Category: classical

Diego Rodríguez de Silva Velázquez

Diego Velázquez, “Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob”, 1630, Oil on Canvas, 223 x 250 cm, Monasterio de El Escorial, San Lorenzo de El Escorial, Madrid, Spain

Born at the Andalusian city of Seville in May of 1599, Diego Rodríguez de Silva Velázquez was an artist of the Spanish Golden Age who rose to prominence in the court of King Philip IV of Spain and Portugal. His work became the archetype for the nineteenth-century realist and impressionist painters.

Diego Velázquez was the first child of notary Juan Rodriguez de Silva and Jerónima Velázquez who raised him in modest surroundings. As he exhibited an early inclination for art, Velázquez was apprenticed for six-years to painter Francisco Pacheco del Río, the founder of Seville’s art academy. His studies under Pacheco included literature and philosophy, perspective and proportion, and, as Pacheco was the official censor of Seville’s Inquisition, the academically strict representation of religious subjects.

Velázquez was one of the first Spanish artists to paint bodegones, realist depictions of kitchen scenes depicting still lifes of pantry objects such as food and drink. These paintings are known for their realism and chiaroscuro, dramatic lighting effects, as well as their religious background scenes. Those executed in 1618 include “Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha” and “Kitchen Scene with Christ at Emmaus”. During his period in Seville, Velázquez painted  his first full-length portrait, the 1620 “Sor Jerónima de la Fuente”, a depiction of the revered nun that was commissioned by the Franciscan order. 

Having established his reputation in Seville by the early 1620s, Diego Velázquez traveled to Madrid in April of 1622 and, at the request of Pacheco del Río, painted a portrait of poet Luis de Góngora. In December of 1622, he received a command to attend the court of King Philip IV’s minister, Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares. Velázquez lodged with Don Juan de Fonseca, Chaplain to the King, and painted his portrait. Satisfied with the work, King Philip IV commissioned a portrait and sat for Velázquez on the thirtieth of August in 1623. Upon the pleasure of the king, Velásquez received substantial funds and moved with his family to Madrid which became his home for the remainder of his life.

Velázquez was now established with a monthly salary and lodgings as well as payments for any future works. His work softened from the severity of the Seville period and the tones became more delicate. In 1627, Velázquez won a painting competition set by King Philip IV with a painting of the expulsion of the Moors, a work later destroyed in a 1734 fire. As a reward, he was appointed gentleman usher and received a daily allowance and yearly funds for clothes. Velázquez met painter Peter Paul Rubens in September of 1628 and accompanied him to view the work of Italian Renaissance painter Tiziano Vecellio (Titian) on display at the Royal Site of San Lorenzo de El Escorial. This meeting with Titian motivated Velázquez to travel to Italy to see the works of the Italian masters.

Diego Velázquez’s first trip to Italy, a major influence on his work, was sponsored in 1629 by King Philip IV. He traveled extensively and painted for a year and a half, a period of major history paintings. Among these were the 1629-1630 “Joseph’s Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob” and the 1630 “Apollo in the Forge of Vulcan”, two compositions of nearly life-sized figures presented as contemporary people with gestures and facial expressions seen in ordinary life. Following the example of the painters from Bologna, he switched to light gray grounds rather than the dark red ground of his earlier works; this became a regular practice that enabled greater luminosity. 

Velázquez returned to Madrid in 1631 and completed the first of many portraits featuring Philip IV’s infant son, “Prince Balthasar Charles with a Dwarf”, now in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. For decorations at the Palacio del Buen Retiro, the king’s new palace, he painted equestrian portraits of the royal family and a large contemporary history painting, “The Surrender of Breda”, all executed in 1634 and 1635. Velázquez again returned to history paintings between 1636 and 1648 with“Aesop”,“Menippus”, and “Mars Resting”. As his royal appointment enabled him to avoid the censorship of the Inquisition, he became the first Spanish artist known to have painted the female nude, the 1644-1648 “Venus at her Mirror”. 

Diego Velázquez traveled in 1649 for his second and last trip to Italy where he bought paintings by many noted artists including Titian, Tintoretto and Veronese. After painting a portrait of the Duke of Modena, Velázquez painted a portrait of Pope Innocent X, for which he was presented with a medal and gold chain. While in Rome, he painted a 1650 portrait of Juan de Pareja, one of his slaves and a notable painter in his own right; Velázquez freed de Pareja in November of that year. He returned by way of Barcelona to Spain in 1651 and proceeded to arrange and catalogue the paintings and three hundred pieces of statuary he had bought for King Philip IV.

Velázquez, upon his return, painted the 1656 “Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor)”, a scene of a group of children and women, one of which was Margaret Theresa, the eldest daughter of Philip IV’s new queen Mariana of Austria. Velázquez had placed himself next to a painting easel and the king and queen are seen reflected in a mirror on the back wall. Three years after the completion of this work, he received the honorary Cross of Saint James of the Order of Santiago. One of his last major works was the 1657 “Las Hilanderas (The Spinners)”, a scene based on Ovid’s myth of Arachna, a Lydian maiden credited with inventing linen cloth and nets.

The 1660 peace treaty between France and Spain was finalized with the marriage of Maria Theresa, the daughter of Philip IV and his first wife Elisabeth of France, and Louis XIV, known as the Sun King. Diego Velázquez was charged with the decoration of the Spanish pavilion and the surrounding area of the small Island of Pheasants. He returned to Madrid on the twenty-sixth of June and, on the thirty-first of July, was stricken with fever. After signing a will, Diego Velázquez died on the sixth of August; his wife died eight days later. Both were buried in the vault of the Church of San Juan Bautista. As the church was destroyed in 1809 by the French, the place of their interment is now unknown.

