Section Meetings:
A: Wed 12 m. Frick rm 204
B: Wed 3 p.m. Frick rm 202
C: Thurs 12 m. Frick rm 202
D: Thurs 1 p.m. Frick rm 202
E: Fri 10 a.m. Frick rm 203
F:    Fri 11 a.m. Frick rm 203
G: Fri 12 m. Frick rm 203
H: Fri 1 p.m. Frick rm 203

Writing Practica (One extra credit--must be preregisterd):
Mon 12 m. Frick rm 203 (CRN 20957)
Wed 12 m. Frick rm 203 (CRN 20964)

COURSE SCHEDULE

INTRODUCTION TO HA&A 0010, FALL TERM 2001

OTHER COURSE INFORMATION

Grading

Egyptian Art

GREEK ART

How art works: text and image in a complex work.

Roman Art

Early Christian and Byzantine Art

Arts of the Central Middle Ages

Romanesque and Gothic Art

The Late-Medieval Tradition in Italy

Giotto and the culmination of Medieval Art

Early Renaissance Sculpture in Italy

Early Renaissance Painting in Italy

High Renaissance Painting

Michelangelo the Sculptor

Michelangelo and Mannerist Painting

The Renaissance in the North: the Age of Jan van Eyck

The Renaissance in the North: the Age of Albrecht Dürer

Baroque Art in Italy: Caravaggio and Bernini

Baroque Art in Flanders, Spain and France

Baroque Painting in the Netherlands

Art in the eighteenth century

Painting in the Nineteenth Century: Realism

Manet, Monet, and Impressionism

Post-Impressionism

Fauvism, Expressionism, and Cubism

Nonobjectivism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism

Post-Heroic Art of the End of the Last Century

The Gothic Cathedral

Renaissance Architecture:  Fifteenth and Sixteenth centuries

In Search of Modern Architecture
 
 

     COURSE SCHEDULE

Monday August 27 Egyptian Art
Wednesday Aug 29Greek Art
SECTION MEETINGS are cancelled this week, but Writing Practica will meet Monday and Wednesday as usual.

[Monday September 3    NO CLASS: University observes Labor Day]

Wednesday Sep 5    How art works: text and image in a complex work.

SECTION MEETINGS WEDNESDAY, THURSDAY, AND FRIDAY AT CARNEGIE MUSEUM this week and almost every subsequent week (see specifics below). Please meet promptly at your beginning times at the admissions desk of the Scaife Gallery (long, low wing of Carnegie Museum on Forbes Avenue near Craig). Attendance will be taken at the beginning of each 50-minute session. If you're late, go up the long steps, take first left, then first right into the ancient art room.

Sep 10    Roman Art
Sep 12    Early Christian and Byzantine Art
SECTIONS MEET in Frick classrooms, as indicated per class

Sep 17    Arts of the Central Middle Ages
Sep 19    Romanesque and Gothic Art
SECTIONS MEET AT CARNEGIE MUSEUM, HALL OF ARCHITECTURE: meet in usual spot, but note that Hall of Architecture is not part of Scaife Gallery

Sep 24    The Late-Medieval Tradition in Italy
Sep 26    Giotto
SECTIONS MEET in Frick classrooms for first midterm review.

Oct 1       FIRST MIDTERM TEST
Oct 3       Early Renaissance Sculpture
NO SECTIONS this week

Oct 8       Early Renaissance Painting
Oct 10    High Renaissance Painting
SECTIONS MEET in Frick Cloister:  Renaissance Fresco

Oct 15     Michelangelo the Sculptor
Oct 17     Michelangelo and Mannerist Painting
SECTIONS MEET AT CARNEGIE MUSEUM:  Early & High Renaissance Art

Oct 22    The Renaissance in the North: the Age of Van Eyck
Oct 24    The Renaissance in the North: the Age of Durer
Hand in one-page writing assignment in lecture today
SECTIONS MEET at Carnegie Museum: Renaissance paintings, North and South

Oct 29    Baroque Art in Italy: Caravaggio and Bernini
Oct 31    Baroque Art in Flanders, Spain and France
SECTIONS MEET AT CARNEGIE MUSEUM: Baroque painting

Nov 5       Baroque Painting in the Netherlands
Nov 7       Painting in the eighteenth century
SECTIONS MEET in Frick classrooms for second midterm review.

Nov 12    SECOND MIDTERM TEST
Nov 14    Painting in the nineteenth century: Realism
NO SECTIONS THIS WEEK

Nov 19    Manet, Monet, and Impressionism
[Nov 21   NO CLASS, NO SECTIONS: University preruns Thanksgiving]

Nov 26    Post-Impressionism
Nov 28    Fauvism, Expressionism, and Cubism
SECTIONS MEET AT CARNEGIE MUSEUM: Realism, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism

Dec 3       Nonobjectivism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism
Dec 5       Post-Heroic Art of the End of the Last Century
SECTIONS MEET AT CARNEGIE MUSEUM: Art of the Twentieth and Twenty-first Centuries

FINAL EXAMINATION:  Thursday December 13 in Frick Auditorium, 10:00--11:50 a.m. Note the special time! Corrected exams will be available at noon Wednesday December 19 in Department office, 104 Frick, until Tuesday 15 January 2002 only: changes in grades not possible after that date. Grades are not given out by telephone or email, but enclose a stamped, self-addressed envelope or postcard and we can mail your grade to you.
 
 

INTRODUCTION TO HA&A 0010, FALL TERM 2001
 

     Welcome to the History of Western Art!  It is ironic to talk about a "new" course when some of the paintings and sculptures we will be studying are 5000 years old, but several things about the course are new this term. The edition of the Art Past, Art Present textbook that you will be using was printed only a few months ago.  Among its advantages besides its very recent date are the attention it gives to the technical processes of making art (all too rarely considered), and the fact that every "key work" for this course is illustrated in your text or else hangs on the walls of CarnegieMuseum.  Another advantage is that the three authors are all faculty or graduates of this University.  The text contains many non-Western works of art that I would have loved to have had when I taught non-Western art around the world on the University's Semester-at-Sea program. Nonetheless, I have decided to concentrate only on Western art this term, because HA&A 0020 already exists as an introductory course on Asian art, and because I have found from experience that one must avoid crowding too many things into a course.  For the same reason, I am concentrating here on paintings and sculptures, though the text also speaks of many works in architecture.  Students who enjoy our glimpse of architecture this term may want to sign up later for HA&A 0040 (a course I often teach myself), which concentrates on the history of architecture.

This will be the first term of this course in which all the works of art are projected as digitized images ("scans") rather than "slides."  Students who may have taken another class with me know that since 1997 I have taught exclusively with computer-generated images.  I held off for this class because color balance is so important when viewing paintings, but ultimately there are so many advantages to scans that I was forced to take advantage of the technology.  There is also a website linked to this class: see www.pitt.edu/~tokerism, then "Introduction to the History of Western Art" (this will require a password, which I will give you at the first class meeting).  That takes you to a full copy of this Sourcebook at that website, and a link to a display of 95% of the images from this class. (You might want to print these dozen or so pages out: they will give you very convenient thumbnail images for later study.)  The website also provides a quick way to email me if you forget my address (ftoker@pitt.edu).

A key component of the course is distinctly low-tech, and you'll soon be glad it is. We will be viewing painting and sculpture face-to-face in the galleries of Carnegie Museum of Art across the street.  You will be meeting there with your Teaching Instructors nearly every week, and, as University of Pittsburgh students, your admission is free!  That goes for any time you may want to visit as part of a class or on your own--but having your UPittsburgh ID on you is essential.  You will need to swipe it through one of the admission machines at either of the Forbes Avenue entrances.

How to guarantee doing well in this course. There is, naturally, that old student question: "What do I need to know for the tests?"  That is not easy for me to answer. You need to know many works of art--probably thousands--before you can understand how art changed through the ages, as well as the cultural contexts of many different historical periods. But in response to student suggestions, I have reduced the number of "key works" from about 300 to somewhere around 100, all of which you can find in your text.  There are now two midterms instead of one (another student request), which means you will need to recall no more than 40 works per test.  And the questions on the midterm and the final exam will be partly factual rather than entirely essay format--still another student request. There are, in addition, occasional quizzes given in the lectures.  You can be certain to do excellently in this course with regular attendance at the lectures and sections, regular studying of the "key works" and the terms in this Sourcebook (another student suggestion), and regular thinking about these works of art.

The teaching assistants and I will do all we can to make this course one that you will remember as one of the highlights of your college career. The rest really depends on you.
 
 

OTHER COURSE INFORMATION

     Class meetings: Class meets for lectures in Frick Auditorium at 11 Monday and Wednesday mornings and for a third hour in smaller section meetings on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. The section meetings will be held at Carnegie Museum and occasionally in the Frick classrooms, upper floor: see this Sourcebook for the weekly locations.

Writing sections: Students enrolled for the extra W-credit will attend a Writing Section each Monday or Wednesday in addition to their regular section.

Important dates:
Monday October 1FIRST MIDTERM TEST
Wednesday Oct 24ONE-PAGE WRITING ASSIGNMENT DUE (details below)
Monday Nov 12SECOND MIDTERM TEST
Thursday December 13 FINAL EXAMINATION, Frick Auditorium 10--11:50 a.m.

Readings:  The required text for this course is Art Past, Art Present, at the book center, plus this Sourcebook, available at Copycat on Forbes Avenue.  The strength of the book--which also includes all the "key works" of this course--lies in giving a full context to the art we will be studying.

Each lecture summarized in this Sourcebook has a "Required Reading" in Art Past, Art Present, and a "Suggested Reading" in a selection of books in Frick Fine Arts Library. Whether specified or not, all references to key works are automatically "required reading" in your text.

Books on reserve: The following books are on reserve in Frick Library. These "short titles" will lead you to the full entries in the reserve book listing there.

Ann Adams: Rembrandt's "Bathsheba Reading King David's Letter" (this is the text for the W-section of this course, but excellent for anyone who wants to better understand how scholars analyze, discuss, document, and interpret works of art.)

Sylvan Barnet: A Short Guide to Writing About Art. Boston, 1985. (Gives actual examples of best writing styles on art, as well as bibliography forms.)

Henry Sayre: Writing About Art

Franklin Toker: "Sourcebook" for HA&A 0010

Catalogue of Carnegie Museum of Art collection

Handbook of Carnegie Museum of Art collection

David Wilkins et al.: Art Past, Art Present
David Wilkins: Thinking and Writing about Art

The regular Frick library collection, NOT on reserve, has the following useful books, among thousands of others (ask for them at the circulation desk):

Helen Gardner: Gardner's Art Through the Ages
Sam Hunter, American Art of the Twentieth Century: Painting, Sculpture, Architecture
Peter and Linda Murray: The Penguin Dictionary of Art and Artists. Harmondsworth, England, 1983.
James Pierce: From Abacus to Zeus:  A Handbook of Art History. Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1986. (Good outline of terms in art.)
Joshua Taylor: Learning to Look. Chicago, 1957.
Daniel Wheeler: Art Since Mid-Century
 
 

     Grading: 20% apiece for the first and second midterms, 30% for the final examination; 20% for the one-page writing assignment and quiz results in the lectures, and a final 10% for participation and attendance at section meetings (W-sections are graded separately).  We don't accept excuses for missed quizzes or section meetings except in case of long-term illness or accident, since there is no penalty for missing up to two quizzes or sections.  This course follows this Department's statement on academic integrity: "Plagiarizing is an act that violates the Student Conduct Code, and will not be tolerated in this class. Plagiarized assignments will result in a failing grade for that assignment."  This applies to copying from another student or any other dishonest acts regarding any assignment or test.

The occasional quizzes: You will be given unannounced occasional quizzes throughout the term, counting for nearly 20% of your term grade. Most of the quizzes will be multiple-choice and true/false.  Bring a #2 pencil to every class.  You will be responsible for material given in the lectures, in the "required reading" selections in Art Past, Art Present, and for the key works and key terms listed in the Sourcebook. (Note, however, that the "key work" designation in the Sourcebook is provisional only, and can change at any point during the course.)  You will only be asked about those key works that were discussed in class or in section meetings.  You are responsible for finding the relevant pages in both the Sourcebook and the class text.

These quizzes will prevent you from goofing off between one test and another: you will need to do regular reading and reviewing of the material, or else it will all become a jumble in your mind.  In calculating your term grade, we will drop the two quiz grades in which you did least well.  Since you can miss two without a penalty, we will accept no excuses if you are obliged to skip one (see note above).  Correct quiz answers will be given in the lecture following.

Please observe that merely doing well in the three tests will get you no higher than a C, since nearly a third of your grade comes from the quizzes and participation--not merely attendance--at the section meetings. Observe, in the spreadsheet below from an actual class, how much better students would have done--including four who would have passed rather than failed the class--had they regularly attended lectures and section meetings:

The one-page writing assignment will be collected at the lecture on Wednesday October 24. Expected length: one doublespaced typed page. At top right, please write both your name and the letter corresponding to the section you attend each week. In this short paper, you are asked to be a critic at any temporary art show currently on view in the city of Pittsburgh.  That can include the temporary exhibition galleries at the Carnegie, the Frick, the Warhol, the Mattress Factory (my unabashed favorite), UPittsburgh, CMU, Pittsburgh Center for the Arts, Society for Contemporary Crafts, the Silver-Eye (photography) and the various commercial galleries in town, in any medium.  You can find "what's up" in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, City Paper, and In Pittsburgh. Your best choice would be a one-artist show, or some "theme" show. Consult with me or your Teaching Instructor about applicability, but be warned that works on permanent view at any of these galleries will not be accepted: in which case you will get zero credit on the assignment.

As a critic, you have the power to change a reader's perception of a work of art. A good critic does not merely find fault, but calls our attention to interesting matters going on in works of art, and enhances our perception and appreciation of them.  The assignment requires neither reading nor research--just hard, concentrated looking, feeling, and thinking. Choose your subject carefully: these must be artists about whom you genuinely have something to say.  Write the paper several times: it's easy to gush for ten pages, tough to convey your sentiments in just one.

Student meeting hours: I meet students Tuesdays from 9 to 10 a.m. and from 1 to 2 p.m. in room 233 on the Frick Fine Arts Library balcony; should these hours change I will announce it so in class when term begins.  For an appointment at other times, call 648.2419. I encourage you to email me at ftoker@pitt.edu: I will reply within 24 hours, and generally faster.  I also like to have lunches and sometimes fieldtrips with students: suggestions wanted!

The teaching instructors meet students in Frick room 151, by the entrance to the Frick Fine Arts Library. Their weekly office hours are posted on the door; they can also be reached by telephone during their office hours at 648.2178. They will give out their email addresses when you first meet them.

Required reading:
Art Past, Art Present, pp. 44--57.

Each year I debate whether I should begin the history of art with art or theory--since the course will deal with both.  This year I decided to look at art first--Egypt and Greece--and then summarize what I'm doing with a third session devoted to "How to Look at Art."

Thus we start the class today with Egypt. Ancient Egyptian art is best known from religious and funerary contexts, although some domestic art and architecture has been recovered archaeologically.  Religious art was part of the cult temple and assisted the pharaoh (the king) in continuing Egypt's survival on a daily basis.  Funerary art was designed to create an environment where the body and soul (the ka) of the deceased would be able to survive forever after death.  Egyptian art, like all ritual art, is formulaic.  Within the obvious repetition of forms and artistic formulas, however, one does find innovation and preogress in the posing and solution of artistic problems.

Key works:
48. [Note that every key work is preceded by the page number in Art Past, Art Present on which it is illustrated.]  Palette of Narmer from Hierakonpolis, Upper Egypt, ca. 3150 BCE; Egyptian Museum, Cairo. [BCE is an abbreviation for "before the Common Era," a more inclusive chronological designation than the old BC or AD; the contraction ca. (from the Latin word circa) means "about," in cases in which there is no precise document on the creation of a work.]

44.  The Pharaoh Khafre, ca. 2500 BCE, from the Valley Temple opposite his pyramid at Gizeh, outside Cairo. Now Egyptian Museum. Diorite, height, 5 1/2 ft.; over-lifesize.

57.  Pond in a Garden, New Kingdom; fresco fragment from Tomb of Nebamun at Thebes, ca. 1390 BCE, now in British Museum.

56. Ti Watching a Hippopotamus Hunt, painted relief from tomb of Ti, still at Saqqara, ca. 2500 BCE.

Works in Context:
--Pyramids of Menkure, Khafre, and Khufu, ca. 2530--2470 BCE, Gizeh.  The Khufu Pyramid was once 480 ft. high; each side 755 ft. long.
--Daily Life Scene, tomb of Khnun-hotep, Beni Hasan, ca. 1900 BCE
--Fowling Scene, tomb of Nebamun, Thebes.
--Head of Queen Nefertiti from Tel el-Amarna, ca. 1360 BCE.

Key Terms:
[Note: whether preceded by the words "Key Terms" or not, the terms you need to learn are generally in bold type and underlined, as shown here. Note, too, that all major terms are also defined in the glossary to your text, pp. 598--605.]

Hierarchic scaling - a characteristic of Egyptian art and of much medieval Christian art, to show certain figures larger than others based not on their true proportions nor on their closeness or farness from the picture plane, but according to their importance in a social or religious hierarchy.

Medium - the material(s) of which a work of art is composed

Perspective - a formula for projecting an illusion of three-dimensional objects on a two-dimensional surface (typically a painting or a relief).

