Week Eight

Michelangelo’s “David” demonstrates Italy’s High Renaissance interests in Humanism and Idealism.  The subject is depicted at the “perfect” age and is given a smooth and flawless healthy body from a clean, pure white marble.  Artists of the time were seeking to make the visual arts a more intellectual craft.  Michelangelo develops an expressive face to show a value in contemplation and intellectualism, which is a switch from the previous depictions of victory where young lads stood tall and proud over a grotesque, decapitated head. Collected and deep in thought, this “David” expressed the Italian’s idea of an admirable, academic Renaissance Man: healthy, attractive, and a clearly physically active intellectual.

Bernini’s “David,” while still utilizing the ideal male form, embodies the shift away from intellectualism to using drama and emotion.  Bernini took the expressive face Michelangelo introduced over a century earlier and added action and motion.  Instead of appreciating an individual and their beauty, the movement of Bernini’s “David” provides a narrative.  This is not David simply existing as David, it is a recognizable biblical character standing next to the armor and weaponry he turned down, concentrating on defeating a giant with his humble shepherding slingshot. Previous “Davids” displayed character or triumph, but this sculpture identifies the story. This works to make David a more believable and relatable personality for viewers to identify with.

Bernini, taking the contrapposto stance further to a more extreme “S,” activates all of his figures muscles, making the noticeable musculature more natural looking.  The clean, fresh-out-of-the-baths whiteness of Michelangelo’s sculpture is exchanged for a grittier, fleckier, yet glossier one. The dirty but shiny arms and legs feign an oily, sweaty man instead of Michelangelo’s powdered man posing with his sling. The heavenly perfection the High Renaissance idealized is not such a priority to Bernini as was effectively describing the scene.

All of these formal elements lead to the Baroque’s favored dynamism. Where the Renaissance produced calm, collected and simple beauty, the Baroque brought action and emotion. Michelangelo sculpted in a culture where the simple, unadorned beauty of a human body was valued.  The differences between his and Bernini’s Davids exhibit the change in the Catholic Church’s and other patrons’ priorities from allowing the appreciation of humanity to understanding and emotionally experiencing the Bible. The addition of details and action in Bernini’s “David” shows us that.

A more blunt expression of the shifting values would be the “subtle” covering of inappropriate body parts. Where Michelangelo would proudly display anatomy (and possibly exaggerate some “idealized” musculature), Bernini included a conveniently located cloth fluttering by, diluting the viewers need to appreciate David’s manliness to the fullest extent, an addition Michelangelo would not have desired on any of his works. Bernini’s work effectively reveals how art moved away from the explicit Humanism from Michelangelo’s time to the more exciting and action-oriented Baroque style.

Week Six

In Southern Europe, many artists expressed an extreme discomfort in the religious situation following the start of the Reformation. Up in the North, art was affected a little differently. Subject matter, interests, and styles expanded beyond religious conflicts for a lot of Northern Renaissance art.

Artists and patrons seemed to want to ignore or avoid the tension created by religious disagreement and political disarray, unlike in Italy as we can see in Mannerists’ artwork. While the Roman Catholics faced trying to fix their system, a lot of Europe decided to move away from the Catholic Church. This resulted in new denominations across Europe. With people realizing they did not have to act according to the pope, there was room made for new priorities in interests such as science, philosophies, landscapes, and normal people or everyday living. Artists and others traveled and achieved higher education than what used to be available to them. There was a new motivation to improve one’s self for the sake of being better instead of the traditional assumption that one needed to be focused on become more like Christ or to avoid hell. Eternal damnation used to be a bigger factor and was a major tool for Catholics’ conversion – one example being Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights,” an earlier Northern European work, and another being Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment” in the Sistine Chapel.  There were “moralizing” artworks or images, demonstrated by many of Bruegal the Elder’s works, promoting good traits in this audience without referencing religion or the bible. This appealed to the widening population of art customers of the time. They did not want reminders of the anxieties and pressures from Christianity, especially those of the corrupt Catholic hierarchy of the time.

Another idea that benefited from the Reformation was using landscape as a more dominating element of visual composition. Works exclusively describing landscape became more popular, like the works of Albrecht Altdorfer – the Northern Renaissance Bob Ross. Landscape portraits allowed the viewer to appreciate a beautiful image with the option to attribute wonderful scenery to God or not. Religious connotation could be given or ignored, depending on the individual, which is exactly what Northern Europeans wanted. They wanted the choice to interpret and enjoy art because of their personal beliefs and interests.

