying hard and Saffie scolding them the whole time. I can't wait! Here's a hilarious clip from the newest episode in which they trash-talk the Kardashians (who I still to this day do not understand why people think they are important!!). Enjoy, sweetie dahling!

Is It Baroque, and Do We Fix It?

A couple of days ago I had an email conversation with SFR, who lives in northern Florida. Her local museum is hosting a loan of 16th- and 17th-century Italian paintings from the Pinacoteca di Brera in Milano (a lovely gem of a museum itself). This loan exhibition is being marketed as "Baroque" art, about which SFR wanted to know more. This is a good question, because when you think about it, what does Baroque actually mean? When I emailed her back, this was my quick, off-the-cuff response: "Baroque typically means it's more dramatic than Renaissance art, which is more balanced and harmonic. In Italy this was a period of intense religious fervor, so you get lots of contrasts of lighting and shadows for dramatic effect, sometimes some violent scenes. ... But then you also get these delightful still lifes ... which symbolize bounty and the wealth of the patrons." From the picture you see here of Artemisia Gentileschi’s Judith Decapitating Holofernes (1612-21, Uffizi), you can get a sense of what I meant by the first part of my definition. This painting to me captures the spirit of the Italian Baroque because it is a Biblical (i.e. Apocryphal) subject presented in a way that’s highly melodramatic and incredibly violent, driving home the intensity of Judith’s determination to save the Jewish people from the Babylonian general. The fact that it was painted by a woman (a rare feat itself at this time) makes the picture even more fascinating because of our ongoing societal belief that women in general are less violent then men, driving home even more the determination of Judith and her maidservant in this picture. The painting also has a spotlight effect, making the figures stand out from the darkness around them. This results in thrusting the subject into the viewer’s plane more sharply, so that you cannot escape the work's visceral intent.

I could go on about this painting (which I love, in case it wasn't obvious), including talking about the influence of Caravaggio on Baroque art, but now take a look at the picture you see here, Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas, or The Family of Philip IV (1656-57, Prado), which also is Baroque (and another favorite of mine). What makes this picture Baroque? It’s certainly not violent. You could say it’s dramatic, but more like a theatrical tableau. The intricacies of what’s going on in this picture have been debated by numerous art and cultural historians, including Leo Steinberg and Michel Foucault. Although people differ on the specifics, everyone seems to agree that there’s a determined level of psychology and interpersonal communication taking place, with the artist looking out at the viewer, who stands in the place of the king and queen whose portrait he is painting. The king and queen in turn are reflected in the mirror in the background, while their children and servants are positioned staring back at them, i.e. you the viewer. Are we to understand then that Baroque art also implies psychology? Not necessarily, because one could argue that the paintings of Leonardo da Vinci also have a psychological subtext to them (Freud certainly believed so!). The intricacies of light and darkness are at work in Velázquez's painting, so perhaps that is why the picture is Baroque. Does this fit in then with pictures by other so-called Baroque artists from the North, like Rembrandt and Vermeer, both of whom painted in very different styles but were known for manipulating the power light for dramatic purposes? But if it's all about light, then how does this fit in with Nicolas Poussin's Et in Arcadia Ego (1637-39, Louvre), whose classical referencing clearly seems to call into question what French Baroque might mean.

My point is this: isn't it time we stopped using useless labels like Baroque? Or even the ever more popular Renaissance, for that matter? PR told me he’s teaching a course this fall on the Renaissance, and while I have no doubt Michelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael will appear in his course, will he go further back to include the "early" Renaissance art of Fra Angelico? And will he go forward to include the "late" manneristic Renaissance art of Parmagianino? Will he stay in Florence and Rome, or cover Venice too? And what about Netherlandish and German "Renaissance" art of the same period? In this context, I ask, what does "Renaissance" actually mean, and what does it tell you about the art itself? In truth, nothing.