Relief - the projection of a figure or part of a design from the background on which it is carved, often distinguished as high or low relief.

Suggested reading:
David, Rosalie: The Egyptian Kingdoms, London, 1975
Edwards, I. E. S.: The Pyramids of Egypt, Baltimore, 1982
Smith, W. Stevenson: Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt, NY, 1981

Required Reading: class text, pp. 70--95.

In assessing the art and architecture of Greece, we must be aware of the great gaps in chronology of three interrelated periods in ancient architecture: the Old Kingdom of Egypt c. 2700 BC; the buildings of the "Aegean" period at Knossos and Tiryns, c. 1400 BC; and the age of classical architecture in Greece in the 5th century BC. In the Aegean period architecture evolves in two very different historical settings; the domesticity and luxury of Knossos, and the military austerity of Tiryns and Mycenae. Greek architecture in the classical period built on those early precedents in several ways. The most important was its use of the column, which was developed structurally, anthropomorphically, and aesthetically into the refined formulas of the classical period. To a remarkable degree, the interweave of the arts of design and sulpture in Greek buildings--above all the Parthenon--reflects the theories of knowledge that were proposed by the Platonic and the Aristotelian schools of philosophy. The Greeks were thus the first to apply artistic theory to what had previously been an essentially workshop tradition. This classical foundation is probably the single most important component of Western art and architecture.

Key works:
74. Exekias (both potter and painter): Achilles and Ajax Playing Draughts, black-figure amphora. ca. 530 BCE; Vatican Museum, Rome. We will study a variant of this pot in the ancient art room at Carnegie Museum.

76.  Archaic style Kouros from the Tomb of Kroisos, Anavysos, Greece, ca. 520 BCE.  Marble with red paint on the hair, headband, pupils of the eyes; height 6 ft.  National Archaeological Museum, Athens.

82.  Zeus (or Poseidon?), ca. 480 BCE. Bronze, National Archaeological Museum, Athens.

90. Praxiteles: Hermes and Dionysos, marble. From Olympia, 1st-c. BCE copy after a lost 4th-c. original.

Works in Context:
--Iktinos as architect, replacing Kallikrates, and Phidias as sculptor: Parthenon at Athens, with sculptures in the frieze, metopes, pediment; 447-4 BCE.
--Panathenaic Amphora with Runners, Archaic Style, ca. 520 BCE.  Painted terracotta, height 24 1/2 in.  The Metropolitan Museum, New York
--Kouros, also called Kritias Boy, Acropolis Museum, Athens, ca. 480 BCE
98.  Polykleitos: Doryphorus ("Spear-bearer"; Roman copy), ca. 450 BCE, Naples.
--Brygos Painter, Revelers, red-figure kylix from Vulci, ca. 490 B.C.
--Apollonius (?), Seated Boxer, Hellenistic bronze, ca. 50 B.C., 50" tall

Key terms:
Naturalism - An attitude or working method that strives to make art resemble as closely as possible the appearance of the natural world.

Realism is essentially the same (Gardner calls it "the representation of things according to nature"); it wants to tell us that we are seeing the real world.  Both are to be contrasted with idealization or idealism, which is the abstracting and "improving" of things (especially in the representation of the human body) according to a pre-conception of an ideal type, or some arbitrary standard of beauty.

Contrapposto ("weight-shift") - a lifelike pose adopted by the Greeks, in which a statue rests its weight on one straight leg, while the second leg is shown bent, in a relaxed position.

Proportion - the relation of one part to another in a work of art and of each part to the whole in size, height, width, length, and depth.  A canon of proportion is an established norm:  deviations from that would be called tall, short, thick, thin, etc.

Plato - Associated with philosophy of knowledge by ideals: the world we inhabit is only a dim reflection of a world of ideal types.  Hence our knowledge can only be a knowledge of the ideal types from which everything in our world is derived. Major impact on the arts.

Aristotle - Associated with philosophy of empiricism, or knowledge by facts. We can only know what we directly ascertain by our five senses: touch, taste, sight, hearing, smell.  Major impact on science.

Suggested Reading:
Martin Robertson: A Shorter History of Greek Art, Cambridge, 1981
Richard Brilliant: Arts of the Ancient Greeks, New York, 1973
Vincent Bruno (ed.): The Parthenon, New York, 1974

Selected texts on Greek art and architecture:

Among the old sculptors who are particularly mentioned as having spent time among them [the Egyptians] are Theodoros and Telekles, the sons of Rhoikos, who made the statue of Pythian Apollo for the Samians.  Of this image it is related that half of it was made by Telekles in Samos, while, at Ephesus, the other half was finished by his brother Theodoros, and that when the parts were fitted together with one another, they corresponded so well that they appeared to have been made by one person.  This type of workmanship is not practiced at all among the Greeks, but among the Egyptians it is especiallycommon.  For among them the symmetria of statues is not calculated according to the appearances which are presented to the eyes, as they are among the Greeks; but rather, when they have laid out the stones, and, after dividing them up, begin to work on them, at this point they select a module from the smallest parts which can be applied to the largest.  Then dividing up the lay-out of the body into twenty-one parts, plus an additional one-quarter, they produce all the proportions of the living figure.  Therefore, when the artists agree with one another about the size of a statue, they separate from each other, and execute the parts of the work for which the size has been agreed upon with such precision that their particular way of working is a cause for astonishment.  The statue in Samos, in accordance with the technique of the Egyptians, is divided into two parts by a line which runs from the top of the head, through the middle of the figure to the groin, thus dividing the figure into two equal parts.  They say that this statue is, for the most part, quite like those of the Egyptians, because it has the hands suspended at its sides, and the legs parted as if in walking.
         --Diodorus Siculus I, 98: 5-9
Polykleitos of Sikyon, a disciple of Ageladas, made a Diadoumenos (one who binds a fillet on his head), a soft-looking youth which is famous for having cost one hundred talents; and a Doryphoros (spear bearer), a virile looking boy.  He also made a statue which artists call the "Canon" and from which they derive the basic forms of their art, as if from some kind of law; thus he alone of men is deemed to have rendered art itself in a work of art.                                  --Pliny: Natural History, XXXIV, 55

A painting contest between Parrhasios and Zeuxis:
[Parrhasios] entered a contest with Zeuxis, and when the latter depicted some grapes with such success that birds flew up to the [painting, Parrhasios] then depicted a linen curtain with such verisimilitude that Zeuxis, puffed up with pride by the verdict of the birds, eventually requested that the curtain be removed and his picture shown, and, when he understood his error, conceded defeat with sincere modesty, because he himself had only deceived birds, but Parrhasios had deceived him, an artist.  It is said that afterwards Zeuxis painted a picture of a boy carrying grapes, and when the birds flew up to them, he approached the work and, in irritation with it, said, "I have painted the grapes better than the boy, for if I had rendered him perfectly, the birds would have been afraid."
--Pliny: Natural History, XXV, 61
Beauty, he (Chrysippos) believes, arises not in the commensurability of the constituent elements (of the body), but in the commensurability of the parts, such as that of finger to finger, and of all the fingers to the palm and the wrist, and of these to the forearm, and of the forearm to the upper arm, and, in fact, of everything to everything else, just as it is written in the Canon of Polykleitos.  For having taught us in that work all the proportions of the body, Polykleitos supported his treatise with a work; he made a statue according to the tenets of his treatise, and called the statue, like the work, the "Canon."
         --Galen: de Placititis Hipposcratis et Platonis, V
Modellers and sculptors and painters, and in fact image-makers in general, paint or model beautiful figures by observing an ideal form in each case, that is, whatever form is most beautiful in man or in the horse or in the cow or in the lion, always looking for the mean within each genus.  And a certain statue might perhaps also be commended, the one called the "Canon" of Polykleitos; it got such a name from having precise commensurability of all the parts to one another.
         --Galen: de tempramentis, I, 9
A definition of Beauty, by Plotinus:
What is it that impresses you when you look at something, attracts you, captivates you, and fills you with joy? The general opinion, I may say, is that it is the interrelation of parts toward one another and toward the whole, with the added element of good color, which constitutes beauty as perceived by the eye; in other words, that beauty in visible things as in everything else consists of symmetry and proportion.  In their eyes, nothing simple and devoid of parts can be beautiful, only a composite.

Required reading:
ART PAST/ART PRESENT: give close and repeated reading to the Introduction, pp. xii--xv, and Chapter One pp. 1--21 on the objectives of your textbook, and on the process of viewing and analyzing art.

Key work:
Nicholas Poussin (French, seventeenth century): The Infant Bacchus Entrusted to the Nymphs. 1658. Now Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. See photograph on following page.

In examining Poussin's The Infant Bacchus Entrusted to the Nymphs we can follow the choices made by the artist and suggest some of his motivations through a close description of the painting, including a preparatory drawing and an x-ray.  This process leads us into the history of art because we examine the subject matter of Poussin, which is taken from Greco-Roman mythology, and we also learn about his personal situation.  We will examine also how Poussin affected later artists such as Cezanne.  These are all questions routinely examined by art historians.

Art Appreciation - The "standard" approach to looking at art. It dates from Antiquity, and still dominates in high-school classes on art and in museum tours. Art Appreciation puts its whole emphasis on our enjoyment of art, and analyzes the qualities that make certain works of art "masterpieces."  This approach rarely looks at art in its cultural context, nor does it concern itself with the technical and documentary questions about works of art.

Art-as-Cultural-History - A second approach, also used in Antiquity but more powerful in the twentieth century, where it is often found in the service of Marxism and other social or political movements.  This approach emphasizes not the special values that are unique to art as the language of form and vision, but interprets works of art as documents in the history of civilization.

History of Art - The third and newest approach to looking at art, invented about 200 years ago as part of the scientific revolution and popularized in Germany a century ago.  This approach is no less concerned with the inherent qualities of works of art than the first approach, and no less concerned with cultural history than the second, but it attempts to look at art objectively (while acknowledging that this can never be actually so). Art History investigates works of art through technical and documentary analysis and a thorough investigation of all circumstances that created the work of art in the first place:  the artist and his or her background; the patron who commissioned the work, and his or her motives; the audience that "received" the work, and its culture; and any and all economic, religious, political, social, or intellectual currents that may have affected the work when it was created or which affect our current interpretions of it.

"History of art," then, boils down to three key questions: As you look at paintings and sculptures with me in the lectures, in your textbook, or on the walls of the Carnegie Museum, keep in mind three questions about every work we look at:

1) The first question regards the "artist at work": what artistic decisions did the artist employ in each work to convey its visual meaning? (Did s/he make certain figures larger and smaller, closer or farther from the painting surface, or, in a sculpture, is the surface smoother or rougher?  These are all examples of artistic decisions.)

2) The second question regards the work of art as cultural document. How is each work related to the cultural and historical context from which it emerged?  What does it tell us about that era?

3) The third question regards the work of art as an object of enjoyment.  Art has always been one of the most enjoyable things on the face of the planet.  Naturally we don't all have the same taste in art, and we would not want to, but it is a fact that art can be discussed in terms of quality and, to a degree, in terms of why it gives us pleasure.

The first question could be called a contemporary analysis: it explores how the work of art looks to you.  It requires application of the first three of a total of six steps to a full history of art.  The first three steps are:
1) describe the work.
2) analyze it (show how it works formally).
3) create a provisional criticism (judgment based on "just looking").

The last three steps could be called a historical analysis:
4) form a historical analysis, which will incorporate facts of the context in which the work was created.
5) create a learned criticism (based on these facts as well as on personal reactions).
6) expand into a theory of art.

Description denotes the act of conveying what we see in the object of art:  its subject matter, its color, shapes, scale, proportion, space, texture, and overall composition.

Analysis includes description but takes it one more step:  What is the purpose of the artist?  Analysis presupposes that all art is a question of choice and seeks to find the motivation behind these choices.

Three definitions in Webster's Collegiate Dictionary may help:
Describe: "To represent by words; to give an account of."
Analyze: "To separate or resolve into elements or constituent parts. To separate mentally the parts of (a whole) so as to reveal their relation to it and to one another; as, to analyze an economic theory.  To study the factors of (a solution, problem, or the like) in detail, in order to determine the solution or outcome."
Criticism: "The art of judging with knowledge and propriety the beauties and faults of works of art or literature."

How do you distinguish description from analysis?  The following conversation with my optometrist provides an example.  I told my optometrist: "I read a lot better when my book is under a bright light."

Dr. Morgan replied: "Of course: the pupil reacts to the bright light by getting smaller. When smaller, it creates a lens that is much sharper than it is when the pupil is wider. So you see better."

My first observation was a description, which is at the heart of both both art and science. Dr. Morgan's reply was analysis: he put each step in a logical sequence, and explained how things work: he didn't just say what happened.

Criticism does not typically take place in science, at least not as an expression of preference. (Who would bother to say "Those cancer germs are really yukky"?: we take for granted that cancer is yukky to begin with.)  But there can be an expression of criticism, or judgment, on the consequences of what you have just observed.

So, looking at any work, or any pair of works, you need to describe each work first, then analyze it: that is, show what artistic decisions the artist made in creating the work. In the end you are able (and encouraged) to say: "I really prefer this work to that one," but you are obliged to specify the bases for your judgment.

When you have studied the specific background to a work, you are ready to present a historical analysis, which explores how the work of art looked to the audience for which it was created.  This involves the fourth, fifth, and sixth of the six steps outlined above.

Finally, you are ready for a learned critique, which is a considered judgment on a work of art in the light of its history.  When you have created learned critiques on many works of art from a certain period, you can conceptualize your own theory of art, and I invite you to help me teach this course.
 

Suggested reading:
The Taylor, Barnet, Pierce, and Sayre books on reserve, on discussing and writing about art.

Works in Context (these works may or may be discussed in a particular class; the citations are provided for your convenience):

290. Michelangelo Buonarroti: David, 1501-04.  Marble, height 14' 3".  Accademia, Florence.
276. Michelangelo: Pietà, 1498--99. St. Peter's Basilica, Rome.
280. Michelangelo: Pietà, ca. 1547--55. Florence Cathedral.

--Annibale Carracci: Christ Appearing to St. Peter, ca. 1600; National Gallery, London.
--El Greco: Vision of St. John, ca. 1600; Metropolitan Museum, New York.
--Baccio Bandinelli: Dead Christ, ca. 1555, from high altar of Cathedral of S. Maria del Fiore, Florence.
--Simone Martini (attributed to): Guidoriccio da Fogliano, 1328; fresco portrait in the Palazzo Comunale, Siena, Italy.

Required reading: text, 100--125

Roman painting and sculpture were influenced by, but also evolved independently, from Greek prototypes.  In the place of the calm idealization of Greek sculpture, Roman sculpture tended to realism and expressive representation of specific personalities or events.  The Roman penchant for illusionistic settings, both in sculpture relief and in fresco, complimented the spatial richness of their architecture.

Key Works:
104.  The Emperor Augustus ("Augustus of Prima Porta"), ca. 15 CE.  Marble, with traces of paint and perhaps also gilding; height 7 ft.  Vatican Museums, Rome.

107. Arch of Titus reliefs, Rome, 81 CE

113.  Garden, wall painting from the Villa of Livia, wife of the Emperor Augustus, at Prima Porta near Rome.  Late 1st century BCE  Fresco.

115.  Still Life with Eggs and Thrushes, Villa of Julia Felix at Pompeii.  Before 79 CE

Works in Context:
--Pantheon, Rome, 117-125.  Height of interior 144 ft.
--Temple of Fortuna Virilis, Rome, c. 100 BCE
--Sanctuary of Fortune (Fortuna Primigenia), Palestrina, 1st c BCE
--Pont du Gard, near Nimes, France, 1st c
--Forum of Trajan, with Basilica Ulpia: Rome, ca. 112
--Ara Pacis Agustae, Rome, 13-9 BCE
--Flavian Amphitheater (Colosseum), Rome. Begun 72; dedicated 80; construction completed in 96.  Approximately 615 x 510 ft.
--Still life with Peaches from Herculaneum, ca. 50; Museo Nazionale, Naples
--Frescoes in the Xion Room, House of Vetii, Pompeii, 1st. c.

Key Terms:
illusionism: giving painted or sculpted objects the illusion of actually existing within the artistic space or frame (from the Latin illudere--to mock).

Atmospheric perspective - represents spatial effects as we see them distorted by the atmosphere between the viewer and distant objects:  blurred outlines, diminished detail, diminished size, diminished contrast of saturation and value; hue tending toward blue.

Roman fresco: painting with natural pigments mixed with limewater, applied to fresh plaster. Full definition and illustion on p. 114.

Suggested Reading:
Virgil's Aeneid
Ovid's Metamorphoses
The First Man in Rome and other novels by Coleen McCullough
Richard Brilliant: Roman Art, 1974
J. J. Pollitt: The Art of Rome (Sources and Documents), 1966
William MacDonald: The Architecture of the Roman Empire, 2 vols.