Diego Velázquez has been honored through works of such artists as Édouard Manet, James McNeill Whistler, John Singer Sargent, Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon, Fernando Botero, Herman Braun-Vega and Salvador Dali. In 2009, the “Portrait of a Man’, long attributed to a follower of Velázquez, was restored and found to have been painted by Velázquez himself. A portrait from a collection in the United Kingdom was through x-ray analysis found to be a previously unknown work by Velázquez. 

Notes:  A short 2003 essay on Diego Velázquez by Everett Fahy of the Department of European Paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art can be found at the museum’s site: https://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/vela/hd_vela.htm

The website for the Diego Velázquez Organization, which contains his complete oeuvre can be found at: https://diegovelazquez.org

The Museum del Prado has an article on Velázquez as well as images of all sixty-five paintings by the artist in its collection: https://www.museodelprado.es/en/the-collection/artist/velazquez-diego-rodriguez-de-silva-y/434337e9-77e4-4597-a962-ef47304d930d

Top Insert Image: Diego Velázquez, “Self Portrait”, circa 1645, Oil on Canvas, 103.5 x 82.5 cm, Uffizi Gallery, Florence, Italy

Second Insert Image: Diego Velázquez, “The Feast of Bacchus”, 1628-1629, Oil on Canvas, 165 x 225 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain

Third Insert Image: Diego Velázquez, “Maria Teresa of Spain (with Two Watches)”, 1652-1653, Oil on Canvas, 127 x 98.5 cm, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria

Fourth Insert Image: Diego Velázquez, “The Surrender of Breda”, 1634-1635, Oil on Canvas, 307 x 367 cm, Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain

Bottom Insert Image: Diego Velázquez, “Juan de Pareja”, 1650, Oil on Canvas, 81.3 x 69.9 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

François-Xavier Fabre

François-Xavier Fabre, “The Martyrdom of St. Sebastian”, 1789, Oil on Canvas, 198 x 148.5 cm, Musée Favre, Montpellier, France

Born at the medieval city of Montpellier in April of 1766, François-Xavier Fabre was a French painter of portraits, landscapes and historical subjects. He specialized in half-length portraits that were popular with the British community of Florence, Italy. 

After studying for several years at Montpellier’s art academy, François-Xavier Fabre joined neoclassical painter Jacques-Louis David’s studio in Paris. His studies were funded by financier and art collector Philippe-Laurent de Joubert, the father of Laurent-Nicolas de Joubert, a friend of Fabre as well as an amateur artist. In 1787, Fabre painted a portrait of Laurent-Nicolas seated with arms crossed and dressed in waistcoat and shirt open at the neck, a simple and natural style made fashionable by Marie-Antoinette. This portrait is now housed in the Getty Center, Museum South Pavilion, in Los Angeles. 

An outstanding pupil, Fabre rose to prominence after winning the Prix de Rome in 1787. The upheavals of the French Revolution and his own monarchist sympathies led Fabre to relocate to Florence, Italy in 1793. He soon found patrons among the ranks of the Italian aristocrats who appreciated the elegance, precision, and realism of his portraits. Fabre became a member of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze, the world’s oldest public institution of fine art training, where he taught painting. Rising to prominence in Florentine society, he became both a collector and dealer of art.

Although he remained a lifelong advocate of Jacques-Louis David’s Neoclassicism, François-Xavier Fabre eventually abandoned history painting due to changing fashions, lack of interest on the part of his patrons, and the onset of gout. He focused his work towards portraiture, landscapes, and printmaking. Between 1803 and 1804 in Florence, Fabre met Princess Louise Maximiliane Caroline Emanuel of Stolberg-Gedern, the former wife of Charles Edward Stuart, the Jacobite claimant to the English and Scottish thrones, and the later widow of Italian Count Vittorio Alfieri. 

Fabre and Louise of Stolberg-Gedern remained companions in Florence until the Countess’s death in January of 1824 at which time Fabre inherited her fortune. He returned to his hometown of Montpellier where he founded an art school and curated his extensive collection of books, 16th and 17th century Italian paintings and drawings, artwork by French contemporaries, and the collected artworks of Louise of Stolberg-Gedern. In 1828, the Musée Fabre was inaugurated in Montpellier. François-Xavier Fabre died at the age of seventy in Montpellier on the sixteenth of March in 1837. Upon his death, his entire art collection became part of the Musée Fabre. 

François-Xavier Fabre painted “The Martyrdom of St. Francis” in 1789 at the age of twenty-three. This was an academic work for submission at his second Académie réglementaire in Paris. Fabre was well-versed in the nude form at this time; he had painted the male nude during his apprenticeship under Jacques-Louis David. Fabre returned several times to the theme of St. Francis over the course of his career. Several of his St. Sebastian paintings are listed in Parisian sales between the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries. 

Top Insert Image: François-Xavier Fabre, “Autoportrait âgé”, 1835, Oil on Canvas, 72.5 x 59 cm, Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France 

Second Insert Image: François-Xavier Fabre, “Abel’s Death”, 1790, Oil on Canvas, 147 x 198.5 cm, Musée Fabre, Montpellier, France

Bottom Insert Image: François-Xavier Fabre, “Portrait of Michal Bogoria Skotnick”, 1806, Oil on Canvas, 64 x 49.5 cm, National Museum, Kraków, Poland

Gerard van Honthorst

Gerard van Honthorst, “Saint Sebastian”, circa 1623, Oil on Canvas, 101 x 117 cm, The National Gallery, London, United Kingdom

Born in November of 1592 in Utrecht, an important trade center of the Northern Netherlands, Gerard van Honthorst was a Dutch Golden Age painter who was known for his artificially lit scenes. In his early career in Rome, he had great success painting in a style influenced by the work of Caravaggio. Upon his return to the Netherlands, Honthorst became a prominent portrait and allegorical painter. 

