Discussion: French Academic and Romantic Painting and the substyle Orientalism
Discussion: Romanticism Part 1 Blake, Friederich
Discussion: Romanticism Part 2 Walpole Ruskin Turner Goya Gericault
Academic Art, Orientalism and Romantic Art
"The École des Beaux-Arts, in full École Nationale Supérieure Des Beaux-arts, school of fine arts founded (as the Académie Royale d'Architecture) in Paris in 1671 by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, minister of Louis XIV; it merged with the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (founded in 1648) in 1793. The school offered instruction in drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, and engraving to students selected by competitive examination; since 1968, architecture is no longer taught there." (http://www.britannica.com/)
In the 19th century the French Academy (École des Beaux-Arts) that David had taken over still flourished. Artists who worked in David's style continued to dominate the French art world. The style that they worked in was referred to as "Academic" however they didn't just paint Neoclassical scenes but also painted scenes depicting Arabia, Turkey and India and this subject matter was called "Orientalism."
 Oil on canvas, approx. 12' 8" x 16' 103/4". Louvre, Paris. French Academic Painting  Raphael School of Athens 1509-1510 Stanza della Segnatura, Vatican, Rome fresco | Form: This painting is rendered in a very slick and detailed fashion. No brushstrokes are visible in Ingre's paintings. Although photography hadn't been invented yet, this painting recalls the photo realistic surfaces and textures of David and Jan Van Eyck's paintings. The overall design of this image reflects a Neoclassical sense of composition and a Renaissance sense of perspective.The picture plane is arranged in a sculptural frieze like band that takes its cue from antique sculptural friezes such as those found on the Ara Pacis and the Parthenon. Like its classical counterparts, the image is constructed so that most of the figures are placed in the foreground and even though there is the creation of deep space, the background is not as important as the figures. It is also classic in that the composition is arranged symmetrically with the most important figure, proclaiming the oath, in the center. The use of perspective also focusses on this figure. Iconography: The vessel depicts the apotheosis of Homer which is a kind of crowning scene. Homer is about to be crowned by a winged victory figure called a nike. To the right of the nike figure is a figure who hands Homer his harp. This painting contains some similar types of elements as Raphael's work. The figures in the foreground represent important thinkers and paintings from the last three centuries. In the lower right hand corner is Isaac Newton. Above him and to the left is Rene Descartes. In the lower left hand corner is an image of Poussin, the hero of the French school of painting who gestures up towards Homer on his throne. Behind the figures is an ionic temple that serves as both a visual and conceptual frame with which to view the work. Context: Ingres was David's student and came to Paris because he was awarded a scholarship to study there. Throughout his life he became one of the giants of the French academic style and he was instrumental in maintaining the Academy's integrity despite the competition it had with a style of art called Romanticism. |
 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Jupiter and Thetis, 1811 oil on canvas, 130 X 101" | Annibale Carracci The Farnese ceiling-1597-1601 depicting the Loves of the Gods, ceiling frescoes in the Gallery, Palazzo Farnese, Rome. Venus and Anchises (detail)  | Form: This painting falls into all the major characteristics of the Academic style. It is painted almost photographically, it is symmetrical and textures and the human forms are rendered extremely naturalistically and exactly by using glazes. However, one of the qualities that begins to show up in Ingre's work is that he subtly distorts or stylizes the anatomy of the figures. Usually the females have very thin sloping shoulders and slightly rubbery elongated torsos which was the ideal of female beauty at the time. Iconography: one of the criticisms of the French 19th century academic style was that the uses of classical themes were no longer elevated as they had been in the earlier paintings of David. Here we see an eroticized almost Mannerist looking interaction of two mythological figures that looks almost as if it might belong on the ceiling of the Farnese Palazzo rather than in a French 19th century drawing room. Even the figures are stylized almost in a similar manner to Carracci's works. |
 Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Large Odalisque. 1814 oil on canvas, 35"x64" Louvre, Paris French Academic/Orientalist  TIZIANO Vecellio (Titian) Venus of Urbino 1538 Oil on canvas, 119 x 165 cm Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italian Renaissance | Form: This painting falls into all the major characteristics of the Academic style. It is painted almost photographically, it is symmetrical and textures and the human forms are rendered extremely naturalistically and exactly by using glazes. It is also very Ingres- like in his distortions of the figures. Here is a perfect example of his thin sloping shoulders and slightly rubbery elongated torsos which was the ideal of female beauty at the time. Iconography: This painting is a European fantasy of what a Turkish harem girl might look like but if she is a Turkish woman why is her skin so pale? In many ways this painting refers almost exactly to the schema that Titian established in his Venus of Urbino and Boucher established in his Brown Odalisk. These artists chose to juxtapose the eroticized female form with commodities or luxury items. By playing the textures and body of the female against expensive fabrics, feathers, and jewels, the artist is also making the human female form another commodity which can be bought and sold. In this way, the wealth of the patron is also eroticized. A certain amount of moralizing is happening too. The artist wants to paint naked pictures of beautiful French women to appease the "male gaze." But cannot unless it is a classical goddess. Here Ingres finds a new strategy to display the nude female form under the disguise of an ethnographic image very similar to a "National Geographic" magazine. Since these women are foreign, exotic, and somewhat barbaric it's OK to look at them as long as it's for an anthropological type of study. Even the photographic aspect of this image supports that this is a documentary type of image. And, if they are barbaric, we as good Christian soldiers need to go to these places and "civilize" them. In this instance, the luxury items that Ingres plays her body against happen to be the silks and ostrich feathers of the so called orient are by products of our efforts to civilize these people. In this way the style of Orientalism is a kind of advertisement that justifies the colonization of the east. |
 Jean-Leon-Gerome, The Moorish Bath, 1880 oil on canvas, approx. 3'x4' San Francisco, Legion of Honor French Academic/Orientalism | Context: Gerome was the next generation of French Academic painters and in some ways the heir to Ingres. More so than just about any other painter he follows the same schema as Ingres in both his Orientalist paintings and Neoclassical ones.Gerome and Ingres were both proponents of the Academic style but had to deal with two very powerful new movements in the arts, Romanticism and Impressionism. |
According to the Brittanica, Romanticism
One such Romantic figure was Niccolò Paganini,is an attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many works of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography in Western civilization over a period from the late 18th to the mid-19th century. Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism in general and late 18th-century Neoclassicism in particular. It was also to some extent a reaction against the Enlightenment and against 18th-century rationalism and physical materialism in general. Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.Among the characteristic attitudes of Romanticism were the following: a deepened appreciation of the beauties of nature; a general exaltation of emotion over reason and of the senses over intellect; a turning in upon the self and a heightened examination of human personality and its moods and mental potentialities; a preoccupation with the genius, the hero, and the exceptional figure in general, and a focus on his passions and inner struggles; a new view of the artist as a supremely individual creator, whose creative spirit is more important than strict adherence to formal rules and traditional procedures; an emphasis upon imagination as a gateway to transcendent experience and spiritual truth; an obsessive interest in folk culture, national and ethnic cultural origins, and the medieval era; and a predilection for the exotic, the remote, the mysterious, the weird, the occult, the monstrous, the diseased, and even the satanic.
 These drawings of Paganini were created during the 19th century. On the right is a photograph of him.  |  | According to the Brittanica Niccolò Paganini was an,Italian composer and principal violin virtuoso of the 19th century. A popular idol, he inspired the Romantic mystique of the virtuoso and revolutionized violin technique. . .Paganini's romantic personality and adventures created in his own day the legend of a Mephistophelean figure. Stories circulated that he was in league with the devil and that he had been imprisoned for murder; his burial in consecrated ground was delayed for five years. . . |
Both Delacroix and Ingres worked with "Orientalist" subject matter. Using the ideas that you've read about in this page and in Linda Nochlin's article, try to explain how these two artists are similar and or different in their views of the "Orient." Do they have the same goals? Think about how the formal aspects of there work add to or detract from the subject matter. You may want to read the article below to help you.
