Saturday, December 31, 2016

Artifacts - 18th century

Nicolas Lancret
The Indecisive Shepherd
ca. 1725-50
oil on canvas
Victoria & Albert Museum, London

"For Sigmund Freud himself, the destruction drive is no longer a debatable hypothesis.  Even if this speculation never takes the form of a fixed thesis, even if it is never posited, it is another name for Ananke, invincible necessity.  It is as if Freud could no longer resist, henceforth, the irreducible and originary perversity of this drive which he names here sometimes death drive, sometimes aggression drive, sometimes destruction drive, as if these three words were in this case synonymous.  Second, this three-named drive is mute.  It is at work, but since it always operates in silence, it never leaves any archives of its own.  It destroys in advance its own archive, as if that were in truth the very motivation of its most proper movement.  It works to destroy the archive: on the condition of effacing but also with a view to effacing its own 'proper' traces  which consequently cannot properly be called 'proper'.  It devours it even before producing it on the outside. This drive, from then on, seems not only to be anarchic, anarchontic (we must not forget that the death drive, originary though it may be, is not a principle, as are the pleasure and reality principles): the death drive is above all anarchivic, once could say, or archiviolithic. It will always have been archive-destroying, by silent vocation."

"Allowing for exceptions.  But what are exceptions in this case?  Even when it takes the form of an interior desire, the anarchy drive eludes perception, to be sure, save exception: that is, Freud says, except if it disguises itself, except if it tints itself, makes itself up or paints itself in some erotic color.  This impression of erogenous color draws a mask right on the skin.  In other words, the archiviolithic drive is never present in person, neither in itself nor in its effects.  It leaves no monument, it bequeaths no document of its own.  As inheritance, it leaves only its erotic simulacrum, its pseudonym in painting, its sexual idols, its masks of seduction: lovely impressions.  These impressions are perhaps the very origin of what is so obscurely called the beauty of the beautiful.  As memories of death."

 from Archive Fever : a Freudian Impression by Jacques Derrida, translated by Eric Prenowitz (University of Chicago Press, 1996)

Sebastiano Ricci
Bacchanal
18th century
oil on canvas
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Anonymous English artist
Snuffbox with couple picking flowers
18th century
enamel on copper
British Museum

Joseph Nollekens
Merucry in repose
18th century
terracotta
private collection

Antonio Canova
Orpheus
1776
marble
Museo Correr, Venice

Donato Creti
Mercury and Paris 
1710s
oil on canvas
Palazzo d'Accursio, Bologna

Hubert Robert
Fallen Roman Capitals
18th century
drawing
British Museum

Claude-Joseph Vernet
View of Naples
1748
oil on canvas
Louvre

Henry Fuseli
Satan and Death with Sin intervening
1799-1800
oil on canvas
Los Angles County Museum of Art

Pierre-Paul Prud'hon
Mélidore et Phrosine (opera, 1794)
etching
1797
British Museum
John Flaxman
Illustration to Dante's Inferno
1793
engraving
Bibliothèque nationale, Paris

Thomas Gainsborough
Study of a Lady
ca. 1785
drawing
private collection

Thomas Gainsborough
Study of a Lady & a Child
ca. 1785
drawing
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Jacques-Louis David
Homer reciting his verses to the Greeks
wash drawing
1794
Louvre

Religious Painting - 15th & 16th centuries

Geertgen tot Sint Jans
Tree of Jesse
ca. 1500
oil on panel
Rijksmuseum

A medieval tradition of representation informed the early Renaissance painting above. The human ancestry of Christ had long been illustrated with charts showing schematic figures distributed among branches of schematic trees. E.H. Gombrich points out in The Preference for the Primitive (Phaidon, 2002) that the new 15th-century fashion for fully illusionistic figures inhabiting illusionistic space was grafted onto older, non-naturalistic schematic forms. The Tree of Jesse by Geertgen tot Sint Jans of the Netherlands was Gombrich's favorite example of this anomaly  an entire cast of full-sized, three-dimensional, fashionably-dressed courtiers swarming the branches of a modest naturalistic tree  this excess of naturalism creating an overall impression of intense weirdness.  