The son of a decorative painter, Gerard van Honthorst initially trained under his father and finished his education under painter and printmaker Abraham Bloemaert, a painter of historical subjects and an early advocate of the emerging Baroque style. Bloemaert was an important teacher who would train most of the Utrecht painters who were influenced by Caravaggio’s style. Upon completion of his education, Honthorst traveled to Rome where he lodged at the palace of Vincenzo Giustiniani, an aristocratic banker and art collector whose collected paintings and sculptures totaled over fifteen-hundred pieces. 

Honthorst was influenced by the contemporary artists in Giustiniani’s collection, particularly those works by Caravaggio, Bartolomeo Manfredi and the Carracci family of artists. The technique used by these artists to depict light in their canvases strongly impressed the young artist. While lodged at Giustiniani’s palace, Honthorst painted his 1617 oil on canvas “Christ Before the High Priest”, a work in which lighting plays a particular importance. The scene of Jesus questioned by the priest Calaphas takes place at night with the only source of light being a candle in the center of the table. Jesus and Calphas are illuminated by that candle; all the secondary figures in the room are shrouded in darkness.

Gerard van Honthorst acquired an important patron in Rome, Cardinal Scipione Borghese, a member of the Borghese family and also the patron of Caravaggio and  Gian Lonrenzo Bernini. Through the Cardinal, Honthorst received important commissions at Monte Compatri and Santa Maria della Vittoria in Rome. He also received work from the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Cosimo II de’ Medici. In 1620, Honthorst returned to Utrecht and through his new work increased his reputation in the Dutch Republic and abroad. 

In 1623, the year of his marriage, Honthorst became president of Utrecht’s Guild of Saint Luke, a city guild of painters and other artists in early Europe. His reputation was such that the English envoy at the Hague, Sir Dudley Carleton, recommended his work to Lord Dorchester and the Earl of Arundel, courtier to King James I and King Charles I. Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia, the sister of Charles I, commissioned Honthorst as portrait painter and as drawing-master for her children. He was invited to England in 1628 where he painted several portraits, a vast allegorical scene featuring Charles and his queen as Apollo and Diana, and an intimate group portrait “The Four Eldest Children of the King of Bohemia”. 

Upon his return to Utrecht in 1652, Gerard van Honthorst, still retained by Charles I, painted a 1631 group portrait of the king and queen of Bohemia and all their children. He also painted scenes from “The Odeyssey” for Lord Dorchester, historical scenes in 1635 for Christian IV of Denmark, and a portrait of Countess Leonora during her visit to the Hague. Honthorst opened a second studio in the Hague where he painted portraits of the members of the court, employed a large number of assistants to make replicas of royal portraits, and taught students, each paying one hundred guilders a year.   

A prolific artist, Gerard van Honthorst passed away in April of 1656. Many of his paintings, cultivated in the style of Caravaggio, involved tavern scenes with musicians, gamblers and people dining. He was very skilled in the art of  chiaroscuro, the strong use of contrasts between light and dark to affect the whole composition.

In November of 2013, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC purchased Honthorst’s 1623 “The Concert” from a private collection in France. The painting went on display for the first time in two-hundred and eighteen years at a special installation in the National Gallery’s West Building in November of 2013. It is now on permanent display in the museum’s Dutch and Flemish galleries. 

Notes: Gerard van Honthorst was one of the first artists to portray Saint Sebastian as a half-length figure, slumped forward in a seated position. The pose was subsequently adopted by other followers of Caravaggio in Utrecht, including Hendrik te Brugghen and Jan van Bijlert in the mid-1620s. The painting “Saint Sebastian” was most likely painted shortly after Honthorst’s return to Utrecht from Rome in 1620.

Top Insert Image: Pieter de Jode II, “Gerrit (Gerard) van Honthorst”, Engraving, From Cornelis de Bie’s “Her Golden Cabinet”, Publisher Joannes Meyseens, Antwerp, 1661

Second Insert Image: Gerard van Honthorst, “Saint Peter Penitent”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, 110.2 x 97.4 cm, Private Collection

Third Insert Image: Gerard van Honthorst, “Old Woman Examing a Coin”, 1623, Oil on Canvas, 75 x 60 cm, The Kremer Collection, Amsterdam

Bottom Insert Image: Gerard van Honthorst, “The Denial of St. Peter”, 1622, Oil on Canvas, 111 x 149 cm, Minneapolis Institute of Arts

Anselm Feuerbach

The Paintings of Anselm Feuerbach

Born in September of 1829 in Speyer, one of Germany’s oldest cities, Anselm Feuerbach was a painter and a leading member of the nineteenth-century German classical school. He was the son of archaeologist Joseph Anselm Feuerbach and the grandson of legal scholar Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach, whose reformation of the Bavarian penal code led to the abolition of torture. 

Anselm Feuerbach studied between 1845 and 1848 at the Düsseldorf Academy under the tutelage of romantic painter Wilhelm von Schadow, landscape painter Johann Wilhelm Schirmer, and Carl Sohn, whose poetic and mythical subjects were executed in the idealistic manner of the Düsseldorf school of painting. Feuerbach studied for a year at the Munich Academy of Art; he however left Munich in 1850 to attend the Academy at Antwerp. There he studied under Belgian painter Gustaaf Wappers, an early exponent of the Romanic movement in Belgium.

Anselm Feuerbach relocated to Paris in 1851 and became a student at the atelier of history and genre painter Thomas Couture. Conture is best known for his 1847 masterpiece “Romans During the Decadence” which was  exhibited at Paris’s Salon a year before the revolution toppled the monarchy. In 1854, Feuerbach received funding from Grand Duke Friedrich of Baden which enabled him to visit Venice, accompanied by his friend, the writer Victor Scheffel. There he was influenced by the technique of layering and blending colors to achieve a glowing richness, a method deemed fundamental to the Venetian Colorist school.