Selected texts on Roman art and architecture:

On painting:

The dignified reputation of painting at Rome was increased by M. V. Valerius Maximus Messala, who first displayed a painting of a battle -- the one in which he had defeated the Carthaginians and Hieron in Sicily -- on a side wall of the Curia Hostilia....  After this I see that paintings were quite commonly displayed even in the Forum.  ...the ancients, who first undertook to use polished wall surfaces, began by imitating different varieties of marble revetments in different positions, and then went on to imitate cornices, hard stones, and weges arranged in various ways with relation to one another. Later they became so proficient that they would imitate the forms even of buildings and the way columns and gables stood out as they projected from the background; and in open spaces, such as exedrae, because of the extensiveness of the walls, they depicted stage facades in the tragic, comic, or satyric style.  Their walks, because of the extended length of the wall space, they decorated with landscapes of various sorts, modeling these images on the features of actual places.  In these are painted harbors, promontories, coastlines, rivers, springs, straits, sanctuaries, groves, mountains, flocks, and shepherds.  In places there are some designs...representing images of the gods or narrating episodes from mythology, or, no less often, scenes from the Trojan war, or the wanderings of Odysseus over the landscape backgrounds, and other subjects....
   Pliny, Natural History XXXV
On portrait sculpture:
After (the public eulogy), having buried (the deceased) and performed the customary rites, they place a portrait of the deceased in the most prominent part of the house, enclosing it in a small wooden aedicular shrine.  The portrait is a mask which is wrought with the utmost attention being paid to preserving a likeness in regard to both its shape and its contour.  Displaying these portraits at public sacrifices, they honor them in a spirit of emulation, and when a prominent member of the family dies, they carry the portraits in the funeral procession....                --Polybious VI
On illusion:
M. Varro records that he knew at Rome an artist by the name of Possis, by whom apples and grapes were made which were so realistic that you could not, simply by looking at them, tell them from the real thing.
--Pliny, Natural History XXXV

Required Reading: text, pp. 140--147; 150--159

The conversion of the Roman Empire to Christianity ocurred after the Emperor Constantine's defeat of his rival Maxentius in 312 A.D.  The state's assumption of the role of patron of Christian art meant that Christian art, which heretofore had been essentially funerary, could now become monumental, and of a public nature.  This art would be fashioned, of course, out of the Greco-Roman tradition then dominant, but it would have new, Christian purposes to serve.  Constantine's architects perfected the Church out of the basilica tradition.  Imagery showed a sharper break with the past, for it now depended almost exclusively on the Bible rather than on Classical mythology.  Style, in the interests of instructional purposes and a new content, would also change.  Sculpture virtually dies out.  Mural painting (fresco) and mosaics are used to depict subjects central to Christian history and doctrine.  With these objectives,  the Classical tradition of rendering the natural world as solid objects within a measurable atmospheric space is transformed into a tendency to emphasize the surface.

Key Works:
140, 141. Synagogue, Dura Europos, Syria: detail of west wall, with Torah niche. Erected in 244/245.  Murals are tempera on plaster; now National Museum, Damascus, Syria.

142.  Three Hebrew Youths in the Fiery Furnace; fresco in the Catacomb of Priscilla, Rome, 3rd c.

143.  Good Shepherd.  Late 3rd century.  Marble (restored), height 39 in.  Vatican Museums, Rome.

158, 159.  Mosaics with Justinian and Theodora at San Vitale, Ravenna, Italy, 526-47.

152. The Prayer of Isaiah from the Paris Psalter, ca. 900.  Byzantine manuscript on vellum, 14  x 10"; details of Night and Dawn. Bibliothèque National, Paris.

Works in context:
--Old St. Peter's Basilica, Rome.  Reconstruction, c. 333-c. 390.  Interior ca. 368 feet in length.
--ANTHEMIUS OF TRALLES and ISIDORUS OF MILETUS (architects): Hagia Sophia (Holy Wisdom) church, Istanbul (Constantinople), Turkey, 532-537.
--Arch of Constantine reliefs, Rome, 312-315
--Christ the Good Shepherd, mosaic in Mausoleum of Galla Placidia, Ravenna, 425-450
--Painted ceilings, catacomb Sts. Peter & Marcellinus, Rome, 4th c.
--Stauronikita Gospels, 10th century, Mt. Athos monastery.

Key Terms:
Iconography - The study of the symbolic (often religious) meaning of objects, persons, or events depicted in works of art.  Iconography is essentially the deciphering of symbols within a cultural milieu:  we recognize Superman, Uncle Sam, and Santa Claus from their symbolic costumes (their attributes).

Medievalizing - the process by which Classical art became the European art of the sixth-fifteenth centuries by an admixture of Eastern and Northern elements to its original Mediterranean base.

Suggested Reading:
Ernst Kitzinger, Early Medieval Art in the British Museum, London, 1969
Howard Saalman, Medieval Architecture. New York, 1962
John Beckwith, Early Christian and Byzantine Art, New York, 1979
Cyril Mango, The Art of the Byzantine Empire, 312-1453
O. von Simson, Sacred Fortress, Chicago, 1948

Required reading: text, pp. 160--163; 178--181; 188--189.

The process of medievalization of the arts, which began in the Early Christian period, was promoted by a number of social and historical factors.  These include the Oriental influence, both on the Imperial cult in the late Roman Empire and in Christianity; the fortress mentality of a besieged Europe during the Migration Period (the barbarian invasions) and the expansion of Islam; the political and social organization of feudalism; and the intermingling of Roman-origin and Germanic-origin peoples.  These historical and social factors appear to have produced a new process of vision that was already manifested in the Arch of Constantine and in Early Christian mosaics.  We see it in a developed stage in two favorite art forms of the Middle Ages:  ivories and manuscripts.  This new process of vision, which greatly favored surface over space, seems also to account for the vastly changed spatial and rhythmic articulation of buildings in the Carolingian and Ottonian periods.

Key Works:
160.  Sutton Hoo purse cover, ca. 620. Made by an Anglo-Saxon jeweler in gold and precious stones over an ivory or bone support. Excavated at Sutton Hoo, England; now British Museum.

162.  "Carpet Page" (fol. 94v) from the Lindisfarne Gospels, manuscript illumination painted on vellum by Bishop Eadfrith, ca. 698; 13 1/2 x 9 3/4 in. British Library, London.

178. St. Matthew, from the Gospel Book of Archbishop Ebbo of Reims.  Produced at Reims, France, 816--823. Manuscript painting on vellum, 12 3/4 x 10 in.; now in municipal library at Épernay.

163. Incarnation Page from the Book of Kells, c. 800?  Manuscript painting on vellum, 13 x9 1/2". Trinity College, Dublin.

Key terms:
Carolingian - art of the late eighth and ninth centuries, centered on the court of Charlemagne at Aachen.

Ottonian - Art of the tenth and eleventh centuries centered on the Holy Roman Empire in Germany.

Linear - art is described as linear (as opposed to "painterly") when it is conceived as lines or sharp edges as opposed to broad masses of light and dark and edges blurred rather than sharply defined.

narrative - art in which figures tell a story.

Iconic - (as opposed to narrative): a mode of representing figures in art so that they are read for their symbolic content.

Required reading: text, pp. 190--197; 204--217.

European civilization came of age in the late eleventh century.  Its maturity was marked by papal reform which strengthened and centralized administration of the Church, by the establishment of national monarchies which fostered distinct national cultures, by the expansion of western Christian influence in Islamic territories (both in Spain, with the pilgrimage of St. James, and in Israel, with the Crusades), and by the transformation of intellectual life from the passive reading of "authorities" to the active formulation of newideas.  In art, this new civilization produced a flowering of monumental architecture and architectural sculpture intended to recall and rival the splendors of ancient Rome.  The style of this new art, known by the modern term of Romanesque, was modified in the mid-twelfth century from a robustly sculptural formulation into an ethereal illusion of dynamic vitality, expressive of mystical spirituality.  The new style, known since Renaissance times as Gothic, was employed in the great churches, the focal point of late medieval artistic endeavor, until the fifteenth century.

Public display of important spiritual concepts was accomplished through the application of sculptural images to conspicious architectural surfaces, such as cloister arcades and church portals.  Still others were applied on painted or glazed surfaces inside the church.  In the Romanesque period such images were frankly artificial in style because they were regarded as merely illustrative of sacred truths; in the Gothic, they were imitative of reality because the illusion they created was regarded as a powerful evocation of the truth.  In either case, images portraying complex theological ideas or sacred mysteries were held to be theophanies, or divine revelations which aided the soul in rising from the mundane to the heavenly sphere. In other words, images became active agents of spirituality. (With thanks to Prof. M.F. Hearn, Jr.)

What we should be looking for as we look at Romanesque and Gothic art is the return of naturalism; the enduring conflict between the iconic and the narrative approaches to painting and sculpture; the dichotomy of art for public and private consumption; the interweaving of the Germanic and eastern art traditions with the Mediterranean; and the return of public sculpture for the first time in half a millennium.

192, 193. King Harold Receiving a Messenger, detail from panel 33 of Bayeux "Tapestry", ca. 1070--1080 (not a true tapestry, but embroidered wool on linen); height 20 in., total length 231 ft.; Bayeux, France.

197. Last Judgment tympanum at Ste.-Foy, Conques, ca. 1120.

197.  Gislebertus (sculptor, or merely patron?): Last Judgment tympanum and lintel, west portal, Cathedral, Autun (France), ca.  1125-35. Stone, approx. 12 1/2  x 22 ft.

214. Beau Dieu (the "Beautiful God"), ca. 1225-35.  Stone.  Trumeau figure, central portal of the west facade, Cathedral of Amiens, France.

216. Nôtre-Dame de la Belle Verrière ("The Virgin Mary of the Beautiful Window"); stained-glass window of 12th and 13th century, cathedral of Chartres, France.

Works in Context:
--Moissac, Abbey of Saint-Pierre, portal c. 1115-35
--Sainte Chapelle, Paris, 1243-1248
--Rose window from north transept, Notre-Dame in Paris, 1240

Key terms:
Romanesque - art of the eleventh and twelfth centuries in part based on a revival of Roman forms.

Gothic - art of the twelfth--fifteenth centuries, marked by the rise of capitalism and urban society in Europe, and heightened spirituality.

Theophany - the representation of God (in art).

Suggested Reading:
M.F. Hearn: Romanesque Sculpture, pp.  169-219
Whitney Stoddard, Monastery and Cathedral in France: 69-90, 152-164, 253-276

Documents on Romanesque and Gothic Art

Montecassino Abbey: Leo of Ostia on the decoration of the new church:

Meanwhile [Desiderius] sent envoys to Constantinople to hire artists who were experts in the art of laying mosaics and pavements.  The [mosaicists] were to decorate the apse, the arch, and the vestibule of the main basilica; the others, to lay the pavement of the whole church with various kinds of stones.  The degree of perfection which was attained in these arts by the masters whom Desiderius had hired can be seen in their works.  One would believe that the figures in the mosaics were alive and that in the marble of the pavement flowers of every color bloomed in wonderful variety.  And since magistra Latinitas had left uncultivated the practice of these arts for more than five hundred years and, through the efforts of this man, with the inspiration and help of God, promised to regain it in our time, the abbot in his wisdom decided that a great number of young monks in the monastery should be thoroughly initated in these arts in order that their knowledge might not again be lost in Italy.   And the most eager artists selected from his monks he trained not only in these arts but in all the arts which employ silver, bronze, iron, glass, ivory, wood, alabaster, and stone.

St. Bernard of Clairvaux against sculptural decoration, ca. 1125:
". . . But in the cloister, under the eyes of the Brethren who read there, what profit is there in those ridiculous monsters, in that marvellous and deformed comeliness, that comely deformity?  To what purpose are those unclean apes, those fierce lions, those monstrous centaurs, those half-men, those striped tigers, those fighting knights, those hunters winding their horns?  Many bodies are there seen under one head, or again, many heads to a single body.  Here is a four-footed beast with a serpent's tail;  there, a fish with a beast's head. Here again the forepart of a horse trails half a goat behind it, or a horned beast bears the hind quarters of a horse.  In short, so many and so marvellous are the varieties of divers shapes on every hand, that we are more tempted to read in the marble than in our books, and to spend the whole day in wondering at these things rather than in meditating the law of God. For God's sake, if men are not ashamed of these follies, why at least do they not shrink from the expense?"

Raoul Glaber on Church-Building Around the Year 1000:
So on the threshold of the aforesaid thousandth year, some two or three years after it, it befell almost throughout the world, but especially in Italy and Gaul, that the fabrics of churches were rebuilt, although many of these were still seemly and needed no such care; but every nation of Christendom rivalled with the other, which should worship in the seemliest buildings.  So it was as though the very world had shaken herself and cast off her old age, and were clothing herself everywhere in a white garment of churches.

Required reading: text, pp. 218--223

The 13th and 14th centuries were relatively prosperous for Italy.  The artists harkened to their classical roots and at the same time responded to the powerful cultural influence of Gothic art in France.  The result was an art (formerly and still occasionally termed the "proto-Renaissance") that was rich in the stylized elegance and impressionism of Gothic art but also marked by new efforts at naturalism and illusionistic space.  Nicola Pisano and Arnolfo di Cambio began the movement in sculpture and architecture, while Giotto developed illusionism in painting.

219. Cimabue: Madonna Enthroned with Angels and Prophets, from church of S. Trinita, Florence, ca. 1285; now Uffizi, Florence.

218. Giotto di Bondone (ca. 1266-1337): Madonna Enthroned with Angels and Saints, from church of the Ognissanti, Florence, ca. 1310; Uffizi Gallery, Florence

222, 223. Schematic diagrams and sections of typical late-medieval tempera painting and fresco.

Works in Context:
--Arnolfo di Cambio: Portrait of King Charles I of Naples, ca. 1276
--Ambrogio Lorenzetti, Good and Bad Government fresco cycle, Siena, 1339
--Simone Martini (attributed to), Guidoriccio da Fogliano, 1328; fresco portrait in the Palazzo Comunale, Siena, Italy
--Nicola Pisano: The Nativity from Pisa Baptistery pulpit, 1260
--Giovanni Pisano: Annunciation and Nativity from pulpit in S. Andrea, Pistoia, 1301

Key Terms:
Fresco - Perspective - (See under Early Renaissance Painting)

Illusionism - (See under Roman Art)

Trecento - Italian term meaning "fourteenth-century."

Modeling - achieving three-dimensional form in painting by shading so that light falls with greater intensity on some parts of the body than on others.  Also done by altering the value of colors.

Fresco - Italian for "fresh:" A painting made by the use of pigments suspended in water that are applied to fresh plaster on a wall so that plaster and paint are bound in a chemical reaction.  The preparatory drawing, called the sinopia, was at first obscured by the final layer of plaster; later the preparatory drawing was often traced by means of pin pricks or lines incised from paper to the wet plaster.

Tempera - painting by the means of pigments mixed with egg yolk and water, popular in the late Middle Ages and the Early Renaissance for the bright, sharp-edged paintings it produced.

Required reading: as in previous lecture.

By endowing his figures with the suggestion of an ample three-dimensionality and by setting them within an ambience that suggested space and the potential for movement, Giotto created the semblance of reality in his works.  He also gave his figures a new and profound emotional life.  Figures in his paintings seem to have real emotions, expressed as human beings would express them.  His organization of the Arena Chapel into a cycle that is complex and thought-provoking is another indication of his intellect at work.  Historical explanations for these developments are not simple, but the new human quality of religion fostered by St. Francis and the Franciscans in the preceding century must be taken into account, as must the growing commercialism and thriving banking economy of Florence.  The stress that Trecento Tuscany put on individual accomplishment was not lost on the artists, who were encouraged to create their own personal styles--a landmark in the history of art.

220, 221. Giotto: Arena Chapel Frescoes, detail of The Lamentation and The Last Judgment, ca. 1303-1305. Arena Chapel, Padua, Italy.

Suggested reading:
James Stubblebine. Giotto: The Arena Chapel Frescoes, New York, 1969
The Bible: Hebrew and Christian scriptures
The Golden Legend by Jacobus de Voragine
La Commedia (the "Divine Comedy") by Dante Alighieri

Required reading: text, pp. 231--239; 248--249; 252--255

The term rinascita ("Renaissance" in French and English), used by Italians of the period to identify their new attitudes toward the world in which they lived, literally means "rebirth."  In the fifteenth century this term specifically meant the revival of classical learning which, for art, had two main aspects. One was the direct influence of surviving works of ancient Greek and Roman art (as well as of written descriptions of lost works by ancient authors); the second was a new belief in the dignity of the individual and in the value of life in this world.

Painters and sculptors alike explored the representation of reality, examining systems for depicting space (scientific perspective, atmospheric perspective, overlapping, diminution) and for understanding the human body in movement and in repose (contrapposto).

The subject matter of art changed dramatically during the Renaissance.  Although religious art continued to be vitally important, new subjects appeared that were the product of the new attitudes toward life and toward the role of art in society.  The portrait, which before the Renaissance had been virtually non-existant, underwent a remarkable development, while simultaneously subjects from antique literature and art--the nude, allegory, classical history, and mythology--found an enthusiastic audience in Renaissance patrons.

Key works:

The Sacrifice of Isaac (not in text): competition reliefs for the east door of the Baptistery of Florence, 1401--02.  Compare entries by Filippo Brunelleschi and Lorenzo Ghiberti (today both in Bargello National Museum, Florence).

252, 253. Lorenzo Ghiberti: "Gates of Paradise" (east door of the Baptistery of Florence, 1425--52) and detail of Isaac, Jacob, and Esau panel. Until recently still at the Baptistery of Florence, now Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Florence. [Contrary to what your text says on p. 253 about the myth of the term "Paradise" given to these doors by Michelangelo, these literally were the gates of "Paradise," since they opened on to an ancient cemetery, the word for which in medieval Italian was paradiso.]

