ИЛИЯНА БЕНИНА НИКОЛА БЕНИН
Young Lady in a Tricorn Hat (c. 1755-60)
Oil on canvas, 62.2 x 49.3 cm.
National Gallery, Washington DC (Samuel H. Kress Collection)
Born into a wealthy and noble family in Venice, Giambattista Tiepolo was recognized by contemporaries throughout Europe as the greatest painter of large-scale decorative frescoes in the 1700s. He was admired for having brought fresco painting to new heights of technical virtuosity, illumination, and dramatic effect. Tiepolo possessed an imagination characterized by one of his contemporaries as "all spirit and fire."
A gifted storyteller, Tiepolo painted walls and ceilings with large, expansive scenes of intoxicating enchantment. In breath-taking visions of mythology and religion, the gods and saints inhabit light-filled skies. His ability to assimilate his predecessor and compatriot Paolo Veronese's use of color was so profound that his contemporaries named him Veronese redivio (a new Veronese).
Tiepolo's commissions came from the old established families of Italy, religious orders, and the royal houses of Spain, Germany, Sweden, and Russia. His frescoes adorn palaces, churches, and villas, and his artistic legacy consists of some eight hundred paintings, 2,400 drawings, two sets of etchings, and acres of fresco. When Tiepolo died at the age of seventy-four, a Venetian diarist noted the "bitter loss" of "the most famous Venetian painter, truly the most renowned...well known in Europe and the most highly praised in his native land."
Caravaggio [Michelangelo Merisi](Italian, c. 1571-1610)
Medusa (1598-99)
Oil on canvas mounted on wood, 60 x 55 cm.
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence
In Greek myth, Perseus used the severed snake-haired head of the Gorgon Medusa as a shield with which to turn his enemies to stone. By the sixteenth century Medusa was said to symbolize the triumph of reason over the senses; and this may have been why Cardinal Del Monte commissioned Caravaggio to paint Medusa as the figure on a ceremonial shield presented in 1601 to Ferdinand I de' Medici, Grand Duke of Tuscany. The poet Marino claimed that it symbolized the Duke's courage in defeating his enemies.
As a feat of perspective, the picture is remarkable, for out of the apparently concave surface of the shield -- in fact convex -- the Gorgon's head seems to project into space, so that the blood round her neck appears to fall on the floor. In terms of its psychology, however, it is less successful. The boy who modelled the face (in preference to a girl) is more embarrassed than terrifying. For once Caravaggio cannot achieve an effect of horror; he was to find in the legends of the martyrs a more powerful stimulus to the dark side of his imagination than classical myth.
Caravaggio [Michelangelo Merisi](Italian, c. 1571-1610)
The Cardsharps (c. 1596)
Oil on canvas, 92 x 129 cm.
Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth TX
Caravaggio was one of the pivotal figures in the history of Western art. In his short lifetime, he created a theatrical style that was as shocking to some as it was new, inspiring others to probe their subject matter for the drama of psychological relationships. Apprenticed in Milan, Caravaggio came to Rome in the early 1590s. There his early masterpiece The Cardsharps came to the attention of the influential Cardinal Francesco Maria del Monte, who not only purchased it but also offered the artist quarters in his palace. Caravaggio was thus introduced to the elite stratum of Roman ecclesiastical society, which soon gave him his first significant opportunity to work on a large scale and for a public forum. In The Cardsharps, the players are engaged in a game of primero, a forerunner of poker. Engrossed in his cards at left is the dupe, unaware that the older cardsharp signals his accomplice with a raised, gloved hand (the fingertips exposed, better to feel marked cards). At right, the young cheat looks expectantly toward the boy and reaches behind his back to pull a hidden card from his breeches. Caravaggio has treated this subject not as a caricature of vice but in a novelistic way, in which the interaction of gesture and glance evokes the drama of deception and lost innocence in the most human of terms. The Cardsharps spawned countless paintings on related themes by artists throughout Europe —- not the least of which was Georges de La Tour’s Cheat with the Ace of Clubs in the Kimbell. The Cardsharps was stamped on the back with the seal of Cardinal del Monte and inventoried among his possessions after his death in 1627. Its location had been unknown for some ninety years when it was rediscovered in 1987 in a European private collection.