 Eugene Delacroix The Massacre at Chios 1824 Oil on canvas; Louvre    Eugene Delacroix, Women of Algiers in their Apartment. 1834 oil on canvas 5'10"x7'6". Louvre French Romantic/Orientalist | Drinking the color. by Robert Hughes. Time, 1/9/95, Vol. 145 Issue 1, p68, 2p, 3cAt the end of 1831, the French artist Eugene Delacroix did something that would change the course of his own art, and to no small degree that of French painting itself. He left Paris and went to Morocco -- an arduous journey in those days, on winter roads to Marseilles and then by naval frigate to Tangier. It was made easier by his connections. The 34-year-old painter was traveling with his friend, a French diplomat named Charles de Mornay, sent to conclude a treaty with Moulay Abd-er-Rahman, the Sultan of Morocco. (France had conquered neighboring Algeria the year before and did not want any Moroccan interventions in its new colony.) The mission, including Delacroix, arrived in Morocco in January 1832 and stayed six months. Morocco would change Delacroix profoundly. For the next 30 years, the last half of his life, images from ``the land of lions and leather,'' as he called it in a letter from Meknes, would recur in his work, meeting and dictating its needs; the innumerable drawings and watercolors he made there, along with the dense and (to a modern eye) almost cinematic impressions he jotted down in his journal, were a permanent resource he could draw from. Delacroix had already made a brilliant name for himself with ``Oriental'' subjects, including his Byronic denunciation of Turkish barbarity in Greece, The Massacres at Chios (1824), and that enormous Romantic panorama of sex, death and animal vitality, The Death of Sardanapalus (1827). But these were fictions. He had never been to Greece, let alone ancient Asia. Morocco was real, and it bowled Delacroix over. There, he wrote to a friend in Paris, he was confronted ``at every step'' with ``ready-made paintings which would make the fame and fortune of 20 generations of painters.'' And in a sense he was right. From Delacroix on, Oriental exoticism would bulk ever larger in the offerings of the Paris salon: slave markets, dim fretted courtyards, hawk-nosed Arabs and their Barbary mounts, recumbent houris. More important, Delacroix's journey south to the Near East would become a model for avant-garde painters looking for purer and more intense experiences of light, locale and color than Northern Europe could offer. Van Gogh went south to Arles; Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky and above all Henri Matisse would reach North Africa. ``I have found landscapes in Morocco,'' Matisse claimed, ``exactly as they are described in Delacroix's paintings.'' Morocco satisfied something in the early modernist quest for explicit, fresh, formal experience. And it was Delacroix who pointed the artists there. The results of his own journey are set forth in a compelling show of some 100 paintings and sketches on view through Jan. 15 at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, ``Delacroix: The Voyage to Morocco,'' curated by Brahim Alaoui. What did he find there? Basically confirmation, in the real world, of the shape of his own temperament. The leader of the Romantic movement in French painting, Delacroix was both fervid and exceptionally contained. He adored energy -- the fury of stallions rearing and biting one another in a stable, ignoring the efforts of their Arab grooms; the flash in a fighter's eye; the tensed muscles of a lion. He drank color: sonorous reds and browns, flashes of green, veils of cold blue -- a palette he had learned from Rubens. But at the same time he knew, as his idols Rubens and Titian had known, that all the passion in the world is aesthetically useless unless it has the container of form: it was his classical heritage that gave measure, shape and intensity to experience. Morocco meant both these things. ``This people is wholly antique,'' he wrote in Tangier; its Arab men and Jewish women -- Arab women were not paintable, since they would not remove their veils for a Western stranger -- possessed, in his eyes, ``the majesty which is lacking among ourselves in the gravest circumstances.'' Years later he confided in a letter to a friend that ``it was among these people that I really discovered for myself the beauty of antiquity.'' And not only of antiquity, either. De Mornay was amused to see that when Delacroix was finally admitted to a harem, he became so overexcited that he had to be calmed down with sorbets. For Delacroix, this antiquity involved color, as for Ingres -- his opposite -- it did not. David and Ingres had given France a colorless antiquity, an abstracted classicism of white marble. What Delacroix got from the arts of Morocco -- woven and dyed fabrics, leather, tiles and pots -- was a sense of extraordinarily vibrant and free color, ``barbaric'' in French eyes but wholly natural (or so he now realized) to him. You see it announcing itself in his watercolor drawing of a Jewish bride in Tangier, whose costume, in all its fantastic profusion of embroidery, overlays and gold jewelry, is suggested in a few washes of pink, vermilion, blue and yellow. He developed it to full pitch in the oil paintings he did later in his Paris studio. It would lead to the packed density of pattern-on-pattern in Women of Algiers (1834) and receive its homages from both Matisse and Picasso. For them, it pointed to abstraction. But in Delacroix's case it was