Art of the Western World
As the 16th century ended and the 17th began,
here in Catholic Rome there was a feeling of jubilation,
a sense of rebirth.
Pope Paul V, in the year of our Lord 1612,
has brought water 35 miles from healthiest spring in Bracciano
through new and restored aqueducts.
What better way to signal the revival of the ancient grandeur of Rome
than to restore its renowned system for bring water
from distant mountains
to the city streets?
Pope Paul's new water supply,
the Aqua Paola, or Paul's water, as it was called in his honor,
was soon rushing out into the daylight from splendid fountains all around the city.
The finest of these fountains
was designed by the great sculptor and architect
Gian Lorenzo Bernini,
It was built in the Piazza Navona,
which stood on the foundations of an ancient stadium
a material expression of the idea of "eternal Rome".
The city had survived a hundred years of political and religious turmoil,
of war and destruction.
Despite the invasions of various European monarchs
who had attempt to conquer the city
on the pretext of defending it,
it had preserved its independence.
And most important,
the Catholic Church had survived the rise of Protestantism
and its challenge to the authority of Rome,
and it was now in the midst of a most extraordinary period of expansion
as European colonization and exploration
took its influence to the farthest corners of the earth.
This Roman Catholic renewal which historian call the Counter Reformation
was given added purpose and vigor
by a remarkable group of visionaries.
The Spanish mystic and philosopher, Teresa of Avila,
insisted that everyone could experience intense and personal knowledge of God;
Ignatius Loyola, the founder of the Jesuit teaching order,
inspired his followers to go out to work with spiritual fervor in the real world;
and the missionary, Francis Xavier,
carried to distant India and Japan
the message of the Roman Church.
To fulfill the needs of the resurgent Church,
artists and architects from all over Europe flocked into Rome.
The came to design and ornament the churches that were built in the explosion of activity
inspired by the Counter Reformation.
The church reformers called for works of art and architecture
that would bring the people into the churches,
inspire faith and religious commitment.
An artistic revival resulted and a new style.
It was an exuberant style,
reflecting the optimism and the assertiveness of the 17th century church
This style is known as the Baroque.
The fresco on the ceiling above our head
was painted by Pietro de Cortona
in the 1630's.
It decorates the reception hall of the Barberini Palace in Rome.
the family home of Pope Urban VIII,
a great patron of the arts.
To the modern sensibility,
molded by the notion that less is more,
it may seem merely decorative and probably confusing.
But a careful look at this work
done at the height of the Baroque period
reveals a well-thought-out design based on a program or written plan
When Urban looked up his ceiling,
he saw the figure of Divine Providence stretch her arms to a chorus of maidens
who carry the emblem of his family,
the Barberini bees.
They carry the bees up to the crossed keys of St. Peter
- the symbol of the papacy -
and to the papal crown.
The painting is meant to be read,
It tells us that Pope Urban VIII is a great and worthy man.
But it also tells us that the ideals of the classical world
have been subordinated to the values of triumphant Christianity.
Every figure in this swirling panorama has meaning.
The scenes painted around the sides of the ceiling, for instance,
tell stories extolling the Pope's virtues.
His unyielding battle against heresy
is there symbolized by Athena
destroying Insolence and Pride
in the shape of the Giants.
Here his piety conquers Lust and Intemperance
represented by the Satyrs.
Like the artist of the Renaissance,
Cortona uses the vocabulary of classical antiquity.
But he draws his figures naturalistically
with life-like vigor and sensuality.
The architectural elements are not real
but are painted as they were.
They blur the distinction between real and illusory space;
at the same time suggesting hidden depths
out of which the painted figures seem to tumble.
Overlapping layers of light and dark
create a sensation of breathtaking movement.
In this one ceiling
we have all the elements of the High Baroque style -
a clearly defined program,
a dynamic and dramatic tension between naturalism and classicism,
between illusion and reality, between light and dark,
and always - movement.
Why were Baroque artists concerned with illusion and reality,
with light and dark, with movement, time and space?
Before the 16th Century,
the earth was believed to be the unmoving center of the universe
about which sun, stars and planets all revolved.
The existence of human being -
- and their salvation -
was the purpose of the universe.
In 1543, the astronomer Copernicus
published his work on the revolution of heavenly bodies.
His revelation that the earth move around the sun
challenged people's perceptions of themselves.