 Feuerbach traveled to Florence and then onto Rome where he would remain until 1873, with only brief trips back to Germany. In 1861, he met Anna Risi who became his mistress and sat as his model for four years, a period during which he painted twenty portraits of her. She was succeeded as a model in 1866 by Lucia Brunacci, an innkeeper’s wife who posed for Feuerbach’s depictions of the Greek sorceress Medea. In 1862, literary and art historian Count Adolf Freidrich von Schack commissioned Feuerbach for several copies of Old Master paintings and introduced him to artists Hans von Marées and Arnold Böcklin. 

Interested in the Persian poet Hafia since his youth, Anselm Feuervach in 1866 painted his “Hafia at the Fountain” which was acquired two years later by art collector Joseph Benzino, Upon Benzino’s death, the painting was bequeathed to  the Kaiserslautern Art Museum. In 1873,  Feuerbach relocated to Vienna and took the position of professor of history painting at the Academy of Fine Arts.  Four years later, he resigned his post and moved back to Venice. where he passed away, at the age of fifty, in January of 1880. 

In remembrance of Feuerbach, his friend Johannes Brahms composed “Nänie (A Funeral Song)”,  a composition for full chorus and orchestra, of which the first sentence states “Even the beautiful must die”. Feuerbach was close to his step-mother Henriette Feuerbach. Throughout his lifetime of travels, he wrote roughly six-hundred letters to his step-mother describing his everyday life and problems, as well as his thoughts on art and his methods of painting. Following Feuerbach’s  death, his step-mother wrote a book entitled “Ein Vermächtnis (A Testament)” which included his autobiographical notes and many of his personal letters. Anselm Feuerbach’s works are housed in collections of the leading public German galleries.

Note: An article written by Candida Syndikus entitled “Far from the Modern World: Anselm Feuerbach’s Idea of Modernity” can be found at: https://www.academia.edu/31442931/Far_from_the_modern_world_Anselm_Feuerbach_s_Idea_of_Modernity_pp_63_103

Top Insert Image: Anselm Feuerbach, Selbetbildnis als Knabe (Self Portrait as a Boy)”, 1845-1846, Oil on Canvas, 15.5 x 12.5 cm, Alte Nationalgalerie

Middle Insert Image: Anselm Feuerbach, “Seated Male Nude”, 1860-1869, Black and white Chalk on Brown Paper, 60.4 x 40 cm, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Bottom Insert Image: Anselm Feuerbach, “Self Portrait”, 1852-1853, Oil on Canvas, 42 x 33 cm, Staatliche Kunsthalle, Karlsruhe, Germany

Hendrik Christian Andersen

The Sculptural Works of Hendrik Christian Andersen

Born in Bergen in April of 1872, Hendrik Christian Andersen was a Norwegian-American sculptor, painter and urban planner. The younger brother of painter Andreas Martin Andersen, he moved in 1873 as an infant with his family to Newport, Rhode Island. As a young man, Andersen worked as a sculptor and served as an art instructor to prominent social figure Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who was a sculptor and both patron and collector of the arts.

In 1893, Hendrik Andersen traveled to Europe to study art. In Paris, he met his older brother Andreas and student painter John Briggs Potter. The three of them traveled for a year through Europe and resided in Florence for some time at the end of their tour. In 1894 at their Florence residence, Andreas Andersen painted a portrait scene of both Hendrik and John Potter rising from sleep, entitled “Hendrik Andersen and John Briggs Potter in Florence”

Now settled in Rome in 1899, Hendrik Andersen met the American expatriate writer, Henry James, who is regarded as a prominent transitional figure between literary realism and literary modernism. Although James was thirty years older, the two men developed a close relationship and maintained correspondence for fifteen years. James, enamored with the sculptor, become one of his first patrons by buying Andersen’s painted terracotta bust of the twelve-year old Count Alberto Bevilacqua who regularly visited every Saturday at Andersen’s studio.

Henry James’s letters to Andersen, seventy-seven of which are in the University of Virginia’s library, show a high level of affection and sensual love for Anderson. James’s letter of condolence for the death of Andreas Andersen in 1902 expresses his grief as well as his love: “to put my arm round you and make you lean on me as a brother and a lover, and keep you on and on. . .”. However, as Andersen’s replies are not available, their actual relationship can not be definitely determined.

After Andreas Andersen’s death, his widow Olivia Cushing traveled to Rome to stay at Hendrik Andersen’s residence for discussions on the commemoration of Andreas’s life and work. Hendrik’s conception for a sculpted funeral monument grew into an idea for a Palace of Arts, and then further progressed into a plan for a World City full of sculptures, museums, and galleries. In 1813, Andersen published his “A World Centre of Communication”, a tome about social and spiritual renewal through the arts, with an emphasis on sculpture.

This tome alienated James who felt that Andersen was pursuing a megalomaniacal version of society at a time when Italy was under the rise of Fascism. By 1915, they both had ceased correspondence. Before his death, Henry James burned many of his papers, including pieces of correspondence. After James’s death, Andersen approached the James estate in 1930 for permission to publish the letters he had received: however, permission was refused. These letters were not available publicly until 2000.

Olivia Cushing Andersen came from a wealthy family with residences in both Newport, Rhode Island, and Boston, Massachusetts. In her own right, she was cultured and had amassed an extensive collection of art and rare books. Upon her death in Rome in December of 1917, she left a large sum of money to Hendrik Andersen. He used this inheritance to build a villa as part of his World City idea. Between 1922 and 1925, Villa Helene was built to Andersen’s design with an immense carving studio in the nearby Piazza del Popolo. 

Henrik Andersen worked in this studio until his death in December of 1940. Over his lifetime, he executed more than four hundred pieces of both plaster models and stone or bronze sculpture, many of which were monumental figurative works of larger than life size. Upon his death, Andersen bequeathed all of his work to the Italian State, only stipulating that Villa Helene be made available to his model and adopted sister, Lucie, until her death.

Upon Lucia’s death in 1979, the villa became state property and is now the Hendrik Christian Andersen Museum, located on Via Pasquale Stanislao Mancini in Rome. The museum houses all the papers and collected works of Hendrik Christian Andersen, which include sketches, models in plaster and bronze, as well as paintings by his brother Andreas and other contemporary artists of that time.