supported by an intimate sense of detail. Nowhere does Delacroix's curiosity about what he saw reveal itself more fully than in the Moroccan drawings. He was determined to get everything right, to bring back exact memory in an age before photography: the weave of a coarse djellaba conveyed in thin licks of wash; the violent white light on a wall; a chaotic still life of saddles, blankets and flintlocks piled in the corner of a guardhouse behind a pair of sleeping soldiers, whose robes give them the monumental air of tomb sculptures. The drawings, individually but even more so as a series, express an immense excitement about the world's variety. They underwrote the authenticity of his later paintings, reinforcing their fictions. After Morocco, Delacroix lost whatever interest he might once have felt in the mandatory artist's trip to Italy. ``Rome is no longer in Rome,'' he would say. ``The Romans and Greeks are here at my door, and I know them face-on; the marbles are truth itself, but you have to know how to read them, and we poor moderns have only seen hieroglyphs in them.'' Morocco saved him from the abstraction that had weakened French responses to the classic. A painting like his Military Exercises of the Moroccans (1832) shows Delacroix using real life -- the ceremonial charge and fusillade of Arab warriors, rearing on their explosively energetic mounts like showoff bikers doing wheelies -- to recall the truth of energy and immediacy that people must have seen in marble battles 2,000 years before. ~~~~~~~~ BY ROBERT HUGHES |
ro.man.ti.cism n (1823) 1 often cap a (1): a literary, artistic, and philosophical movement originating in the 18th century, characterized chiefly by a reaction against neoclassicism and an emphasis on the imagination and emotions, and marked esp. in English literature by sensibility and the use of autobiographical material, an exaltation of the primitive and the common man, an appreciation of external nature, an interest in the remote, a predilection for melancholy, and the use in poetry of older verse forms (2): an aspect of romanticism b: adherence to a romantic attitude or style 2: the quality or state of being romantic -- ro.man.ti.cist n, often cap
 Caspar David Friederich, Cloister Cemetery in the Snow 1817-19 Oil on canvas 121 x 170 cm Destroyed 1945, formerly in the National Gallery, Berlin only black and white and poor color images survived  | Form: This painting only exists in black and white and poor color reproductions from before WW II however, you can still get a sense of it from these two images.Friederich (also sometimes spelled Friederich) uses intense contrasts of color and value structure. Color was quite important to Friederich and he has a tendency to use intense and saturated hues. Often the colors he used are the ones associated with sunset effects in the atmosphere and he plays these colors against his use of dark, earth toned silhouetted forms such as the trees and the gravestones. Friederich also often used a symmetrical and centrally oriented composition. The symmetrical composition serves to draw the eye and he uses linear perspective and atmospheric perspective to create a sense of deep continuous space. He also does this with the size scale relationships of the human figures to the buildings and the relationship if the building's size to the trees in the foreground. All of these formal elements are linked to his iconography. Iconography: Many of the themes of the Romantic movement revolve around images in which the unseen forces of death, decay, time and the power of the spiritual world are made palpable. The intense colors and value shifts that occur at dusk and dawn are part of the iconography of this image. The light that bursts through the missing window frames might be representative of the light of heaven or God which is in sharp contrast to the outlines of the building, trees and figures in the mysterious processional in the snow. The time of day is also symbolic. Dusk is a sleepy and mysterious time of the day. For some, sunsets are symbolic of decline and decay. Decay and nostalgia are echoed in the architectonic trees and the decaying monastery or Gothic style church. The themes of death and decay are further taken up by the tombstones and the snow which highlights them. In fact the reference to the decaying Gothic style building may be a reference to the Gothic Revival style that was advocated by Sir John Ruskin who according to the Brittanica was an "English writer, critic, and artist who championed the Gothic Revival movement in architecture and had a large influence upon public taste in art in Victorian England." Context: This image utilizes many of the standard kinds of images that we are used to seeing in film and specifically films dealing with horror, but for Friederich, these images didn't exist and he is the source of this kind of imagery for cinematographers today. Three great movies that "quote" Friederich's paintings are "Bram Stoker's Dracula" starring Gary Oldman and Winona Rider, "Frankenstein" starring Robert Deniro, and "Gothic" directed by Ken Russell. |