The title page of Galileo's book on the solar system
shows Copernicus demonstrating to the revered ancient philosophers Aristotle and Ptolemy
that their view had been wrong.
The earth was just one of many celestial bodies,
all of which obeyed the same impartial laws.
At about the same time
that Europeans learn that the earth was not the center of the universe,
the discovery of the Americans
and the exploration of the far east
revealed that Europe was not the center of the world.
In this time of spiritual crisis,
provoked by the explosion of knowledge,
artist sought new ways of seeing and understanding.
The out-thrust left art of the disciple
started and astonished its first viewer in 1600.
It breaks into the space in which we stand.
The naturalism of this painting of Chris at Emmaus
by Michelangelo Merisi - known as Caravaggio -
was unprecedented.
Its intention is to convince us
that we are actually participants in this astonishing event:
God's presence in the fresh.
We may no longer regard the earth as unique,
Caravaggio seems to be saying.
But God has dwelt amongst us.
Divinity and sanctity are to be found in our midst.
Caravaggio went out into the streets of Rome
and put the people he found there in his painting.
He came to Rome from northern Italy in the last decade of the sixteenth century.
A strange, violent, driven man,
he was in permanent revolt against authority.
Caravaggio was always in trouble with the police
just around the corner from here on the Campo dei Fiori
he killed a man in a quarrel and had to fleet the city.
He was a carouser and libertine
and painted himself that way.
But the way he painted religious subjects
was as shocking to his contemporaries as his behavior.
He painted St. Peter, as a confused and frightened old man.
The Virgin, in life, as a neighborhood housewife.
The Virgin, in death,
he painted as a swollen, careworn corpse.
The painting was rejected by the monks who commissioned it.
Never before had they seen the Virgin Mary
represented as dead rather than dying.
Caravaggio was rebelling against idealized depictions
such as this Conversion of St. Paul by Taddeo Zuccaro.
This was the conventional way in which divine intervention on earth was portrayed
like a fabulous dream.
But Caravaggio sought to draw the beholder in,
to make the worshiper a participant in the drama enacted on the canvas.
In a small chapel in the Church of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome.
Caravaggio's Conversion of St Paul
depicted the intrusion of the divine into human life
as a real moment,
meant to be seen from the perspective of someone kneeling in prayer.
A contemporary commented
that it looked like an accident in a blacksmith's shop.
But Caravaggio, in the spirit of the Counter-Reformation saints,
was pleading through his pictures
for man's direct knowledge of God.
One of the principal devices that he used to achieve his purpose
was chiaroscuro,
the contrast of light and dark in the canvas.
Caravaggio rejected the convention of attributing the light source to a radiant divine figure.
Here no divinity is visible.
There is no explanation for the light source within the painting
light just appears and totally overwhelms Paul.
Light itself is the presence of God.
Darkness is where God is not.
Caravaggio was one of the first artist bohemians.
Rebellious, uncompromising, and dissolute,
he died at thirty-seven.
Late in his short life,
he portrayed himself as the decapitated Goliath.
It's the work of a deeply religious man
depicting his own damnation.
While Caravaggio saw himself in the headless Goliath.
The young Gian Lorenzo Bernini gave his features
to the heroic David.
Bernini took the immediacy he found in Caravaggio's painting
and recreated it in marble
with phenomenal and unprecedented virtuosity.
The sculptor of the Renaissance had often treated the David theme.
Donatello's David is serenely elegant.
Michelangelo's is contained,
perfect,
full of potential.
But Bernini's David moves:
turns aggressively to confront the observer.
True to the spirit of the Baroque,
this David is meant to be experienced.
The viewpoint in this case, of course,
is that of Goliath.
It's said that the Cardinal Maffeo Barberini himself
held a mirror to Bernini's face
so that the young prodigy could use his own expression of intense concentration
as the model for the David.
When the Cardinal became Pope Urban VIII,
he said to the artist:
"It is your good luck to see Maffeo Barberini pope,
"but we are even luckier,
for the Cavaliere Bernini lives at the time of our pontificate."
There is scarcely a corner of Rome that was not graced by Bernini's touch.
From the small, witty adornment,
the Elephant and the Obelisk in the little piazza of Santa Maria sopra Minerva
to the vast piazza and its enclosing colonnade
in front of the Basilica of St. Peter.