233. Donatello: Equestrian Monument of Erasmo da Narni, called Gattamelata ("honeyed cat"), 1445--50.  Bronze, originally with gilded details; height 12' 2".  Piazza del Santo, Padua.

254, 255. Donatello: Penitent Magdalen, 1430s to 1450s?; Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Florence. Wood with gilding and polychromy.

Works in Context:
--DONATELLO: St. Mark, ca. 1411-15.  Marble, originally with limited polychromy and metal details, height 8 ft.  Formerly on Orsanmichele, Florence.
--BERNARDO ROSSELLINO: Tomb of Lionardo Bruni, ca. 1445.  Marble with traces of paint and gilding, height to top of arch 20 ft.  S. Croce, Florence.
--Donatello: St. George, Orsanmichele, Florence, c. 1415-17
--Donatello: Feast of Herod, Siena Baptistery font, ca. 1425
253.
--NANNI DI BANCO, Four Saints, 1410s.  Marble, height 6ft.  Orsanmichele, Florence.

Key Terms:
Renaissance: see above.
Foreshortening and Perspective - See Early Renaissance Painting
Contrapposto - see in Greek Art, and above

Suggested Reading:
Frederick Hartt, History of Italian Renaissance Art, New York, 1969
Bonnie Bennett and David Wilkins, Donatello, London, 1984

Selected text on Early Renaissance Sculpture:

Donatello's Bookkeeping, 1427:

(A new tax law in Florence in 1427 required every family head--except the very poor--to write a declaration of property, debts, credits, and family status, including the ages of everyone in his household.):

July 11, 1427, before you, the lords officials of the tax of the people and city of Florence, this is the property and obligations of Donato son of Niccolo son of Betto, carver, assessed in the Santo Spirito quarter, in the ward of the Shell, as owing 1 florin, 10 shillings, 2 pence. Without any property except a few household goods for personal and family use.  I practice my art together in partnership with Michelozzo di Bartolommeo, with no capital, except 30 florins worth of various tools and equipment for this art.

And from this partnership and shop I gain my property, I am owed by the Cathedral administrator of Siena 180 florins on account of a narrative scene in bronze, which I did for him some time ago.  Also, from the convent and monks of Ognissanti I am owed on account of a bronze half figure of Saint Rossore, on which no bargain has been set.  I believe I will get more than 30 florins from it.

I have the following family in my house:
Donato, aged 40
Madonna Orsa, my mother, 80
Madonna Tita, my sister, a widow without dowry, 45
Giuliano, son of Madonna Tita, crippled, 18

I rent a house from Guglielmo Adimari, on the Corso degli Adimari, in the parish of St. Cristoforo.  I pay 15 florins a year.

CREDITORS
--To Master Jacopo di Piero, carver, of Siena, on account of that narrative scene for the Siena Administration, as shown, 48 florins.
--To Giovanni Turini, goldsmith of Siena, for time he took on that scene, 10 florins.
--To the Cathedral Administration of Siena, 25 florins for gilding that scene, at their request.
--To Guglielmo Adimari, 30 florins for two years back rent on the house I live in.
--To Giovanni di Jacopo degli Strozzi, 15 florins for a figure of Saint Rossore he cast for me several times in his kiln, and other things.
--To various people for various reasons, small sums, 15 florins.
--To debt to the city of Florence for old assessments from '11 to '24, and for all of a new assessment, 1 florin.

Required reading: text, pp. 228--229; 244--249; 270--271.

Unlike Renaissance sculptors and architects, the painters had few visual models from classical antiquity to inspire them.  They turned instead to textual sources which assigned to ancient painting two major virtues: 1) illusionism, or such close fidelity to visual reality that the spectator believed, at least momentarily, that what was painted was real, and 2) an idealized concept of beauty.

244.  Masaccio, The Trinity with the Virgin Mary, John, and Two Donors, ca. 1425-28.  Fresco, 21' 10 1/2" x 10' 5"; the figures are approximately life-size.  Santa Maria Novella, Florence. See also the detail of the male donor from this fresco, reproduced in the Frick Building cloister.

245, 246.  Masaccio: Brancacci Chapel Frescoes, Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence: details of Tribute Money and Explusion on upper register; ca. 1425-28). Height 96". See detail of the Expulsion fresco in Frick Cloister.

228. Piero della Francesca: The Resurrection, fresco in the Palazzo Comunale, Borgo Sansepolcro, ca. 1460; also reproduced in Frick cloister.

271. BOTTICELLI. Birth of Venus ca. 1484-86.  Tempera on canvas, 5' 9" x 9' 2".  Uffizi Gallery, Florence; also reproduced in Frick cloister.

Works in Context:
--PERUGINO: Christ Giving the Keys to St. Peter and perspective diagram with vanishing point, orthogonals, and transversals of the scientific perspective scheme. 1482.  Fresco, 11 x 18 ft.  Sistine Chapel, Vatican, Rome.

--Piero: The Flagellation (Dream of St. Jerome), ca. 1455; Galleria Nazionale delle Marche, Urbino

--BOTTICELLI: Realm of Venus or Primavera. ca. 1482.  Tempera on wood with oil glazes, 6' 8" x 10' 4".  Uffizi Gallery, Florence.

--At Carnegie Museum:  NICOLA DI MAESTRO ANTONIO D'ANCONA: Madonna and Child with Saints and Single Female Patron, 1472, tempera.
--Andrea del Castagno, Last Supper, c. 1445 (16-30)
--Andrea Mantegna, Camera degli Sposi ceiling, Manuta, 1474 (16-65)

Key Terms:
Atmospheric Perspective - See definition under Roman Art.
Modeling, fresco, tempera - See under "Giotto" lecture.

Foreshortening - representing objects as if they were seen at an angle, receding into space rather than being shown in a frontal or a profile view.

Scientific Perspective - A mathematically generated linear perspective developed in the fifteenth century in which all lines parallel to the picture plane and all diagonals which mark the edges of surfaces in the picture converge to a single point called the vanishing point.  This keeps all objects and figures in the painting at an exactly consistent relationship and gives the impression of measureable depth in the painting.

Cast Shadows - a feature of Roman painting that was brought back in the fifteenth century, in which a specific shadow is shown behind a person or object that is blocking the illusionistic light in a painting.

Suggested Reading:
Frederick Hartt, A History of Italian Renaissance Art
Creighton Gilbert, Italian Art 1400-1500, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1980

Selected texts on Early Renaissance Painting:

A contract to paint a room in the Palazzo Comunale, Siena:
Master Martino, painter, son of the late Bartolomeo, hired out to paint all four vaults of the New Room of the Palace of the Lord Priors, down to the moldings at the end of the said vaults, in good and suitable colors, with as many figures as are painted in the other four vaults of the chapel of the palace, and like them in workmanship, manner, and form, and all expenses for colors and everything else being master Martino's, except the plaster and scaffoldings, which are to be at the cost of the city of Siena, and not of the said master Martino, and with the condition that he does not have to put gold on the panels, but instead of gold can put tin, and for all this he is to have from the city of Siena forty-four Sienese gold florins.  And he promised to have done the whole work and have it finished by the end of February next.

The painter Mantegna takes a fieldtrip to collect classical inscriptions:
On the IX before the beginning of October, 1464.  Starting out together, with Andrea Mantegna the Paduan, incomparable friend, Samuel de Tradate, and myself Feliciano of Verona, for the sake of relaxing our thoughts, we came from a field as lovely as the Tusculan, by way of the lake of Garda, to greenswards like heavenly gardens in the most delicious dwelling places of flowers, but also with the leafy branches of orange and lemon trees everywhere, when we gazed at the islands through fields that were overflowing with springs, and adorned with tall old leaf-bearing laurels and fruit trees.  There we saw a number of remains of antiquity, and first, on the island of the monks, one with highly ornamental letters on a marble pillar. . .

Having seen all these things, we circled lake Garda, the field of Neptune, in a skiff properly packed with carpets and all kinds of comforts, which we strewed with laurels and other noble leaves, while our ruler Samuel played the zither, and celebrated all the while.

At length, having gloriously crossed over the lake, we sought safe harbor and disembarked. Then entering the temple of the Blessed Virgin on the Garda, and rendering the highest praises to the most high thunderer and his glorious mother, most devoutly, for having illuminated our hearts to assemble together and opened our minds to seek and investigate such outstanding places, and caused us to see such worthy and varied diversions of objects, some of them antiquities,and allowed us such a happy and prosperous day, and given us fortunate sailing and good harbor, and our wished-for conclusion.  Especially for seeing such great wonders of antiquities; anyone of great soul should on just that account take the road to see them.

Required reading: text, pp. 268--275; 278--289; 292--293; 304--307; 312--315

The High Renaissance at Florence and Rome constitutes a short moment, from about 1480 to 1527, in which a small group of painters achieved a technical mastery of their art, a new and powerful scale, and a psychological insight that enabled them to create works of extraordinary subtlety and expression.  Central to this achievement were the two environments in which the artists worked:  Florence under Lorenzo de'Medici and the idealistic reformer Savonarola, and Rome under Pope Julius II.  There were many separate contributions to the movements:  Leonardo da Vinci with his scientific and psychological experiments in painting; Michelangelo and the augmentation in scale; Raphael and the perfection of composition.  A parallel but later movement manifested itself in Venice.  Its leaders were Bellini and Giorgione.  Bellini conceived new approaches to Christian imagery, while Giorgione experimented with the relation of subjects to their landscape setting.  In Titian and Tintoretto, painting was raised to a new level of immediacy in dynamic spatial configurations, a looseness of color, and the direct imprint of brushstrokes on the canvas.

274, 275.  LEONARDO DA VINCI: Last Supper, ca. 1495-98.  Oil, tempera, and varnish on wall, 14' x 28' 10 1/2"; the figures are over-lifesize.  Refectory, Santa Maria delle Grazie, Milan

304. Raphael (1483-1520): Philosophy (the "School of Athens") in the Stanza della Segnatura, the Vatican, Rome, 1509-11

312. Titian: Madonna of the Pesaro Family, S. Maria dei Frari, Venice, 1519-26.

306. TITIAN: Venus of Urbino, 1538.  Oil on canvas, main figure about lifesize. Florence, Uffizi.

Works in Context:
--Leonardo da Vinci, Adoration of the Magi, 1481-82; Uffizi, Florence
--Leonardo: The Virgin of the Rocks, ca. 1485
--LEONARDO DA VINCI: Portrait of a Woman (the "Mona Lisa"). ca. 1503-05.  Oil on wood, 30 1/4 x 21 in.  The Louvre, Paris
--Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430-1516): S. Zaccaria Altarpiece, 1505
--Giorgione (1478-1510), Pastoral Symphony, c. 1508

Key Terms:
Chiaroscuro - From the Italian chiaro "light" and oscuro "dark".  A painting method in which forms distinguish themselves softly and gradually rather than sharply, which creates a greater pictorial unity in a painting.  Popularized at the end of the fifteenth century by Leonardo da Vinci to emphasize three-dimensionality of objects and figures in a painting, as opposed to the emphasis on outlines which was then practised by such painters as Botticelli.

Other terms to know: scientific perspective, atmospheric perspective, overlapping, diminution, vanishing point, illusionism, humanism

Suggested additional readings:
Robert Klein/Henri Zerner, Italian Art, 1500-1600, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1966 Anthony Blunt, Artistic Theory in Italy, 1450-1600, New York, 1956
Kenneth Clark, Leonardo da Vinci, Baltimore, 1967
John Pope-Hennessy, Raphael
Sydney J. Freedberg, Painting of the High Renaissance in Rome and Florence.

Required reading: text, pp.

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475-1564) belongs to that very small number of artists such as Bach, Beethoven, and Picasso, whose works fascinate us by their total absorption in their art.  In the case of Michelangelo, the power of his art stemmed from two sources of equal passion:  his neoplatonic ideals and his Christian devotion.  Michelangelo grew up in Florence at the moment of its deepest commitment to neoplatonic philosophy, with its central concept of an Idea that gives birth to replicas in the natural world.  For Michelangelo the ideal sculpture was imprisoned in the block of marble before him:  his task was simply to release it.

Michelangelo was a poet, a painter, an architect and a sculptor.  His proficiency in art was always based on the materials themselves, and the more intractable the medium, the more Michelangelo seemed to flourish working in it.

276. Michelangelo: Pietà, 1498--99, St. Peter's Basilica, Rome. Marble,  about 6 feet high, making the figures over-lifesize.

290, 291. Michelangelo Buonarroti: David, 1501-04.  Marble, 14 feet high. Accademia, Florence.

280. Michelangelo: Pietà, ca. 1547--55. Marble, made for his own tomb in Rome, moved to Florence Cathedral; now Museo dell'Opera del Duomo, Florence.

Works in Context:
--Michelangelo: Moses and Slaves (tomb of Julius II), c. 1513-15
--Michelangelo: Medici tombs, New Sacristy, S. Lorenzo, Florence, 1519-34

Key Terms:
Neoplatonism - A school of philosophy founded in third-century A.D. Alexandria that sought to combine Plato's ideals on love and ideal beauty with the ethics and theology of Christianity.  These precepts were much popularized in Renaissance Florence, as opposed to the empirical, point-by-point logic of Medieval Christian philosophy, heavily influenced by Aristotelianism.

Suggested Reading:
Howard Hibbard: Michelangelo, 1974

Selections from the Sonnets of Michelangelo

He who made the whole (universe) made every part; then from the whole chose what was most beautiful, to reveal on earth, as He has done here and now His own sublime perfections. --c. 1505-1511

Love, they beauty is not mortal.  No face on earth can compare with the image awakened in the heart which you inflame and govern, sustaining it with strange fire, uplifting it on strange wings.--c. 1533-1534

Led by long years to my last hours, too late, O world, I know your joys for what they are. You promise a peace which is not yours to give and the repose that dies before it is born.  The years of fear and shame to which Heaven now set a term, renew nothing in me but the old sweet error in which, living overlong a man kills his soul with no gain to his body.  I say and I know having put it to the proof, that he has the better part in Heaven whose death falls nearest his birth.--c. 1536-1541

I have let the vanities of the world rob me of the time I had for the contemplation of God. Not alone have these vanities caused me to forget His blessings, but God's very blessings have turned me into sinful paths.  The things which make  others wise make me blind and stupid and slow in recognizing my fault.  Hope fails me, yet my desire grows that by Thee I may be freed from the love that possesses me.  Dear Lord, halve for me the road that mounts to heaven, and if I am to climb even this shortened road, my need of Thy help is great.  Take from me a liking for what the world holds dear and for such of its fair things as I esteem and prize, so that, before death, I may have some earnest of eternal life.--c. 1555

In a frail boat, through stormy seas, my life in its course has now reached the harbour, the bar of which all men must cross to render account of good and evil done.  Thus I now know how fraught with error was the fond imagination which made Art my idol and my king, and how mistaken that earthly love which all men seek in their own despite.  What of those thoughts of love, once light and gay, if now I approach a twofold death.  I have certainty of the one and the other menaces me.  No brush, no chisel will quieten the soul, once it is turned to the divine love of Him who, upon the Cross, outstretched His arms to take us to Himself.--c. 1554

Required reading: text, preceding pages on Michelangelo as sculptor and pp. 300-303, 316--319; 328--329.

As the optimism of the Early and High Renaissance gave way to the turmoil and pessimism of the Counter-Reformation, the art of Michelangelo reflected doubts on his early philosophy of beauty.  The clarity and serenity of his Sistine Chapel ceiling were replaced by an interest in unfinished forms and textures both in sculpture (New Sacristy, Florence, and the late Pietàs) and painting (Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel and the Pauline Chapel frescoes in the Vatican).

Michelangelo's painting formed a critical prelude to Mannerism, a mid-sixteenth century style tendency that was often anti-classical and even violent in its arbitrary color, forms and composition.  In contrast to the Mannerists at Florence, the Mannerist painters of Venice emphasized not psychological torment but expansiveness of space and light, and a freedom of the application of oil on canvas.

300--303.  MICHELANGELO: Sistine Chapel ceiling; detail: The Creation of Adam, 1508-12.  Vatican Palace, Vatican City (an independent country inside Rome).

317. MICHELANGELO: Last Judgment, 1534-41.  Fresco, 48 x 44 ft. on end wall of the Sistine Chapel, Vatican, Rome.

285. Parmigianino: Madonna and Child with Angels and a Prophet. 1534--40. Uffizi, Florence.

329. Tintoretto: Last Supper, 1592-94. S. Giorgio Maggiore, Venice.

Works in context:
--Jacopo Pontormo: Descent from the Cross, Capponi chapel, Sta. Felicita, Florence, 1525-28
--Raphael: Expulsion of Heliodorus, ca. 1512, Vatican
--Rosso Fiorentino: Joseph in Egypt, ca. 1521
--Michelangelo: Laurentian Library, S. Lorenzo, Florence, 1520s--40s.
--Bronzino: Allegory of Time and Lust, ca. 1545; National Gallery, London.
--Tintoretto: Christ before Pilate, 1566

Key terms:
Mannerism: see above.

Counter-Reformation - The Catholic internal reform of the mid-sixteenth century, following the Protestant Reformation.

Suggested reading:
Charles Seymour: Michelangelo: The Sistine Chapel Ceiling, 1972

Required reading: text, pp. 228--237 (partly review); 240--243 and 247; 250--251; 256--259.