Notes: A collection of letters from Henry James to Hendrik Andersen can be found in Rosella Mamoli Zorzi’s “Henry James: Beloved Boy: Letters to Hendrik C. Andersen”. The book is available through many vendors.

A collection of six letters from Henry James to Hendrik Andersen, along with a short description of Henry James’s life, can be found at Rictor Norton’s Gay History and Literature site. There is however an error in the description of the Andreas Andersen’s painting; the seated figure is not Andreas Andersen but John Briggs Potter. The letters can be found at: https://rictornorton.co.uk/jameshen.htm

Top Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “Hendrik Christian Andersen”

Second Insert Image: Photographer Unknown, “James Henry and Hendrik Andersen”, 1907

Third and Fourth Insert Images: Sculptures by Hendrik Christian Andersen, Museo Hendrik Christian Andersen

Alexandre Denis Abel de Pujol

Alexandre-Denis Abel de Pujal, “Ixion Chained in Tartarus”, 1824, Oil on Canvas, 127 x 157 cm, Louvre Museum, Paris

Alexandre-Denis Abel de Pujol, “Sisyphus Eternally Rolling the Rock”, 1819, Oil on Canvas, 130 x 212 cm, Musée Henri Martin, Cahors, France

Born in January of 1785 in Valenciennes, a northern French city bordering Belgium, Alexandre Denis Abel de Pujol was a French painter. He was the illegitimate son and only child of nobleman Alexander-Denis-Joseph Mortry de Pujol, Baron de la Grave, who served as advisor to King Louis XVI Auguste and was the founder of the Académie de Peinture et Sculpture in Valenciennes. From the age of twelve, Abel de Pujol studied at the Academy and completed his training as a student of Neoclassical artist Jacques-Louis David, regarded in his time as the preeminent painter in France. 

Receiving little support from his father for his studies, Abel de Pujol earned a pension from the city of Valenciennes which allowed him to continue his studies at David’s studio. He also took classes in perspective, anatomy, and architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In 1806 at  the age of twenty-one, de Pujol won a first-class medal at the Académie and a second-class medal at the Salon of 1810 for his painting “Jacob Blessing the Children of Joseph”; this painting placed second at the Prix de Rome competition in 1810. 

In 1811, Abel du Pujol won the Prix de Rome with his painting “Lycurgus Presenting the Heir to the Throne to the Lacedaemonians”. Having achieved this award, he was formally recognized by his father and was able to add the name Pujol to his own. Abel de Pujol suffered a period of poor health and depression during his stay in Italy, which allowed him only eight months of study in 1812. Restored to health, he returned to his career in Paris and successfully exhibited mainly history paintings at the Salons.

In 1814, Abel de Pujol won gold medals from both Louis XVIII and Napoleon Bonaparte for his monumental painting “The Death of Britannicus”. A compositional study for the 3.54 x 5.50 meters painting is currently housed in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. His grisaille (gray-monochrome) painting “The Preaching and Martyrdom of Saint Stephen”, intended for the church of Saint Etienne du Mont, was entered at the 1817 Paris Salon where it won the prize for history painting. These awards established his reputation as a history painter and muralist.

Abel de Pujol received several important official commissions, He executed three paintings and a ceiling mural for the royal palace at Versailles, as well as a large, allegorical ceiling mural, entitled “The Renaissance of the Arts”, for the Louvre’s grand staircase, later destroyed in 1855 during the joining of the Palais du Louvre to the Palais des Tuileries. Abel de Pujol also painted many mural decorations for public buildings, such as the Galerie de Diane at Fontainbeau and the Palais de Luxembourg. For the ceiling of the Bourse, Paris’s stock exchange, he executed a series of large-scale grisaille tromp-l’oeil decorations of architectural features and draped nudes.

Throughout his career, de Pujol produced altar pieces and designs for stained-glass windows for Parisian churches such as Saint-Roch, Saint Sulpice and Saint Thomas d’Acquin and the Madeleine. He also did work for the cathedral at Arras and the church of Saint-Pierre in Douai. Included among Abel de Pojul’s last major works are the 1846 “Valenciennes Encouraging the Arts”, a monumental canvas for the town hall of Valenciennes, and an 1852 mural for the ceiling of the staircase of the School of Mining at the Hôtel de Vendôme in Paris.

A successful teacher and draftsman, Abel de Pujol was a member of the Institut de France, a learned society composed of all the sciences and fine arts, and an Officer of the National Order of the Legion of Honor. Among his students were sculptor Alphonse Lami, painter Alexandre-Gabriel Decamps, and Julien Hudson, an American painter and free man of color, thought to be the first African American by whom a self portrait is known. Abel de Pujol died in Paris, at the age of seventy-six, in September of 1861. 

Top Insert Image: Alexandre-Denis Abel de Pujol, “Self Portrait”, 1806, Oil on Canvas, 71 x 55 cm, Musée de Beaux-Arts, Paris

Middle Insert Image: Abel de Pujol, “La Colère d’Achille (The Fury of Achilles)”, 1810, Oil on Canvas, 112 x 146 cm, Snite Museum of Art, Campus of Notre Dame, Indiana

Bottom Insert Image: Alexandre_Abel_de_Pujol, “Self Portrait”, 1812, Oil on Canvas, 56.2 x 46 cm, Musée des Beaux-Arts

Giulio Monteverde

Funeral Monuments of Giulio Monteverde

Born on October 8th of 1837 in Bistagno, a municipality in the Piedmont region of Italy, Giulio Monteverde was a sculptor and educator. He moved with his family to Genova where he began, at the age of nine, his initial training at the Ligustica Academy of Fine Arts in Genova, under the guidance of sculptor Santo Varni. Monteverde also studied at Rome’s Academy of Fine Arts, where he later obtained the position of Professor.

