01 Aug 2015
Joanna Woodall on Cooking Artists in Dark Rooms
Many are the ways to demonstrate that a given picture represents the artist in his or her mind: resemblance, pose, apparent errors, "nonsensical" shading, tools expressed in metaphor, etc. We have shown you at least thirty different methods, mos
16 Jan 2015 | 2 Comments
The Centrality of Tools
Art sometimes seems like a meditation on the brush. Certainly visual metaphors for art's tools abound from, say, Edouard Manet’s early Boy with a Sword (in effect he holds a giant paintbrush, see explanation) to Diego Velazquez’s Portrait
17 Oct 2014
Brushing up on the Painter’s Sword
The mind of an artist is poetic so, if you want to understand painting and sculpture, read poets. Their literary metaphors are the artist’s visual ones. However, beware: poets understand visual art no better than most people. Emile Zola, Charl
20 Aug 2014
The Craftsman’s Christ
This is a scene by an unknown 16th-century artist, probably Flemish, at a time when artisanal effort was admired not just for the perfection of the end-product but for the artisan’s closely-guarded knowledge of materials. Wood, stone, minerals,
13 Apr 2014
The Artist is Always Present
Very few novels use the first person pronoun, most using an impersonal narrator to describe the scene. The author David Henry Thoreau noted that, with the ‘I’ omitted, the reader forgets that it really remains there because the novelist is c
03 Mar 2014
The Brush-Sword of Mattia Preti
After the recent post on a new book of cartoons, Daggers Drawn, this one is on the same subject 350 years earlier.
Mattia Preti (1613-1699) was a major Italian artist who is little-known because he spent much of his life on the islan
23 Feb 2014
Daggers Drawn
Daggers Drawn. A new compendium of a political cartoonist’s 35 years in the business and on the cover he stands at his desk, pen drawn, facing the dictators and democrats he has followed, all with daggers drawn too. The conclusion is simple to
20 Nov 2013
Picasso Hid a Sword in Nazi Loot
Sometimes I do no work at all. Things just pop in my face. I suppose I'm so used to looking for certain features that my eyes know what to look for subconsciously. That's what appeared to happen last week as I read the news that the Germans
28 Sep 2013
How Manet and other artists shoot their paintings
Have you ever shot your mother? Directors shoot movies and nearly everyone has made a snap-shot with a camera but few imagine that artists shoot paintings. In fact they have shot nearly every canvas with a gun in it since the devilish implements
21 Sep 2013
Pens, Palettes and their Visual Metaphors
Thoth was an Egyptian god best known in art as having the head of an ibis (above left). He had many functions but was perhaps most celebrated as the scribe of the gods, the inventor of heiroglyphs and writing, and who, when people died, wrote do
17 Jul 2013 | 1 Comments
Michelangelo Rocks in The Battle of Cascina (1504)
This post explains additional obervations not included in the original article here on Michelangelo’s The Battle of Cascina, a 1504 cartoon for a never-completed mural in the civic heart of Florence. It is one of the most celebrated and influe
26 Mar 2013
When Degas made a boob ...on purpose
In a new entry published today you can see for the first time ever how Edgar Degas turned his friend, Edouard Manet (above), into the driver of a carriage holding his whip as a paintbrush flecked with white paint. He then transformed the artist&
01 Dec 2012
Pointing at the Edge
If you cruise the various interpretations on this site, you might have noticed a tendency to explain a figure with an arm or hand pointing to or touching the edge of the image as the artist himself painting a self-portrait. Michael Fried first n
30 Aug 2012
Manet’s Modern Methods
I was crossing the road when a delivery truck owned by a prominent online grocery in the New York area stopped at a light. It displayed a poster of their managers holding a blow-up of the product each specializes in (right). One of the meat mana
25 Jul 2012
Manet’s Little Cavaliers
Major artists are often inspired by earlier masterpieces yet when the young Edouard Manet entered the Louvre to copy whatever he wanted he chose an insignificant little painting. Yes, it was then attributed to Velazquez but Manet, with an in-dep
12 Jul 2012
Ink Flies in a Mind
If anyone doubts that St. Sebastian holds a special place in the creative mind as a symbol of the artist’s self and the idea that every painter paints himself, then take a look at Jaff Seijas’ self-portrait above. It is not proof but it is t
26 Apr 2012
Canvas is Canvas
Most of the visual metaphors for an artist’s implements revealed here are related to their referent in art through their form, their function or some other more abstract link. A rifle or sword is long and thin like a paintbrush. They must be a
22 Apr 2012
Alpers on Rembrandt’s Lucretia (1666)
It’s always encouraging when I can cite another art scholar without comment, a historian in this instance who has so understood what is happening allegorically in Rembrandt’s Lucretia that no further explanation is necessary. This is
08 Apr 2011
Art vs. Illustration
Art is not illustration. We all know that. Illustration simply depicts a verbal story and that alone cannot be art. We call those image-makers “illustrators” because they copy reality or a written story. We should not give them the grander t
02 May 2010
Letters in the Art of All Periods
There are certain long-lived traditions within the history of art-making that, if known, add immeasurably to the viewer's interest and understanding. Among them is the subtle metamorphic inclusion of the artist's initials, one of the many lit
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