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Paintings
that
Changed the World
(by Klaus Reichold & Bernhard Graf)
From Lascaux to Warhol
Supreme art is
a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth,
passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius,
but never abandoned.
William Butler Yeats
Expanding Horizons
Christopher Columbus on his way to the New World
They run about naked, are tall, with handsome bodies and pleasant countenances. Their skin colour resembles that of Canary Islands dwellers - they are neither white nor black. They would surely make good servants. I noticed that some wear a little piece of gold in a hole they make in their noses. This gold can probably be found in the interior of the country.
Christopher Columbus, from a log entry, 1492
Christopher Columbus, conjectural image
by Sebastiano del Piombo in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
At daybreak the ships weighed anchor in the Spanish harbour of Palos de Frontera. Thus began on 5 August 1492 an adventure that was to change the world. The Italian commander of the three ships — the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria — with their crew of eighty-eight men was Christopher Columbus, who would go down in history as the discoverer of America. Columbus, was born in Genoa in 1451, and he had long cherished the plan of finding a western passage to India. Since Greco-Roman antiquity, the talk of a western route to the East had never entirely ceased. Until Columbus, no one had dared set out to explore the possibility because the long voyage across the open sea presented not just a problem of navigation, but a psychological barrier as well. For centuries, vivid imaginations had pictured the ocean teeming with giant squids and other sea monsters. With the dawn of Humanism, however, such superstitious notions were jettisoned. Soon, with the development of new astronomical navigation instruments, the bearings of a ship could be taken accurately, even out of sight of land, and crossing the Atlantic no longer seemed so daunting; indeed, it looked like a practicable venture. Since the Ottomans had expanded their hegemony into the eastern Mediterranean, the traditional trade routes to India were blocked. Consequently, the Spanish King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella gave Columbus the money he needed and permission to start. In the agreement they concluded with him, the Spanish Kings conceded to Columbus the right to be Viceroy of all islands and territories he should discover and ten percent of any profit he might make. Both parties to the agreement were hoping for a rich haul of gold and silver.
Columbus set out with a document in his pocket which designated the purpose of his voyage as "service to God and the dissemination of the true religion", even though four of his crew were men who had been convicted of committing violent crimes but had been pardoned by Ferdinand and Isabella. It took Columbus and his three ships over sixty days before they sighted land. On 12 October 1492 they landed on the island of Guanahani, now one of the Bahama Islands. Columbus, of
course, thought he was in India. In fact he was the discoverer of the New World. Falling on his knees and weeping, he kissed the earth, calling the place he had discovered San Salvador — Holy Redeemer. Then he raised the Spanish flag, had a crucifix erected and took possession of the land for Spain. The "Indios", as he dubbed the natives, struck him as being friendly and gentle. They seemed to have no idea of what weapons were. "I also think that they could be converted to Christianity without any difficulty", he noted in his log book. After discovering Cuba on 27 October 1492 and Haiti on 6 December, he departed for Spain with crates of gold which he had found. When the Spanish rulers saw what he had brought back with him, they started to plan future voyages; these explorations profoundly changed the course of history in the Americas, devastating ancient societies and giving rise to new ones.
Theodore de Bry
(Netherlandish, 1528-1598)
Columbus Landing in the New Woridon 12 October 1492
1596
see collection: Theodore de Bry - "Indians of North America"
Theodore de Bry
The Widows Approach the Chief
Theodore de Bry
How they Treat Their Sick
Theodore de Bry
How Sentinels are Punished for Sleeping at Their Posts
Love Rules the World
Light and shade in Caravaggio's life
Amor rules everything, as ancient writers say. All that Cupid really rules is our hearts. Only your Amor, Caravaggio, conquers both hearts and the senses.
Marzio Milesi, On Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
Amor, Eros, Cupid — no matter what name he is hiding behind, it is always the god of love that is talked about, the driving force in the world. Succumb to his charms at your own peril: "Amor remains a knave. Whoever trusts him will be deceived", wrote Goethe, who surely knew from experience. In antiquity Amor was depicted as boyishly charming and wearing wings. From the fourth century ВС, he carried a bow and arrows.