"He is a rare man," said Urban VIII,
"and a sublime artist born by divine disposition"
"and for the glory of Rome."
These statements by the great pope about his favorite artist
are significant in two ways.
They were prophetic of the prodigious role
Bernini would play in his works for Urban
and a succeeding pope for a period of 60 years.
Rome was transformed into a modern city,
replete with public monument meant
not just for the elite but for everyone to admire and enjoy.
The open arms of the vast porticos in front of St. Peter's
convey exactly this sense of out-reach
beyond the traditional bonds of society
to include every individual in a universal embrace.
This concern is made visible in what
Bernini described as his "least and bad work":
the Cornaro family chapel,
dedicated to the 16th century Spanish mystic Saint Teresa of Avila
which Bernini created about 1650
in the church of Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome.
Our eye are met by those of the Cardinal patron
who looks out from among his ancestors
and accompanies the visitors down the nave
to view the chapel from the center of the crossing.
There we are confronted
with a spectacle of truly, cosmic proportion.
In the pavement before the altar,
gesticulating skeletons rise from the lower depths
to face their maker at the end of time.
The vault of the chapel has scenes from Teresa's life.
Bernini makes a chorus of winged and cloud-borne angels
singing, playing instruments, and strewing flowers,
seem to filter through the solid vault,
filling the chapel with their fragrant hymns
of praise and celebrations.
At the sides,
the members of the Cornaro family appear in balconies
with architectural background,
whose perspectives merge with that of the church.
Their space becomes indistinguishable from ours.
They consider, study, discuss, describe, indicate,
and thereby bear witness
to a mysterious event in which they participate,
encouraging us to join them.
Here Bernini created a visual sensation
by making a literal portrayal
of a woman in ecstasy.
From time immemorial mystic have used the vocabulary of earthly love
to convey their feeling to others.
Communion with God is like communion with lover,
only infinitely more so.
In her autobiography
Teresa describes the famous vision of the Transverberation,
In the angel's hands I saw a long golden spear,
and at the end of the iron tip I seemed to see a point of fire.
With this he pierced my heart several times so that it penetrated my entrails.
When he drew it out
he left me completely afire with a great love for God.
A prime tenet of Christianity
is that God created the world
out of his love for humanity.
Bernini made love and creation the key to his chapel.
Baroque architecture follows different laws from those of antiquity and the Renaissance;
gone is the stately equilibrium and logic.
Instead the framework seems to move,
the boundaries seem to melt and walls to dance.
The very stone seems to bend itself to the will of the architect.
The most willful architect of them all
was Francesco Borromini.
St. Ivo della Sapienza is Borromini's masterpiece.
His architecture is intellectually complex
a starting amalgam of mathematics and fantasy.
He knew the history of architecture
and drew upon the past boldly and freely.
The facade curves in but the dome above it carves out,
presenting the beholder with a dramatic contrasts.
Using a symmetry so odd that it seems almost asymmetrical,
he opposes convex and concave arcs.
The result is that the building itself seems to be alive and pulsating.
Borromini's work emphasized one of the central teaching
of the Roman Catholic Church in the 17th Century.
Salvation could not be attained by reason alone,
nor by simple sensual experience;
it required an imaginative leap of faith.
In bewildering the eye and challenging the mind,
Borromini sought to plunge the worshiper into the mystery of salvation.
Not everyone understood.
A contemporary critic wrote:
"Everyone gets in his head a new idea
"and displays it in public squares and upon facades,
madly deforming building and even towns."
But an official of Borromini's Church of San Carlo recorded:
"Nothing similar with regard to artistic merit
"can be found anywhere in the world.
"Members of different nations arrive daily in Rome
"and try to procure plans of the church.
"We have been asked for them by Germans,
Flemings, Frenchmen, Spaniards, and even Indians."
The Baroque style in architecture that had its roots in Counter-Reformation Rome
spread north into war-torn Germany and Austria.
During most of the 17th Century,
Austria was preoccupied with its lonely fight against the encroaching armies of the Ottoman Turks.
When the Austrians defeated the Muslim Turks at the gates of Vienna in 1683,
a new era began.
The Hapsburg Holy Roman Emperors
turned to rebuilding their ravaged land.
All along the Danube where bleak fortresses had guarded the river,
a chain of magnificent abbeys was built.