 William Blake Frontispiece from "Europe a Prophecy" God as the Divine Geometer c1790  God as the Divine Geometer c1220 from a French Moralizing Bible | Form: In a way William Blake was like a Gothic manuscript illustrator. Each one of Blake's prints was a print that he hand colored and sometimes even annotated. According to the Brittanica,Blake's invention of what he called "illuminated printing," in which, by a special technique of relief etching, each page of the book was printed in monochrome from an engraved plate containing both text and illustration: an invention foreshadowed by his friend, George Cumberland. The pages were then usually coloured with watercolour or printed in colour by Blake and his wife, bound together in paper covers, and sold for prices ranging from a few shillings to 10 guineas.In this way, Blake's work is both an original painting and a print.The forms that Blake works with are almost naive. In some ways, his rendering of the human anatomy is awkward and his depiction of chiaroscuro and color are almost unsophisticated. Nevertheless, the composition of many of Blake's images and the interaction of the texts with the illustration is very similar in design to Gothic manuscripts from the 13th century. "God as the Divine Geometer" is a symmetrically placed image. Surrounding the well muscled figure is a kind of nimbus or he could be placed within the sun. In his left hand he holds a compass used for geometry and measurement. Blake would have drawn this as God's right but it would have been reversed. The figure is surrounded by clouds and a black void. Iconography: Everything about this image is designed to create a humanistic, intelligent, and wise image of God as a philosopher and scientific creator. God is represented in the uncreated black void, he is surrounded by an aura of light and he is using an enlightened and scientific instrument to design the world. Blake has modeled his image of God as the creator from a similar source as the Gothic manuscript shown here with a similar device. God is then a scientific and logical designer but God is also a humanistic "superman/philospher" in his appearance. He is bearded and well muscled as in Michelangelo's depictions of God from the Sistine Chapel. Context: Look in Stokstad for more context on Blake. |
 located in Detroit Fuseli was born Swiss and then moved and worked in England  FUSELI,Henry 1741-1825 The Nightmare (Incubus) 1781-82 located in Freies Deutsches Hochstift,Frankfurt-am-Main. English, Romanticism, | Form: Theses two paintings seem to use the chiaroscuro that Caravaggio advocates, however, if you look closely at how the light moves across the figures you should notice that the values transitions across the figures are not as well rendered as some of the earlier images we have looked at. The anatomy and the realism of the figures is sacrificed in favor of the drama and gesture of the figures.Just like Caravaggio and some of the Neoclassic artists, Fuseli creates a stage like setting in which the figures are pushed up to the front of the picture plane. Tenebrism is used to highlight the nightmarish creatures that emerge out of the darkness. Iconography: The titles of the painting express quite a bit about the spiritual system of beliefs and social beliefs that Fuseli and many individuals held about women, sexuality, and spirituality. Here is an image of the "weaker sex" being preyed on by the incubus which really symbolizes the weakness of the female and her inability to control her sexual nature. These paintings are literally rebuses. The painting takes place at night and in the background is a horse. A female horse is referred to as a "mare." The combination of the two terms adds up to the title of the painting. In the foreground of each painting is a table with a small bottle on it which contains a drug called laudanum. According to the Brittanica, "laudanum, for example, was an alcoholic tincture (dilute solution) of opium that was used in European medical practice as an analgesic and sedative." This drug was widely prescribed for females during this era because of the widely held belief that women were prone to attacks of nerves and that it was necessary to sedate women because they often became hysterical. Opium drugs can cause hallucinations and often when women would fall asleep they were prone to nightmares caused by the drugs in their systems. Context: Stokstad discusses the link between Fuseli and his own desires that are expressed in this painting. The Brittanica provides some biographical information you may find useful. |
Henry Fuseli
b. Feb. 7, 1741, Zürich, Switz.
d. April 16, 1825, Putney Hill, London, Eng.
original name JOHANN HEINRICH FÜSSLI , Swiss-born painter whose works are among the most exotic, original, and sensual pieces of his time.
Fuseli was reared in an intellectual and artistic milieu and initially studied theology. Obliged to flee Zürich because of political entanglements, he went first to Berlin, and then settled in London in 1764. He was encouraged to become a painter by Sir Joshua Reynolds, and he left England in 1768 to study in Italy until 1778. During his stay in Rome he studied the works of Michelangelo and classical art, which became his major stylistic influences; his subject matter was chiefly literary. Fuseli is famous for his paintings and drawings of nude figures caught in strained and violent poses suggestive of intense emotion. He also had a penchant for inventing macabre fantasies, such as that in "The Nightmare" (1781). He had a noticeable influence on the style of his younger contemporary, William Blake.In 1788 Fuseli was elected an associate of the Royal Academy, becoming a full academician two years later. During 1799-1805 and again from 1810 he was professor of painting at the Royal Academy. He was appointed keeper of the Academy in 1804.
 FRIEDRICH, Caspar David | Form: Color was quite important to Friederich and he has a tendency to use intense and saturated hues. Often the colors he used are the ones associated with sunset effects in the atmosphere and he plays these colors against his use of dark, earth tonedsilhouetted forms such as the trees and the gravestones. Friederich also often used a symmetrical and centrally oriented composition. The symmetrical composition serves to draw the eye and he uses linear perspective and atmospheric perspective to create a sense of deep continuous space. He also does this with the size scale relationships of the human figures to the mountains. All of these formal elements are linked to his iconography. Iconography: Many of the themes of the Romantic movement revolve around images in which the unseen forces of death, decay, time and the power of the spiritual world are made palpable. The intense colors and value shifts that occur at dusk and dawn are part of the iconography of this image. In this image Friederich is depicting a spiritual ascension. Here a so called "wanderer" symbolizes all men's wanderings through life and the possibility of enlightenment through a spiritual journey through the a metaphysical landscape. The mountain this wanderer has ascended is a metaphor for man's spiritual journey. |
 Strawberry Hill, located in Twickenham Horace Walpole and othersStrawberry Hill, located in Twickenham, was bought in 1747 by Horace Walpole and over the next 30 years developed into the first conscious translation of Picturesque principles of gardening and landscape into architecture. The building was worked on by five architects; William Robinson and Richard Bentley designed the exterior in the mid-1750's, Robert Adam built the central round tower in 1759, and John Chute of the Vyne and Thomas Pitt constructed interior rooms such as the Library, Great Parlor, and Gallery. While the exterior is the first example of a resurgence of Gothic style, the interior designers drew from models of old tombs in Canterbury and Westminster Abbey and an aisle in Henry VII's chapel. Strawberry Hill, because of its use of many different revived styles, is considered to have begun the Picturesque style.   | According to the Brittanica, Strawberry Hill is the, earliest documented example of the revived use of Gothic architectural elements is Strawberry Hill, the home of the English writer Horace Walpole. As in many of the early Gothic Revival buildings, the Gothic was used here for its picturesque and romantic qualities without regard for its structural possibilities or original function.Context: According to the Brittanica Walpole was an, English writer, connoisseur, and collector who was famous in his day for his medieval horror tale The Castle of Otranto, which initiated the vogue for Gothic romances. He is remembered today as perhaps the most assiduous letter writer in the English language.The youngest son of the prime minister Sir Robert Walpole, he was educated at Eton and at King's College, Cambridge. In 1739 he embarked with his Eton schoolmate, the poet Thomas Gray (later to write "An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard"), on a grand tour of France and Italy, in the midst of which they quarrelled and separated. They were later reconciled, and Walpole remained throughout his life an enthusiastic admirer of Gray's poetry. On his return to England in 1741, Walpole entered Parliament, where his career was undistinguished, although he attended debates regularly until 1768. In 1791 he inherited the peerage from a nephew, a grandson of Robert Walpole. He remained unmarried, and on his death the earldom became extinct. |
 Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, Middlesex, Thomas Pitt (1737-1793) 1759-62  |
 TURNER, J.M.W. Burning of Houses of Parliament October 16,1834 (painted in 1835)  Houses of Parliament (1837-67) Sir Charles Barry and Augustus Welby Pugin | Iconography: The buildings of Parliament represented the stability and power of the English government. When the building burned, for some, as in the case of Turner, the power of nature (fire) represented a spiritual one which scrubbed clean the past of the structure.When Pugin and Barry began the reconstruction of the buildings, for them the use of the Gothic Revival style was a return to England's noble and feudal past. According to Ruskin (a popular critic and scholar) and the architects, the Gothic style was a representation of history and a less complex more spiritually clear time.According to the Brittanica, The earliest manifestations of an interest in the medieval era were in the private domain, but by the 1820s public buildings in England were also being designed in the Gothic mode. Perhaps no example is more familiar than the new Houses of Parliament (1840), designed by Sir Charles Barry and A.W.N. Pugin. In that large cluster of buildings, the haphazard picturesque quality of the early revival was replaced by a more conscientious adaptation of the medieval English style. Other structures built around mid-century were within this basic pattern. Later, the desire for more elegant and sumptuous landmarks created the last flowering of the style.A fire in 1834 destroyed the whole palace except the historic Westminster Hall, the Jewel Tower, the cloisters, and the crypt of St. Stephen's Chapel. |
 Arctic Shipwreck or Sea of Ice1823  JMW Turner The Slave Ship 1840 35"x48"  GERICAULT,Theodore 1791-1824 Raft of the Medusa 1819 Paris,Louvre French, Romanticism | Iconography: Man vs Nature.The theme these three paintings seem to share deals with men and the sea. Overtly all three paintings show the attempt of men to navigate their way through the oceans and the natural forces they may encounter in doing so. Turner and Friederich do this by also using electric saturated hues and shifts of color to demonstrate how man is in his twilight. Both deal with the destruction of ships and man's attempt to navigate through the natural world. In both cases it seams that "Mother Nature" is winning the battle. Both images deal with death as an unalterable fact. In the case of Friederich, he is showing you a failure of man to get to the forbidden arctic poles but it may represent a kind of journey to the forbidden underworld. The arctic circle is then a symbol of Hades. This may be further fleshed out by the suggestion that this painting may also be inspired in some way by the death of the artist's brother. Turner and Gericault are showing man's battle with nature but may also be showing the eventual judgment of man. The men in Turner's painting in particular were slave traders. In Gericault's painting the men are merchant marines who are "wage slaves." In Turner's image