This last guise was the motif Michelangelo Merisi from Caravaggio near Bergamo had in mind when he accepted a commission from Marquis Vincenzo Giustiniani in Rome in 1602. Nevertheless, Caravaggio's Amor was notably different from earlier representations of mythological figures. His Eros is cheeky, he laughs impertinently, and is aggressively roguish; he is also sexier than Cupid had ever been before. Speculation on what his left hand is doing behind his back fills volumes. All this may have contributed to making the painting Caravaggio's most famous work — and possibly the most celebrated Cupid in history. Moreover, Amor, who also stands for homosexuality and was the love child of the love goddess, Aphrodite, by the god of war, Mars, reflects the duality of Caravaggio's own nature. A passionate lover of men his own age, he could be dangerously violent on occasion.
Caravaggio was a genius who was known for impish humour. He loved to stroll through the streets of Rome strumming on his guitar, yet he also had the reputation of being hot-tempered and was always getting into brawls. This trait tragically cut his career short. After years of impoverishment, he had finally achieved recognition. To show how successful he was, he even allowed a boy to carry his sword. On 29 May 1606, he was involved in a fight, which left one of the participants dead, murdered — it was maintained — by Caravaggio. Banished from Rome, he fled to Naples, Malta and Sicily, where paintings lined his path. At last he arrived in Monte Argentario, Tuscany, hoping to be permitted to return to Rome. In vain. He died of malaria in Monte Argentario at the age of thirty-six, "in squalor and neglect". As the irony of fate would have it, the Papal letter that would have permitted his return to Rome had already been sent.
It hardly seems a coincidence that Caravaggio should have introduced chiaroscuro, the dramatic contrast of light and shade, to European painting, since few painters had as much firsthand experience of light and dark in their own lives as he had.
MICHELANGELO MERISI DA Caravaggio
(1571—1610)
Amor Victorious
Amor vincit omnia
(Profane Love)
1602-1603
Staathche Museen Preussischer Kulturbesitz, Gemaldegalene, Berlin
Tempestuously Voluptuous
Turbulent painting
Castor and Pollux, Zeus's sons abducted
Both Leucippus's daughters. The two brothers,
Aphareus's sons, mighty Idas and Lynceus,
In love with the girls, stormed after them:
"Friends, it is indecorous for men of breeding
To woo women wedded to others."Theocritus, The Dioscuri (Idyll XXII), third century ВС
Rubenesque figure: From The Full Body Project Leonard Nimoy
see collection: "Rubenesque" Proportions
Rubens is said to have painted with blood on occasion. He certainly loved excitement, dramatic scenes and passion. He exuded limitless vitality, as shown in his paintings of drinking and dancing scenes, of robbery and death. A bloodbath of colour out of which spectacularly voluptuous bodies rise up from a sea of Baroque turbulence — eyes speaking helplessly of fear or lascivious lust, figures swooning in desperation or ardently passionate. His trademark is sensuality and voluminous nudity. When he painted the Last Judgement for a high altar in a Jesuit church, the work had to be removed because the priests could no lonaer officiate at mass or concentrate on hourly prayers as long as those "disgusting nudes" were there. It was not only critics of the period who were repelled by the carnality of his work; even today his pictures are occasionally derided as "sides of ham".
Peter Paul Rubens
The Last Judgement
1617
Alte Pinakothek, Munich
Peter Paul Peter Paul Rubens, from 1598 a master of the Antwerp St Luke's Artisans' Guild, ignored the ironic comments of his detractors. Politically committed, the Flemish painter acted as a diplomat for the Spanish Governors of the Netherlands, which enabled him to travel often and extensively. He soon made enough money with his painting to be financially secure. After serving several royal Courts, he realised that he "could not stand Court life", although he did accept an appointment as Court Painter to the Spanish Governors of the Netherlands. Rubens built a house in Antwerp, where he lived and worked most of the time. Elevated to the peerage, he even bought a castle, leading the life of a country gentleman. His meteoric rise to fame and fortune was only possible because he was showered with commissions. Over 3,000 paintings are known to have left his studio, where he employed a great many assistants. Only some 600 of these works were painted by his own hand. Sharing a love of Greek and Roman literature with many of his contemporaries, Rubens gleaned the motif for The Rape of the Leucippidae from mythology. Malicious contemporaries regarded it as "a bundle of bodies tied up in a knot". Again, Rubens chose to illustrate a dramatic event. The nude women are the daughters of Leucippus, King of Argos. The Hellenistic pastoral poet Theocritus told a late version of the story of how they were kidnapped from their wedding feast after marrying Idas and Lvnceus. The miscreants, the twins Castor and Pollux, were demigods who had also fallen m love with the sisters. Rubens does not depict the sequel to the kidnapping, although it would certainly have been a classic motif for the artist: the bridegrooms' pursuit of the kidnappers ended with both bridegrooms and one kidnapper dead. Zeus, the demigods' father, executed Idas with a thunderbolt. Pollux, who was immortal, was the only survivor of the slaughter.
Peter Paul Rubens
The Rape of the Lecippidae
1618
Wine, Women and Song
A medieval pub-crawl
The favourite I have lies in an inn cellar.
Clad in a wooden coat, he's known as Muscadella.
Me he's made drunk through the nights
And jolly all day.
God's on his side, there's no doubt of his sway.
Reviving my blood, he grants strength for the jape.
May God only keep thee, thou juice of the grape.
After Antonio Scandello, The Favourite I Have, before 1580
Adriaen Brouwer
In the Tavern
The sixteenth century was the age of feasting and drinking. On a sophisticated plane, Thomas More and Erasmus of Rotterdam exchanged their witty writings at banquets. In German-speaking territories, the Reformer Martin Luther brought conviviality down to earth. Of course his ninety-five theses are remembered, but so is his "Table Talk" in which the voluble glutton explained his theology in a welter of sausages, sauerkraut and graphic language. One wonders whether his table companions were always able to follow his train of thought. More than likely not.
Contemporary sources note that many princes became drunk every day. They may be pardoned for their excessive drinking when one remembers that it took a lot of strong drink to wash down the vast quantities of roast meat, nutmeats and gingerbread that banqueters consumed in those days. The nobles were not the only ones to indulge in such culinary excesses. Tradesmen and craftsmen also sat down to festive tables groaning under the weight of the fare. To drink beer, wine and more potent potations, men preferred to meet at taverns, most of which also offered beds for the night. The Dutch scholar and wit Erasmus of Rotterdam had quite a bit to say about what went on at an inn where he was staying: "The heated public room is open to all guests. Here one is combing his hair and another polishing his shoes or boots. It is part of good hospitality to ensure that everyone is soaked with sweat. Finally wine of considerable acidity is brought in. One is amazed at the shouting and din which arise when heads are hot with drink. Buffoons and jesters often mingle in the tumult and the delight those present have in them is unbelievable. They make so much noise with their songs, babble and shouting, their leaping and brawls that the walls threaten to collapse."
The greatest tavern roisterer among painters was probably Adriaen Brouwer. A brilliant raconteur, a gifted impromptu poet and a witty conversationalist, the painter had access to the literary and affluent mercantile circles of Antwerp. However, the "genius of low-life" felt much more at home in taverns because he loved "drinking and licence" as his biographers tell us. They add that Brouwer "dawdled over painting but was quick at devouring his victuals". The genre scenes he painted, such as Peasants Brawling in a Tavern, probably represent firsthand experience. Although he was acclaimed and well paid for his work as a genre painter during his lifetime, Brouwer's passion for tavern life proved his undoing. As the story goes, Rubens, who admired the Flemish painter's work and even owned seventeen of his paintings, once took him in but soon threw him out again because he could not stand his bawdy ways. Brouwer, an "Adonis in rags" died at the age of thirty-three, possibly of the plague which he contracted in a tavern.
