Art Appreciation 1 - Renaissance to Baroque Painting in 5 Parts

Hi, this is Genevieve Davis with an approximately one hour lecture on art appreciation. We're looking at the Mona Lisa, perhaps the most famous painting of all time by Leonardo da Vinci. He was born in 1452 and died in 1519. One of the important things about the Mona Lisa is the concept of suffumata, which is an Italian word for mist or haze. And when we look at the Mona Lisa, we see that the light is flattering, and it's very soft as it falls on her face. In fact, Leonardo kept notebooks with advice to painters on how to work in the studio, and he suggested the following for portrait painting. If you have a courtyard at your disposal, cover it with a cloth of linen. This light will be good. Or when you want to paint a portrait in bad weather or do it towards evening, make the portrait with the sitter's back facing one of the walls of this courtyard. If you go out into the street in the evening, the faces of the men and women when the weather is bad, what grace and sweetness you see in them. And when he's talking about bad weather, he just means cloudy weather, because in Florence, cloudy weather is bad weather. That's my translation from his notebooks, by the way. Here we have a painting by Leonardo called The Adoration, and when I first saw this painting in the Louvre, I thought, oh, this is really a shame he didn't finish this painting. However, I now appreciate the fact that he didn't finish the painting, because it gives us a chance to study his method. And if you look at the figure of the Madonna in the center, you can see how she's just worked a little bit. That's maybe like a chalk drawing and then a little bit of oil over the top of that. And then if you look at the other figures in the painting that are darker, you know, they've been worked a lot more, and so you can see that he would just keep going in different passes and different layers, adding more detail as he went until he got the level of finish that he was looking for. If you look in the far right, there's a character that's looking off to the right. That's actually a self-portrait of the young Leonardo. This next painting is a painting of Cecilia Gallarani. She was the mistress to Ludovico Sforza, who was the ruler of Milan. Her father was an ambassador to Florence, and she was educated alongside her brothers in Latin and literature, which was a pretty great education for any person, male or female. In the Renaissance, it was a very unusual education for a female. She was a gifted musician and singer, and she also wrote poetry. Even after Ludovico married, she continued to keep her apartments in the castle and had a son with him, and she later married somebody else. The ermine pictured here is a symbol of purity and chastity, and it also is a play on Cecilia's name, because the Greek word for ermine is galē, which is a play on her last name, Gallarani. Cecilia was only 15 years old when this portrait was painted. A couple of years ago, I was lucky enough to see it when it was on loan in Milwaukee, and I have to say it's the most haunting painting that I've ever seen. My mother and I sat for a half an hour, completely mesmerized looking at it, and we wept. It was so beautiful. This is a portrait of Beatrice d'Este, who is the wife of Ludovico. She was a patron of the arts, and this portrait was a wedding gift from Leonardo. She didn't live very long. She died in childbirth at age 22, and this was a common problem for all women. In fact, they would make their wills out before they gave birth, because they didn't know if they were going to live through the experience. This portrait of Ginevra de' Benci is in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., so it's one of the masterpieces of Italian Renaissance art that's in America, that you can see easily. It's a very beautiful portrait. She looks disappointed and angry in reproductions, but when you see this in person, she's a very proud young woman. The juniper in the background is a pun on her name, Ginevra Juniper, and it's also a symbol of chastity. In this next picture, you can see close up the detail of the juniper in the background, and you can also see a fingerprint of Leonardo. He liked to work his paint with his fingers, which is something we don't recommend now, but back then they didn't think too much about artist's safety. This is a drawing by Leonardo de' Benci. It's a punto d'argento drawing, which means silver point, done with a wire of silver, and the drawing has to oxidize, which takes about six months to a year, in order for it to have the darkness that it should have, the depth of value. It's thought that this is a drawing of Ginevra's hands, and it's thought that the original portrait of Ginevra was cut down when somebody decided to reframe it, and they thought, oh gee, this frame looks so great on it, let's just cut it down, let's cut off those hands, nobody will notice. And if we look at this marble portrait done by Verrocchio, who was Leonardo's teacher, we can see hands that are in a similar position to what the hands might have been in the Ginevra portrait. Here's the Ginevra portrait again for reference. The last thing we're going to see by Leonardo is a drawing that he did of himself as an older man. This is a red chalk drawing. Leonardo was a very kind man, he was a very convivial man too, and he was in high demand as a guest at parties. He played the lute very nicely and sang beautifully. He was also a vegetarian, and he liked to buy birds in the marketplace and set them free. Here we have a painting by Botticelli. His real name was Alessandro di Mariano di Filippetti, but he was raised by and large by an older brother who was nicknamed Botticello, which means little tub, because he was a big eater, and he was a friend of Lorenzo de' Medici, who was the richest man in Europe and a Florentine. Botticelli was the recipient of a number of commissions from the Medici family. This is a life-size painting called The Birth of Venus, and it is a really amazing painting. It's in the Uffizi Gallery, and fortunately now it's behind bulletproof glass, which makes everything a little bit greener because they had a bombing a number of years ago in the Uffizi. This particular painting is inspired by Tableau Vivant of the time, which were entertainments on big festive occasions. It's similar to where we have people in floats today and parades, and Tableau Vivant was an acting out of some kind of mythical scene by live characters. So here we have The Birth of Venus, where Venus is coming to shore on a half-shell, having been born from the drops of her father's blood which fell into the ocean as he died. And on the right we have a handmaiden coming to give her a cloak, and the winds on the left are blowing her into shore. This painting was commissioned by the Medici family from Botticelli's studio, and it's a painting of the three kings visiting the baby Jesus right after his birth. The three kings are personified by various members of the Medici family. The gray-haired man next to the baby Jesus is the grandfather Cosimo de' Medici, and his son is kneeling beneath him wearing a red cloak, and that's Piero de' Medici. And then to his left, in a blue cloak, is Lorenzo de' Medici, the richest man in Europe. We also have other members of the Medici family and their retainers painted in portraits in this painting. And if we look on the far right, we see a figure in gold, and this character is the painter himself. This is Botticelli. In spite of the fact that Botticelli seems to have been a rather good-looking man, and he seems to have admired women and painted lots of beautiful women, he himself never married. And in fact, one time he had a dream that he got married, and it woke him up, and he was so horrified by the fact that he had married that he ran around the streets of Florence for the rest of the night to stay awake so that he wouldn't fall asleep and dream that again. And his friend, Tommaso Soderini, to whom he told this story to, said, well, this is not a soil where you can grow grapes, meaning that this was not fertile soil for marriage, and that Botticelli should remain a bachelor, which indeed he did.