Behind the Artist’s Eye
This group of images is really a sub-set of the Hand and Eye theme. In depicting their own imaginations at work, some great artists have set their scene where, if you think about it, we ought to expect it: behind the eye or, more exactly, behind their eyes in their imagination. Yet we are so accustomed to the idea of painting as a mirror of nature, or as a view through a window, that even when we know for certain that the scene is set inside an artist’s imagination we think of it as outside, in nature. It is a failure of the viewer's imagination which, to understand the artist on the poetic level, must be equally imaginative. That's why a great artist's true audience is other great artists, not you and me.
Most Recent Articles
Look at art from every which way you can. You never know what you might see.
Signorelli’s Virgin & Child with John the Baptist and Donor (c.1491-4)
All Articles (Alphabetical by Artist, then Title)
Is this merely a scene of everyday life or something more important?
Aertsen’s Cook in front of the Stove (1559)
Altdorfer's scene of incest is an early example of a long tradition with very similar and surprising meaning
Altdorfer’s Lot and His Daughters (1537)
Learn how one scene can turn into another through visual metamorphosis
Bacon’s Two Men Working in a Field (1971)
Learn how to deconstruct a portrait by Balthus using a few simple principles
Balthus’ The White Skirt (1937)
See how the second of a pair of paintings by Bosch is also "behind the eye."
Bosch’s St. John on Patmos (1504-5)
Learn how additions to a painting's narrative often provide access to the composition's underlying meaning
Caravaggio’s Rest on the Flight into Egypt (c.1597)
Goya often used bright eye-shapes in the background to indicate that the scene itself is inside his mind.
Goya’s Eyes
Change your perspective: looking at Goya from the inside out
Goya’s Portrait of General Nicolas Guye (1810)
How even contemporary art is heavily invested in the methods and meaning of the Old Masters
Kapoor’s Memory (2008)
Leonardo's closely observed landscape turns into something else entirely but only if you expect it
Leonardo’s Storm Over the Alps (c.1499)
A 20th-century version of medieval angels playing stringed instruments. See how.
Lichtenstein’s Girl with an Accordion (1961)
A pipe may be a pipe for René Magritte but a piano is not a piano for Roy Lichtenstein
Lichtenstein’s Piano (c.1961)
Find out how the viewer in this garden scene is really inside Manet's mind
Manet’s Monet Family in the Garden (1874)
How to recognize the Madonna and Child as a symbol of the artist
Mantegna’s Madonna with Sleeping Child (c.1465-70)
Find out what the studio and Golgotha have in common
Mengs’ Christ on the Cross (1761-9), Goya’s and Francis Bacon’s too
There is yet more meaning in the drawing as we see in Part 2 of this analysis
Michelangelo’s Archers Shooting at a Herm (c.1530) Part 2
Peale's American portraits have more in common with great European art than is generally accepted.
Peale’s Portrait of George Washington (c.1780)
When you discover what is underneath Picasso's early Blue Period paintings, the meaning changes...drastically.
Picasso’s Harlequin (1901) and Blue Period
See how Picasso in "copying" a portrait changes it into an image of his own thought process
Picasso’s Portrait of Gongora (1947)
A resurrection by its very name suggests two realities: the old and the new, the illusory and the real.
Piero della Francesca’s Resurrection (c.1458)
See how an Impressionist painting is really constructed
Pissarro’s View of the Tuileries. Morning (1900)
Still-lifes by great artists may seem simple or devoid of meaning, especially when compared to figure paintings, but they rarely are either simple or meaningless.
Redon’s Pavots et Oeillets de Poète… (c.1906)
How the setting is so rarely what you think....you must think differently
Rembrandt’s Bathsheba at Her Bath (1643)
Several clues, easy to spot, reveal the true underlying meaning of two similar masterpieces
Rembrandt’s Man in Armour (1655) and Minerva (c.1655)
In the epistle of an apostle, the letters matter; as they also do in the self-portrait of a prophet, even if self-proclaimed.
Schiele’s Self-portrait as a Saint (1913)
Look at art from every which way you can. You never know what you might see.
Signorelli’s Virgin & Child with John the Baptist and Donor (c.1491-4)
One of Titian's masterpieces, it was destroyed by fire in 1577 but recorded in this engraving. Its secret, though, lives on.
Titian’s Battle of Cadore (1538-9)
See how Titian tricks us into thinking there is one reality in art when there are, at least, two
Titian’s Woman with a Mirror (1512-15)
Turner's landscapes with distant views are based, in turn, on close-ups of his own face
Turner’s The Fifth Plague of Egypt (1800)
If a poet uses a storm as a metaphor, who mistakes it for a real storm? Why do so in art?
Turner’s The Shipwreck (1805)
See how a portrait viewed one way resembles a portrait; viewed another way turns the world inside out
Van Gogh’s The Zouave (1888)
There is more to Vermeer than a pretty scene and dull symbolism
Vermeer’s The Love Letter (c.1669-70)
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