I'm certainly not criticizing PR at all, just using his upcoming course as an example of the problematics of these stylistic terms. There was a point in art history when these labels made sense because in general people understood the unfolding of Western art in terms of historic appellations. You went from ancient to Greek & Roman classical, then Early Christian, Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Neoclassical, Romantic, Realist, etc., until you got to the modernist 'isms' from Impressionism to Cubism and so on. Most large museums still arrange their galleries in this fashion. What made these labels work was the assumption that students/viewers were all White and Judaeo-Christian. But as every professor can tell you today, it’s not like that anymore in our ever-expanding global communities. There are students who have no idea who that guy Jesus really was, heaven forbid be able to identify the gods Mars and Venus. Complicating this is that the idea of history unfolding on a timeline also has lost its meaning, so that the Apollo Belvedere and Michelangelo's David are seen as parallel creations by some students, without any sense as to which came first and how one may have inspired the other. And yet, for some reason, academic programs are still teaching classes using these terms. Columbia University’s Fall 2011 undergraduate program has a course on "Early Italian Renaissance Art," and Princeton is offering "Neoclassicism through Impressionism." In truth, the reason why these terms are still used is because they are easy catch-all phrases that help (supposedly) get across similar ideas and concepts about art produced by a European cultural group during a particular period in time. After all, the alternative of offering classes on "Italian Art, 1400-1490" and "French Art, 1750-1886" are actually less helpful in giving students or the general public any sense of what they are actually going to see and study. And switching to using the names of artists ("Fra Angelico to Botticelli" and "Jacques-Louis David to Camille Pissarro") may make matters even worse because that assumes the student/viewer already knows who these people are and can date/contextualize them.

My art history survey textbook Gardner’s Art Through the Ages (12th ed., 2005) more-or-less says the same thing I said to SFR about what Baroque actually means. The authors also mention that the word comes from the Portuguese barroco, meaning an irregularly shaped pearl, and that it contrasts "with the rational order of classicism" (689). More noteworthy is that they acknowledge "the problematic associations of the term and because no commonalities can be ascribed to all of the art and cultures of this period," they have restricted its use to very specific cultures as it seems most appropriate. But then as you go through the chapter, you see that they use the term in each section on Italy, Spain, Flanders, The Netherlands, etc., showing that even they fall into the trap. Clearly relying on art historical terms like Baroque are now "baroquen" and need to be fixed, but it seems the only way to do this is to ensure the terms are explained as having some, but not all, defining characteristics that are appropriate to a particular time period because of current social and political events in a particular geographical area. And even with all that, it's important to note that not every artist shared the same styles and thus there are exceptions to every rule. Admittedly, it may confuse some, but need in the past to pigeon-hole everything into single broad-sweeping categories just doesn't work anymore for contemporary audiences. The new world order of art history needs a more nuanced explanation. (Images: Web Gallery of Art)

YCBA Visiting Scholar Award

I'm a regular visitor to the Yale Center for British Art, and I haven't had a chance to report until now on some exciting news about them and me. Stay tuned for that below. Yesterday afternoon I took a train ride up to New Haven, CT with Peter Trippi (editor of Fine Art Connoisseur magazine and co-curator of the recent John William Waterhouse exhibition). We were on our way to the YCBA to hear Elizabeth Prettejohn give the last of a series of public lectures on Victorian art that she had been doing all month. I had hoped to attend more of them, but I was actually in Europe at the time. Regular bklynbiblio readers know that Prettejohn's name makes appearances here from time to time. I admit it: I'm a fan. In her talk she focused on the idea of Giorgione (ca. 1477/8-1510), specifically how his work was an influence on Victorian painters such as Edward Burne-Jones and art critics such as Walter Pater. Almost no works are safely attributed to Giorgione. For instance, the ca. 1509 work above, Le Concert champêtre (Musée du Louvre), was attributed to Giorgione but it is now said to have been by Titian. Even in the 19th-century very few works were definitively attributed to Giorgione. Prettejohn argued that this obfuscation charmed Aesthetic painters into borrowing on his Venetian style so as to create pictures about beauty without subject or moral virtue. The talk was interesting, and there was a wine reception afterwards, with opportunities for networking. I was invited to join a group for dinner as well, which was very generous of them. I always find myself feeling a bit self-conscious interacting with all the bigwigs of Victorian art criticism (including Tim Barringer, Martina Droth, and Jason Rosenfeld), but it was a pleasant evening overall and well worth the trip. By the time I got the train and subway home, it was after 1am.

Now for the news. I've been selected to participate in a 1-week seminar that will be taught by Martina Droth (Head of Research and Curator of Sculpture, YCBA) and Mark Hallett (Prof. of the History of Art, York University) at YCBA this June. The topic of the seminar is "The Artist's Studio in Britain, 1700-1900" and will be of great use to me in my dissertation research on the sculptor John Gibson. But the even BIGGER news is that the YCBA also has awarded me a 1-month Visiting Scholar Award. Much like the fellowship I received to the Henry Moore Institute last year, this award will provide me with housing, a per diem stipend, research facilities, and access to their fantastic collection and all the Yale University Libraries. I'll be there from November to December. I'm really looking forward to it.