Geertgen tot Sint Jans
The Holy Kinship
ca. 1494
oil on panel
Rijksmuseum 

Geertgen tot Sint Jans
Adoration of the Magi
ca. 1485
oil on panel
Rijksmuseum

Jan van Scorel
Mary Magdalene
ca. 1530
oil on panel
Rijksmuseum

Jan van Scorel
Madonna of the daffodils, with Christ Child and donors
ca. 1535
oil on panel
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Jan van Scorel
Landscape with Bathsheba
ca. 1540-45
oil on panel
Rijksmuseum

Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen
Salome with the head of John the Baptist
1524
oil on panel
Rijksmuseum

Jacob Cornelisz van Oostsanen
Crucifixion
ca. 1507-10
oil on panel
Rijksmuseum

Carlo Crivelli
Mary Magdalene
ca. 1480
tempera on panel
Rijksmuseum

attributed to Francesco Bonsignori
St Sebastian
ca. 1470-90
oil on canvas
Rijksmuseum

Maarten van Heemskerck
Hercules destroying the Centaur Nessus
ca. 1550-60
oil on panel
Rijksmuseum

Colijn de Coter
Lamentation
ca. 1510-15
oil on panel
Rijksmuseum

Giovanni di Paolo di Grazia
Crucifixion
ca. 1447
tempera on panel
Rijksmuseum

Aertgen Claesz van Leyden
Calling of St Anthony
ca. 1530
oil on panel
Rijksmuseum

Friday, December 30, 2016

Things made in Italy during the 15th century

Agostino di Duccio
St Bridget of Sweden
1459
marble relief
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

"Fifteenth-century Italy witnessed the introduction of a group of technologies and formats that would quickly attain a newly elevated status. These included the oil painting, executed on canvas at an easel; the drawing in ink, chalk, or pastel on paper; the medal; and the print. In some cases, these media replaced earlier ways of doing things ... oil supplanted the earlier egg-based tempera painting, for example, and canvas gradually took over the role of the wooden panel. Other formats with more continuous histories, such as the small bronze and the marble statue, became a focus of attention in the same years in a way that they had not for centuries before. Into the early twentieth century, being an "artist" usually meant making the sorts of things that fifteenth-century Italians had introduced."

 Stephen J. Campbell and Michael W. Cole, A New History of Italian Renaissance Art (London : Thames & Hudson, 2012)

Domenico Ghirlandaio
Francesco Sassetti and his son
ca. 1488
tempera on panel
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Michele Giambono
Man of Sorrows
ca. 1430
tempera on panel
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Fra Filippo Lippi
Portrait of a woman and a man at a casement
ca. 1440
tempera on panel
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Filippino Lippi
Youths
1480s
drawing
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Filippino Lippi
Youths
ca. 1485
drawing
British Museum, London

follower of Andrea Mantegna
Copy of Mantegna's design for a fountain
15th century
drawing
British Museum, London

Andrea Mantegna
Entombment
ca. 1465-70
engraving
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Anonymous artist working in Padua
Young man in profile
ca. 1450-75
drawing
British Museum, London

Anonymous artist working in Padua
Nude men fighting
ca. 1450-75
drawing
British Museum, London

Giovanni Antonio da Brescia
Judith with the Head of Holofernes
ca. 1497-1520
engraving
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Luca Signorelli
Standing figure from the back
1490s
drawing
British Museum, London

Vittore Carpaccio
Head of a woman in profile
late 15th-early 16th century
drawing
Ashmolean Museum, Oxford

Bernardo Parentino
Satyr Playing an Aulos
1480s
drawing
Getty Museum, Los Angeles

Modern French Landscapes

Paul Signac
Paimpol
1925
watercolor
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid 

Hippolyt Petitjean
Village and Bell Tower
ca. 1912-1929
watercolor
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

The Impressionists famously broke down the representation of solid forms into a struggle to represent light reflections  their main claim to newness.  At an even more basic level of form, though, they seldom altered (or even questioned) the conventional two-dimensional representation of three dimensional space using linear perspective. Instead these academically-trained artists continued to exploit the conventional depiction of receding space that had remained constant in European painting for at least five hundred years. This was the final generation of serious painters in the West who could operate without challenging spatial illusionism.

Hippolyt Petitjean
Boat on a Pond
ca. 1912-1929
watercolor
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Louis Valtat
Skaters in Winter (Garden of the Petit Trianon,Versailles)
ca. 1900
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Jean Lubin Vauzelle
The Tuileries
watercolor
19th century
British Museum

Stanislas Lépine
The Seine at the Pont de Sèvres
ca. 1876-80
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Paul Signac
Port en Bessin, The Beach
1884
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssesn-Bornemisza, Madrid

Camille Pissarro
The Orchard at Éragny
1896
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Camille Pissarro
The Cabbage Field, Pontoise
1873
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Camille Pissarro
Route de Versailles-Louveciennes, Winter, Sun & Snow
1870
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid 

Alfred Sisley
A Forest Clearing
1895
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Alfred Sisley
Evening in Moret, end of October
1888
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Alfred Sisley
Flood at Port Marly
1876
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

Paul Gauguin
Dogs running in a meadow
1888
oil on canvas
Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid