Caravaggio’s striking painting The Supper at Emmaus is one of the most respected and influential paintings in the canon of Western Art.

The occasion of the painting crossing the Atlantic to be on display at The Art Institute of Chicago is an occasion to be noted; similar to the significant visit of Vermeer’s The Milkmaid to the Met in NYC.

The rarity of Caravaggio paintings in U.S. museums in general makes the visit of what is perhaps his most significant work even more worthy of note.

In exchange for the loan of the Art Institute’s The Crucifixion by Francisco de Zubaran, the painting will be on loan from The National Gallery, London to the Art Institute from October 10, 2009 to January 31, 2010.

Caravaggio’s display of virtuosity here is well known (in spite of the oddly disproportionate rendering of the right hand of the disciple to our right). The painting is also fascinating for the compositional choices the artist has made, the fingers extending off canvas at right, the about-to-stand position of the foreground figure, the rich detail of the still life arrangement on the table, the dramatic shadows against the wall, seemingly in contradiction to the direction of light in other parts of the painting, and the interplay between the figures and the directions of their gazes.

Caravaggio painted two versions of this scene, separated by time, space and widely different circumstances in the artist’s life; as reflected in the dark, subdued version in Milan, a stark contrast to the richly colored, dramatic composition of the London painting.

Through some remarkable combination of circumstance and personal strength, the work of Judith Leyster was not lost to us; as must have been the case with countless potential women artists who were denied the opportunity to even pick up a brush by centuries of restrictive social convention.

Leyster was active in Harrlem and Amsterdam in the first half of the 17th Century. She painted still life, portraits and genre scenes; particularly domestic scenes of women, a subject which she effectively pioneered. Many of her works feature dramatic lighting, and have a visible light source in the painting, an unusual practice at the time.

It’s presumed because of stylistic similarities that she was a student of Frans Hals, to whom much of her work was attributed for many years, including the image above, top, Serenade. To have had her work mistaken for that of Hals is a testament to her skill.

She also showed the influence of the Utrecht painters who took their inspiration from Caravaggio . She married painter Jan Miense Molenaer, whose work she easily outshone, and shared a studio with him, along with models and props found in both of their paintings.

The image above, bottom left, is a self portrait. Like most artists’ self portraits at the time, it was essentially a demonstration of her skill and an advertisement for her abilities as a portraitist.

This work is in the collection of the National Gallery in Washington, D.C., where it is currently the centerpiece of a show celebrating Leyster’s 400th birthday, Judith Leyster 1609-1660. The exhibition runs until November 29, 2009.

There is a click-thgough slideshow (accompanied by period music) on the national Gallery site.

Leyster’s active career was short, truncated by her duties as a mother, but at least we have her oeuvre as it stands.

[Suggestion and link courtesy of Larry Roibal (see my post on Larry Roibal)]

One of the best things about the internet is its exponential rate of growth. If there’s something you can’t find today, wait a few years (or months, or days) and it just may pop up. “All things”, to paraphrase the zen-like passage from the Bible, “come to he who waits.”

When I started writing Lines and Colors back in 2005, my very first post was about the Art Renewal Center, a sprawling art image resource dedicated to representational art. Since then I’ve discovered many other art image portals, like terrific Web Gallery of Art (see my post here), and The Athenaeum, which has recently been one of my favorites; as well as several others that I frequently link to in my posts about well represented artists from the past.

Sites like ARC, the WGA and the Athenaeum are constantly adding to and improving their image catalogs, but occasionally I’ll be surprised to find a new (at least to me) major trove of online art.

A case in point is the Allpaintings Art Portal, which I wasn’t aware of until a few months ago (at allpaintings.org, allpaintings.com is just a squatted domain). Im not certain how long the site has been established, but it boasts over 33,000 images (though some of them contemporary, in a “Users Gallery”), as well as a blog and Art News listing.

The works are arranged in general stylistic categories with oddly varying degrees of specificity, like Baroque, Impressionism, Hudson River School, Barbizon School, Symbolism and Realism, with subsections for individual artists.

The image “thumbnails”, actually quite large, are presented as square crops and alphabetically arranged, oddly enough, by the artists’ given names rather than by surname.

While not “complete” in any sense of the word, or even “as complete” as some of the art image sites that have been established for many years, the site nonetheless contains an impressive number of images, carefully selected and nicely presented; with well balanced color and good quality of reproduction.

The best thing about the Allpaintings Art Portal, though, is the size of the images. While many of the other art portals have very large images for some works, the Allpaintings site seems to be taking pains to post large images whenever possible, some of them are among the highest resolution images of paintings you’ll find in art portal sites.