The art of the 15th and 16th centuries in Flanders and Germany is stylistically, chronologically, and geographically transitional between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. In actuality, such painters as the Limbourg brothers, Robert Campin, and Jan van Eyck were for the most part unaware of Renaissance developments in Italy, but their art shows many parallels with the more famous school in the south.  Flemish art was essentially an outgrowth of the highly elaborated "International Style" of Late Gothic painting.  It is characterized by its keen powers of observation, its technical virtuosity, and its triumph of illusionism.

The development of oil paint in the paintings of Robert Campin and Jan van Eyck helped to make possible the breathtaking detail and naturalism that became a trademark of the Flemish painters during the 15th century.  The slow-drying nature of oil allowed the painters to blend their colors and shading until they had achieved a fine, almost enamel-like finish, while the translucency of the oil gives their colors a rich luminous glow.  The great detail of these paintings is tied to their iconographic content, for they are full of disguised symbolism; everything in Van Eyck's Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and Giovanna Cenami, for example, has a profound religious content that adds layers of meaning to what seems to be a rather straightforward double portrait.  The patrons of these works were wealthy middle-class businessmen who had made their own fortunes, and who would have appreciated the artists' demonstrations of their mastery over the depiction of reality.

We need to be aware of the introduction of a new type of painting in the Northern Renaissance: the portrait.  This reflects the new power of the businessman-patron, but it also grew out of a special devotional image of Christ, called the Andachtsbild.  A curious echo of this was still alive two centuries later, when Rembrandt painted a head of Christ called Naar Leven--from life!

Key works:
240, 241.  LIMBOURG BROTHERS: February calendar page and Crucifixion in the Darkness of the Eclipse, both from the Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry.  Before 1416.  Manuscript painting on vellum, 11 x 8 in. Condé Museum, Chantilly, France.

242, 243. ROBERT CAMPIN: Annunciation with Donors, St. Joseph in his Workshop (popularly known as The Mérode Altarpiece); ca. 1425--30. Oil on wood; Metropolitan Museum, Cloisters Collection, New York.

259.  Schematic diagram of section of a Flemish 15th-c. oil painting, demonstrating luminosity.

256. Jan Van Eyck: Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini and Giovanna Cenami (popularly called the Arnolfini Wedding), 1434.  Oil on wood, National Gallery, London.

Works in Context:
--Annunciation, from the "London Hours" codex, a "book of hours" created in Paris by an Italian artist in the "International Style," c. 1400-1410.  Manuscript painting on vellum, 9 x 6 in; fol. 20r.  British Library Add.MS 29433, London.
--JAN VAN EYCK (and brother Hubert?--one scholar-friend of mine says Hubert was mythical only): Altarpiece of the Lamb, completed 1432.  Oil on panel, 11 1/2 ft. x 15 ft.  Cathedral of St. Bavo, Ghent.
--Jan van Eyck: Self(?)-portrait, 1433
--Hugo van der Goes: Portinari Altarpiece, ca. 1476; Uffizi, Florence.
--Claus Sluter, The Moses Well, Dijon, France, c 1400 [plaster cast in Hall of Architecture, Carnegie Museum]

Key Terms:
Oil Painting - Invented around the time of Jan van Eyck, oil painting mixes pigments in oil, which can be applied in extremely thin, virtually transparent glazes or layers of paint.  This allows the lower layers to show through.  The result is extremely rich, luminous and illusionistic.  It largely supplanted tempera painting in the fifteenth century.  At first applied to wooden panels, by the late fifteenth century painters were using oils on stretched canvas.

Iconography - See under Early Christian Art.

Suggested Reading:
Erwin Panofsky, Early Netherlandish Painting, 2 vols., Cambridge MA, 1958
James Snyder, Northern Renaissance Art, New York, 1985
Ivins, How Prints Look
Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Durer, Princeton, 1955
Wolfgang Stechow, Northern Renaissance Art, 1400-1600. Englewood Cliffs, NJ.

Required reading: text, pages for previous lecture, plus pp. 267; 294--297; 308--311.

The art of the Germans Matthias Grunewald and Albrecht Dürer captures the heightened spiritual expression of German culture at the close of the Middle Ages.  Dürer especially was torn between German Gothic expressionism and the classical sources and scientific experiments of the Italian Renaissance, which he knew first-hand.  The medium of printmaking was special not only in its effects in art but in its importance in social terms, because like printing it was a mass medium.  Both the spiritual crises of Grunewald and Dürer and the new medium of printmaking suggest the convulsion through which Germany and all Europe would pass in the 16th century.

295. Albrecht Dürer: The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse woodcut, c 1498

294. Dürer: Adam and Eve. Engraving, 1504.

296, 297. Definitions and diagrams of woodcut and engraving.

308, 309. HIERONYMUS BOSCH: Triptych including the Garden of Earthly Delights, ca. 1510-15.  Oil on wood, Prado Museum, Madrid.

310, 311. Matthias Neithardt known as Grünewald: Isenheim Altarpiece, ca. 1510; Musée Unterlinden, Colmar, France.
 

Works in context:
--Martin Schongauer, St. Anthony Tormented by Demons, engraving ca. 1480
--Albrecht Dürer, Italian Mountains, watercolor, c. 1495
--Dürer: Self-portrait, 1500
--Dürer: Melencolia I, 1514 engraving
--Pieter Bruegel the Elder: Peasant Wedding Feast c. 1566.
--Bruegel: December Landscape 1565.

Key Terms:
Woodcut - A print made from a design that is raised in relief from a wooden block:  the print is therefore a negative of the block itself.

Engraving - A print made by cutting with a metal point into a metal plate.  In contrast to a woodcut, in which the ink lies on the raised portion of the block, in engraving the ink is forced into furrows in the plate and transferred to the paper print under pressure.

From the letters and diary of Albrecht Durer:
(From Venice to his friend Pirckheimer): Amongst the Italians I have many good friends who warn me not to eat and drink with their painters.  Many of them are my enemies and they copy my work in the churches and wherever they find it; and then they revile it and say it was not in the antique manner and therefore not good. I shall have finished here in ten days; after that I should like to ride to Bologna to learn the secrets of the art of perspective, which a man is willing to teach me.  I should stay there eight or ten days and then return to Venice.  After that I shall come [home to Germany].  Oh, how I shall long for the sun!  Here [in Italy] I am a gentleman, at home only a parasite....

(From Durer's diary): On Friday before Whitsunday in the year 1521, tidings come to me at Antwerp that Martin Luther had been so treacherously taken prisoner....  [They] carried away the pious man, betrayed into their hand, a man enlighted by the Holy Ghost, a follower of Christ and the true Christian faith.  [He] suffered this for the sake of Christian truth and because he rebuked the unchristian Papacy....  May every man who reads Martin Luther's books see how clear and transparent is his doctrine, when he sets forther the Holy Gospel.  Oh God, if Luther be dead, who will henceforth expound to us the Holy Gospel with such clearness?

Required reading: text, pp. 332--347; 352--353; 356--359.

Following the close of the Council of Trent (1565), which was Rome's response to the Protestant Reformation, art was enlisted in the service of the Catholic Church.  A period of austerity and self examination in papal Rome yielded by the start of the 17th century to a resurgence of optimism and to reaffirmation of the strength of Catholicism.  Tangible expression of this new spirit is best seen in the decoration of the interior of St. Peter's, the major artistic project of the period, during the papacies of Urban VIII and Alexander VII, and realized by Gianlorenzo Bernini.  Bernini's monumental colonnade extended its arms outward in a welcoming embrace to the pilgrim who came to pray at the tomb of St. Peter.  Upon the threshold of St. Peter's, the pilgrim's eye was immediately drawn down the nave to the colossal spiral columns of Bernini's Baldacchino, the climax of the Baroque basilica, which marks the symbolic spot of St. Peter's tomb.

The dynamic quality of these works, magnificent both in scale and materials, persuasively conveyed the vigor and wealth of the Church. Bernini's unparalled mastery of architecture and sculpture established him as the virtual artistic dictator of Rome for more than half of a century, c. 1625-1680, and secured him an international reputation with great significance for the spread northwards of the style of the Italian Baroque.

Key works:
345.  CARAVAGGIO: Christ with the Doubting Thomas. ca. 1602-3; Neues Palast museum, Potsdam, Germany.

345.  CARAVAGGIO: Conversion of St. Paul. ca. 1601. S. Maria del Popolo, Rome.

358. BERNINI & WORKSHOP: Ecstasy of St. Teresa. 1645-52.  Marble and bronze; the figures are over lifesize. Cornaro chapel, S. Maria della Vittoria, Rome.

Italian Baroque Works at Carnegie Museum:
--BERNINI, Portrait of Pope Gregory XV, c. 1621-22
--ASSERETO, Christ Healing the Blind Man, c. 1639-42
--Attributed to Camillo Rusconi, Pluto and Persephone, c. 1700, bozzetto for a fountain.
--Nuvolone, Martyrdom of St. Agatha

Works in Context:
--BERNINI: Baldacchino for St. Peter's, 1624-33; 93 feet high; and Cathedra Petri (1656-66; marble, bronze with gilding, stucco, alabaster, and stained glass).  Both in St. Peter's Basilica, Rome.
--BERNINI: St. Peter's Square (Colonnade), Rome. Begun 1656.  Travertine, longitudinal axis approx. 800 ft.
--ARTEMISIA GENTILESCHI:  Judith and her Maidservant with the Head of Holofernes.  ca. 1625.  Oil on canvas, 72 1/2 x 55 3/4"; the figures are over life-size.  Detroit Institute of Arts.
--G. B. GAULLI (assisted by GIANLORENZO BERNINI?), Triumph of the Name of Jesus, 1672-85.  Ceiling fresco with gilded stucco surround and white stucco angels.
--Francesco Borromini: S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, Rome, plan ca. 1638; facade ca. 1666
--Bernini: David, 1623; Borghese Gallery, Rome
--Caravaggio, The Calling of St. Matthew, 1599-1602

Key Terms:
Baroque - Originally used at the end of the 18th century to condemn what was seen as the excesses in the style of the preceding epoch; now applied as a convenient label without prejudice to the art of the 17th century.

Tenebrism - From the Italian for "obscure".  A manner of painting popular in sixteenth-century Venice but especially identified with Caravaggio in seventeenth-century Rome, in which much of the painting would be veiled in shadow.  This shadow is generally non-specific in origin (in contrast to cast shadow--defined under Early Renaissance Painting).  Caravaggio often spotlighted the central figures in dramatic contrast to his shadowy backgrounds.

Suggested Reading:
Howard Hibbard: Bernini, Harmondsworth, 1965
Robert Enggass and Jonathan Brown: Italy and Spain, 1600-1750
Howard Hibbard: Caravaggio

Selected texts on Bernini and Italian Baroque:

Baroque is the ultimate in the bizarre; it is the ridiculous carried to extremes . . . .  The century in which things were done correctly was over; the century of corruption had begun . . . .  Borromini in architecture, Bernini in sculpture, Pietro da Cortona in painting .  . . represent a diseased taste - one which has infected a great number of artists.
         --Milizia, Dictionary of the Fine Arts, 1797

In our time such strong and noble vitality of nature was the lot of Cavalier Giovan Lorenzo Bernini, a man who in the arts of painting, sculpture and architecture was not only great but extraordinary. To be ranked with the most splendid and renowned masters of antiquity and of modern times, he lacked little from fortune save the age . .  . .  The opinion is widespread that Bernini was the first to attempt to unite architecture with sculpture and painting in such a manner that together they make a beautiful whole.  This he accomplished by removing all repugnant uniformity of poses, breaking up the poses sometimes without violating good rules although he did not bind himself to the rules.  His usual words on this subject were that those who do not sometimes go outside the rules never go beyond them.
         --Baldinucci, Life of Bernini, 1682

The four columns [of the Baldacchino] weigh an hundred and ten thousand pounds, all over richly gilt; this, with the pedestals, crown, and statues about it, form a thing of that art, vastness, and magnificence, as is beyond all that man's industry has produced of the kind; it is the work of Bernini, a Florentine sculptor, architect, painter, and poet, who, a little before my coming to the city [Rome], gave a public opera, wherein he painted the scenes, cut the statues, invented the engines, composed the music, write the comedy and built the theatre. --John Evelyn, Diary, 1644

I did see an angel not far from me toward my left hand, in corporal form. . . .  He was not great but little, very beautiful, his face so glorious, that he seemed to be one of the higher angels, which seem to be all enflamed, perhaps they are those which are called Seraphim. . . . I did see in his hand a long dart of gold, and at the end of the iron head it seemed to have a little fire, this he seemed to pass through my heart sometimes, and that it pierced to my entrails, which me thought he drew from me, when he pulled it out again, and he left me wholly enflamed in great love of God. . . --From the Autobiography of Saint Theresa

Required reading: review many of the preceding pages in the text, plus pp. 350--351; 366--369; 372--373.

The exportation of the Baroque style from Italy had a diverse effect wherever it went. In devoutly Catholic Flanders, it was embraced for its dynamic qualities, heightened by Rubens's extensive personal knowledge of Italy and Italian Renaissance and Baroque art. Rubens's canvas reveals a fundamentally different approach to representation from that we generally usetoday.  Rubens's explanatory letter [text, pp. 350-351] might well not have been necessary for a well-read intellectual of his period.

In Spain, Diego Velazquez was particularly motivated by the psychological penetration of Caravaggio's art, but his works were also perfectly attuned to court politics, as I shall discuss in my lecture.

In France, the art and architecture of the Age of the Baroque underwent an individualized development, with a special emphasis on Classicism, as seen in the works of Poussin and the architecture at Versailles.  The garden at Versailles, with its tremendous vistas and emphasis on diagonals, represents the new dynamic planning seen in the 17th and 18th centuries, and which influenced such distant sites as the new city of Washington being planned as the capital of the United States.

351.  SIR PETER PAUL RUBENS AND WORKSHOP: Allegory of the Outbreak of War, 1638.  Oil on canvas, 6' 9"  x 11' 3 7/8".  Pitti Palace, Florence.

366. Diego Velazquez: Las Meninas, 1656; The Prado, Madrid

Nicholas Poussin (1594-1665): The Infant Bacchus Entrusted to the Nymphs, 1658; Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA (not in text, but see photocopy with notes for the third lecture in this Sourcebook)

Works in context:
--Louis Le Vau, Jules Hardoin-Mansart, Andre Le Notre: Chateau and Gardens of Versailles, ca. 1661-85
--Rubens: Portrait of Thomas Howard, Early of Arundel, 1630
--Rubens or school: Head of a Thief; The Carnegie
--Velazquez: Los Borrachos, 1628
--Velazquez: Juan de Pareja, 1649
--Velazquez: Pope Innocent X, 1650.

Suggested Reading:
John Rupert Martin: Rubens
Jonathan Brown. Velazquez.
Anthony Blunt. Poussin.

Required reading: text, pp. 349--349; 354--355; 360--365; 376--377.

Holland was the most prosperous and open-minded country in seventeenth-century Europe. While the majority of its citizens were Protestant, the country tolerated its Catholic minority with equanimity and provided a haven for persecuted Jews and Protestants from other countries, especially the Spanish Netherlands and France.  The United Provinces, as Holland was then called, had successfully defended its boundaries against threats from the Spanish Netherlands early in the century and secured it from destruction by flooding from the North Sea with a sophisticated system of dykes that was in use until recently.  In a political situation of stability formalized by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648, Holland prospered and its inhabitants' pride in their communal achievements soon found reflection in art.

The quantity, quality and variety of painting produced by Dutch artists for patrons of all economic and social strata in seventeenth-century Holland were without parallel in the rest of Europe, and inspired a similar extension of art patronage to middle-class patrons in France and England in the eighteenth century.  While paintings with religious subjects were produced in seventeenth-century Holland, especially for Catholic patrons, most pictures were made for private display and not for public sites in churches and civic buildings, as had been the case in the past.  Consequently patrons wanted small works with secular subjects.  Still-life, landscape and scenes of daily life (genre scenes) all developed more vigorously in the 17th century than before, as well as portraiture.  Many artists specialized in one kind of painting (Hals in portraits, Ruisdael in landscapes, for example), although some were more versatile. Of these, the greatest was Rembrandt, who created masterpieces in every category named but who preferred to paint religious or historical subjects that allowed him to explore and record the human spirit.

Like many of his contemporaries, Rembrandt was a prolific printmaker (he made 287 etchings).  He used the etching medium with a freedom and lack of inhibition that has never been excelled.  The popularity of engravings and etchings by artists after their own designs or based on paintings by other artists (in effect, reproductions that served the purpose later taken over by photography) was an important development in its own right, for prints made works of art accessible even to collectors of modest means and made artists' ideas widely available as well to other artists throughout Europe (Rembrandt was admired by Italian collectors and influenced Italian art).  It became commonplace in the eighteenth century for even modest households to own prints, hung on the wall or mounted in albums.  Great art was no longer the exclusive property of the rich and powerful.

Key works:
335. Frans Hals: Merry Drinker. 1628--30. Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

349. Vermeer: A Maidservant Pouring Milk. ca. 1660. Oil on canvas, 17 7/8 x 16 1/8".  Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

376.  JACOB VAN RUISDAEL: Dutch Landscape from the Dunes at Overveen. ca. 1670.  Oil on canvas, 21 7/8 x 24 3/8". Mauritshuis, Hague.

