Tag: fresco

Diego Rivera

Diego Rivera, “The Maize Festival”, 1923-1924, Fresco Mural, Secretariat of Public Education Main Headquarters, Mexico City, Mexico.

The Maize Festiaval mural was painted on the south wall of the Ministry of Public Education in Mexico City. It was part of a series of paintings done between 1923 and 1928 by Diego Rivera in his first major large-scale mural project.

The themes center around workers, and the glorification of all things Mexican, especially the Mexican Revolution. Rivera named the two courtyards “Labor Courtyard” and the other the “Fiesta Courtyard” based on the themes he painted in each. Because he was affiliated with the Communist Party at the time, Rivera painted small hammers and sickles next to his signature on the panels in this building.

Reblogged with thanks to https://artist-rivera.tumblr.com

Hans Von Marées

Hans Von Marées, “The Orange Grove”, 1873, Fresco, Stazione Zoologica, Naples, Italy

Born in 1837 in Elberfeld, Prussia, Hans Von Marées studied at the Berlin Academy from 1853 to 1855. In 1854, he also entered the studio of painter and printmaker Car Steffeck. Marées moved to Munich where he worked for eight years, influenced by the historical school of painting. He then traveled to italy in 1864 where he lived for twenty years. In 1873 he received his most important commission, the painting of the frescoes in the library of the newly built Stazione Zoologica, the zoological museum in Naples. The frescoes consisted of landscape scenes with figures, intended to express the joys of sea and beach life. “The Orange Grove” is a fresco from that series.

Hans Von Marées initially specialized in portraiture but later turned to painting mythological subjects. He developed an individualistic technique of overpainting tempera with layers of oil, creating a depth of color quite unlike the muted tones of his fellow artists. During the 1880s, Marées painted four triptychs of importance: “The Judgement of Paris”, “The Hesperides”, “The Wooing”, and “Three Saints on Horseback”. He spent his last years of his life in Rome, supported by his patron, art theorist Konrad Fiedler. Marées died at the age of 49 and was buried in the Protestant Cemetery of Rome in the rione of Testaccio.

In 1935, Hans Von Marées’s painting “Die Labung,(The Refresment)” was stolen by the Nazi regime,.   In 1980 the painting came into the possession of the Museum Wiesbaden, the museum of art and natural history in Wiesbaden, Germany. In order to fulfill the museum’s project of identifying and returning Nazi-plundered artwork, the museum showed only the back side of the painting until it could gather enough donations to purchase the work.

Insert Image: Hans von Marées, “Doppelbildnis Marées und (Franz) Lenbach”, 1863, Oil on Canvas, 54.3 x 62 cm, Schack Collection, Munich, Germany

Pordenone

Pordenone, “Pilate Judges Christ”, Detail, Fresco,1520, The Cathedral of Cremona, Italy

Pordenone, Il Pordenone in Italian, is the byname of Giovanni Antonio de’ Sacchis (c. 1484–1539), an Italian Mannerist painter, loosely of the Venetian school. Vasari, his main biographer, wrongly identifies him as Giovanni Antonio Licinio. He painted in several cities in northern Italy “with speed, vigor, and deliberate coarseness of expression and execution—intended to shock”.

He appears to have visited Rome, and learnt from its High Renaissance masterpieces, but lacked a good training in anatomical drawing. Like Polidoro da Caravaggio, he was one of the artists often commissioned to paint the exteriors of buildings; of such work at most a shadow survives after centuries of weather. Michelangelo is said to have approved of one palace facade in 1527; it is now only known from a preparatory drawing.

Much of his work was lost when the Doge’s Palace in Venice was largely destroyed by fires in 1574 and 1577. A number of fresco cycles survive, for example part of one at Cremona Cathedral, where his Passion scenes have a violence hardly repeated until Goya. Another cycle was at the Scuola Grande della Carità in Venice, now the Gallerie dell’Accademia, the main art museum, where he worked with the young Tintoretto.

His life was as energetic and restless as his art; he married three times, and was accused in court of hiring criminals to kill his brother to avoid sharing their inheritance. He perhaps had some influence on later works by Titian and more clearly on Tintoretto, who to some extent took over his position as the leading painter of large mural commissions in Venice. Titian and Pordenone were rivals in his last decade and gossip even claimed that his death was suspicious.

Diego Rivera

Diego Rivera, “Automotive Assembly Line”, Detail of One of Twenty-Seven Fresco Panels, North Wall, Detroit Institute of Arts, Michigan

When the Mexican artist Diego Rivera arrived in Detroit in 1932 to paint the walls at the Detroit Institute of Arts, the city was a leading industrial center of the world. It was also the city that was hit the hardest by the Great Depression. Industrial production and the workforce were a third of what they had been before the 1929 Crash.

The space Rivera was given to paint was aligned on an east/west/north/south axis. Rivera utilized this architectural orientation in a symbolic way. The manufacture of the 1932 Ford V-8 at the Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge plant is captured in the two major panels on the north and south walls.

On the north wall, Rivera captured all the processes related to the assembly of the motor. The blast furnace glows orange and red at extreme temperatures to make molten steel that is poured into molds to make ingots that are then milled into sheets. All the major processes related to the manufacture of the motor of the car from mold-making in the upper left to the final assembly of the motor on the assembly line in the foreground are accurately rendered with engineering precision.

Diego Rivera wove the processes together through the use of the serpentine conveyors and assembly lines. The composition is grounded by two rows of white milling machines that stand as sentinels in the center of the wall and march into the background to the blast furnace.

Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino

Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, “L’ Incendio di Borgo (The Fire in the Borgo)”, (Detail), 1514, Fresco, 670 x 500 cm, Apostolic Palace, Vatican City

Born in early April of 1483, Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino, known as Raphael, was an Italiam painter and architect of the High Renaissance period of Italy. His artwork is known for its clarity of form, the ease of the composition, and the visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human greatness. Raphael, along with Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo, form the traditional trinity of great masters of that period.

Raphael’s fresco “L’ Incendio di Borgo”, which is in the Vatican Museums in Rome, depicts an episode taken from the “Liber Pontificalis” concerning the 847 fire which flared up in the neighborhood in front of St. Peter’s Basilica. On that  occasion Pope Leo IV imparted a solemn blessing from the Loggia delle Benedizioni, which miraculously extinguished the fire and saved the church and the people. The fresco has the clear intent of being a political allegory that presented Pope Leo IV to his contemporaries as the peacemaker who had put out the flames of the war.

The figures and architectures of the fresco clearly recall and allude to the Virgilian description of the Trojan fire. To the left of the fresco, as seen in the detail above,  are Aeneas with his father Anchises on his shoulders, his son Ascanio on the side and his wife Creusa behind. The Corinthian colonnade is reminiscent of the “Temple of the Càstori” , part of the Roman Forum in Rome.