Saturday, December 31, 2016

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