Once you’ve drilled down through an artist to an individual painting. look for the link above it to “View larger Image” (the image itself at that point is often linked to a detail crop, or a series of them, click on the text link for the full large image).

The selection of images is impressive as well. Though fewer artists may be represented than other portal sites, the selection of images for an individual artist may include images not found in the others, such as one of the best resources for the pre-tonalist work of George Inness (my post here), good selections of American Impressionist Theodore Robinson and undersung French Impressionist Gustav Caillebotte (my post here), a section dedicated the Pre-Raphaelites (my post here) and related painters, including John William Waterhouse (my post here), a wonderful selection of very high resolution detail crops from Caravaggio’s paintings, and probably the best resource anywhere for one of my (undeservedly obscure) favorites, Frits Thaulow (Hooray! — my post here); just to name a few.

(Image above: Caravaggio, Frits Thaulow, Theodore Robinson, George Inness, Gustav Caillebotte, John William Waterhouse)

As usual in this kind of situation, I’ll issue my Major Time Sink Warning. There are enough beautiful images here to keep you avoiding work for weeks on end.

Enjoy.

According to a saying that became popular in the 1960’s, you are what you eat.

Perhaps not as directly as in the marvelous and bizarre portrait heads created by 16th Century painter Giuseppe Arcimboldo out of arrangements of fruit, vegetables, tree roots, fish, birds and other natural forms, but a sobering thought nonetheless as most Americans prepare today for a traditional Thanksgiving Day turkey dinner.

Born in Milan, Arcimboldo worked on frescos and tapestries in cathedrals in Italy and was also court painter to royalty in Vienna and Prague. Most of his traditional work has been lost, though a few examples survive, but his quirky and amusing portraits made from fruit, flowers and other elements of the natural world, as well as books and other man-made objects, remain, and attract attention to this day.

Some of his fruit/vegatable portraits were less obvious, disguised in what were ostensibly paintings of arrangements of vegetables in bowls, in which the face was revealed when the images was viewed upside-down, a precursor of the popular optical illusions circulated in later centuries. These upside-down portraits, when viewed in their orientation as paintings of fruit or vegetables in bowls, were, along with more straightforward images sometimes attributed to Caravaggio, among the earliest examples of still life as isolated subject matter for paintings.

The image above (large version here) is thought to be a likeness of Arcimboldo’s patron, Emperor Rudilf II, but it’s titular subject is Vertumnus, the Roman God of the seasons, whose penchant for changing his form to get what he wanted (like the favors of the goddess Pomona) personified the value of change in the practice of rotating crops to preserve the fertility of fields.

Arcimboldo’s striking visions have inspired others to follow in a similar vein, like contemporary painter Andre Martins de Barros (link contains NSFW material).

Arcimboldo’s paintings were celebrated by the Surrealists, who were always on the lookout for hallucinatory visionaries they could consider their precursors; and there has been some speculation that his inclination to see faces in arrangements of objects was the result of mental illness; a notion perhaps encouraged by his more disturbing images made of fish, birds and other animals, or the haunting images made of tree roots; but the truth is likely more prosaic. The Renaissance, a time of relative plenty and stability compared to the centuries that preceded it, not only provided the luxury of devoting more attention to art, but of indulging in puzzles, whimsies and amusement with the bizarre.

The luxury to enjoy the fruits of life beyond the necessities of survival, in particular the bounty of art, is always something for which to be thankful.

There are a number of science fiction and fantasy artists who will acknowledge their study of old master painting techniques and tell how it has influenced their work; there are few, however, whose work demonstrates that heritage as visibly as Donato Giancola.

Giancola is one of the finest science fiction and fantasy artists working in the field today, and to my mind, one of the best in the history of the genre. His extensive list of honors and awards, including multiple Chesley’s, Spectrum Gold and Silver Medals, World Fantasy Awards for Best Artist, the 2006 and 2007 Hugo Awards for Best Professional Artist, First Place in the Figurative category of the First International Art Renewal Center Open Salon and recognition in this year’s ARC event, indicates that not only do his contemporary artists and editors agree, but he is receiving notice in realist art circles at large. And well he should; Giancola is a terrific painter by any standard.

When I first wrote about Donato Giancola back in 2005, his web site was fairly well developed, but since then it has been expanded considerably, even if the appearance of the site hasn’t changed a great deal.

Giancola has added many new and larger images, and some paintings are accompanied by supplementary images of preliminary drawings, painted sketches and even works in progress on the easel.