The victory over the Turks
means that money was now available for grand enterprises.
The monks' taxes paid for buildings rather than for weapons.
These abbeys were meant to serve not only religious communities
but also as hospices for the Emperor.
St. Florian's Abbey, began in 1689,
is the work of a Italian and an Austrian
Carlo Carlone and Jakob Prandtauer.
In true Baroque fashion,
the new abbey was a stage upon which royal ritual
could be played out by the visiting Emperor.
Paradoxically, the stage usually lacked its leading actor,
for the Emperor himself rarely visited any of the abbeys.
But it didn't matter.
The object was not imperial housing.
It was to make a political point -
to bear witness to the unity of Christianity and empire.
Here we are dealing not with the glorification of an individual Emperor
but with the need to assert the divine right to rule of an institution -
the Habsburg Empire.
Newly victorious over the Turks,
the Austrians believed themselves to be the saviors of Christian Europe
They proclaimed their triumph in their art
and in their architecture.
The Karlskirche - or Charles Church - in Vienna
is a example of the power of the Christian faith
to absorb and transfigure many influences.
The gabled portico reminds us of the Pantheon;
the columns suggest Trajan's column in imperial Rome
as well as the Bible's description of Solomon's temple;
the dome is like the domes of papal Rome;
at the end of the building,
the two towers suggest an imperial fortress.
Began in 1716, the Charles Church is the work of Fischer von Erlach
who studied the work of Bernini and Borromini in Rome.
It's dedicated to Charles Borromeo, one of the great Counter-Reformation saints.
It is not a coincidence
that the Austrian Emperor of the time was also named Charles.
For in the lands where absolute monarchs ruled,
architecture was part of the vocabulary of royal power.
The Belvedere Palace in Vienna
was built in 1721
for Prince Eugene of Savoy,
the general who led the Austrians to their victory over the Turks.
The architect was Lukas von Hildebrandt
The Belvedere actually consists of two palaces,
set at opposite ends of an enormous formal garden
in which nature has been completely subdued.
The design is based on a simple program.
Together the two palaces and the garden
present the visitor with an allegory of life's journey.
At one end, where Prince Eugene lived,
is the Lower Belvedere and its gardens,
representing the earth.
At the other end where visitors were received
the Upper Belvedere, are the heavens.
At first you think you can go directly to the palace
- the path appears straight -
but you find that you cannot.
The grand staircase in the center of the garden reveal itself,
as you approach, to be a cascade
water.
You must go to the left or to the right.
The garden forces you to be a player
in an allegory of the human journey to eternity.
The palace faces north
so that's always a shadow on its facade.
Like the heaven it represents,
you can't read its features until you are very close.
As you arrive at the entrance hall of the Upper Belvedere,
you are reminded that you may have to struggle like Hercules
to stay on the right path.
At last the grand staircase brings you to the hall of the Emperor.
In the end,
the journey is worth taking for, if you proceed correctly,
you arrive at you goal.
This has not been a dismal journey.
It has taken place, after all, in a garden.
A reminder that the earth can be a happy place
at least for the privileged few who might find themselves here
as the guests of Prince Eugene.
Like much art throughout history, then,
Baroque was optimistic.
But whose optimism?
The 17th century was certainly a period of great expansiveness in European culture
both in geographical space
and in the mind.
But it was also the time of the Inquisition,
of bitter religious wars which devastated the continent,
and the time in which despotic monarchs
dressed up their naked power in the trapping of benevolence.
The style in which they did this can be seen all around us here in the Belvedere Palace.
The Italian Baroque artists who developed this
visual language
used it to express the faith, confidence, and power
of the Catholic Counter-Reformation Church.
It was a style ideally suited
to expressing the interworking of heavenly and earthly rule.
And so, here in Vienna, as throughout Europe,
kings and states seized upon this language
to make their assertion
that their authority was sanctioned by God.
It was a style which had a long life.
Indeed, it still speaks power to us today.
The equestrian portrait
- the man on horseback -
the standard mode for portraying aristocratic and royal rulers.
The ruler powerfully up,
the subject safely down.
Kings and princes were trained
to ride horses in the improbable manner that we see portrayed in equestrian portraits.
The idea was that they should be seen to control a rearing horse
with just one hand on the reins.
Surely such a person
could confidently rule and command a kingdom.