Adriaen Brouwer
(1605/06—1638)
Peasants Brawling in a Tavern
Wherever We Look there Is Fire, Plague and Death
Europe in the turmoil of the Thirty Years' War
We are now entirely,
more than entirely, devastated!
Towers stand like smouldering charcoal,
the church has been thrown down.
The Town Hall lies in rubble,
the strong are vanquished.
Virgins have been ravished
and wherever we look
there is fire, plague and death.Andreas Gryphius,
Tears of the Fatherland, anno 1636
See collection: Jacques Callot: The Thirty Yaars War "Miseries of War"
Between 1618 and 1648, Europe was on fire.
From France to the Baltic Sea, from Sweden to Spain, marauding troops from all factions of the conflict devastated vast territorres. Cities and marketplaces, castles and huts, even fields of grain ripe for harvesting were ravaged by war. Until the Thirty Years' War, Europe had not known destruction on this scale. During these years, the population diminished by more than a third. Entire regions were decimated. Barbaric incursions were followed by plague epidemics, which always found fertile soil in times of war. The German territories bore a considerable brunt of the disaster at the hands of Swedish mercenaries. When they wanted to break the resistance of a territory, the Swedish armies ruthlessly attacked one village after another, leaving nothing behind but scorched earth. "Almost the entire village was reduced to rubble, burnt by the enemy on the 24th", noted the abbot of Andechs Monastery in Bavaria in June 1632. "No one could save anything. All supplication and lamenting was fruitless." The pious man was particularly horrified "at the unusual cruelty shown everywhere by the enemy to the elderly, the frail and the simple. In Erling twelve people of the above categories have fallen victim to their slaughter. After tormenting and torturing them, they were killed. The atrocity committed at Traubmg against an old man and woman may serve as an example, where they heinously raped and mutilated her and gouged out the man's eyes before throwing both into the fire." In those dark days children in the streets sang gloomy songs: "The Swedes have come, have taken everything, broken windows, carried off the lead, made bullets of it and shot the peasants."In autumn 1632, the suffering peoples of the German territories glimpsed a ray of hope. A decisive battle against the invaders seemed to be in the offing. On 16 November the German and Swedish armies clashed at Lutzen, a town south-west of Leipzig. The Swedish King, Gustav II Adolf, fell in battle. The short-sighted monarch wandered into the lines of the Holy Roman Empire where "soon his left arm was shot to bits above the elbow" before he was felled by two blows of a sword and died in a hail of musket balls. Despite the demise of their king, the Swedes won the battle. The conflict was to drag on for sixteen more weary years. The Peace of Westphalia finally put an end to the war in 1648, the date that marks the end of an age of religious conflict. A new era of European history dawned in which the welfare of principalities and kingdoms no longer depended on the religious affiliation of their subjects.
Jan Asselyn
(1615-1652)
Gustav II Adolf at the Battle of Lutzen
1650
A Well-Guarded Painting
The fascination of The Night Watch
How the drum beats,
How the pipe trills.
How trumpets also,
and shawms,
and kettle-drums sound,
О see
How fresh the flag flutters.
May your hearts
Leap light for joy.
Johannes Grab, Soldier's Song, seventeenth century
The Man in the Golden Helmet
с 1650/55, is attributed to the circle of Rembrandt
Pulsating with life — a drum is beaten, a dog barks, lances and muskets are raised, a flag is flown, children run about in all directions — The Night Watch is regarded as the masterpiece of the great Dutch painter Rembrandt van Rijn. The only oddity is that the subject of the painting is not a night watch. The title emerged towards the close of the eighteenth century after the many layers of varnish coating the surface of the painting had considerably darkened. The gloom thus produced led to the idea that the scene was captured at night. The original title of the painting was The Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocg. Instead of depicting a night watch, it is a group portrait of Amsterdam militia men. At the time it was painted, Amsterdam was Europe's leading mercantile city, with three civic militias. They called themselves The Crossbowmen, The Long-bowmen and The Guild of Arquebusiers after the weapons the men of their companies had borne in the Middle Ages. The militias recruited members from the pool of men in their city fit for military service, while each district had its own company. In times of war and unrest, the militias fulfilled the function of protecting the community. Before Rembrandtt's time, their duties included patrolling the ramparts of the city and mounting guard at its gates.