Canaletto [Antonio Canal](Venetian, 1697-1768)
Detail: Piazza San Marco (c. 1727-29)
Oil on canvas
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Mrs. Charles Wrightsman Gift)
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian, 1573-1610)
Judith Beheading Holofernes (c. 1598)
Oil on canvas, 145 x 195 cm.
Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Antica, Rome
Caravaggio had a thing for beheadings, the separation of head from body seemingly the perfect subject for exploiting the dramatic potential inherent in his chiaroscuro technique. This painting was the first of several he was to do on the gruesome theme (see his "David Holding the Head of Goliath," also in this gallery.) The Bible devotes a whole book to the exploits of Judith, who embodies the power of the people of Israel to defeat an enemy superior in numbers through cunning and courage. The heroine seeks out the would-be conquerer Holofernes in his tent, seduces him and makes him drunk, then beheads him. When she displays her trophy on the battlements of Bethulia, Holofernes' troops freak out and head for the hills. The nation is saved, for the moment.
Caravaggio most likely meant to express here an allegorical-moral contest in which Virtue overcomes Evil, yet it is the visual effects which monopolize our attention. In contrast to the elegant and distant beauty of the vexed Judith, the ferocity of the scene is concentrated in the inhuman scream and the body spasm of the giant Holofernes. Caravaggio has managed to render, with exceptional efficacy, the most dreaded moment in a man's life: the passage from life to death. The upturned eyes of Holofernes indicate that he is not alive any more, yet signs of life still persist in the screaming mouth, the contracting body and the hand that still grips at the bed.
The realistic precision with which the horrific decapitation is rendered (correct down to the tiniest details of anatomy and physiology) has led scholars to hypothesize that the artist had witnessed one or more execution. It was the heyday of the Inquisition, after all, and it didn't take much to lose your head. Around the time of this painting Beatrice and Lucrezia Cenci were publicly beheaded in Rome for murdering their abusive father; and the philosopher-scientist Giordano Bruno infamously burned at the stake for suggesting that the Sun was a star.
Luca Giordano (Italian, 1632-1705)
Apotheosis of the Medici: Fortitude (1683-85)
Fresco
Palazzo Medici Riccardi, Florence
In 1682-83 Giordano he painted various fresco series in Florence, including in the dome of Corsini Chapel of the Chiesa del Carmine. In the large block occupied by the former Medici palace, he painted the ceiling of the Biblioteca Riccardiana (Allegory of Divine Wisdom) and the long gallery of the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi. The vast frescoes of the latter are contained in the 1670s gallery addition, overlooking the gardens. The planning was overseen by Alessandro Segni and commissioned by Francesco Riccardi. They include the prototypic hagiographic celebration of the Medici family in the center, surrounded by a series of interlocking narratives: allegorical figures (the Cardinal Virtues, the Elements of Nature) and mythological episodes (Neptune and Amphitrita, The Rape of Proserpine, The Triumphal procession of Bacchus, The Death of Adonis, Ceres and Triptolemus)
Giovanni Battista Tiepolo (Italian, 1696-1770)
Armida Encounters the Sleeping Rinaldo (c. 1742-45)
Oil on canvas, 187.5 x 216.8 cm.
The Art Institute of CHicago (James Deering Bequest)
The Art Institute's sequence of four large paintings illustrating the ill-fated love of Armida and Rinaldo from Torquato Tasso's epic poem "Gerusalemme Liberata" once decorated a "cabinet of mirrors" in the Venetian palace of the distinguished Cornaro family. Giovanni Battista Tiepolo also provided smaller decorative panels and a ceiling painting for what must have been a sparkling, light-filled room. In this, the first narrative scene, the beautiful sorceress Armida sees the young knight Rinaldo asleep and, falling in love with him, decides to carry him away on her cloud-borne chariot. Her actions will distract Rinaldo from his quest of liberating Jerusalem, the chief subject of Tasso's epic.
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