Images of power tell us a great deal about the people who make them,
but even more about the people who commission them.
The dynastic monarchs of 17th century Europe,
their power increasingly challenged
by far-reaching social and economic change,
sought to present themselves
as the heirs of the Roman Emperors
- their authority divinely ordained.
For them, art was an instrument of state power - just as armies were -
important in directing and maintaining the absolute obedience of their subjects.
We have seen how the Counter-Reformation Church
demanded its artists
that their images
should inflame the religious imagination of the people.
Just so,
kings required their court painters
that their images
should convey a sense of their benevolence, their dignity,
their wealth, their taste,
and their divine right to rule.
In 1622, Maria de Medici,
the mother of King Louis XIII of France,
commissioned Peter Paul Rubens
to paint for her new home in the Luxembourg Palace
a series of more than thirty enormous canvases.
They were to commemorated the four years when she ruled as Regent:
after the assassination of her husband Henry IV,
until her son Louis XIII came of age in 1614.
Even though Maria was only the Regent
and not really the Queen at all,
Rubens employs the full apparatus of glamour, power and glory
to proclaim the greatness of her rule.
Her late husband, King Henry,
is shown being carried off to Heaven.
Yet all the action rushes towards Maria,
whose position in the painting higher than the King's
a little odd since he is the one on his way to Heaven.
But it is in the religious paintings that Rubens pulls out all the stops.
His church paintings,
such as the Descent from the Cross in the cathedral in Antwerp,
serve the requirements of Roman Catholic Counter-Reformation ideology -
- inspiring faith, inducing piety.
The immediacy and individuality of the figures,
the use of great circling arcs in the sweeping compositions,
his dazzling use of color,
all contribute to the heightened emotionalism
that was intended to lift the spectator
out of everyday world
into a state of exaltation.
His works are the most powerful expression of triumphant Christianity.
Rubens achieved his success early,
as we see in this youthful self-portrait
together with his first wife.
He was the superstar of the art world of the day
the most collected painter of his time
and the most esteemed court painter in Europe.
When in 1628,
he was summoned to Spain to paint the king.
From his capital of Madrid,
Philip IV ruled the greatest empire in the world,
with dominions stretching from the Philippines to Peru.
But, bugged down by a long war in the Netherlands,
the most powerful state in Europe
was about to slip into decline.
As so often in history,
at a time beset with uncertainty,
the arts flourished.
Of the painters he met at Philip's court,
Rubens was particularly impressed by one
- the young Diego Velázque.
Velázque was an original
who would paint a classical subject like the god Bacchus
- getting drunk with a group of real peasants.
Velázque first drew the attention of the court
with his early paintings of simple, unheroic subjects of daily life
what we called "genre paintings".
They startling pictures,
depicting things never before painted
such as the precise moment at which cooking eggs solidified.
Like many of the young painters of his time,
Velázque was profoundly influenced
by the naturalism of the Italian Caravaggio.
Caravaggio placed miraculous event
in a familiar naturalistic setting.
Velázque fused the real and the mythological
to create a new, psychologically penetrating reality.
In The Forge of Vulcan,
he chooses the moment when the god Apollo tells Vulcan
that his wife, Venus,
is making love to Mars, the god of war.
Velázque combines theatrical gesture
with the astonished faces of real workmen
set in an authentic forge.
He quickly became a favorite portrait painter of King Philip.
As court painter,
Velázque would make a portrait for one of the royal family.
In his studio, assistants then make copies which were sent out to foreign courts.
This was an important part of the diplomatic process of the day,
especially of the business of finding marriage partners for royal offspring.
Secure in his position as court painter,
Velázque turned his attention
to formal and painterly innovation.
In his portraits of the jesters and dwarfs at the court,
Velázque was free to experiment.
He understood the painting made according to the classical rules
produced something other than what the eye sees.
The eye cannot focus simultaneously on different planes.
Here, Velázque treats the background to a portrait as a blur.
It works the way the eye sees.
The boldest and most daring of Velázque's paintings
is explored for us
by Professor Simon Schama of Harvard University.
Las Meinas is in the most literal sense a challenging painting.
Coming on it,
we are challenged by no less than six pairs of eyes
trained intently on us.
The effect is distinctly unsetting.
It's rather as though we'd blundered into a corner of the royal domain
where we had no business being.