362. REMBRANDT: Bathsheba with King David's Letter. 1654.

363. REMBRANDT: Return of the Prodigal Son. c. 1662-68.  Oil on canvas, 8' 8" x 6' 8".  Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg.

365. Rembrandt: Three Crosses. 1653. Drypoint and burin.

Dutch and French Paintings at Carnegie Museum:
--FRANS HALS, Portrait of Pieter van der Morsch, 1616.
--SIMON VOUET: Toilet of Venus

Works in Context:
--Vermeer: Young Woman with Water Jug, 1665; Metropolitan Museum, New York
--Rembrandt: Syndics of the Cloth Guild, 1662; Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
--REMBRANDT: The Militia Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq. 1642.
--Honthorst, Supper Party, 1620
--Kalf, Still Life, 1659
--Ruisdael, View of Haarlem, 1670
--Hals: (Balthasar?) Coymans, 1645; National Gallery, Washington
--Rembrandt: Self-Portrait, 1659

Key Terms:
Genre - French term from the Latin genus, meaning "kind" or "class".  The term in its general use refers to the various types of paintings in Baroque and the eighteenth century art:  history paintings, still lives, landscape, portraits, etc.  In its specific use genre means paintings of everyday life without religious or moral overtones.  These were especially popular in seventeenth century Holland.

Etching - A print made from a design scratched on a copper plate, but--as opposed to engraving--not directly.  Instead, the copper is coated, so that when bathed in acid, those parts of the coating that have been scratched away will produce lines in the metal.  The method allows for far greater subtlety than woodcut or engraving.  Etchers such as Rembrandt could rework their prints into many different stages called states.

Suggested Reading:
Ivins, How Prints Look
Seymour Slive. Frans Hals.
William Hekscher. Rembrandt's "Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Tulp"
Simon Schama, Rembrandt's Eye, 1999
Clifford Ackley, Printmaking in the age of Rembrandt
Kenneth Clark, Landscape into Art

Selected text on Dutch 17th Century Painting:

As for the art off Paintings and the affection off the people to Pictures, I thincke none other goe beeyond them, there having bin in this Country Many excellent Men in thatt Faculty, some att presentt, as Rimbrantt, etts. All in general striving to adorne their houses, especially the outer or street roome, with costly peeces, Butchers and bakers not much inferiour in their shoppes, which are Fairly sett Forth, yea many tymes blacksmithes, Coblers, etts., will have some picture or other by their Forge and in their stalle.  Such is the gernall Notion, enclination and delight that these Countrie Native[s] have to Paintings.
--Peter Mundy, an English traveller in Amsterdam, 1640.

Required reading: text, pp. 376--397.

While pluralism in art is traditionally attributed to the nineteenth century, in fact the first century to evidence different and even opposing art movements was the eighteenth century.  The eighteenth century begins in France and Germany with the Rococo movement.  This movement got its name from the French rocaille, meaning rock work or elaborate shell work--an allusion to the sinuous, curvilinear, florid effects of what was essentially the end moment of the Baroque.  In painting and architecture in France the Rococo was a reaction after the death of Louis XIV in 1715 to the exaggerated pomposity and coldness of French Baroque.   Rococo was a vigorous movement in French painting right until the eve of the Revolution, as epitomized by the superb freedom of execution and lightness of subject of such painters as Fragonard.

About the middle of the eighteenth century the movement curiously named Romanticism appeared in England, France, and Germany in both art and literature.  Much of its spirit lasted well into the nineteenth century, particularly in music (Beethoven, Berlioz).  Romanticism--particularly its off-shoot, the Gothic Revival--was in part a reaction against the Classical tradition, but it encompassed elements of the Classical tradition as well, particularly in subject matter.

Romanticism attacked the artificiality and frivolity of Rococo, but also worked against what artists saw as the over-intellectuality of Neoclassicism (defined below).  Romanticism stressed freedom, spontaneity, and the power of nature.  It was in many respects an antiintellectual movement, and reveled in escapism.  It thus admitted all kinds of exotic arts into Europe, from China to remote America.  Where Neoclassicism stressed action in its art, Romanticism stressed feeling.

Opposing both Romanticism and Rococo as the most powerful art movement of the later eighteenth century was Neoclassicism.  By this term is meant not merely a revival of Greek and Roman forms, as in the Renaissance, but a new movement marked by extreme austerity of line in both painting and architecture.  In part Neoclassicism was fueled by the rediscovery of the Roman ruins at Pompeii and expeditions that measured the remains of Greek architecture; in part the movement was a reaction to the frivolity of Rococo.  Certainly Neoclassicism was perfectly suited to the revolutionary climate at the end of the eighteenth century in France as well as inAmerica.  In the new United States, Neoclassicism was the favorite style of President Thomas Jefferson and served as a major inspiration for the public buildings of Washington D.C.

Key Works:
388. ANTOINE WATTEAU (French): A Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera. 1717.  Oil on canvas, 51 x 76 1/2". Louvre, Paris.

388.  JEAN-HONORÉ FRAGONARD: Happy Accidents of the Swing. 1767.  Oil on canvas, 31 7/8 x 25 3/8".  Wallace Collection, London

390. JOHANN BALTHASAR NEUMANN (architecture), Giambattista Tiepolo (fresco), and Antonio Bossi (stucco): Kaisersaal (Imperial Hall), Episcopal Palace, Würzburg, Germany. 1735-4, and 1752

394. THOMAS JEFFERSON: State Capital, Richmond, Virginia. 1785-89.

396. JACQUES-LOUIS DAVID: Death of Socrates, 1787.  Oil on canvas, 59 x 78".

Works in Context:
--Richard, Earl of Burlington: Chiswick villa, near London, 1725ff.
--Jean-Baptise Chardin, Still Life with Coffeepot, The Carnegie, 1728
--Robert Adam, Etruscan Room, Osterley Park, 1761
--Jean-Baptiste Simeon Chardin: Grace at Table, 1740; Louvre
--Jacques-Louis David: Oath of the Horatii, 1784; Louvre
--David: Death of Marat, 1793; Musees Royaux, Brussels

Key terms: as underlined in the text above.

Suggested Reading:
Michael Levey: Rococo to Revolution

Required reading: text, pp. 398--419; 424--425; 430--431

Realism is a general term meaning the representation of things according to nature, but as a specific art movement, the term denotes a specific mid-nineteenth century French movement led by Gustave Courbet in painting and by such writers as Balzac and Zola.  It emphasized minute observation of even the most common scenes of everyday life.

Around the middle of the nineteenth century the Realist painters broke away from the Academy, which had ruled the French art world for over a century.  One innovation of the Realists was a scandalous change in subject matter; instead of grand historic or religious themes, Courbet painted peasants and working people.

When Courbet's major works, the Burial at Ornans and the newly painted Artist's Studio, were rejected by the jury of the Universal Exposition of 1855, an infuriated Courbet withdrew the eleven pictures that had been accepted and constructed his own exhibition building on the Avenue Montaigne, where, with customary bravado, he held a one-man show in competition with the official exhibition.  Courbet then distributed what has come to be called the "Realist Manifesto," whose agressive tone was reminiscent of the political texts of this stormy period.

Key works:
416. Francisco Goya: The Execution of Madrileños on the Third of May, 1808. 1814-15.  Oil on canvas, 8' 9" x 13' 4"; the figures are life sized.  The Prado, Madrid.

418. Théodore Géricault: The Raft of the Medusa, 1818-19. Louvre, Paris.

424, 425. Honoré Daumier: Rue Transnonain, April 15, 1834. Lithograph: see technical diagram p. 425).

430. Gustave Courbet: The Stonebreakers, 1849; formerly Gemaldegalerie, Dresden

Works in Context:
--Daumier: Third Class Carriage, ca. 1862
--Courbet: The Painter's Studio, 1855; Louvre, Paris
--Jean-Francois Millet: The Gleaners, 1857; Louvre
--Antoine Jean Gros, Napoleon in the pest house at Jaffa, 1804
--J.A.D. Ingres, Grande Odalisque, 1814
--Courbet: Burial at Ornans, 1849
--EMMANUEL LEUTZE: Washington Crossing the Delaware. 1851.  Oil on canvas, 12' 5" x 21' 3".  Metropolitan Museum, New York.

Key Terms:
Realism: as defined in text above.

Romanticism: see definition in preceding lecture text.

Academy - A specific place, such as the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris, founded in 1648, or the Royal Academy of Arts in London, which flourished a century later.  As a general precept, the "academy" refers to a view that art can be taught through rules and scrupulous attention to the work of the Old Masters.  The subjects of paintings at the academy were generally of a historical or religious bent, frequently in the service of the state, as opposed to the radical or apolitical subject matter of the Realists. Leutze's Washington Crossing the Delaware is one of the great academic paintings in the United States--but it was painted in Düsseldorf, Germany, by a painter who had almost certainly never seen the Delaware River!

Lithograph - A print made from the impression of a greasy crayon or pencil upon a stone slab.  Ideally suited for illustrations in magazines and books, it became a favorite reproductive art technique of the nineteenth century.

Suggested Reading:
Robert Rosenblum and H.W. Janson, 19th-Century Art, 1984
George Heard Hamilton, 19th and 20th Century Art
Linda Nochlin, Realism and Tradition in Art, 1848-1900, 1966

Selected texts on Realism:

"The title of Realist was thrust upon me just as the title of Romantic was imposed upon the men of 1830.  Titles have never given a true idea of things: if it were otherwise, the works would be unnecessary. . . Without expanding on the greater or lesser accuracy of a name which nobody, I should hope, can really be expected to understand, I will limit myself to a few words of elucidation in order to cut short the misunderstandings. . . I have studied, outside of any system and without prejudice, the art of the ancients and the art of the moderns.  I no more wanted to imitate the one than to copy the other; nor, furthermore, was it my intention to attain the trivial goal of art for art's sake.  No!  I simply wanted to draw forth from a complete acquaintance with tradition the reasoned and independent consciousness of my own individuality. . . To know in order to be able to create, that was my idea.  To be in a position to translate the customs, the ideas, the appearance of my epoch, according to my own estimation; to be not only a painter, but a man as well; in short, to create living art--this is my goal."
Gustave Courbet, The Realist Manifesto, 1861

Required reading: text, preceding pages on Realism and pp. 440-455; 446--451

In the 1860s the French painter Èdouard Manet took over important parts of the forms and subjects of the Realists, but he emphasized even more the flatness of his canvas with little modeling of his figures and broad patches of color.  Going back to such seventeenth-century painters as Hals and Velasquez (both of whom he copied, literally), Manet employed "obvious brushstrokes," meaning that one could see the mark of his brushstroke as a physical entity on the canvas (rather than being melded into the preceding "invisible" brushstrokes in the manner of Northern Renaissance oils).

The masters of Impressionism, above all Claude Monet, adopted the loose and "obvious" brushstrokes of Manet, and some of Manet's penchant for untraditional subject matter (such as industrial scenes), which Manet in turn had taken over from the Realists.  Monet's work is characterized by bright colors and a scientific interest in light and perception.  Impressionism developed in the 1860s and flourished in the 1870s and 1880s; its supporters held their own exhibits between 1874 and 1886.

441. ÉDOUARD MANET: Olympia, 1863.  Oil on canvas, 51 x 75 3/4".  Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

Review 306. TITIAN: Venus of Urbino, 1538, an important source for Manet's Olympia.

See also 591. Morimura Yasumasa, Portrait (Futago) 1988 photograph, Carnegie Museum of Art, which recreates Manet's Olympia in a startlingly different context.

440.  ÉDOUARD MANET: Le Déjeuner sur l'herbe (The Picnic). 1863.  Oil on canvas, 7' x 8' 10". Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

404.  ÉDOUARD MANET: A Bar at the Folies-Bergères. 1881-82.  Oil on canvas, 37 1/2 x 51". Courtauld Institute, London.

446.  CLAUDE MONET: Impression-Sunrise, 1872.  Oil on canvas, 19 1/2 x 25 1/2".  Musée Marmottan, Paris.

447.  CLAUDE MONET: Gare St. Lazare, Paris. 1877.  Oil on canvas, 32 1/2 x 39 3/4".  Fogg Art Museum,  Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Works in context:
--Claude Monet: Rouen Cathedral, 1894; Metropolitan Museum, New York
--AUGUSTE RENOIR: A Luncheon at Bougival, (now known as The Luncheon of the Boating Party). 1881.  Oil on canvas, 51 x 68".  The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
--EDGAR DEGAS: The Rehearsal, 1873-74.  Oil on canvas, 18 x 24".  Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts. (Bequest of Maurice Wertheim, 1951).
--Edgar Degas: Viscount Lepic and Daughters, 1873; formerly Berlin
--Manet: Still Life with Brioche, 1882; The Carnegie
--Monet: Nympheas (Water Lilies), 1920-21; The Carnegie

Suggested reading:
Linda Nochlin, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, 1966

Texts on the Salon des Refusés, 1863:

Numerous complaints have reached the Emperor on the subject of works of art which have been refused by the jury of the exhibition.  His Majesty, wishing to let the public judge the legitimacy of these complaints, has decided that the rejected works of art are to be exhibited in another part of the Palace of Industry.  This exhibition will be voluntary, and artists who may not wish to participate need only inform the administration, which will hasten to return their works to them.
Proclamation of the Salon des Refuses, 1863

The exhibition of the rejected works, which we saw only for a moment, will certainly be a triumph for the jury.   More than 1,500 artists have withdrawn, and of course some of the best.  Nevertheless among the remaining canvases are some which would have held an honorable place with the work which was accepted . . . Manet has a gift for displeasing the jury.  If he had only that, we should most certainly not be grateful to him, but he has others. Manet has not yet had the last word.  His paintings, whose qualities the public cannot appreciate, are full of good intentions.  Manet will triumph some day, we have no doubt, over all the obstacles he encouters, and we shall be the first to applaud his success.
Critique of the Salon des Refuses, 1863

A commonplace woman of the demimonde, as naked as can be, shamelessly lolls between two dandies dressed to the teeth.  These latter look like schoolboys . . . and I search in vain for the meaning of this unbecoming rebus ...This is a young man's practical joke, a shameful open sore not worth exhibiting this way ... The landscape is well handled,...but the figures are slipshod.
A critique of Luncheon on the Grass, 1863

Required reading: text, pp. 458--465, especially the quotations from van Gogh and Cezanne.

In 1886, the Impressionists held their last group exhibition.  Their experiments in paint were no longer revolutionary; their work had gained wide acceptance and favor among artists and the public.  At this juncture (the 1880s), Post-Impressionism in painting eclipsed Impressionism as the avant-garde.  The generic label "Post-Impressionists" refers to the painters of significance since the 1880s who passed through an Impressionist phase, became dissatisfied with the limitations of that style, and went beyond it into a variety of highly individualized directions.

H.W. Janson has written: "As they did not share one common goal, it is difficult to find a more descriptive term than Post-Impressionism. In any event, they were not anti-Impressionists.  Far from trying to undo the effects of the Manet Revolution, they wanted to carry it further. . . Post-Impressionism is a late stage of the developments that had begun in the 1860s with such pictures as Manet's Dejeuner sur l'herbe."

We have already seen that Impressionism was in part an outgrowth of Realism, in that it aspired toward scientific color and naturalistic optics.  Some Post-Impressionists similarly tested the limits of objective perception, while others sought an art that was subjective or personal; their art was based as much on visions as on vision.  Of the four great Post-Impressionist masters in France, Seurat and Cézanne were the more scientific.  They attempted to demonstrate laws of color mixture (Seurat) or principles of binocular vision (Cézanne). Yet even they favored certain shorthand abstractions in transposing from nature to art; they sought a monumental art--durable, like the art of museums--rather than the momentary and fugitive impression. Van Gogh and Gauguin went much further in the subjective direction, since each sought to evoke ideas and feelings through art.  Van Gogh worked directly from nature, but tried to evoke this subjective response to the motif by heightening his color or by exaggerating line or shape properties. Gauguin departed from nature most of all, turning grass red or envisioning saints or angels, yet he too attempted to suggest interior states of mind or feeling.  Indeed Seurat, Van Gogh, and especially Gauguin were claimed as "Symbolists" by literary critics of the 1890s.  The Symbolist, as Mallarme put it, wanted "to suggest, not to describe."

Key works:
459.  GEORGES SEURAT: A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. 1884-86.  Oil on canvas, 6' 9 1/2" x 10' 1 1/4".  The Art Institute of Chicago.

458. Paul Gauguin: The Vision after the Sermon, 1888. National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh.

462.  VINCENT VAN GOGH. Starry Night,  1889.  Oil on canvas, 28 3/4 x 36 1/4". Museum of Modern Art, New York.

464.  PAUL CÉZANNE: Still Life with Basket of Apples. 1890-94.  Oil on canvas, 24 3/8 x 31".  The Art Institute of Chicago.

