Sunday, May 20, 2018

Italian Painters at work in the Seventeenth Century

Guido Reni
Christ appearing to the Virgin
ca. 1608
oil on canvas
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Guido Reni
Ecce Homo
ca. 1639
oil on canvas
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Archibald Higbie

I loathed you, Spoon River. I tried to rise above you,
I was ashamed of you. I despised you
As the place of my nativity.
And there in Rome, among the artists,
Speaking Italian, speaking French,
I seemed to myself at times to be free
Of every trace of my origin.
I seemed to be reading the heights of art
And to breathe the air that the masters breathed,
And to see the world with their eyes.
But still they'd pass my work and say:
"What are you driving at, my friend?
Sometimes the face looks like Apollo's,
At others it has a trace of Lincoln's."
There was no culture, you know, in Spoon River,
And I burned with shame and held my peace.
And what could I do, all covered over
And weighted down with western soil,
Except aspire, and pray for another
Birth in the world, with all of Spoon River
Rooted out of my soul?

– Edgar Lee Masters (1915)

Guido Reni
Infant Moses with Pharoah's crown
ca. 1640
oil on canvas
National Galleries of Scotland

Pier Francesco Mazzucchelli
Marriage of the Virgin
ca. 1600-1625
oil on canvas (grisaille)
National Galleries of Scotland

Sinibaldo Scorza
Landscape with Latona and the peasants
ca. 1620
oil on canvas
National Galleries of Scotland

Sinibaldo Scorza
Landscape with Philemon and Baucis
ca. 1620
oil on canvas
National Galleries of Scotland

Pietro da Cortona
The Calling of St Peter and St Andrew
ca. 1626-30
oil on canvas
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Guercino
Virgin and Child with the infant St John the Baptist
ca. 1615
oil on canvas
National Galleries of Scotland

Guercino
St Peter Penitent
1639
oil on canvas
National Galleries of Scotland

attributed to Guercino
Holy Family on the Flight into Egypt meeting the infant St John the Baptist
before 1666
tempera on canvas
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

Francesco Furini
Poetry
1633
oil on paper, mounted on panel
National Galleries of Scotland

Italian

What is Italian? It is the language spoken
By a man from Italy.
Not all in words, in part in phrases,
Of brow, wrist, lightening
Of glance, glancing of touch,
More than the language can take in chance,
More than the man can take in language.
Breathing and sighing, some glides over him,
Sleek, sentential, Italian: that portion
He apprehends.

– Josephine Miles (1958)

after Pietro Testa
The Triumph of Painting
ca. 1650-1700
oil on canvas (grisaille)
National Galleries of Scotland

Salvator Rosa
Landscape with St Anthony Abbot and St Paul
ca. 1660-65
oil on canvas
National Galleries of Scotland

Sassoferrato
The Holy Family
before 1685
oil on canvas
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge

– poems from the archives of Poetry (Chicago)