In 1653 Rembrandt settled permanently in Amsterdam. The civic militias still retained something of their military character, although by then theirs was predominantly a social function. The traditional guilds with their historic past represented different sections of the city, sometimes marking political factions, and their members paraded at civic festivities. Commissioned in 1640 by the Amsterdam Arquebusiers to paint their group portrait, Rembrandt probably portrayed the members before they were to participate in a traditional parade, which may have been held in celebration of the visit of the French Queen, Marie de' Medici, in 1638. Contemporary sources show that the queen was welcomed by the marksmen's guilds and was accompanied by them in a ceremonial parade to a lavish feast in the festival hall of a guild house. Rembrandt's company of men was possibly depicted early in the morning of this royal visit. Led by their captain, Frans Banning Cocq, a reputable Antwerp merchant, the guild members seem to be about to take leave to greet the French queen outside the city. The large painting with its life-sized figures most likely hung in the festival hall of the Arquebusiers' guild house. In 1715 it was transferred to Antwerp's Town Hall. Because it was too large for the space it was to occupy there, it was promptly cut down to size.
Rembrandt van Rijn
(1606—1669)
The Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq
(The Night Watch)
Frans Banning Cocq (with a red sash)
1642
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam
Landscapes, Light and Legends
Restrained Romanticism
An indescribable enchantment informs his work. Claude Lorraine, a pure soul, hears in nature the voice of consolation. He repeats its words. To those who immerse themselves in his pictures -their consummate artistry and finish make this a great pleasure indeed - no further word is needed.
Jacob Burckhardt, The Cicerone, 1855
The Pope, the Spanish King, cardinals and Roman nobles showered him with commissions. Louis XIV of France, the first notable collector of his work, greatly admired the painter Claude Gellee, who took the name of his birthplace, Lorrain, as his surname. When he was twelve or thirteen, he moved to Rome, where he spent the rest of his life, with the exception of two years in France. In Italy-he was caught up in the enthusiasm for antiquity and the Middle Ages. Claude Lorrain loved painting fantastic landscapes filled with temples, palaces, ruins and magnificent trees of his own invention. He not only worked over his compositions, he staged the scenes. His handling of light was what made him unique; indeed, Lorrain is famous for being the first painter to exploit overtly the manifold possibilities offered by the play of light and atmospheric effects. His paintings of seaport scenes with the sun reflecting off the surface of the water have earned him his reputation as a master of landscape painting. The Romantic philosopher Carl Gustav Carus raved about Lorrain's "mild wafting of southern breezes" with all their "clarity inspiring sensibility". Johann Wolfgang von Goethe owned twenty-seven Lorrain etchings. In his Italian Journey, Goethe feels at a loss for words to express his debt to Lorrain: "There are no words to describe the clear haze hovering over the coasts when we used to go towards Palermo on the most lovely afternoons; the purity of contour, the softness of the whole, the subtle gradation of tones, the harmony of sky, sea and land. He who has seen it possesses it for a lifetime. Now I begin to appreciate Claude Lorrain."
Lorrain had always focused on landscape. However, he used his shady foregrounds as settings for mythological and biblical scenes, such as Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba. There are no literary references to the event. The Old Testament merely describes the legendary queen's stay in Jerusalem, where she visited King Solomon in the tenth century ВС to ascertain whether his wisdom was all it was reputed to be. The subject-matter of the painting, which was commissioned by a nephew of Pope Innocent X in 1648, the last year of the Thirty Years' War, is purely a product of the artist's own poetic imagination. Yet, Lorrain was not the only artist enthralled by the Queen of Sheba. In his play entitled The Sibyl of the Orient or The Great Queen of Sheba, the Spanish playwright Calderon de la Barca writes: "Where the sun's first cradle stands, where the light begins the travail of his daily journey, there lies a fertile, rich land like a thousand gardens of narcissi. This place, which glows so delightfully in the young beams of day, is ruled by the Queen of Sheba."