But one pair of eyes and one pair of hands
- those of the artist -
ensure that once we have strayed into Velázque' magic box
- we can't casually take our leave
and move on whatever else happens to be in the next gallery.
Pinned to the spot
by the most extraordinary visual conundrum ever painted,
our first reaction is probably to find out,
as best as we can,
"What exactly is going on here?"
The most incurious explanation,
but on we can surely start with,
is that Velázque has offered us an informal glimpse
into his working day,
producing one of the many portraits
he executed of royal princesses,
designed to advertise their desirability
in one of the marriages on which
dynastic politics so crucially turned.
Royal in-breeding had its problems,
especially for the Spanish Habsburgs,
exaggerating their family trademarks:
pop eyes and lantern chin.
And as if to compensate for this rather unpromising raw material,
Velázque provided brilliant production numbers,
gorgeously costumed,
using a daring blob-and-blotch technique
to give the illusion of a dancing light
playing on the kind of fabric
- satins, silks, and taffetas -
that would best show them off.
What else do we know for sure about this painting?
From an account published half a century after Velázque's death,
we knew that the scene is set in the royal palace of the Alcazar
in the room set aside for the use of the royal painter,
one which he turned into his studio.
Velázque himself had been given responsibility for decorating the palace
and installing its paintings,
including two by Rubens that we can see dimly,
hanging at the back of the painting.
The same account manage to identify nearly everybody in the composition:
the five-year-old princess - the Infanta Margarita;
the maids of honor, the meninas themselves;
courtiers and guards.
By setting himself down amidst all this royal company,
Velázque decorated with the knightly cross of Santiago,
is staking out a claim to the nobility of his calling
in the culture where to be a painter usually precluded being a gentleman.
The real subject of Las Meninas
is not the royal princess.
Still less is it Velázque' social pretensions.
The true subject is the art of painting itself.
In the course of the painting,
Velázque shows us his whole box of tricks:
illusions of space, depth and perspective.
Yet he always withholds from us
the exact means by which he executes
those extraordinary effects and illusions.
Las Meninas really is a conjuring trick
of the greatest genius.
Like all conjuring tricks
it teases and provokes us by multiplying uncertainties.
We can't even be sure
of the exact subject matter of the painting
on which Velzáquez is working
and whose surface is actually hidden from us.
Perhaps it is not of the princess at the front of the painting
but a portrait of the King and Queen
whose image we belatedly realize
is reflected on the mirror at the back wall.
Yet, in this cunning game between artist and beholder,
there is a third possibility.
Namely that that mirror reflection
is not actually of the painting,
but of the real King and Queen
who have dropped by to observe, like royal eavesdroppers,
their artist at work.
Now, in that case,
this would put me,
in front of the picture plane,
in the disconcerting position
of the shoes of Philip IV.
In all likelihood the painting was meant
for the private pleasure of the King alone
and the privileged eavesdropping
implied by the reflection would certainly explain
all the attentiveness of those gazes,
directed in different ways at the royal intruder.
Yet there is nothing deferential about this painting at all
In this realm
it is the artist rather than the King who is sovereign.
Well, after all these amazing visual fireworks,
it come to something of an anti-climax
to learn that Velázque spent the later part of his life
in the almost obsessive quest for gentlemanly status.
The snobbery that made him hunger
to be a Knight of the Order of Santiago
may seem degrading to us, perhaps.
After all, the nobility of the man
lay in his art which he had taken to undreamt of levels
of sophistication and technical virtuosity.
Perhaps our disappointment is just a measure of the huge distance
from his culture to ours.
His sublimely confident play with illusion and reality,
with certainty and uncertainty
seems to make us want to recruit him
as a fellow-traveler of the modern world.
But the Knight of the Order Santiago,
surrounded by other servants of the cult of royalty
- dwarves, maids of honor, princesses, and courtiers -
stares back at us,
the hidden contents
of his enigmatic painting
forever denying us that familiarity.
Even more successfully than Velázque,
Rubens played the court game to perfection.
As the years passed, honors piled up.
He was knighted
He undertook difficult diplomatic missions.
But religious and territorial wars in northern Europe raged on.
Rubens grew discouraged.
He withdrew from court and public life
and went home to the baronial house he owned in Antwerp.
His first wife has long since died
and he married the sixteen-year-old Helena Fourment.