In 1865, Monteverde won the Pensionato Artistico Triennale, a three-year grant, which allowed him to relocate to Rome and establish his own studio. A neo-classical sculptor, his romantic-realist style achieved rapid success and critical acclaim, particularly in the United States. In 1886, Italian naval officer Enrico Alberto d’Albertis acquired a castle and commissioned a statue of the young Christopher Columbus from Monteverde. The 1870 white Carrara marble sculpture, “Colombo Giovinetto”, modeled from D’Albertis’s nephew Filippo, won a gold medal at an exhibition in Parma, Italy.

In 1873, Giulio Monteverde completed a narrative work, “Edward Jenner Vaccinating His Son Against Smallpox”, a life-sized marble sculpture, which he presented at the Vienna International Exposition. This was shown again at the 1878 Universal Exposition in Paris, and now resides at Rome’s National Gallery of Modern Art. Following his success a the Vienna Exposition, Monteverde, in the following year, sculpted a realistic, intricately detailed marble statue of the Roman water nymph, Egeria.

Most of Monteverde’s talent was dedicated to the execution of  religious sculpture and funerary monuments. The theme of the Angel of Death, or of the Night, was portrayed in a number of variations throughout Italy and Spain. The tomb of the Oneto Family, commissioned by Francesco Oneto, President of the General Bank, is located at the Staglieno Cemetery in Genoa. It portrayed a sensual angel holding the trumpet of Universal Judgement in his right hand, and was replicated many times by Monteverde for other families, an exmaple of which is the more demure angel leaning against the Llambi Campbell family vault in the Recoleta Cemetery of Buenos Aires, Argentina.

As an educator, Giulio Monteverde taught at Rome’s Acadey of Fine Arts; among his students were Argentine sculptor and medalist Victor de Pol and Lola Mora, a Argentine sculptor and a pioneer of women in her field. Monteverde was made an officer in the Legion of Honor in 1878 and, in 1889, became an Italian Senator. He passed away on October 3rd of 1917, at eighty years of age.

Bottom Insert Image: Giulio Monteverde, “Colombo Giovinetto (The Young Columbus)”, 1870, Carrara Marble, Museo della Culture del Mondo, Genoa, Italy

Arcangelo Corelli: Music History

Arcangelo Corelli, Concerto in D Major Op. 6 No. 4, 1714, Performed by the Voices of Music Ensemble

Born on February 17, 1653 in Fusignano, Papal States, Italy, Arcangelo Corelli was a violinist and composer of the Italian Baroque era, whose  family were prosperous landowners, but not of the nobility. Known chiefly for his influence on the development of violin style and for his sonatas, Corelli’s “12 Concert Grossi “ established the contrast between a small group of soloists and the full orchestra as a popular compositional medium. 

Historical records of the poet Giovanni Mario Crescimbeni, founder of the celebrated Academy of Arcadians, state Arcangelo Corelli initially studied music under priests, first in the city of Faenza and then in Lugo, before he moved in 1666 to Bologna, a major center of musical culture. Plausible, but largely unconfirmed, historical accounts link his musical education with several master violinists, including Giovanni Benvenuti, Bartolomeo Laurenti, and Giovanni Battista Bassani. 

Although it is unclear exactly when Corelli arrived in Rome, it is known that he was actively engaged as a violinist in 1675. He played as one of the supporting violinists in three Lenten oratorios: one at the church of San Giovanni dei Florentini, one held on August 25th for a celebration at the church San Luigi dei Francesi, and one for the ordination ceremony of a noble Chigi family member held at the church Santi Domenico e Sisto. By February of 1675, Corelli was third violinist in the Chapel of San Luigi dei Francesi’s orchestra in Rome; by the following year Corelli was second violinist.

Corelli rapidly gain a reputation by playing in a number of ensembles sponsored by wealthy patrons at San Marcello al Corso, for whom he played in oratorios during the Lenten seasons from 1671 to 1679. In June of 1677, Corelli completed and sent his first composition “Sonata for Violin and Lute” to Count Fabrizio Laderchi, a noble in Faenza attached to the household of Prince Francesco Maria de Medici. Corelli’s “Twelve  Trio Sonatas (Two Violins and Cello, with Organ Basso Continuo), Opus 1”, dedicated to Queen Christina of Sweden, was published in 1681. 

From September 1687 to November 1690, Arcangelo Corelli was musical director at the Palazzo Pamphili, where he performed and conducted important musical events, Including conducting an orchestra of one hundred fifty strings for Queen Christina. A favorite of the great music patron Cardinal Pietro Ottoboni, Corelli in 1690 entered into the Cardinal’s service where he performed in concerts at Ottoboni’s Palazzo della Cancelleria. Joining him at these concerts were the violinist Matteo Fornari, the cellist G. B. Lulier from Spain, and the harpsichordist Bernardo Pasquini, and other orchestral players.

Corelli had first met Matteo Fornari in 1682, and they soon developed an intimate relationship which lasted until Corelli’s death. Socially protected by Ottoboni and living discreetly among male friends, they devoted their time together to the pursuit of their music which included many performances played together. Their relationship became the inspiration for two compositions by their friend Giuseppe Valentini, who dedicated his trio sonatas to both Corelli and Fornari. During this period, Corelli quietly developed his best-known and most influential works, the orchestral “Concerti Grossi”, and also became one of the most renowned violin teachers, who taught such students as Gasparini, Castrucci, and Locatelli.

In 1702, Corelli went to Naples and performed a composition by the Italian composer Alessandro Scarlatti, a performance which was probably performed  in the presence of its regent, King Philip IV.  In 1706, together with composer Bernardo Pasquini and Scarlatti, Corelli was received into the Pontifical Academy of Arcadia in Rome and conducted a concert for the occasion. By 1708 he withdrew from public view and began to revise his compositions. A contemporary of both Lully and Handel, Corelli died in Rome on the 8th of January in 1713. 