465.  PAUL CÉZANNE: Mont Ste.-Victoire. 1904-06.  Oil on canvas, 25 5/8 x 31 7/8". Private Collection.

The following Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works hang in Carnegie Museum:
--MONET, The Sea at Le Havre, 1868
--MONET, Waterloo Bridge, London, 1903
--RENOIR, Garden in the Rue Cortot, 1876
--MONET, Nympheas (Waterlilies), ca 1920
--VAN GOGH, The Moulin de la Galette
--VAN GOGH, The Plain of Auvers, 1890
--CEZANNE, Landscape Near Aix 1892-95
--SIGNAC, Place des Lices, St. Tropez, 1893

Works in context:
--VINCENT VAN GOGH: The Night Cafe.  1888.  Oil on canvas, 27 1/2 x 35".  Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven.
--Gauguin: Spirit of the Dead Watching (Manao Tupapau), 1892; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
--GAUGUIN. Where do we come from?  What are we?  Where are we going?  1897.  Oil on burlap, 4' 6 3/4" x 12' 3 1/2".  Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Selected texts on Post-Impressionism:

A young  Tahitian girl is lying on her stomach, showing part of her frightened face.  She rests on a bed covered by a blue pareu and a light chrome yellow sheet.  A violet background, sown with flowers glowing like electric sparks; a strange figure sits beside the bed. . . . What can a young native girl be doing completely nude on a bed, and in this somewhat difficult position?  Preparing herself for making love?  That is certainly in character, but it is indecent, and I do not wish it to be so.  Sleeping?  The amorous activity would then be over, and that is still indecent.  I see here only fear.  What kind of fear?  Certainly not the fear of Susanna surprised by the Elders.  That kind of fear does not exist in Oceania.

The tupapau (Spirit of the Dead) is clearly indicated.  For the natives it is a constant dread. . . A lamp is always lighted at night.  No one ever goes out on the paths on a moonless night without a lantern, and even then they travel in groups. . . Once I have found my tupapau I devote my attention completely to it and make it the motif of my picture.  The nude sinks to a secondary level. . . What can a spirit mean to a Tahitian?  She knows neither the threatre nor the reading of novels, and when she thinks of a dead person she thinks necessarily of someone she has already seen.  My spirit can only be an ordinary little woman.  Her hand is outstretched as if to seize a prey.

My decorative sense leads me to strew the background with flowers.  These flowers are the phosphorescent flowers of the tupapau; they are the sign that the spirit nears you.  Tahitian beliefs. . . The title Manao tupapau has two meanings, either the girl thinks of the spirit, or the spirit thinks of her.

To sum up:  The musical part: undulating horizontal lines; harmonies of orange and blue, united by the yellows and purple (their derivatives) lit by greenish sparks.  The literary part: the spirit of a living person linked to the spirit of the dead.  Night and day. . . This genesis is written for those who must always know the why and the wherefore.  Otherwise it is simply a study of an Oceanian nude.
Gauguin, on Spirit of the Dead Watching, 1893

I now have another unpleasant thing to tell you about the money, which is that I shall not manage this week, because this very day I am paying out 25 frs.; I shall have money for five days, but not for seven.  This is Monday; if I get your next letter on Saturday morning there will be no need to increase the enclosure.  Last week I did not one only but two portraits of my postman, a half-length with the hands, and a head, life size.  The good fellow, as he would not accept money, cost more eating and drinking with me, and I gave him besides the "Lantern" of Rochefort.  But that is a trifling and immaterial evil, considering that he posed very well, and that I expect to paint his baby very shortly, for his wife has just been brought to bed . . . Today I am probably going to begin the interior of the Cafe where I eat, by gas light, in the evening.  It is what they call here a Cafe de Nuit (they are fairly frequent here), staying open all night.  "Night prowlers" can take refuge there when they have no money to pay for a lodging, or are too tight to be taken in. All those things--family, native land--are perhaps more attractive in the imaginations of such people as us, who pretty well do without native land or family either, than they are in reality.  I always feel I am a traveller, going somewhere and to some destination.

If I tell myself that the somewhere and the destination do not exist, that seems to me very reasonable and likely enough. I have tried to express the terrible passions of humanity by means of red and green.

The room is blood red and dark yellow with a green billiard table in the middle; there are four citron-yellow lamps with a glow of orange and green.  Everywhere there is a clash and contrast of the most disparate reds and greens in the figures of little sleeping hooligans, in the empy, dreary room, in violet and blue.  The blood-red and the yellow-green of the billiard table, for instance, contrast with the soft tender Louis XV green of the counter, on which there is a pink nosegay.  The white coat of the landlord, awake in a corner of that furnace, turns citron-yellow, or pale luminous green.
Vincent Van Gogh: letters to his brother Theo from Arles, 1888

In your letter you speak of my realization in art.  I think that every day I am attaining it more, although with some difficulty.  For if the strong experience of nature--and assuredly I have it--is the necessary basis for all conception of art on which rests the grandeur and beauty of all future works, the knowledge of the means of expressing our emotion is no less essential, and is only to be acquired through very long experience.
     Paul Cézanne: letter to Louis Aurenche, 1904

Required reading: text, pp. 470--491; 500--510; 504--509; 514--517; 538--539.

The three significant movements in early twentieth-century art that are encapsulated in this lecture are described below:

Fauvism was a short-lived movement in French painting in the first years of the twentieth century whose best-known figure was Matisse.  It was characterized by bright, often arbitrary colors, simple outlines, and a diminished sense of illusionistic depth.  Its subject matter ranged from scenes of everyday bourgeois urban life to fantasies based on the sense of loss of an arcadian innocence, of estrangement from an irrecoverable pagan version of the Garden of Eden.  The principal sources of Fauvism were in the styles and subjects of the immediately preceding generation of Seurat, van Gogh, and above all, Gauguin.

Expressionism was primarily a movement in the German-speaking countries of Central Europe.  It arose shortly after Fauvism in France, and was greatly influenced by it formally and stylistically. In content, however, the German Expressionists were preoccupied with gaining access to authentic inner feelings and instincts which they believed had been lost because of modern urban and industrial life.  In many cases, this search for inner authenticity caused them to turn to primitve states of nature and experience, but also to the attempt to regain a lost sense of the spiritual, with art being used instead of orthodox religion.

Cubism was a process of abstraction in which planar modeling and multiple viewpoints recreated objects as planar facets lying near or on the picture plane. It was created by Picasso before World War I as a reinvention of the classical means of representation, using a new system of signs for depicting the visual world.  Although Picasso borrowed from African tribal art in his invention, Cubism is totally Western.  Although known to only a limited public when it was first created, Cubism was widely influential on other artists. One needs to distinguish Analytical Cubism from Synthetic Cubism (definitions in your text, pp. 504--507).

Key works:
490.  HENRI MATISSE: The Joy of Life, 1905-6.  Oil on canvas, 68 1/2 x 93 3/4". Barnes Foundation, Merion, Pennsylvania.

Review: 388. ANTOINE WATTEAU: A Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera, 1717 and 388.  JEAN-HONORÉ FRAGONARD: Happy Accidents of the Swing. 1767.

514. Ernst Ludwig Kirchner: Street, Berlin, 1913. Museum of Modern Art, New York

500.  PABLO PICASSO: Les Demoiselles d'Avignon. 1907.  Oil on canvas, 96 x 92".  Museum of Modern Art, New York.

579. Robert Colescott, Les Demoiselles d'Alabama: Vestidas, 1985, recreates Picasso's painting in a startlingly different context. Yang Collection, New York.

506. PICASSO: Still Life with Chair Caning. 1911-12.  Collage of oil and pasted oilcloth, simulating chair caning, on canvas, oval 10 5/8 x 13 3/4".

538--539. PICASSO: Guernica, May 1-June 4, 1937.  Oil on canvas, 11'6" x 25' 8". Queen Sofia National Arts Center, Madrid.

Works in context:
--Matisse: The Dance, 1909--10.
--Matisse: Red Room (Harmony in Red), 1908; Hermitage, St. Petersburg
--Matisse: The Thousand and One Nights, 1950 Carnegie Museum.
--Kirchner: The Street, ca. 1908; Museum of Modern Art, New York
--PICASSO: Ma Jolie (Woman with Guitar). 1911-l2.  Oil on canvas, 39 3/8 x 25 3/4".  Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Key terms: underlined terms in text above.

Suggested reading:
Arnason: History of Modern Art
Hamilton: Nineteenth and Twentieth-Century Art
Alfred H. Barr, Jr.: Matisse, His Art and His Public, New York, 1951
Peter Selz: German Expressionist Painting, Berkeley, 1957

Selected texts on Fauvism, Expressionism, and Cubism:

What I am after, above all, is expression.  Sometimes it has been conceded that I have a certain technical ability but that, my ambition being limited, I am unable to proceed beyond a purely visual satisfaction such as can be procured from the mere sight of a picture.  But the purpose of a painter must not be conceived as separate from his pictorial means, and these pictorial means must be the more complete (I do not mean complicated); the deeper is his thought.  I am unable to distinguish between the feeling I have for life and my way of expressing it.

Expression to my way of thinking does not consist of the passion mirrored upon a human face or betrayed by a violent gesture.  The whole arrangement of my picture is expressive.  The place occupied by figures or objects, the empty spaces around them, the proportions, everything plays a part. Composition is the art of arranging in a decorative manner the various elements at the painter's disposal for the expression of his feelings.  In a picture every part will be visible and will play the role conferred upon it, be it principal or secondary. All that is not useful in the picture is detrimental. A work of art must be harmonious in its entirety; for superfluous details would, in the mind of the beholder, encroach upon the essential elements . . . I cannot copy nature in a servile way; I must interpret nature and submit it to the spirit of the picture.  When I have found the relationship of all the tones the result must be a living harmony of tones, a harmony not unlike that of a musical composition.

The chief aim of color should be to serve expression as well as possible.  I put down my colors without a preconceived plan.  If at the first step and perhaps without my being conscious of it one tone has particularly pleased me, more often than not when the picture is finished I will notice that I have respected this tone while I have progressively altered and transformed the others.  I discover the quality of colors in a purely instinctive way.  To paint an autumn landscape I will not try to remember what colors suit this season, I will be inspired only by the sensation that the season gives me; the icy clearness of the sour blue sky will express the season just as well as the tonalities of the leaves.  My sensation itself may vary, the autumn may be soft and warm like a protracted summer or quite cool with a cold sky and lemon yellow trees that give a chilly impression and announce winter.
   From Henri Matisse: Notes of a Painter, 1908:

From the painters of the origins, the primitives, whose work is obviously different from nature, down to those artists who, like David, Ingres and even Bouguereau, believed in painting nature as it is, art has always been art and not nature.  And from the point of view of art there are no concrete or abstract forms, but only forms which are more or less convincing lies.  That those lies are necessary to our mental selves is beyond any doubt, as it is through them that we form our aesthetic point of view of life.

Cubism is no different from any other school of painting. The same principles  and the same elements are common to all.  The fact that for a long time cubism has not been understood and that even today there are people who cannot see anything in it, means nothing.  I do not read English, an English book is a blank book to me.  This does not mean that the English language does not exist, and why should I blame anybody else but myself if I cannot understand what I know nothing about?

I can hardly understand the importance given to the word research in connection with modern painting. In my opinion to search means nothing in painting. To find, is the thing.  We all know that Art is not truth.  Art is a lie that makes us realize truth, at least the truth that is given us to understand.  The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies.  If he only shows in his work that he has searched, and researched, for the way to put over lies, he would never accomplish anything.

They speak of naturalism in opposition to modern painting.  I would like to know if anyone has ever seen a natural work of art.  Nature and art, being two different things, cannot be the same thing.  Through art we express our conception of what nature is not.

Many think that cubism is an art of transition, an experiment which is to bring ulterior results.  Those who think that way have not understood it.  Cubism is not either a seed or a foetus, but an art dealing primarily with forms, and when a form is realized  it is there to live its own life.  A mineral substance, having geometric formation, is not made so for transitory purposes, it is to remain what it is and will always have its own form. But if we are to apply the law of evolution and transformation to art, then we have to admit that all art is transitory.  On the contrary, art does not enter into there philosophic absolutisms. If cubism is an art of transition I am sure that the only thing that will come out of it is another form of cubism.

There is no abstract art.  You must always start with something. Afterward you can remove all traces of reality.  There's no danger then, anyway, because the idea of the object will have left an indelible mark.  It is what started the artist off, excited his ideas, and stirred up his emotions.  Ideas and emotions will in the end be prisoners in his work.  Whatever they do, they can't escape from the picture.  They form an integral part of it, even when their presence is no longer discernible.  Whether he likes it or not, man is the instrument of nature. It forces on him its character and appearance.
Picasso, on his art

Required reading: text, pp. 516--523; 530--533; 546--549

Fauvism, Expressionism, and Cubism can be understood as varieties of Abstraction, in that the "real world" of representation is still present, although stylized.  In all those paintings by Matisse and Picasso in which a human figure appears, for example, we are still able to recognize the presence of that figure.  Nonobjectivism (sometimes called Nonrepresentational painting) goes one step farther, and presents forms in a work of art that no longer resemble forms in the visual world.  The Kandinsky and Mondrian paintings in today's lecture are habitually called Early Abstraction, but that term is in error: they ought properly to be called examples of Nonobjectivism.

In 1912, the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky wrote the following about his experiments in Nonobjectivism:
If you let your eye stray over a palette of colors, you experience two things.  In the first place you receive a purely physical effect, namely the eye itself is enchanted by the beauty and other qualities of color.  You experience satisfaction and delight, like a gourmet savoring a delicacy.  Or the eye is stimulated as the tongue is titillated by a spicy dish. But then it grows calm and cool, like a finger after touching ice.  These are physical sensations, limited in duration.  They are superficial, too, and leave no lasting impression behind if the soul remains closed.  Just as we feel at the touch of ice a sensation of cold, forgotten as soon as the finger becomes warm again, so the physical action of color is fogotten as soon as the eye turns away.  On the other hand, as the physical coldness of ice, upon penetrating more deeply, arouses more complex feelings, and indeed a whole chain of psychological experiences, so may also the superficial impression of color develop into an experience.

The disillusionment caused by World War I led the Dada artists, particularly in Germany, to reject what they considered the "merely" spiritual claims of the new abstract art, and to revolt in general against classicism and reason.

Surrealism--as seen in today's lecture in the work of Dali--arose as an attempt to extend the dada protest against ordinary rationality. Through dream, eroticism, drugs, and other systematic means the Surrealists hoped to liberate the mind from false constraints in order to lead mankind toward a fuller and freer humanity.  Although primarily a literary movement, many surrealist artists achieved these goals, using planned accident, seemingly illogical imagery, and a kind of doodling called Automatism (the creation of forms without conscious control; it emphasizes chance as a major element in the creative process). Automatism is well represented in the early career of Jean Arp.

Other artists, disillusioned with the modernist tradition, returned to a new classicism and realism in their art in the years between the two world wars.  During and after World War II, American artists responded to Surrealist and other European modern movements.  The result, called Abstract Expressionism, was the first American art of world significance.  The abstract expressionist movement in its radical reexamination of art and cultural values necessarily resorted to an often extreme degree of abstraction; the immediately following generations of American artists tended either to extend this abstraction by different means, or to react against it by turning to various new kinds of realism.  The postwar era in American art was dominated by Abstract Expressionism and the influence of its most famous practitioner, Jackson Pollock.

Key works:
516. Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944): First Abstract Watercolor, ca. 1913. Pompidou Center, Paris.

16. Piet Mondrian: Composition No. 8, 1939--42. Kimball Art Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

523. Jean (Hans) Arp, Collage Arranged according to the Laws of Chance, 1916--17. Museum of Modern Art, New York,

532. André Masson, Battle of Fishes, 1927; drawing and painting on canvas; Museum of Modern Art, New York.

531. SALVADOR DALI: The Persistence of Memory. 1931.  Oil on canvas, 9 1/2 x 13".  Museum of Modern Art, New York.

546. JACKSON POLLOCK: Convergence, 1952; Albright-Knox Gallery, Buffalo.

Works in context:
--Kandinsky, Improvisation 28, 1912; Guggenheim Museum, New York
--Kandinsky, Improvisation no. 30, 1912-13; Art Institute, Chicago
--Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968): Nude Descending a Staircase, #2, 1912; Philadelphia Museum of Art
--Duchamp, Bottle Rack and other works, 1914--1919, Moderna Museet, Stockholm.
--Kasimir Malevich (1878-1935): Suprematist Composition: White on White, 1918; Museum of Modern Art, New York
--MONDRIAN, Diamond Painting in Red, Yellow, and Blue, 1921-25.
--POLLOCK: No. 4, Carnegie Museum, ca. 1950.
--Mark Rothko: White and Greens in Blue, 1957.
--Morris Louis: Saraband, 1959. Acrylic on canvas.
--DONALD JUDD: Untitled, 1968.  Eight stainless steel boxes, each 48" square and placed 12" apart.

Key terms: those underlined in preceding paragraphs

Suggested reading:
William Rubin: Dada and Surrealist Art
Irving Sandler: The Triumph of American Painting

Required reading: text, pp. 554--569; 578--579

The last four decades of the twentieth century were marked by painting and sculpture that reacted against the "heroism" and absolutism in the Abstract Expressionism of the 1950s.  Minimalism in painting and sculpture retained Nonobjectivism without the personal expressionism of Action Painting; Pop Art reacted against both the form and content of Abstract Expressionism, while new tendencies in realism and expressionism experimented with a selective return to the art produced before World War II. Post-Modernism in architecture (and to a less successful degree, in painting) was a movement born in the 1970s that tried to incorporate history, whimsey, and representation as opposed to what its critics felt was the anti-historical and anti-representational bias of Nonobjectivism in "modern" painting and architecture.

Key works:
554. Jasper Johns: Flag, 1954; Museum of Modern Art, New York.