Recap on CAA 2011 in NYC

Last March I had written about the call for papers for the College Art Association's centennial conference, which was held the past few days at the Hilton near Rockefeller Center. It was a crowded conference this year. Case in point: on Wednesday afternoon I was interested in going to the session "The Crisis in Art History," but the room was so packed that people were spilling outside into the hallway. I decided everyone else can worry about the crisis, I had better things to do with my time. Three days later I still don't know what the actual "crisis" is, but I'm sure I'll find out soon enough. I don't want to suggest that the conference wasn't worth attending, because it is always informative, although I minimized my participation this year because I haven't been feeling well and I was working this week. I did have the opportunity to reconnect and network with colleagues from the past, including friends from the Henry Moore Institute who were in the Exhibitors' Hall with a booth promoting the museum and institute as a center for the study of British sculpture. I did go to some excellent panel sessions, although curiously none of them were the ones I first thought about attending back in March. I decided to use the conference more as an opportunity to fill in gaps for areas I was less knowledgeable about, which turned out to be useful. Below are a few highlights that stand out, but not everything I attended. You can see the entire schedule of sessions by clicking here.

The panel session "Sexuality and Gender: Shifting Identities in Early Modern Europe" included a paper by one of my professors, James M. Saslow, entitled Gianantonio Bazzi, Called the Sodomite: Self-Fashioning and the "Gay Gaze" in Art and History. I have heard him speak of Sodoma in the past, but it was refreshing to hear him go into more detail about other aspects of this 16th-century Renaissance artist's life and work. The image above is Sodoma's sensual painting of St. Sebastian, 1525, in the Palazzo Pitti, Florence (image: Web Gallery of Art). Caroline Babcock's paper Illustrating the Sex Manual in the Seventeenth Century: Nicolas Venette's "On Conjugal Love" spent a great deal of time discussing graphic representations of the clitoris in anatomical texts of the day, to the point (unfortunately) that I have no idea what her paper actually was about. Diane Wolfthal's paper Beyond the Human: Visualizing the Posthuman in Early Modern Europe drew our attention to the debates on the posthuman (part-man, part-machine) by focusing on representations of the mandrake root as sexualized creatures in Baroque engravings.

The Thursday afternoon panel session "Rococo, Late-Rococo, Post-Rococo: Art, Theory, and Historiography" had one of the best papers: Colin Bailey on A Casualty of Style? Reconsidering Fragonard’s Progress of Love from the Frick Collection. Bailey is a curator at the Frick Collection here in NYC and is an 18th-century French painting specialist. The image here is Love Letters, 1771-72, one of the exquisite four panel paintings by Jean-Honoré Fragonard in that series (image: Frick) that eventually were bought by Henry Clay Frick and installed in his house. He offered a new interpretation of these paintings, suggesting the old story that Madame du Barry rejected them for the Château de Louveciennes in favor of a Neoclassical suite of paintings by Joseph-Marie Vien may in fact be wrong, that the architect Claude-Nicolas Ledoux may be responsible for their rejection because they no longer fit in with his intended decorative scheme for the music pavilion for which Bailey argues they were intended. Using Photoshop, he integrated the paintings back into archival photos of the room, which offered viewers an opportunity to see the paintings as they may have been intended when first painted.

Finally, the panel session "New Approaches to the Study of Fashion and Costume in Western Art, 1650–1900" offered a few interesting papers that reminded me how closely the history of fashion mirrors the history of art itself. Kathleen Nicholson instructed us not to assume early fashion plates from the period of Louis XIV are always true in her paper When Isn’t Fashion Fashion? Late Seventeenth-Century French Fashion Prints and Dress in Portraiture. Amelia Rauser and Heather Belnap Jensen offered different ways of looking at women's fashion in the Post-Revolutionary period ca. 1800, with the first focusing on idealized beauty and sexuality and the second on motherhood and haute couture. Jennifer W. Olmsted shifted focus to masculinity and portrait painting during the period of the July Monarchy. Unfortunately, I felt like she expressed the obvious, that painters had to come up with alternative ways to depict luxury once men's bourgeois fashion shifted from colorful fabrics to blacks and browns, and ultimately never addressed the issue of masculinity itself, but perhaps it's part of a larger work in which she explains all this in more detail.