Arcangelo Corelli left his large art collection of paintings, all his instruments and music, and all future proceeds from it, to Matteo Fornari who readied Corelli’s unpublished “Op. 6 Concertos” for publication with Estienne Roger of Amsterdam. By special decree from the Pope, Corelli was buried next to Raphael in the section of the Pantheon in Rome that holds the remains of painters and architects.

Arcangelo Corelli’s “Concerto in D Major Op. 6”, was published in 1714 in Amsterdam and dramatically affected the style of the baroque concerto for the next generation of composers. The reception of this collection, considered one of the crown jewels of baroque instrumental music, owes a portion of its success to the music publishing boom which began around 1690. Corelli’s signature violin sonata set, “Opus 5”, also widely published, appeared in at least forty-two editions by 1800. 

Corelli’s concertos are written in an expanded trio sonata style, in which the two solo violins and cello form a small ensemble within the larger tutti framework, which is performed with all instruments together. The fourth concerto, played in the video linked above, is noteworthy for its suave and serene introduction, the gracefulness of the dance movement, the exceptionally well-balanced counterpoint and harmony, and the furious concluding coda which flows out of the second ending of the last movement.

Note: The video is from the Voices of Music Lamentations of Jeremiah concert held in April of 2014. Played with period instruments and practice,, there isn’t any conductor present at the performance. Kati Kyme and Elizabeth Blumenstock play solo baroque violins; Shirley Edith Hunt plays solo baroque cello; Gabrielle Wunsch and Maxine Nemerovski play ripieno baroque violins; Lisa Grodin plays baroque viola; Farley Pearce plays violone; Hanneke van Proosdij plays baroque organ; and David Tayler plays the archlute.

Jaques Augustin-Catherine Pajou

Jaques Augustin Pajou, Academic Male Study, 1785, Oil on Canvas, 100 x 82 cm, Private Collection

Insert: Jaques Augustin Pajou, “Academic Male Study”, 1787, Oil on Canvas, 100 x 82 cm, Private Collection

The son of famous sculptor Augustin Pajou, Jacques-Augustin-Catherine Pajou was born in August of 1766 in Paris, France. He was a historical and portrait painter in the Classical style, with the emphasis on form, simplicity, proportion and the clarity of formal structure. In 1784, Pajou became a student at Paris’ Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture. 

In 1792, accompanied with painter Louis-François Lejeune and economist Jean-Baptiste Say, Jacques Pajou became a member of the Compagnie des Arts de Paris. This military unit of the French Revolutionary Wars, organized by the Louvre, consisted of students of literature, the arts, and sciences, particularly from the École des Beaux-Arts and the École de Droit. Pajou, during this period, was stationed in Sedan, an administrative district in north-east France.

After demobilization, Jacques Pajou was a member of the General Arts Community of Paris, a revolutionary institution, founded by painters Jacques-Louis David and Jean ll Restout, to replace the Royal Academy. This movement succeeded in abolishing the Academy in September of 1793 during the French Revolution, burning paintings and books. It was later restored as a division of the Institute of France in 1803 by Napoleon Bonaparte.. Jacques Pajou served as Secretary for the General Arts Community’s president, painter Joseph-Marie Vien. 

Under the First French Empire, ruled by Napoleon Bonaparte, Jacques Pajou was commissioned to paint a portrait of Louis-Alexandre Berthier, Marshal and chief of staff to Napoleon, which is now on view at Versailles. In 1812, Pajou was awarded a gold medal for his depiction of Napoleon offering clemency to the Royalists who had taken refuge in Spain. In 1814, he painted three tableaux, displayed at the Paris Salon, which celebrated the Bourbon Restoration, the period in France following the first fall of Napoleon and the restoration of a conservative government under Louis XVII and Charles X.

Citing poor health, Jacques-Augustin-Catherine Pajou resigned in 1823 from most of the associations of which he was a member. After experiencing increasing poor health and a year of continual tremors, Pajou died in November of 1828, while residing in Paris. His body was interred at the Père-Lachaise Cemetery. 

Sebastiano Ricci

Sebastiano Ricci, “The Fall of the Rebel Angels”, 1720, Oil on Canvas, 82 x 68 cm, Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

Born in August of 1659, Sebastiano Ricci, an Italian painter of the late Baroque school of Venice, enjoyed an international reputation. He worked all over Italy, Austria, France, and England, primarily painting walls and ceilings with decorative schemes. Ricci’s patrons included Anne, Queen of England, Scotland and Ireland, and Lord Burlington, who commissioned Ricci for eight canvases of mythological frolics. 

In his 1720 “The Fall of the Rebel Angels”, Sebastiano Ricci portrays the War in Heaven, as described in the Bible’s Book of Revelation 12,2-9. Archangel Michael leads the angels of Heaven against the rebel angels, who follow Satan. Ricci portrays, with great exuberance, the moment when Saint Michael drives the fallen angels from Heaven. The light radiating from the upper left quadrant illuminates St. Michael while casting the fallen angels into darkness, offering a poignant juxtaposition between virtue and vice. 

There are five drawings relating to this composition at the Royal Library of Windsor Castle and one drawing in the Galleria dell’ Accademia in Venice.

Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres

Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres, “The Ambassadors of Agamemnon in the Tent of Achilles”, Detail and Full Canvas, 1801, Oil on Canvas, École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts

The monumental history painter Jean-Auguste Dominique Ingres was born in August of 1780 in the southern French town of Montauban. After receiving early instruction from his artist father, he was enrolled at the Academy of Toulouse, studying under neo-classical painter Guillaume-Joseph Roques. In 1797 Ingres left for Paris to study with Jacques-Louis David, who recognized his talent and allowed Ingres to assist on his “Portrait of Madame Récamier”.