It has been suggested that he was satirically alluding to himself and Helena
when he painted this aging but still lusty satyr
carrying off a young nymph.
His paintings joyfully and sensually celebrated his love for Helena.
He purchased the Castle of Steen
and with his family and his title,
retired to a twilight fantasy of country life
as the Lord of Steen.
Rubens' landscapes are suffused with a kind of nostalgia.
They evoke a dream of an aristocratic life
- a life based on the ownership of land.
Today, it's only half an hour of so by car or train
to the landlocked aristocratic landscape that Rubens painted
to the seascapes, rivers, and canals of the Dutch Netherlands.
Though not far apart physically,
these two societies were as different at heart as the landscapes they inhabited.
The Dutch escaped from feudalism
by making new land.
They built dikes against the sea
in a vast communal effort that continues to this day.
They made their own precarious land,
and their peculiar geography made them.
Vermeer's View of Delft
shows us a secure a town
that has confidently mastered its difficult environment.
The sea shaped Dutch society.
But eighty bitter years of cruel and bloody war for independence from their Spanish rulers
created a Dutch nation.
In the middle of the 17th century,
the seven northern provinces of the Netherlands
emerged victorious from their struggle for independence
and established the predominatly Protestant Dutch Republic.
In a Europe dominated by absolutes and Catholic monarchies
- Spain, France, Austria -
the Republic was an island of relative freedom.
And the Town Hall of the Dutch city of Amsterdam,
built in the 17th century,
tells us something about the life
and the ideal of the Dutch Republic.
It has none of the qualities of absolutist architecture.
Here, no grand colonnade
leads the world in to a central focus
as at St. Peter's Rome,
No succession of rooms, and corridors, and staircases
takes us to the monarch's bedroom,
as Louis XIV's palace at Versailles.
What you have here in Amsterdam
are seven simple , unpretentious doorways.
The architecture of the new Town Hall, then,
is an embodiment of the independent political aspirations of the Netherlands,
an expression of Amsterdam's sense of itself
as a free city at the center of the world.
In the 17th Century
the Dutch city of Amsterdam was the greatest economic power in the world,
a vast marketplace where every kind of goods could be had
pepper, whale oil, Japanese lacquer, cloth, wine.
The Dutch became rich.
They were the most urban society in Europe
literate, stable, well-fed, and decently housed.
They knew themselves to be fortunate.
They strongly identified with the chosen people of the Old Testament
with all that implied about the need for piety
and obedience to God's will.
In this peculiar new society
artists could not look to the traditional sources of patronage.
There are no royal court.
And the Dutch Protestant churches had been stripped of pictures.
as we can see in this painting of the Mariakerk in Utrecht
by Pieter Saenredam.
Nevertheless,
the Netherlands experienced an explosion in the production and consumption of art.
The first mass art market in history arose
because, for the first time,
ordinary people bought paintings, etchings, and drawings.
Artists produced in large quantity for that market.
The society was defining itself
in the images it produced.
The simplicity of these domestic scene is often deceptive.
This Still Life with Trout by Willem Claeszoon Hada,
while reassuring the Dutch of the plenty of their lives
also warns them of the remorseless passage of time.
Jan Steen's comic painting The World Upside Down
was intended to amuse.
But it also cautions against the dangers of excess.
Here drink and sexual license cause a household
to slide into complete domestic disorder.
Jan Vermeer's Woman Weighing Pearls
stands before a painting of The Last Judgement,
warning that wealth must not distract us from our ultimate fate.
The Dutch genre paintings are not just innocent images of everyday life,
but of the problem and moral cries of everyday life.
Like other works of the Baroque period,
they convey a message.
Group portraits are still important today.
In the 17th century Netherlands they were essential,
for power in the Dutch Republic
was held not by prince,
but by corporate bodies,
boards of governors, councils.
And so the group portrait was, for the Dutch,
the equivalent of the equestrian portrait in aristocratic and dynastic states.
In the hands of the most remarkable of the Dutch painters,
the group portrait becomes an intense and purposeful experience of the group ethos.
The Night watch.
More has been written about Rembrandt
than any other painter in the history of western art.
But if we had to think of one word
that would sum up the essence of that art
it would probably be "drama".
All the elements of Rembrandt's art
were put to the service of drama,
none more so, perhaps, than light.
His use of light was at the opposite extreme from Vermeer's.
