03 Dec 2011
The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini #4
This one is a complete head-scratcher. It's a little after the Renaissance, obviously, but not long after. Why no specialist has ever noticed that Rubens' portrayal of the Duke of Buckingham in this oil sketch (left) is identical to his
02 Dec 2011
The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini #3
Both portraits above will be in the exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum (Cat. #163 and #159) and may even be hung near to each other where the similarity will surely be noticed. The portrait of Caterina Cornaro, Queen of Cyprus (left), i
01 Dec 2011
The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini #2
For a late portrait Raphael was asked to paint a Neapolitan princess he had never seen, a problem he solved by sending Giulio Romano to Naples do a drawing from life. The painted portrait (left) was mostly done by studio assistants after a desig
30 Nov 2011
The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini
On December 21st the Metropolitan Museum, New York, will be opening an exhibition titled The Renaissance Portrait from Donatello to Bellini. As long-time users know, the whole idea behind this site and its blog is that art, especially Renaissanc
10 Nov 2011
The Importance of an Artist’s Turban
I've been looking forward to discussing turbans for some time because, for an art lover, a little knowledge can go a long way. Almost everyone thinks of them as oriental in some manner but, up until the end of the eighteenth century, you could f
04 Nov 2011
Maurizio Cattelan at the Guggenheim
The Maurizio Cattelan exhibition opening today at the Guggenheim New York (on till Jan 22nd, 2012) is entitled All because it is meant to be a complete retrospective of the Italian artist’s career. In fact, aged 51, he has formally announc
27 Sep 2011
Matisse on Making a Portrait
In 1937 Henri Matisse made some charcoal portraits of Henry de Montherlant, a French playwright whom Matisse had met the year before. The artist’s account of the process is quite revealing. The issues which art historians traditionally assume
02 Sep 2011
Art Bulletin’s Bumper Issue
This month’s Art Bulletin, the magazine of the U.S. College Art Association, is a bumper issue as far as we are all concerned. One article by Michael Lobel reveals how John Sloan, a member of the Ashcan School in early twentieth-century Americ
29 Aug 2011
Petrarch on Imitation
I have always doubted whether the poets and writers in an artist's social circle have any greater understanding of visual art than we have. They are, of course, deeply familiar with poetic techniques in writing but seem blind to them in art.
02 Aug 2011
Dürer’s Portrait of Philip Melanchthon (1526)
Durer’s 1526 Portrait of Philip Melanchthon is notable for the manner in which the artist treats the eyes. One eye is large, bright and clear; the other mostly unseen, the tip of its eyelash just visible above the clouds. This contras
30 Jul 2011 | 1 Comments
Titian is a dog
Some viewers remain convinced that artists subconsciously fused their features into their portraits of other people - as Leonardo misleadingly suggested - even though the evidence is now strong that face fusion was practiced consciously and with
04 Jul 2011
Left Right, Open Closed: Eyes and Perception
I have explained under the theme Insight-Outsight how poetic painters often distinguish between two different modes of perception: outwards to see the exterior world of matter, inwards for insight into the soul and imagination. It is such a comm
15 May 2011
Wisdom and Leonardo’s Self-Portrait
One of the mysteries surrounding Leonardo’s so-called self-portrait (above center) is that it only emerged in the early nineteenth century. It was then decreed to be a self-portrait based on its likeness to the frontispiece portrait of Leonard
01 May 2011
Picasso’s Pain on Being an Artist
If Picasso saw an attractive subject, like a girl lying on a beach, he would cryptically say :
“What a pity one isn’t a painter! If one was a painter one could do her portrait!”
What did he mean? Picasso&
25 Apr 2011
Face Recognition
Organizing family photos is not my thing; can never get around it; and rarely look at them either. That is by way of explaining why my first brush with face recognition software was the above request from IPhoto to explain my relationship
14 Apr 2011
Is the Mona Lisa Leonardo’s male lover?
“Groundless” grumped Pietro Marani, a Leonardo authority, about a new theory offered from outside his field. He was responding as academics do to the report of an Italian researcher, Silvano Vinceti, on how several of Leonardo’s works, inc
14 Apr 2011
Beyond Face Fusion
“Face fusion” is not the only way an artist can insert his or her identity into the portrait of someone else. Courbet’s 1846 Portrait of H.J. van Wisselingh (above left) demonstrates another. An art historian, Rae Becker, has s
07 Apr 2011
Vinceti’s Bogus Claims
In my last entry here I criticized an Italian art historian’s recent conclusion that Salai, Leonardo da Vinci’s’s young assistant, was the model for several of Leonardo’s paintings, including two of St. John the Baptist.
18 Mar 2011
Face Fusion is Everywhere
For years I’ve been rattling on about face fusion to demonstrate that portraits by true artists are not what they seem. Many are not accurate depictions but a fusion of features from different faces, often the artist’s own. Salvador Dali, fo
25 Feb 2011
The Spell of Gossaert
The Jan Gossaert (c.1478-1532) exhibition that was on at the Met in New York last year has now moved in truncated form to London’s National Gallery. There are 37 of his 63 extant paintings in London. The Met had 50. Yet there i
21 Feb 2011
As Time Goes By
Irina Werning, an Argentine photographer, takes pictures of friends re-enacting photos from their youth and then depicts them side-by-side. I find them fascinating, in part because we all age in slow-motion, in part because the resemblances betw
13 Jan 2011
How Swords Become Paintbrushes
Even though artists across the ages have morphed swords into paintbrushes and spears into etching needles, few have ever been recognized. Indeed the use of weapons as visual metaphors for the tools of an artist is so widespread in art generally
18 Dec 2010
A Visit to the French Ambassador
I’ve just been to see Palazzo Farnese, the great French Embassy in Rome, partly designed by Michelangelo, which is rarely open to the public. They’ve arranged a wonderful exhibition with loans from Naples and Parma to celebrate the F
15 Dec 2010
Mona’s Eyes are Lettered
Last week we demonstrated how Nicolas Poussin’s Ordination includes the unseen face of Christ with Poussin’s own initial, N, painted over Christ’s eye. Christ, we explained, is the divine artist in Poussin’s own mind. Now news comes from
06 Dec 2010
How Mr. and Mrs. Robert Andrews are one and the Same Person
This painting, a British icon, is considered one of the National Gallery's most important masterpieces but, as we show in our most recent entry, it is largely misunderstood especially by the gallery itself. The Gallery and many critics think
03 Dec 2010
Giacometti in New York
If you are in Manhattan for the Christmas shopping season and need a few minutes' peace, pop on over to the Eykyn Maclean Gallery at East 67th Street where a small but magnificent collection of Giacometti drawings and sculptures are on displ
23 Nov 2010
Art and Eckhart
“Knowledge of Meister Eckhart’s work is indispensable to the understanding of medieval art, even though he has been almost totally neglected by those who like to call themselves ‘historians of art.’”
So wro
17 Nov 2010
Bronzino’s Mirror
I just discovered a self-portrait of Bronzino that I did not know. According to the catalogue for the current exhibition in Florence and earlier scholars too, Bronzino depicted himself in a religious painting as the poet-king David (above right)
05 Nov 2010
Dante Pops Up Again!
No art historian has yet commented, positively or otherwise, on how the presence of Dante’s profile in Michelangelo’s Last Judgement makes sense within the overall concept that Michelangelo himself pronounced: “every painter paints himself
05 Nov 2010
Manet as Tintoretto
A large number of Manet's early copies after other masters are either self-portraits or depictions of other artists. Art is often the apparent subject. One of his copies is Tintoretto's Self-Portrait (above), of which Carol Armstrong, a Manet sp
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