perhaps they are being delivered to a different sort of "Last Judgment" again delivered by Nature herself. Turner's painting in part represents nature about to punish guilty human beings. The full title of the picture isSlavers Overthrowing the Dead and Dying- Typho[on]n Coming On, and in the left distance the beholder observes the guilty vessel about to meet its deserved end, while in the right and central foreground he encounters thrust upon him slaves being devoured by the sea and its creatures. Although Turner's painting presents images of fanciful ocean predators, his image of Gothic [196/197] horror is not the product of his imagination. In fact, he was portraying what had become sound business practice: since insurance on slave-cargoes covered only those drowned at sea and not slaves who perished from brutality, disease, and the dreadful conditions on board, profit-minded captains cast the dead and dying into the ocean. As John McCoubrey has demonstrated the artist painted his picture specifically for an anti-slavery campaign, and one may add that he has succeeded in creating a particularly effective image of these horrors. Works as different as Heinrich Heine's 'Das Sklavenschiff', Robert Hayden's 'Middle Passage', and Norman Mailer's Of A Fire on the Moon have elaborated upon the situation and paradigm of the slave-ship, but few, if any, have done so more powerfully than this painting. The closing lines of Turner's epigraph -- 'Hope, Hope, fanacious Hope!/Where is thy market now?' -- further suggest that he was attacking not only the specific horror s of the slave-trade but also the situation of an men in a society whose basic bond had become the cash nexus. [On Turner's politico-economic beliefs, see See Jack Lindsay's edition of Turner's poems. The Sunset Ship (London, I966), pp. 46-9; http://65.107.211.206/victorian/art/crisis/crisis4e.html |
 Francisco Jose de Goya y Lucientes The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (El Sueño de la Razon Produce Monstros),1803 Plate 43 of Los Caprichos, second edition Etching and aquatint a web site with Los Caprichoshttp://images.library.smu.edu/ISC2 | Form: This print is one of many in a series of prints published as a folio. (A collection of prints sold as a single work or book.)The depiction of human anatomy and light and shadow in this work, as in others by Goya tends to look a bit cartoonish caricaturish and even at times the anatomy and light are so contrived that they look inaccurate. The process used to create this print is called aquatint. According to the Brittanica, aquatint is, a variety of etching widely used by printmakers to achieve a broad range of tonal values. The process is called aquatint because finished prints often resemble watercolour drawings or wash drawings. The technique consists of exposing a copperplate to acid through a layer of granulated resin or sugar. The acid bites away the plate only in the interstices between the resin or sugar grains, leaving an evenly pitted surface that yields broad areas of tone when the grains are removed and the plate is printed. An infinite number of tones can be achieved by exposing various parts of the plate to acid baths of different strengths for different periods of time. Etched or engraved lines are often used with aquatint to achieve greater definition of form.In the 17th century a number of attempts were made at producing what later became known as aquatint prints. None of the efforts was successful, however, until 1768, when the French printmaker Jean-Baptiste Le Prince discovered that granulated resin gave satisfactory results. Aquatint became the most popular method of producing toned prints in the late 18th century, especially among illustrators. Its textural subtleties, however, remained largely unexplored by well-known artists except for Francisco de Goya. Most of his prints are aquatints, and he is considered the greatest master of the technique. |
Iconography: Stokstad points out that this work was meant originally as the frontispiece and remarks that the idea of the image is that of unbridled imagination. The print was accompanied with the text, "Imagination abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders," but Stokstad also points out how angry and satirical this image and the rest of the images in the series "Los Caprichos" is.The image depicts a man asleep assailed by phantoms. The image of an owl is often a symbol of sleep, death and knowledge. In fact Michelangelo had used the image of the owl as death in one of the Medici tombs. The bats are almost universally icons of death and night, but in Spanish folk tales their is a vampiric creature called los chusas (the sucker which is similar to the modern Mexican myth of the chupa cabra)which is a kind of blood sucking or incubus like entity. The forces that descend on the sleeping figure are really representitive of nightmares rather than wondrous positive creatures. The overall interpretation of the image could be that the Spanish intellect is asleep and because of this the monsters of the superstitious mind seem to have too much power.
Context: According to the Brittanica Encyclopedia,
Francisco de Goya is hard to place in the historical development of the comedy of manners. His "Caprichos" (1796-98), etchings prepared by some of the most simple and trenchant brush drawings ever made, appeared in the last years of the 18th century and can be called comedies of manners only insofar as they are related to folk sayings and the bittersweet Spanish folk wisdom. Thus, they stand in the line of Bosch and Bruegel, so many of whose paintings were in Habsburg collections in Madrid. The "Proverbios" of 1813-19 are even more monumental transfigurations of various states of the human condition. Like the "Caprichos," they used the caricaturist's means for irony and satire, but there was little of the comic left in them and none at all in the "Desastres de la guerra" (1810-14, "Disasters of War"), which used the Peninsular phase of the Napoleonic Wars as a point of departure. They are closer to universality than even Callot's similarly inspired series and are searching comments on more stages of cruelty than Hogarth covered. In them, Goya was really a political cartoonist using no names; yet he was hardly a public cartoonist in the normal sense because censorship and other factors allowed only a very small circulation of his later work until a sizable edition was printed a generation after his death. The earlier work, which contains elements of comedy, did get abroad and had influence in France and England probably before Goya's death. Artistically, if not politically, his work would have had the same powerful effect whenever "discovered" or circulated.