The Delft painter flooded his figures
with a even, serene radiance,
so that they sparkled
with the intensity of an image caught by a lens.
Rembrandt on the other hand,
turned the lights down low,
plunging his histories into a theatrical darkness,
the better to use his spotlight for dramatic emphasis
and expressive brilliance.
The painting was one of Rembrandt's most important assignments
but it was also, perhaps,
one of the most difficult.
Militia pieces were hard work.
In this picture by Nicholas Eliaszoon Pickenoy,
We can see that they were much like boardroom or team photographs,
expressions of the collective spirits.
On the other hand, each of the sitters
was paying a tidy sum to have his own individual likeness
rendered as faithfully
and as flatteringly as possible.
So, conventionally,
they are lined up in front of us
in a shallow, elongated space,
marked out from each just by variations in uniform
or by gestures of painful artificiality.
Rembrandt brushed aside all these compromises.
Instead of lining-up his figures in a frieze-like format,
he scooped out great hollows of recessed space
at back and front of the painting.
And this sculpted space really gave Rembrandt
the freedom that he needed to deploy his troops
with animation.
The drastically foreshortened hand of Captain Banning Kok
and the drastically foreshortened halberd -
- that weapon there -
of Lieutenant Ruytenbergh,
give the painting the quality of propulsion,
so much movement forward that it was almost
threatens to trample the beholder
with an irresistible onrush of energy.
The painter seems to make virtue
out of energetic disorder.
It is, after all, how the Dutch often liked to see themselves:
full of dynamism and high spirits.
At the same time, Rembrandt did his best
to give the group a more soldierly appearance.
The figure we see here loading a musket,
shooting it off,
dangerously close to the Lieutenant's hat,
blowing the powder away from the top of the gun,
all correspond to the war-like values
which this group of soldiers still liked believe they embodies.
It's a group portrait and a history painting;
something that testifies
to the reassuring disorderliness of plain citizens.
It's really chaos on an epic scale,
something which immediately expresses
not dumb discipline but high animal spirits,
a boisterous riot of energy, movement and visual noise
that explodes our from its center towards us:
in every sense, to give it its correct title,
The March Out of the Company of Frans Banning Kok.
The flair for drama that invests The Nightwatch with so much energy
carries over into Rembrandt's more intimate work.
His portraits go far beyond the mere rendering of facial features and social position.
In the eyes of Rembrandt's subjects,
we read personal and private history
and psychological nuance.
Rembrandt made this self-portrait at the age of 23.
It is Rembrandt's steady, deep, probing gaze,
that penetrating look to something beyond the surface
that distinguishes what many consider his greatest work
- that monument of self-scrutiny:
his self-portraits.
In about forty paintings,
20 engravings and 10 drawings
Rembrandt offers us himself,
an individual.
This extended act of self-portraiture
was unprecedented in western art.
It may be instructive to look once more
at Velázque' great meditation on art.
The painter confronts us with a challenging stare,
daring us to follow his lead in contemplating the nature of perceived reality.
But Velázque stands in a highly structured social and political framework
which is part and parcel of the meaning of the painting.
Rembrandt also portrays himself
confronting the viewer and in relation to his craft.
But Rembrandt is entirely alone,
with his palette ready to define himself
in his characteristic thick impasto,
The paint troweled on and worked with his fingers
rather than with the brush.
Rembrandt, in his solitude,
with his direct look
and with his coarse, visibly- applied paint
asserts his presence,
his selfness,
his individuality
as the matter for contemplation.
In the story of western art,
the 17th century, the age of Baroque,
began, through much of Europe,
in subjection to the ideals of the Italian Renaissance.
But by the end of the century,
new artistic tastes had developed,
new ways of seeing the world.
Boldly naturalistic,
richly sensual,
ambitiously intellectual,
passionate and profound,
Baroque artists had served a variety of masters in achieving that.
They had, as always,
provided the images of power
for absolute monarchs whose subjects
now increasingly saw them as all too mortal.
They had provided religious images to bolster a faith
shaken by the rise of modern science
and by religious conflict.
But something else had happened.
By the end of the century,
western artists had achieved, as never before,
the depiction of inwardness.
Look how Rembrandt fixes our gaze,
draws us in,
plays with our emotions
compelling our attention
to the mystery of a single human heart.
By iPippo@小綿貓HD