480. Andy Warhol: Green Coca-Cola Bottles, 1962; oil on canvas. Whitney Museum, New York

557. Frank Stella: Empress of India, 1965, shaped canvas. Museum of Modern Art, New York.

559. Roy Lichtenstein: As I Opened Fire, 1964. Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.

567. CHRISTO: Running Fence, 1976 (dismantled).  2,050 steel poles set 62' apart; 65,000 yards of white woven synthetic fabric, height 18', for a total length 24 1/2 miles.  Sonoma and Marin Counties, California.

568. Duane Hanson: Tourists, 1970. Fibreglass and polyester. Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh.

579. Robert Colescott: Les Demoiselles d'Alabama: Vestidas, 1985. Yang Collection, New York.

591. Morimura Yasumasa, Portrait (Futago) 1988 photograph, Carnegie Museum of Art.

589. Jenny Holzer: Untitled (Selections from Truisms, etc)., LED signboards temporarily displayed in Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1989.

Suggested reading:
Sam Hunter and John Jacobus, American Art of the Twentieth Century:  Painting, Sculpture, Architecture, New York, 1974.

Here follow three or four pages that were taken out of text in 2001:

222--225, 229.  Chartres Cathedral (Notre-Dame), rebuilt ca. 1194-1225.

229. Chartres cathedral, ca. 1145-55 Ancestors of Christ column figures preserved from the older part of the church that escaped the fire of 1194.

230.  Nôtre Dame de la Belle Verrière, stained glass window, Chartres cathedral, 12th c.

229. Amiens Cathedral (Notre-Dame), ca. 1220-1275: facade and south portal trumeau figure of the Vierge Dorée ("Gilded Virgin").

Works in Context:
St. Philibert, Tournus, 10-11th century
203. St. Michael abbey church, Ottonian style, Hildesheim, Germany, ca. 1001-1031
Abbey of St. Denis, outskirts of Paris, 1144

Suggested Reading:
Whitney Stoddard, Monastery and Cathedral in France: 31-52 and 173-190
Otto von Simson, The Gothic Cathedral, New York, 1956, pp. 3-141
Teresa Frisch, Gothic Art 1140-c.1450, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1971
David Macaulay, Cathedral, Boston, 1972

Selected texts on Romanesque and Gothic Architecture:

Dionysius the Pseudo-Areopagite:  The Celestial Hierarchy, on the spiritual value of images:
"Indeed, it is only through images that it is possible to contemplate and know God:  For the mind can by no means be directed to the spiritual presentation and contemplation of the Celestial Hierarchies unless it use the material guidance suited to it, accounting those beauties which are seen to be images of the hidden beauty, the sweet incense a symbol of spiritual dispensations, and the earthly lights a figure of the immaterial enlightenment.

"These images which reveal the unknowable are theophanies and their purpose is to raise man's spirit to the spirtual realm:  "The divine theology, in the fullness of its wisdom, very rightly applies the name theophany to that beholding of God which shows the Divine Likeness, figured in Itself as a likeness in form of that which is formless, through the uplifting of those who contemplate the Divine; inasmuch as a Divine Light is shed upon the seers through it, and they are initiated into some participation of divine things."

Abbot Suger on the architecture and decoration of his abbey church of St. Denis, c.  1144:
...I implored Divine mercy that He Who is the One, the beginning and the ending, Alpha and Omega, might join a good end to a good beginning by a safe middle; that He might not repel from the building of the temple a...man who desired this very thing, with his whole heart....Thus we began work at the former entrance with the doors.  We tore down a certain addition asserted to have been made by Charlemagne on a very honorable occasion...and we set our hand to this part.  As is evident we exerted ourselves incessantly with the enlargement of the body of the church as well as with the trebling of the entrance and the doors, and with the erection of high and noble towers....

In the same year, cheered by so holy and so auspicious a work, we hurried to begin the chamber of atonement in the upper choir where the continual and frequent Victim of our redemption should be sacrificed in secret without disturbance by the crowds.  And...we were mercifully deemed worthy--God helping and prospering us and our concerns--to bring so holy, so glorious, and so famous a structure to a good end, together with our brethren and fellow servants....How much the Hand Divine Which operates in such matters has protected this glorious work is also surely proven by the fact that It allowed that whole magnificent building [to be completed] in three years and three months, from the crypt below to the summit of the vaults above, elaborated with the variety of so many arches and columns, including even the consummation of the roof.  Therefore the inscription of the earlier consecration defines the year of completion:

"The year was the One Thousand, One Hundred, Forty and Fourth of the Word when [this structure] was consecrated."

To these verses of the inscription we choose the following one to be added: "Once the new rear part is joined to the part in front,     The church shines with its middle part brightened.
For bright is that which is brightly coupled with the bright,
And bright is the noble edifice which is pervaded by the new light;
Which stands enlarged in our time,
I, who was Suger, being the leader while it was being accomplished."

Often we contemplate, out of sheer affection for the church our mother, these different ornaments both new and old . . . . Thus, when--out of my delight in the beauty of the house of God--the loveliness of the many-colored gems has called me away from external cares, and worthy meditation has induced me to reflect, transferring that which is material to that which is immaterial, on the diversity of the sacred virtues:  then it seems to me that I see myself dwelling, as it were, in some strange region of the universe which neither exists entirely in the slime of the earth nor entirely in the purity of Heaven; and that, by the grace of God, I can be transported from this inferior to that higher world in an anagogical manner.

275.  FILIPPO BRUNELLESCHI: Dome (Cupola) of the Cathedral of Florence, 1420--36.

274. Brunelleschi: Church of Santo Spirito, Florence. Begun 1436.

287. Leonardo da Vinci, Plan of a centrally planned church from his Notebooks, Milan, 1480s and 1490s; now Paris and elsewhere.

312, 313. Donato Bramante (1444-1514): Project for New St. Peter's Basilica, Rome, 1505/06--17th c.

313. MICHELANGELO BUONARROTI: Plan for New St. Peter's, 1546-64. Longitudinal section and elevation (engravings by Etienne Dupérac, 1569).

23, 24. Andrea Palladio (1508-1580): Villa Rotonda, Vicenza, 1566-1570

Works in Context:
Leon Battista Alberti (1407-1472): S. Andrea, Mantua, 1470 (completed 18th c.)
Donato Bramante (1444-1514), Tempietto of S. Pietro in Montorio, Rome, 1502?-1508

Key Terms:
Central-plan Church - A popular Renaissance type of church (as opposed to, or in addition to the traditional longitudinal basilica), in which the altar is set in a circular or polygonal building, or one with four equal arms (the so- called Greek Cross).

Module - The basic unit of measure in a modular plan, generally derived from the human body.  The module is then repeated numerically throughout the building (this numerical system, popularized around the time of Brunelleschi, replaced the geometric basis of most Medieval architecture, which could not be expressed in terms of whole numbers).

Harmonic Proportion - Renaissance architecture stressed the consistent ratio of all parts of their buildings, one to the other and from each part to the whole in height, width and depth.  Alberti and Palladio especially favored harmonic proportion, in which the parts of a building stood in arithmetical ratios which were derived from muscial harmony.

Positive-Negative Space - The perception of space in architecture at the end of the fifteenth century, especially in Leonardo and Bramante, in which space was treated not merely as a vacuum but as an almost tangible positive force in architecture.

In terms of formal analysis, the Renaissance in architecture marks a return to the vocabulary and (in part) the composition principles of classical architecture, and hence a return to the foundations of western art.  The importance of this achievement can hardly be overemphasized, because the return to rationality and modular linkage in building prefigures the emphasis on rationality and scientific method so characteristic of the modern world.  But in terms of human significance, we are indebted to the Renaissance architects for instilling "self-awareness" in their buildings, parallel to the self-awareness of Renaissance painting, sculpture, and philosophy.  These themes are first enunciated by the two co-founders of Renaissance architecture, Filippo Brunelleschi and Leon Battista Alberti.  Brunelleschi represents self-awareness in his concern for architecture as a system of mathematical co- ordinates rather than an arbitrary or irrational selection of forms.  Alberti expands on Brunelleschi's experiments by stressing walls rather than points in his buildings, and by enwrapping architecture in a wider urban and social context.

In the High Renaissance the focus of architecture moved physically from Florence to Rome and Venice, while its aesthetic objectives became the search for an all encompassing spatial experience.  The three major architects of the century were Donato Bramante, Michelangelo, and Andrea Palladio.  Bramante expanded on the Quattrocentro idea of self-awareness, which he transformed into a perception of one's position in a complex by response to mass and volume.  At St. Peter's, Michelangelo completed the work of his three predecessors with a mastery of scale and organizing powers--characteristic of all High Renaissance artists--and in addition returned to architecture some of the expressionistic qualities that had been downplayed in the Early Renaissance.  Andrea Palladio represented a last flowering of Renaissance objectives in a series of buildings concerned with self-awareness through a reduction of building components into a refined harmony.  In human terms, again, Palladio fashioned houses and churches of such grandeur that the men and women who use them might indeed take on the god-like appearance we read of in Renaissance philosophy and literature.

Michelangelo was highly important as a bridge to Baroque painting, sculpture, and architecture in the 17th century.  Baroque sculptors and painters carefully examined the motifs and compositional schemes employed in Michelangelo's works.  In architecture, above all, 17th-century Rome would be unthinkable without his precedents a century earlier.  From Michelangelo, Gianlorenzo Bernini took the scale and grandeur of his piazza and colonnade at St.Peter's.  Francesco Borromini was inspired by Michelangelo's sculpted surfaces and molded interior volumes in S. Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, a design so "alive" that it suggests (in the words of critic Siegfried Gideon) an architecture that has mastered not only space but time.

Suggested reading:
Howard Saalman: Filippo Brunelleschi:  The Cupola of S.Maria del Fiore and Brunelleschi's Buildings
Eugenio Battisti, Brunelleschi, New York, 1984
Wolfgang Lotz, Studies in Italian Renaissance Architecture, Cambridge MA, 1979
James Ackerman, Palladio, Baltimore, 1967
James Ackerman, The Architecture of Michelangelo, London, 1961
A. Bruschi, Bramante, London, 1980

Selected texts on Renaissance Architecture:

I used to marvel and at the same time to grieve that so many excellent and superior  arts and sciences from our most vigorous antique past could now seem lacking and almost wholly lost. We know from remaining works and through references to them that they were once widespread.  Painters, sculptors, architects, musicians, geometricians, rhetoricians, seers and similar noble and amazing intellects are very rarely found today and there are few to praise them.  Thus I believed, as many said, that Nature, the mistress of things, had grown old and tired.  She no longer produced either geniuses or giants which in her more youthful and more glorious days she had produced so marvellously and abundantly.

Since then, I have been brought back here [to Florence] -- from the long exile in which we Alberti have grown old -- into this our city, adorned above all others. I have come to understand that in many men, but especially in you, Filippo [Brunelleschi], and in our close friend Donato [Donatello] the sculptor and in others like Nencio, Luca and Masaccio [Ghiberti, Luca della Robbia], and  Masaccio, there is a genius for accomplishing every praiseworthything.  For this they should not be slighted in favour of anyone famous in antiquity in these arts. . . . It must be admitted that it was less difficult for the Ancients -- because they had models to imitate and from which they could learn -- to come to a knowledge of those supreme arts which today are most difficult for us.  Our fame ought to be much greater, then, if we discover unheard-of and never-before seen arts and sciences without teachers or without any model whatsoever.  Who could ever be hard or envious enough to fail to praise Pippo [Brunelleschi] the architect on seeing here such a large structure [the dome of Florence Cathedral], rising above the skies, ample to cover with its shadow all the Tuscan people, and constructed without the aid of centering or great quantity of wood?  Since this work seems impossible of execution in our time, if I judge rightly, it was probably unknown and unthought of among the Ancients.
--Leon Battista Alberti, On Painting, 1436

Painting and mathematics are as indispensable to the architect as the knowledge of metrical feet and syllables is to the poet, and I doubt whether a superficial knowledge of these arts will suffice.
--Leon Battista Alberti, On Building, c. 1452

The extent to which Michelangelo was able to impose his personal style upon St.  Peter's without essentially altering the interior is astonishing.  We can see in comparing his plan to Sangallo's that a few strokes of the pen were sufficient to change a complex and confused form into a simple and cohesively organized unit.  Sangallo, in taking from Bramante the scheme of a major cross echoed in four lesser crosses at the corners, had expanded the later to constitute isolated pockets of space. . . . Michelangelo, by merely walling off the entrances to each of Sangallo's disconnected spaces, made one church out of many; he surpassed the clarity that he admired in Bramante's plan in substituting for the concept of major and minor crosses a more unified one of an integrated cross-and-square, so that all circulation within the Basilica should bring the visitor back to its core.  The solution was strikingly simple, and far more economical than any proposed before:  it even seems obvious, once it is familiar; but in a generation distinguished for great architects, it took one trained as a sculptor to discover a form that would express the organic unity of the structure.  Unity was Michelangelo's contribution to St.  Peter's; he transformed the interior into a continuun of space, the exterior into a cohesive body.
         --James Ackerman, The Architecture of Michelangelo, 1961

That the house may be commodious for the use of the family, without which they would be greatly blame-worthy, far from being commendable, great care ought to be taken, not only in the principal parts, as the loggia, halls, courts, magnificent rooms, and ample stairs, light and easy of ascent; but also, that the most minute and least beautiful parts be accomodated to the service of the greatest and more worthy...As our Blessed Creator has ordered the members of our bodies in such a manner, that the most beautiful are in places most exposed to view, and the less comely more hidden; so in building also, we ought to put the principal and considerable parts, in places the most seen, and the less beautiful, in places as much hidden from the eye as possible... in the remaining part of the fabric there may be great, middle-sized, and small rooms, and all near one another, that they may reciprocally be made use of.
         --Andrea Palladio, Four Books of Architecture, 1570

440. Barry & Pugin: Houses of Parliament, London, 1836-c. 1860

448. Joseph Paxton and Fox & Henderson: Crystal Palace, London, 1851 (destroyed)

450. Gustave Eiffel: Eiffel Tower, Paris, 1889.

481. Louis Sullivan: Carson Pirie Scott store, Chicago, 1899-1904

23, 24, 25. FRANK LLOYD WRIGHT: Edgar J. Kaufmann house "Fallingwater," near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 1937 (tours for UPittsburgh students run every term)

553. MIES VAN DER ROHE: Seagram Building, 1956-8.  New York

558--559. LE CORBUSIER: Notre-Dame-du-Haut, Ronchamp (near Belfort, France), 1950-54.

580. Peter Eisenman: Wexner Center for the Visual Arts, Columbus, Ohio, 1983--88.

Works in Context:
449. John & Washington Roebling: Brooklyn Bridge, New York, 1869--83.
453. H. H. Richardson: Allegheny County Courthouse and Jail, Pittsburgh, 1884-88 (to inspect it, take any 61, 67, or 71 bus from campus)

Key Terms:
Eclecticism - The selection from various sources in history to create a new style:  characteristic of the pluralism of painting and architecture in the nineteenth century.

Steel Cage - A general term for skyscraper construction, in which the building is no longer held up by the exterior walls (known as bearing wall construction), but is instead supported by a steel framework integrated throughout the building.  The exterior wall in such a building no longer has a true structural function and often simply hangs from the internal structure:  hence it is frequently called a curtain wall.

Functionalism - A mid-nineteenth century philosophy espoused, among others, by the French theorist Viollet-le-Duc and the American Louis Sullivan, which argues that buildings should not only be practical but should be expressive of its function.

International Style - The machine-like architecture of the nineteen twenties and thirties (an outgrowth of the Modern movement of the turn of the century), characterized by its austerity of style and penchant for abstraction.

The architecture of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries presents us with a paradox: buildings of the late eighteenth century, such as Jefferson's house at Monticello, bear a much more striking resemblance to twentieth-century houses (e.g. Wright's Robie House) in their freedom of plan, abstract elevations, and reduction of ornament than they do to the formal, highly decorated, historicist and representational architecture of the intervening nineteenth century.

We can explain this anomaly by looking at the problems facing the architects of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  At one level is the problem of the new technology--building with steel and glass but still attempting to make a humanistic environment. Another is the problem of too much history.  But greater than all is the problem of too much freedom.  The architect traditionally had to work within the constraints of climate, materials, and local conservatism.  Now he or she has none of these constraints:  anything can be built, with any technical solution, anywhere in the world.  The pioneers of Modernism: Wright, Mies, and LeCorbusier, made a heroic breakthrough in creating works reflecting the new climate of freedom but still in the monumental tradition of pre-industrial art.

Architecture on a world scale in the forty years since 1945 rather neatly divides into a first twenty years in which the great pioneers Wright, Mies, and LeCorbusier produced their final and most fruitful works, and a second twenty years in which a generation of new architects has sought to modify and even overthrow the achievements of those three giants.  To these new architects and to many critics, the products of the International School had become dishonest, anti-humanistic and above all boring.  The current age of pluralism has produced imaginative designs ranging from the superrationalism of Eisenman to the superfunctionalism of Piano and Rogers, to the populism of Charles Moore and Robert Venturi.  The oddest component of "architecture now" is the return to history.  In this return we see the characteristic urge of the art of our times not to live outside tradition but, whatever the cost, within it.

Suggested reading:
Henry-Russell Hitchcock, Modern Architecture:  Romanticism and Reintegration
William Curtis, Modern Architecture Since 1900, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1983
Franklin Toker: Fallingwater Rising: Frank Lloyd Wright, E.J. Kaufmann, and the Finest House in the World (forthcoming, 2002).