Giancola’s excellent draftsmanship, graceful compositions and dramatic but refined use of color make his work a joy to look at. His blending and application of color in particular is exceptional, both in the overall composition and within the detailed rendering of individual subjects, particularly in in the portrayal of figures and faces. There his use of greens and multiple red hues give the sense of the varied and veinous character of caucasian skin found in Renaissance and Baroque painting.

He wears some of his other classical influences on his sleeve as well. His figures are painted with a chiaroscuro and drama inspired by Caravaggio and color and dynamism inherited from a study of Rubens. Some of his historical images reflect the influence of great illustrators like Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth. Most of all, though, Giancola seems enthralled with the painting mastery of Valezquez. (If you’re going to learn, learn from the best.)

Whether painting gleaming robots, intricate spaceship cockpits, towering dragons or armored warriors, Giancola’s study of old master painting gives his wildly imaginative fantasy and science fiction subjects a force and gravitas that is uncommon not only for the genre, but in contemporary illustration in general.

His site includes extensive galleries of science fiction and fantasy illustration, work done for the Magic: The Gathering collectable card game and a selection of concept art as well as a section of very nice life drawings. Unfortunately the latter two are hampered by one those annoying navigation schemes that require you to hover your mouse over little squares to view the images instead of simply clicking on them; but hey, I’ll take whatever Giancola art I can get.

The site also includes a section on technique that includes a discussion of his palette, a brief step-through of the editorial illustration process, a discussion of influences and a few step-through painting sequences (again with the roll-over dots navigation, but I’m picking nits).

In addition there is a Bio, a FAQ and a section of books, prints, card proofs and original art for sale.

The News section indicates that Giancola will be participating, along with Dan Dos Santos, Julie Bell, Boris Vallejo, Scott Fisher, Rebecca Guay and Greg Manchess, in a week-long Illustration Master Class to be held in Amherst, MA from June 16-22, 2008. (If you’re interested, act soon; attendance is limited to 90.) Special guest for the event will be Tor/Forge/Starscape Books art director extraordinaire Irene Gallo, whose informative and fascinating blog The Art Department features several mentions of Giancola.

I was looking through the website of the Maine Art Gallery (in Kennebunkport), when I was struck by this image. On looking up the artist’s website, I realized I had written a brief post about him a couple of years ago.

William B. Hoyt’s clear, precise, realistic approach is most often applied to landscapes and seascapes. In the latter you can see the influence of realist giants like Thomas Eakins, a point he makes clear by including a pinned-up print of Eakins’ Max Schmitt in a single scull over the sink in one of his combination interior/landscape paintings, Flat Water.

Likewise, he has painted a small print of Vermeer’s The Milkmaid into a painting of his kitchen he has titled King Arthur and the Milkmaid (the King Arthur reference is to the brand of the bag of flour), Andrew Wyeth’s Christina’s World in his Lobsters and Champagne; and has Caravaggio’s Baccus tucked in the window in Kitchen in Tuscany.

There are other references to influences tucked into the interiors in his new work at the Maine Art Gallery. Unfortunately, the images posted there are too lo-res to see in detail.

In fact, it is Hoyt’s interiors that I find most interesting. Though his landscapes have an obvious appeal and are the major focus of his work, the interiors have a stillness and “moment in time” quality that are wonderfully evocative, and I was glad to see that his new works include a number of interiors. The large windows in his kitchen, in particular, invite his repeated theme of interior/landscape combinations, and the porcelain and unpainted wood make for a rich setting to tie the objects together.

Hoyt doesn’t shy away from complex compositions and seems to challenge himself in his interior paintings with numerous objects that vary in color, texture, degree of sheen and sensitivity to reflected light and color. His landscapes are often panoramic in proportion and complex in subject matter.

Hoyt has revised his website since I last visited, but I’m a little disappointed that the new one still doesn’t show his work to best advantage. Instead of elegantly introducing you to the artist and his work, and quietly letting you know that there are prints available, the site starts right in trying hard to sell the Giclées, giving it an air of commercialism. You almost feel that the primary focus of the paintings is to sell the prints. I’m sure this isn’t the case, but it’s an unfortunate effect of the emphasis on the prints rather than on the paintings.

It’s also still way too easy to miss the link at the bottom right of the image pages that brings up the “high-res version”, without which you wouldn’t be able get a much feeling for subtlety and strength of his work.

