Tuesday, September 19, 2017

Flourishes (Drawings, Prints, Paintings)

François Cuvilliés the Younger
Scroll Ornament
1768
drawing, watercolor
Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf

François Cuvilliés the Younger
Inscription Plate withinin Scroll Ornament 
1768-69
drawing, watercolor
Museum Kunstpalast, Düsseldorf

Melchior d'Hondecoeter
Pelican and other birds near a pool
1765
oil on canvas
Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

"Melchior d'Hondecoeter's (1636-1695) specialty of poultry painting was something of a family business.  Melchior's father and grandfather had both been interested in animal painting, and an aunt was married to the painter Jan Baptist Weenix, an Italianist.  After studying with his father, d'Hondecoeter was apprenticed to his uncle Weenix, and this gave him an opportunity to develop his technique and use of color.  Besides strikingly realistic scenes of birds, d'Hondecoeter also painted wall hangings with views of buildings and parks.  Here, too, birds were usually involved."

– curator's notes from the Rijksmuseum

James McNeill Whistler
Valparaiso Harbor
1866
oil on canvas
Smithsonian American Art Museum

James McNeill Whistler
Nocturne - Blue and Silver - Chelsea
1871
oil on panel
Tate Britain

Giacinto Gimignani
Studies of four putti
before 1681
drawing
British Museum

Giacinto Gimignani
St James and St Eulalia among clouds
adoring an effigy of the Virgin and Child
with the city of Pistoia below
before 1680
wash drawing
British Museum

Francesco Allegrini
Landscape with sheep
before 1663
drawing
Teylers Museum, Haarlem

Domenico Beccafumi
Public Virtues of Greek and Roman Heroes - The Sacrifice of King Codrus of Athens
1529-35
fresco
Fondazione Musei Senesi

CODRUS, supposedly king of Athens in the 11th century BC.  According to the story current in the 5th century, his father Melanthus, of the Neleid family, came to Attica when expelled from Paylos by the Dorians, and, after killing the Boeotian king Xanthus in single combat during a frontier war, was accepted as king of Athens in place of the reigning Theseid Thymoetes.  During the reign of Codrus the Dorians invaded Attica, having heard from Delphi that they would be victorious if Codrus' life was spared; a friendly Delphian informed the Athenians of this oracle.  Codrus thereupon went out dressed as a woodcutter, invited death by starting a quarrel with Dorian warriors, and so saved his country.  He was succeeded by his son Medon, and the kingship remained in the family until the 8th century.

Oxford Classical Dictionary, 3rd edition, 1996, edited by Simon Hornblower and Antony Spawforth

Cassiano dal Pozzo Paper Museum
Etruscan bronze statuette of a priest
ca. 1650
drawing
British Museum

Cassiano dal Pozzo Paper Museum
Etruscan bronze statuette of winged female Lasa
ca. 1650
drawing
British Museum

John Berryman
M for Mermaid
ca. 1818
wood-engraving
British Museum

Sebald Beham
Fountain of Youth - and Bathhouse
1536
woodcut
 Kupferstichkabinett, Berlin

Émile Bernard
Boy sitting on the grass
1886
oil on canvas
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

"The prominence to our minds of cast shadow is clearly due to a number of things.  It often moves fast on the ground and is noticeable because of that.  Because it is simple its constituent three terms – one light source, one object, one silhouette – are often simultaneously present to us in a satisfying way: so it expounds itself, the inviting territory of sciography.*  Its third term, the silhouette, has obvious resonances with the edge-seeking thrust of the whole visual system.  And the nuisance effect of its intermittent interference with that thrust, our having to distinguish it from an object edge, also makes us aware of it.  But perhaps a fifth reason is that its form, linear inference, is so much the form of our own conscious reflection: it flatters ratiocination by being amenable to it.  We can easily and pleasurably attend to it, but that does not mean it embodies more useful information than other shadows."

– Michael Baxandall, from Shadows and Enlightenment (Yale University Press, 1995)

*sciography, a sub-branch of linear perspective, is the representation in two dimensions of the calculated forms of projected shadows – a widespread study in 18th-century France"