Claude Lorrain
(1600-1682)
Seaport with the Embarkation of the Queen of Sheba
1648
National Gallery, London
Behind the Scenes
At the palace of King Philip IV of Spain
Palaces and temples were built,
armies engaged in battle,
the elements raged-
and the King in reality is nothing
but an actor in disguise, and his throne
a make-shift chair....
Masks and makeup, deception and
pretence - this is theatre.
Adapted from Richard Alewyn's work on life
at the Court of King Philip IV of Spain, 1985
A monastery and royal palace: El Escorial was under Diego Velazquez's administration in the 17th century
Their numbers were legionary. Some say there were 30,000 courtesans at the Court of Philip IV of Spain. Reigning from 1621 until 1665, the monarch had to leave governing to his regent, Count Olivares. No wonder, for in addition to women, Philip IV was an aficionado of hunting, the arts and literature. He was particularly fond of the theatre. Because the country was in decline, the king, like his countrymen, withdrew into a world of illusions. However, Philip IV did not content himself with occupying the Royal box; he wrote plays himself, most of them comedies. When he was not busy playing the King of Spain on the world stage, he could be admired displaying his talents as an actor in amateur performances put on at Court. Philip IV lived in and for the theatre. The responsibility for designing this world of illusion devolved increasingly upon the painter Diego Velazquez. After being called to the Spanish Court in 1623, Velazquez had a meteoric career as a Court official. The last office he held was that of Lord High Usher of the Chamber, the highest rank he might attain in the king's retinue. Under Velazquez's tenure, the royal palaces were restored, enlarged and refurnished. For each of the numerous Court revels and festivities, among them the marriage of the Infanta Marie-Therese of Spam to Louis XIV of France, Velazquez threw himself into the task of designing all the decorations and curtains, stage sets and backdrops. It was not long before he was, to put it in modern terms, not only the Head Designer at Court but also its top-ranking Installation Artist. Philip IV was very fond of the man who created his dream world. He used to visit the artist in his workshop, which was in the palace. The king also provided him with lodgings near the royal apartments. Now an intimate friend of the king, Velazquez had no compunction about disturbing his royal master at any time. The painter became familiar with everything that was going on at Court and in the royal family. How close the painter's friendship with the king really was is perhaps shown most clearly in Las Meninas. The scene is like a photographer's snapshot, casually anecdotal about what was happening on the fringes of real life. The little Infanta Margarita appears in Velazquez's studio, while the artist is painting a double portrait of her parents, which is reflected in a mirror on the rear wall. Responsible not only for construction work and staging festivities, he was also charged with ensuring that royal outings went smoothly. He saw to the linen, the firewood, the servants, the carpeting and guests' comfort and welfare, kitchen domestics and everything having to do with art. Overburdened by his many duties, Velazquez collapsed and died on 6 August 1660. He was buried in the dress and insignia of a Knight of Santiago. After his Favourite's death, King Philip IV is said to have personally taken up a brush and altered the artist's portrait. After all, when this picture was painted, the artist had not yet become a Knight of the Order.
Velazquez
(1599—1660)
Las Meninas (The Maids of Honour)
1656
Museo del Prado, Madrid
Everyday Scenes Transformed Into Poetry
The calm and peace of a great master
We would need an entire book if we wanted to describe the art of painting. It ought to be presented to us in the guise of a beautiful young female with curly black hair and her mouth bound, wearing a gold chain about her neck from which a larva dangles. In one hand she is holding several brushes and the motto: Imitatio - that is, imitation.