Multiple Choice: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi from the town of Caravaggio, Italy) was:

A. One of the greatest painters in the history of Western art

B. A rebellious upstart who defied the conventions of religious painting, alienated patrons and incensed the church

C. A master of chiaroscuro, the dramatic contrast of light and dark, perhaps matched only by Rembrandt

D. A master of foreshortening, the difficult representation of the body or limbs from end on, possibly matched only by Michelangelo Buonerotti

E. A bragging, swaggering show off who specialized in dramatic, violent scenes of fights, struggles and particularly beheadings, one of which featured his self-portrait as the severed head of Goliath

F. One of the most respected and envied painters in Rome at the beginning of the Baroque period, and a tremendous influence on other artists

G. Largely forgotten in the centuries following his death until “rediscovered” in the 20th Century

H. A violent, irresponsible, brawling miscreant, who went looking for fights and was arrested and imprisoned for multiple assaults, one of which resulted in the death of his opponent over a disputed game of court tennis and forced him to take it on the lam for several years until pardoned by the Pope

I. All of the above.

Well, whatever else you may say of him, one thing stands out about Caravaggio: this guy could paint!

Look at his famous painting of the Supper at Emmaus (image and details, above). This is no glossed over, idealized religious scene, aglow with the unreality of poetic divinity, this a real scene with very real figures.

Everything here is tangible, and rendered with the kind of palpable fidelity to life that got some of Caravaggio’s other works rejected as vulgar and secular. Look at the disciple’s hand on the chair in the foreground, the “instant in time” position as that figure is about to rise, the outstretched hand of the beardless figure of Christ and other disciple’s hands extended into space, suspended toward or away from us in dramatic foreshortening, the rich, dark shadows, against which the whites of the cloth pop forward, the tactile physicality of the food and plates on the table, rendered with as much care and emphasis as the figures themselves, the odd way one disciple’s elbow and the other’s fingertips are cut off by the edge of the canvas, and the striking realism of the faces, more portraits than idealized figures. What a tour de force of painting skill. What a show-off. What a painter!

Though I can’t say I was unequivocally thrilled with last week’s showings of the PBS series The Power of Art (see my previous post), I will say that they were interesting and thought provoking and for that reason worthwhile. Tonight’s program will be on Caravaggio (10PM on most PBS stations), and it will be interesting to see which of Caravaggio’s faces the program chooses for its focus.

There are many angles by which to approach Caravaggio; he was a pretty remarkable fellow in more ways than one. Take your choice.

The Power of Art is a new PBS series, based on the book by Simon Schama, and made with his cooperation and participation.

In a series of eight broadcasts, the program will examine eight artists and their impact on the history of art, and on the cultural, political and social currents of their time. In the process, the shows will apparently focus on one painting by each artist that the author considers particularly significant and explore that work in depth.

I learned about this series from Nita Leland’s Exploring Color and Creativity (I reviewed her recent book The New Creative Artist back in February.) While I have not read the book on which the series is based, Leland has. She mentions it here and in her post on the PBS special notes that it is the emphasis on the social, political and business aspects, which are not often brought to light, that she found most intriguing.

The eight artists to be featured in the series are Vincent van Gogh, Pablo Picasso, Caravaggio, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Rembrandt van Rijn, Jacques-LouisDavid, J.W.M. Turner and Mark Rothko.

Excuse me? Mark Rothko?

To me, throwing someone like Rothko into that group is like doing a special on Mozart, Bach, Beethoven and Brahams and tossing in Axl Rose, but I’ll try to bite my tongue and bear in mind that perhaps the political and social implications are more important here than the accomplishments of the artists. I won’t know until I’ve seen the program.

The first installment of the series starts tonight, Monday, June 18th at 9PM Eastern on most PBS stations, and is devoted to Van Gogh. It will be followed immediately by the second program in the series, which centers on Picasso.

PBS has a web site in support of the series that has a section for each artist along with an “Explore the Painting” feature that shows some interesting points about the work from the commentary in the program.

The Van Gogh program will focus on Wheatfield with Crows (image above, top), often assumed to be Van Gogh’s last painting. Though that is far from certain, much symbolism has been read into the painting as a result. It will be interesting to see the program’s take on its significance. One of the fascinating things about this painting is that it was part of a series of paintings of wheatfields that that Van Gogh painted in a very unusual elongated shape, on canvasses with an almost cinematic aspect ratio (bearing in mind that this was 1890, and the word “cinematic” was essentially meaningless).

The original painting is in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The “Show Enlargement” feature on their site, while a poor substitute for a nice big digital image, does let you zoom way in on the image and see it in greater detail than on the PBS site.