Yet another area of interest that gained popularity was representations of “normal life.” Before the Reformation in the North, less wealthy patrons were already trying to commission portraits of themselves, but as the 16^th century went on, audiences and artists became interesting in having art illustration everyday and relatable activities and people. Quaint or recognizable scenes that focused on people not being pious or mythological were more desirable to look at than the figures of stiff portraits where a person’s likeness could be seen without any action or behavior.  “The Banker and His Wife” by Marinus van Reymerswaele I think is a good example of this. One could actually find this scene in town, unlike the what is depicted in something like Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” or Campin’s Triptych of the Annunciation.

A good example of all these themes is Bruegal the Elder’s “The Fall of Icarus.” It has nothing to do with the political/religious offenses of the time, first of all. Second, it references the moralizing tale of Icarus. The piece can suggest that one should not get too excited by bad ideas. The painting also includes a reference to a Flemish proverb which would appeal to the intended audience and help emphasize the insignificance of the out-of-the-ordinary. There is a focus on landscape, as well as a focus on normal people and their everyday life. There are two deaths depicted in the painting, but they are almost unobservable because the artist made the working people the dominating subjects. This piece presents the many interests that flourished at the time and would easily satisfy the growing audience in Northern Europe.

I chose to compare Pontormo’s “Entombment” and Parmigianino’s “Madonna with the Long Neck.” They both depict well known religious subject matter, but, instead of a sense of piousness or godliness, each work describes a disturbance to me.

The entombment has grieving figures taking Christ’s body to the grave. No one is really looking at anything in particular; they all are spacing out in their own directions. The (living) bodies are leaning this way and that way as if they’re marionettes in the hands of an inept puppeteer – as if gravity is pulling harder on their torsos than their legs and feet which seem to be pushing away from and barely touching the ground.  It is unquestionably despairing, like everyone just wants to fall over and give up, but they can’t. Christ got to die and go limp, but everyone else has to suffer and live and stand up. Life is so unfair.

As for the “Madonna with the Long Neck,” I don’t really know what to make of it. The easy answer is that it is the Madonna and Child, but I really don’t want to accept that as a reliable and solid interpretation. A good Madonna would not be so happy and pleased to have such a lifeless looking child falling out of her lap.  The child has the limpness of the Christ form Pontormo’s “Entombment” so I want to associate this image with Christ’s death, but the surrounding figures of these works have opposite reactions. Pontormo’s people are freaking out, falling over themselves thinking it’s the end of the world while Parmigianino’s are touched by this limp thing’s beauty or whatever. It’s just weird.

Formally, Parmigianino’s piece is going to extremes to showcase the Mannerist proportions of humans.  Limbs and digits are excessively lengthy. The toes look a little like they could belong to gorillas. This work also utilizes awkward, unstable positions that a normal human being would not be particularly comfortable staying in. The child is sliding off the lap, the Madonna should be slipping off of her throne, and the admiring figures to her right, I think, are contorting their bodies at least some to be seen in a “graceful” pose. The columns in the back add a strange perspective that doesn’t fit with the small figure in the right-hand corner. They also don’t make sense left as they are with no functional purpose. All this sums up to another Mannerism trait: it disturbs me. The tenderness and pride the figures show toward the dead looking child is unsettling. It reflects how people at the time, and possibly the artist, are not sure what to make of their own religion anymore.  The Catholic faith, which had been a constant for centuries, was revealed to be corrupt and alarmingly twisted from its original state. They wanted to retain their faith and religious images, but the church was changing and did not provide any stability, just like the visual compositions of the time. Also, I personally think this Madonna’s eyes look like they are popping out too far, adding an extra bit of creepiness to the painting.

Pontormo’s work has some equally troubling qualities, aside from everyone being jealous of Christ’s limpness. The weird little man from the corner of Parmigianino’s Madonna and Child painting has an equivalent in the one random cloud in Pontormo’s “Entombment.” It’s just there being completely unrelated to everything else. The weird perspective I found in the Parmigianino’s columns I equate to the Entombments weird, crouching person in the front. His back looks like it’s reflecting something pink, and his stomach looks like it’s reflecting something blue. Meanwhile, there’re blue clothes behind him and pink and orange clothes on his other side. These things work against each other, or rather they work together to confuse my mental understanding of what I’m seeing. Both of these works display upsetness with the basic, run-of-the-mill religious images the artists and audiences were taught to believe in. Frankly, the results hurt my brain.