Cesare Ripa, Iconologia, 1593
The Muses, the daughters of Zeus and the Titaness Mnemosyne, bear resounding names: Calliope ("fair voice"), Euterpe ("gladness"), Terpsichore ("joy in the dance"), Erato ("lovely"), Melpomene ("singing"), Thalia ("abundance" or "aood cheer"), Polymma ("many songs") and Urania ("heavenly"). These sisters were regarded by the ancient Greeks as the goddesses of the fine arts, music and literature. As ancient mythology has it, they lived on Mt Parnassus, a barren limestone spur of the Pindus Mountains in central Greece. On its southern slopes the Delphic oracle of Apollo prophesied in riddles. A consensus was never reached as to the domains over which the individual Muses presided, nevertheless, certain art forms came to be associated with each of them, although some overlapped: poetry and flute-playing, song and dance, comedy and tragedy, pantomime and even the science of astronomy. Yet, painting remained amongst the fields of art to be ignored entirely.
The Dutch painter Jan Vermeer van Delft was surely not the first painter to have felt slighted by his art being thus overlooked. However, he was one of the few to feel that he ought to do something about this sorry state of affairs. In short, he took the ninth muse, Clio, as his personal patron. Clio presided over history. Why did Vermeer take this particular Muse as his own and not the poetic allegory proposed by the Italian writer Cesare Ripa, who was widely read in Vermeer's day? Like many of his contemporaries, Vermeer probably saw history painting with a mythological background — the representation of biblical and allegorical scenes — as the major genre in painting. In his Allegory of Painting, Vermeer portrayed Clio as a young girl holding a history book in one hand and a trumpet proclaiming fame in the other.
The artist does not seem to have been inspired by his particular Muse all that often. The man from Delft most likely painted only the thirty-four works that are known. Was Vermeer, in fact, a painter by profession? He is said to have inherited the Mechelen Tavern on the north side of the Delft marketplace from his father in 1652. Later the story goes that he worked as an art dealer. Even that was obviously not enough to keep him financially secure. When Vermeer, who today stands beside Frans Hals and Rembrandt as the most famous seventeenth-century Dutch painter, died in 1675, he left behind eight young children and a destitute widow. One of the first things she did was to give the Delft master-baker Hendrick van Buyten two paintings by her late husband to discharge debts amounting to 617 guilders and 6 stivers.
Jan Vermeer
(1632—1675)
The Allegory of Painting
1666
Kunsthistonsches Museum, Vienna
"L'etat, c'est moi!"
Why Louis XIV failed to smile
The King is the regent and the image of God on earth, his majesty is the reflection of the divine; the entire state, the will of the people are embodied in him. Only he who serves the King serves the state.
Jacques-Benigne Bossuet (1627-1704), Bishop of Meaux, Politics According to the Teachings of the Holy Scriptures (begun in 1678/79)
Centre of the absolutist world: The Palace of Versailles
He wanted to impress and he was feared: Louis xiv of France, the Sun King, Absolutism incarnate. He particularly liked to be portrayed as an Imperator, omnipotent, magnificent and proud. He was remarkably healthy and was known for his sexual prowess. In Versailles, the magnificent palace he had built to commemorate himself, no woman was safe from him. Politically, he was equally successful. His invasion of Holland, his occupation of Strasbourg and of German territories, the sacking and burning of Heidelberg and Mannheim not only enraged his contemporaries; Louis XIV was given bad marks for his wars by later historians as well. His behaviour those relating to his teeth, all of which he had extracted on the advice of his physicians, who were woefully incompetent. One gruesome dental disaster led to another, ultimately leaving the king's face lopsided. Yet the real reason for his unsmiling portraits is an aesthetic convention that goes back at least as far as the sombre busts of the Roman Republic and was given new emphasis in Absolutism. Rulers, divine or otherwise, were not only held in awe. Those who portrayed them were expected to observe the conventions of frontality and unsmiling dignity to enhance the quality of regal aloofness, which ultimately meant absolute power. Even royal women, little Infantas and the beautiful queens of Spain, were subject to this austere treatment.