 Francisco Goya: The Third of May, 1808 painted 1814 Oil on canvas, 8'9" x 13'4" Collection Museo del Prado, Madrid | Form: The chiaroscuro and cartoon like anatomy of this image is very similar to the print above. Goya's color is local but his brushwork is quick and gestural. The composition is divided into a series of receding bands, the highly lit and spotlighted victims creates the first band or frieze and the back of the soldiers the second.Iconography: The formal elements are also iconographic. The local colors are drab and dark as is the subject. The tenebristic flair of the soldiers spot light focuses on the central figure whose pose is reminiscent of a crucifixion. This literally highlights the role of the rebels as martyrs. The arrangement of the soldiers with their backs to the viewers creates a symbolic representation as faceless soldiers who are inhuman. Context: According to the Brittanica, On the restoration of Ferdinand VII in 1814, after the expulsion of the invaders, Goya was pardoned for having served the French king and reinstated as first court painter. "The 2nd of May 1808: The Charge of the Mamelukes" and "The 3rd of May 1808: The Execution of the Defenders of Madrid" were painted to commemorate the popular insurrection in Madrid. Like "Los desastres," they are compositions of dramatic realism, and their monumental scale makes them even more moving. The impressionistic style in which they are painted foreshadowed and influenced later 19th-century French artists, particularly Manet, who was also inspired by the composition of "The 3rd of May." In several portraits of Ferdinand VII, painted after his restoration, Goya evoked--more forcefully than any description--the personality of the cruel tyrant, whose oppressive rule drove most of his friends and eventually Goya himself into exile. |
ar.chi.tec.ton.ic adj [L architectonicus, fr. Gk architektonikos, fr. architekton] (1645) 1: of, relating to, or according with the principles of architecture: architectural 2: having an organized and unified structure that suggests an architectural design -- ar.chi.tec.ton.i.cal.ly advfron.tis.piece n [MF frontispice, fr. LL frontispicium facade, fr. L front-, frons + -i- + specere to look at--more at spy] (ca. 1598) 1 a: the principal front of a building b: a decorated pediment over a portico or window 2: an illustration preceding and usu. facing the title page of a book or magazine
Gothic Revival Style, architectural style that drew its inspiration from medieval architecture and competed with the Neoclassical revivals in the United States and Great Britain. Only isolated examples of the style are to be found on the Continent.
The earliest documented example of the revived use of Gothic architectural elements is Strawberry Hill, the home of the English writer Horace Walpole. As in many of the early Gothic Revival buildings, the Gothic was used here for its picturesque and romantic qualities without regard for its structural possibilities or original function.
(Brittanica)
in.cu.bus n, pl -bi also -bus.es [ME, fr. LL, fr. L incubare] (13c) 1: an evil spirit that lies on persons in their sleep; esp: one that has sexual intercourse with women while they are sleeping--compare succubus 2: nightmare 2 3: one that oppresses or burdens like a nightmare
meta.phys.i.cal adj (15c) 1: of or relating to metaphysics 2 a: of or relating to the transcendent or to a reality beyond what is perceptible to the senses b: supernatural 3: highly abstract or abstruse; also: theoretical 4 often cap: of or relating to poetry esp. of the early 17th century that is highly intellectual and philosophical and marked by unconventional imagery -- meta.phys.i.cal.ly adv Metaphysical n (1898): a metaphysical poet of the 17th century
re.bus n [L, by things, abl. pl. of res thing--more at real] (1605): a representation of words or syllables by pictures of objects or by symbols whose names resemble the intended words or syllables in sound; also: a riddle made up of such pictures or symbols
sil.hou.ette n [F, fr. Etienne de Silhouette d. 1767 Fr. controller general of finances; perh. fr. his ephemeral tenure] (1783) 1: a likeness cut from dark material and mounted on a light ground or one sketched in outline and solidly colored in 2: the outline of a body viewed as circumscribing a masssyn see outline ²silhouette vt -ett.ed ; -ett.ing (1876): to represent by a silhouette; also: to project on a background like a silhouette -- sil.hou.et.tist n
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