Admitted to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Ingres won the Rome Prize in 1801 with his first major work, “The Ambassadors of Agamemnon in the Tent of Achilles”. Living in Paris and studying medieval church sculptures and the works of early Italians and Flemings at the Louvre, Ingress drifted away from the classicism he studied under Roques and David. He developed a new style, intricately designed with nearly shadowless figures, formed of distinct areas of color. Ingress exhibited four works at the Salon of 1806; though three were ignored by the critics, his “Napoleon on the Imperial Throne”,with its hard Gothic-styled artificiality and symmetry, scandalized them.

Between 1806 and 1814, Ingress spent his time painting in Italy, surviving on a four year stipend from the French Academy of Rome, painting portraits, before receiving patronage from, among others, Caroline Murat, sister of Emperor Napoleon and Queen of Naples. His works during this time includes “Oedipus and the Sphinx” and the “Valpincon Bather”, both executed in 1808 and now in the Louvre. Ingres was also among the painters charged with decorations for the Quirinale Palace, the residence of Napoleon’s infant son, king of Rome, producing two large paintings: the romantic 1813 “The Dream of Ossian” and the 1812 tempera painting “Romulus Victorious over Acron”.

Ingres received his first major commission from the Restorative government for two major works: an altar piece for the church of Santa Trinita dei Monti in Rome and, for the cathedral of Montauban, a painting to depict King Louis XIII’s vow to consecrate his kingdom to the Virgin Mary in Her Assumption. “The Vow of Louis XIII” achieved critical success at the Paris Salon of 1824, establishing Ingres’s reputation as the main classical artist. He was awarded the Legion of Honor and elected to the Royal Academy, staying in France and opening a teaching studio in 1825.

After the Revolution of 1830, Ingres received honors but little work from the liberal monarchy of Louis-Philippe. He labored for ten years on a commission for the Autun Cathedral entitled “Martydom of Saint Symphorian”, only to find dismissal from the critics at the 1834 Salon as outmoded in subject matter and style. Ingress departed for Rome, staying for six years, returning only after the popular success of his 1840 “Antiochus and Stratonice”, painted for the Duke of Orlénas, the king’s eldest son.  

In the 1840s and 1850s, despite spending much of his energy on large mural works, Ingress achieved his honors from his portraits of society women, including the portraits of “Baroness Rothschild” in 1948,;“Madame Moitessier” in 1851 and now in the National Gallery of Art; and “Princess de Broglie” in 1853. For the government of Napoleon III, he painted “Apotheosis of Napoleon I” and was honored with a retrospective exhibition at the Universal Exposition of 1855.

Ingress finished his painting “Turkish Bath” in 1862 at the age of eighty-two; in the same year, he was appointed to the French Senate. He died, after a brief illness, in January of 1867, of natural causes at the age of eighty-seven. His daring individual style, often criticized, was dedicated to an idea of beauty based on the relationship between forms, and harmonies in the use of line and color.

Agnolo Di Cosimo

Agnolo Di Cosimo (Agnolo Bronzino), “Saint Sebastian”, 1533, Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain

Agnolo Di Cosimo, known as Agnolo Bronzino, was a prominent artist of the second-wave of Italian Mannerism in the middle of the sixteenth century. Born to a poor Florentine family in 1503, he started his art education at the age of eleven as a pupil of Raffaelino del Garbo, a Renaissance painter from Florence. In 1515 Bronzino undertook an apprenticeship in Florence with the man who would become his biggest artistic influence and, some say, adopted father: Jacopo Carucci, better known as Pontormo.

In 1525, Pontormo called upon his pupil Agnolo Di Cosimo to help with what would be Pontormo’s masterpiece, the  “Deposition from the Cross”. This altarpiece was painted in the Florentine church of Santa Felicità. Pontormo was commissioned to decorate the entire church with frescoes; in a testament to Pontormo’s trust in and affection for his pupil, Pontormo enlisted Di Cosimo to assist in the work.

After the Siege of Florence in 1530 which reinstalled the Medici family as rulers, Agnolo Di Cosimo fled to Urbino. There he was commissioned by the Duke of Urbino to paint a nude Cupid above an arch of the Imperiale vault. He was also commissioned by a prince of Urbino to paint his portrait. As Di Cosimo became known for his portraits, he became the official portraitist for the Medici family members. Di Cosimo is known mostly for these portraits, perhaps his greatest contribution to Italian Mannerism.

Agnolo Di Cosimo’s painting technicus is extremely controlled and meticulous, with immaculate attention to detail..His brushstrokes appear non-existent, which give his works, particularly his portraits, an extremely realistic, almost life-like appearance. Di Cosimo used the tehnique of chiaroscuro to bring attnetion to the light-colored figures in the painting, pushing them forward against the dark background. Chiaroscuro is an effect of contrasted light and shadow created by light falling unevenly or from a particular direction on the subject of the painting.

 

Antonio Canova

Antonio Canova, “Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss”, Detail, 1787, Marble, Louvre Museum, Paris

“Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss” is a marble sculpture by Italian artist Antonio Canova, who was raised by his stonemason grandfather, Pasino Canova. Antonio Canova valued his independence as an artist, believing that art was above politics. However, through pressure by the French on the papacy, he was forced to accept titles and honors.

The marble sculpture is in a Neoclassical style but shows characteristics of the then emerging Romantic movement. There were two versions of this piece; the image shown being the prime version, which was acquired by Joachim Murat, Marshal of France and Admiral of France under the reign of Napoleon. After Murat’s death, the sculpture entered the Louvre Museum in 1824.

Image reblogged with thanks to http://abrighterhellas.tumblr.com

Dragon Aquamanile

Dragon Aquamanile, 1200 AD, Copper Alloy, Northern Germany, 22 x18 cm., The Cloisters Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

An aquamanile is a vessel made specifically to hold water for hand-washing. Most of the Middle-Ages aquamaniles are fashioned from copper or bronze, an alloy of copper and tin with other metals. The artists used a lost was process, a time consuming and complicated process, to fashion these hollow figures. This process has been in use since the 4th century B.C.