For the Picasso segment, the focus will be on his amazing anti-war masterpiece Guernica (image above, bottom); also, interestingly enough, painted on a large canvas with elongated, cinematic proportions. The original painting is now in the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Renia Sofia in Madrid, to where it was moved in 1992, stirring up controversy because it defied Picasso’s wish that it be displayed at the Prado. (There is a larger version here, click for enlargement.) There is some history on the painting from a different PBS special here.

It’s interesting to note that a large scale tapestry copy of Guernica, a painting in which Picasso expresses his horror at the cost of war and his “…abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death”, hangs in the United Nations building in New York at the entrance of the Security Council chamber. The tapestry was a gift to the United Nations by Nelson Rockefeller and was meant to be a reminder to all nations of the terrible price of war in human suffering.

On the day in 2003 when Colin Powell and John Negroponte gave their press conference at the UN in a effort to stir up support for the war in Iraq, a large blue curtain was placed over the work. Excuses were made that it was a request of the TV crews to simplify a distracting background, but word got out from the attending diplomats that it was actually representatives of the US government that had pressured UN officials to have it covered during the conference.

The power of art, you say?

Somewhere between the emotional drama of Caravaggio and the crystalline stillness of Vermeer lie the intimate, candlelit paintings of Georges de la Tour, a French master whose work was all but forgotten between his death in 1652 and its rediscovery in the early 20th Century.

I doubt that la Tour was directly influenced by Vermeer (or vice versa), but there is an assumption that Caravaggio’s revelation of form through the use of intense chiaroscuro was a distinct influence on the French painter, particularly in the sharply defined forms in the candlelight scenes of his later career. la Tour painted religious and genre subjects, scenes of everyday life, in his case largely images of the poor arranged as morality tales for amusement of his well-to-do patrons. He refused to indulge in the condescending caricature of his subjects, as was common at the time, and represents them as directly as a portrait.

The striking characteristic of his later work is the light source, often a single candle or lamp, sometimes with the flame in view but more often with the light source itself hidden by a hand or object in the painting, and the subjects and foreground objects revealed in sharp relief by the simple direct focus of the light.

Focus seems to be the intent of la Tour’s compositions, most of them have nothing of a background other than the suggestion of shadowed walls and areas of darkness. Just as Vermeer revealed his subjects by capturing a golden moment in the sunlight from a single window, so la Tour grasps a moment of time between the flickers of a candle’s flame, producing a similar feeling of contemplative stillness and of something waiting to be revealed by quiet inspection of the scene.

Writers, and often the public, like to romanticize the connection between madness and art. From the emotional anguish of van Gogh to the physical violence of Caravaggio, there is a notion of the artist going to the brink, and over, and returning with visions from the other side that would be inaccessible to the normal mind.

Whether this is true is a matter of debate, and mental illness is hardly romantic, though in the case of Victorian Painter Richard Dadd, his most memorable works of ramantic fantasy were produced after he was committed to “Bedlam” (Bethlem Hospital) because of violent insanity.

Dadd descended into a state we would now call paranoid schizophrenia during a trip to Egypt and the middle east. After his return, he murdered his father, who he evidently believed was possessed by the devil, and fled to Paris, where he was arrested for assaulting another traveler, who he also perceived as possessed. Evidently there was a genetic predisposition to mental illness in his family.

Dadd was a painter whose images of fairies and other subjects from folklore and fantasy are part of a larger stylistic branch of Victorian painting dealing with these subjects, sometimes simply called the “Fairy School”. His pre-commitment paintings of the subject were open and airy; those created afterwards, for which he is most noted, are quite different, large scale, flattened in perspective and richly (or obsessively) detailed.

Fairy Feller’s Master-Stroke, shown here, is his most recognized work. Dadd worked on it for nine years and still considered it unfinished. He finally did stop working on it, however, and then produced a copy in watercolor (the original is in oil) and wrote a strange “guidebook” for the painting in verse.

It’s difficult to get any feeling for this painting from the tiny image here. There is a large version here, another large one here and a larger one here, that is unfortunately a bit dark.

Low resolution web versions still don’t convey the detail in the image, though. If you are interested you really should look for a reproduction in print. The one I have is in Victorian Painting by Lionel Lambourne (an excellent book, BTW). There are also books devoted to Dadd’s work. The World of Richard Dadd by Michael Mott is inexpensive and serves as a nice introduction.

By all accounts, though, you really can’t grasp this painting, which is in the Tate Gallery in London, until you see it in person (I haven’t), because of the dramatically three-dimensional nature of the application of the paint.

Dadd did many other paintings during the time he spent in the hospitals, and his work has been influential on fantasy painters from his own time through the present.