The stern Absolutist convention had a sequel in the United States. The painter Charles Wilson Peale (1741—1827), who served in the American Revolution, was a true son of the Enlightenment. A man of many talents, he advanced early palaeontology, invented several new types of spectacles and made false teeth. The archetypal portraitist of Revolutionary War heroes, Peale might be called George Washington's official portrait painter. All his portraits of the first President of the United States (including, of course, the variant on greenbacks) are tight-lipped and unsmiling. Legend has it that George Washington, too, had trouble with his false teeth. Could they have been made by Peale? In any case it can be safely assumed that the President, like Louis XIV of France, was only too aware of the image he owed to his nation and to history.
HYACINTHE RIGAUD
(French, 1659—1745)
Louis XIV of France in His Coronation Robes
1701
Musee du Louvre, Paris
Pierrot and Other ClownsComedy and melancholy
Get your apparel together, good strings to your beards, new ribbons to your pumps; meet presently at the palace; every man look o'er his part.... In any case, let Thisby have clean linen; and let not him that plays the lion pare his nails, for they shall hang out for the lion's claws. And, most dear actors, eat no onions nor garlic, for we are to utter sweet breath, and I do not doubt but to hear them say, it is a sweet comedy....
William Shakespeare, Bottom in A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act V, Scene 11,36-46,1600
Maurice Sand
(1823-1889)
Pulcinello; Pantaleone; Harlequin; Il Dottore; Le Notaire
In the eighteenth century, members of the French Court amused themselves splendidly: "The day before yesterday there was a great masque in Versailles". Thus a letter written in 1700: "The Duchess of Burgundy, in the guise of a village bride, came with her retinue of ladies in waiting, who were all masked, as she was, and whose hair was adorned with many flowers. This made a gloriously cheerful effect.... Eight days before there was another pretty harlequinade at Marly. The loveliest were the Savoyardes with their pedlar's bundles on their backs, which they opened. Two little harlequins and two Columbines popped out, little girls and boys, who danced beautifully." Even King Louis XV, then only eleven years old, took part in fetes galantes, elegant entertainments, in 1721. He mimed a ballet dancer in a ballet entitled The Elements.
Not only did the nobility love dressing up and playing theatre. Like many of his contemporaries, painter Jean-Antoine Watteau did, too. He was particularly taken with the characters in Italian improvised comedy, commedia dell'arte. They brought welcome diversion and pleasure to the poor as well. Commedia dell'arte originated around 1550 in Lombardy, evolving as street theatre in which improvised pieces based on stock situations were performed by troupes of specially trained actors. All that was prearranged were synopses of the plot and the sequence of scenes. Consisting mainly of clowning and jokes, the dialogue was entirely improvised. Although a couple in love belonged to the stock repertoire, the other characters were burlesque types, instantly recognisable because they always appeared in the same masks and costumes: Pantalone — an elderly Venetian merchant, the doctor, a scholar of Bologna and Arlecchino, and his crafty man-servant, whose awkward and melancholy side soon became personified as a separate character called Pedrolino.
After commedia dell'arte had become established in France at courts, fairs and in the streets, Pedrolino changed into a pitiable fool, who might be called either Pierrot or Gilles. This character represented the rejected lover, who was always sad. He was characterised by a distinctive white, wide-sleeved costume, a white mask and a wide white beret. Did Watteau paint his Gilles as a portrait of an actor famous for playing the part of Gilles or Pierrot? Was this life-sized painting possibly hung in front of a cafe, or theatre in which the actor in question may have appeared in the role? Be that as it may, the melancholy clown, mocked, ridiculed and despised for his asinine helplessness, was a favourite with Watteau for the sole reason that he was so wretchedly sad. The mournful clown appears several times in his work. Is this a biographical clue? The painter knew all too well what it was like to have only himself for company. His final years were marred by disease and melancholy before he died at thirty-seven of tuberculosis.
Jean-Antoine Watteau
(1684—1721)
Gilles and Four Other Characters from the Commedia dell'Arte (Pierrot)
1718
Musee du Louvre, Paris
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