Plated

Adolph Menzel
Suits of Armour
1866
watercolor and gouache on paper
Hamburger Kunsthalle

Salvator Rosa
Two Soldiers with Attendant
ca. 1657-58
etching
Hamburger Kunsthalle

Hans Thoma
Young Woman with Dejected Knight
1894
watercolor on paper
Städel Museum, Frankfurt

Leonhard Beck
Tournament Opponents Unhorsed
1517
woodcut
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Christian Friedrich Wilhelm Beyer
Francis I, Holy Roman Emperor
(posthumous portrait in classical garb)
ca. 1770-80
marble
Belvedere Museum, Vienna

Philibert Benoît Delarue
Soldiers gathered around a Knight of Malta
1753-54
drawing
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Benjamin West
Portrait of George III
1783
oil on canvas
Cleveland Museum of Art, Ohio

Francesco Solimena
Prince Joseph Wenzel I von Liechtenstein
1725
oil on canvas
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna

François Guérin
Portrait of Prince Xavier of Saxony
ca. 1765
oil on canvas
Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden

Anonymous Britain Artist after Anthony van Dyck
Portrait of Thomas Wentworth, 1st Earl of Strafford
ca. 1635
oil on canvas
National Portrait Gallery, London

Pierre Mignard
Portrait of young Louis XIV, King of France
ca. 1655-60
oil on canvas
Statens Museum for Kunst, Copenhagen

Hyacinthe Rigaud
Prince Joseph Wenzel I von Liechtenstein
1740
oil on canvas
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna

Jean-François de Troy
Louis-Auguste, duc du Maine
(illegitimate son of Louis XIV)
ca. 1705
oil on canvas
Musée d'Île de France, Château de Sceaux

Anthony van Dyck
James, 3rd Marquess of Hamilton
ca. 1640
oil on canvas
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna

Heinrich Göding
Portrait of Elector Moritz of Saxony
ca. 1606
oil on canvas
Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister, Dresden

Frank Eugene
Man in Armour
ca. 1910
photogravure
Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas

For shadow, as Hogarth knew, is only an indication of form as long as we know where the light comes from.  If we do not know, we have to guess.  Psychologists have found that in the absence of other clues, Western observers have settled for the probability that the light falls from high up and from the left-hand side.  It is the position most convenient for drawing and writing with the right hand, and it therefore applies to most paintings.  . . .  The method of isolation and guessing is not merely a frivolous game.  It reminds us of the tremendous gulf that separates the reading of pictures from the sight of the visible world.  Simply to equate the one with the other, as Ruskin did, in common with so many nineteenth-century critics, is to bar one's way to the understanding of representation.  . . .  Without some initial system, without a first guess to which we can stick unless it is disproved, we could indeed make no "sense" of the milliards of ambiguous stimuli that reach us from our environment.  . . .  It is hardly necessary to stress how immeasurably richer is the information we have at our disposal in this process of trial and error when we move around in the real world, compared with the interpretation of representations.  The philosophers and psychologists from Berkeley's time onward were certainly right when they stressed the importance of touch for our confidence in a solid, permanent world.  But we now know that touch is only one of a whole battery of cross checks at our disposal.  . . .  But all these clues, we may be sure, are subsidiary to the test of movement.  Whenever we do not quite trust our eyes or want additional information, we shift our head slightly and watch the relative change of position.  

– E.H. Gombrich, Art and Illusion: a Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation (Princeton University Press, 1960)

Eugène Delacroix - Taking of Constantinople by the Crusaders

Eugène Delacroix
Taking of Constantinople by the Crusaders
1840
oil on canvas
Musée du Louvre

Title and Subject

This work is known by two titles: that which appeared on the commission conveyed to the painter by the cultural ministry of Louis-Philippe and under which the painting was exhibited in 1841 – Taking of Constantinople by the Crusaders; and another which little by little has come into usage – Entry of the Crusaders into Constantinople.  Depending on the title one gives it, the picture assumes a different meaning.  The two titles do not commemorate the same event.  

In the first case, the canvas glorifies not only France, but also and primarily the surviving remnants of France's nobility, whose ancestors had led the attack, since this image was destined to hang in the hall devoted to the Crusades in the gallery of battles at Versailles.  Under the second title we can better perceive the skepticism of Delacroix concerning the military adventure he was called on to depict, which had in fact amounted to nothing better than a pretext for pillage under the cloak of religion.  That is why it is possible to discover the painter's features in the fallen figure at extreme right gazing upward in pain and losing his grip on a torch.  That is why the waving banners, far from displaying recognizable arms of the great families, are rendered as mere drapery in black and red.   

The artist intended to snub the Crusaders and their descendants, those who had in some sense usurped his own name ("Delacroix" meaning literally "of the Cross"), of which they had proved themselves unworthy, pillaging Constantinople instead of delivering Jerusalem.  But he wished also to snub the king, Louis-Philippe, the picture's patron, who was all the more odious to Delacroix because of his own unavoidable dependence on royal favor for continuing opportunities to paint historical extravaganzas like this one.  Beyond that, the king had let it be known that he was hoping for a painting that would, if possible, "not have the air of a typical Delacroix."   

– translated and adapted from Le Musée imaginaire de Michel Butor: 105 œuvres décisives de la peinture occidentale (Paris: Flammarion, 2019)