吃吃喝喝的读书笔记（5）

感谢琪琪给我买的《艺术的故事》，很久没有从头到尾好好读一本书了，于是吃吃喝喝的读书笔记又上线啦。分享几幅觉得特别美的画吧！
#Looking Eastwards – 2nd to 13th century
The religion swept everything before it in the seventh and eighth centuries AD, the religion of the Muslim conquerors of Persia, Mesopotamia, Egypt, North Africa and Spain, was even more rigorous in this matter than Christianity had been.
The making of images was forbidden. But art as such cannot so easily be suppressed, and the craftsmen of the East, who were not permitted to represent human beings, let their imganination play with patterns and forms.
It is an unforgettable experience to walk through the courtyards and halls of the Alhambra, and to admire the inexhaustible variety of these decorative patterns.
Even outside the Islamic dominions the world became familiar with these inventions through Oriental rugs. Ultimately we may we their subtle designs and rich colour schemes to Muhammad, who directed the mind of the artist away from the objects of the real world to this drea m world of lines and colours.
Later sects among the Muslims were less strict in their intepretation of the ban on images. they did allow the paintings of figures and illustrations as long as they had no connection with religion. The illustrating of romance, histories and fable done in Persia from the 14th century onwards, and later also in India under Muslim rulers, shows how much the artists of these lands had learnt from the discipline which had confined them to the designing of patterns.
The moonlight scene in a garden, from a Persian romance of the 15th century is a perfect example of this wonderful skill.
Western Art in the Melting Pot
Europe, 6th to 11th century
The picture shows a page from a gospel book producted at the court of Charlemange. It represents the figure of St. Mattew writing the gospel.
The painter of another manuscript of the 9th century perhaps did not want to represent the evangelist like any serene old scholar, sitting quietly in his study. To him St. Mattew was an inspired man, writing down the Word of God. It as an immensely important and immensely exciting event in the history of mankind that he wanted to portray, and he succeeded in conveying sth of his own sense of awe and excitement in this figure of a writing man.
Courtiers and Burghers
14th century
This altar panel <Annunciation> was made by Simone Martini (1285 – 1344) and Lippo Memmi (-1347). The virgin has been reading. The appearance of the angel has taken her by surprise. She shrinks away in a movement of awe and humility, while looking back at the mesenger from Heaven. Between the two there stands a vase with white lilies, symbls of virginity, and high up in the central pointed arch we see thr dove, sumbol of the Holy Ghost, surroucned by 4-winged cherubim.
One can never cease to wonder at the way in which these figures are fitted into the complicated shape of the panel, the way in which the angel ‘s wings are framed by the pointed arch to the left, and virgin’s figure shrinks back into the shelter of the pointed arch to the right,while the empty space between teh is filled up by the vase and the dove over it.
The Conquest of Reality – the early 15th century
This is from an altar piece made by Swiss painter Konrad Witz (1400- 1446) for Geneva in 1444. It is dedicated to St Peter and reprsents teh saint’s encounter with Christ afte the Resurrection as it is told in the Gospel of St. John. Some apostles and their companions had gone to fish in the sea of Tiberias, but had caught nothing. When the morning came Jesus stood on the shore, but they did not recognize him. He told them to cast the net on the right side of the ship and it was fo full of fish that they were unable to pull it in. At that moment one of them said” It is the Lord”, and when Peter heard of this, he girt his fisher’s coat onto him (for he was naed) and did cast himself into the sea. And other disciples came in a little ship, after which they partook of a meal with Jesus.
A medieval painter who was asked to illustrate this miraculous event would probably have been satisfied with a conventional row of wavy lines to mark the sea of Tiberias. But Witz desired to bring home to the burghers of Geneva what it must have looked like when Christ stood by the waters. Thus he painted not just any lake but a lake they all knew, the lake of Geneva with the broad ridge of Mont Saleve in the background. It is a real landscape which everyone could see, which exists today, and still looks very much as it does in the painting.
Tradition and Innovation I – the later 15th century in Italy
Fra Angelico (1387 -1455) applied the new methods of Masaccio mainly in order to expresds the traditional ideas of religious art.
It shows a picture of the Annunciation which he painted in one of the cells. We at once see that the art of perspective presented no difficulty to him. Yet it was clearly not Fra Angelico’s main intention to break a hole into the wall. Like Simone Martini in the fourteenth century, he only wanted to represent the sacred story in all its beauty and simplicity.
There is hardly any movement in Fra Angelico’s painting and hardly any suggestion of real solid bodies. It is all the more moving because of its humility, which is that of a great artist who deliberately renounced any display of modernity despite his profound understanding of hte problems which Brunelleschi and Masaccio had introducted into art.
What had mattered to Giotto was the inner meaning of the story – how men and women would move and behave in a given situation. Mantegna (1431 – 1506) was also interested in hte outward circumstances.
In Gozzoli’s gay pageantry we recognized a return tothe taste of the international Gothic style. Mantegna, on the other hand, carries on where Masaccio had left off. His figures are as statuesque and impressive as Masaccio’s. Like Masaccio, he uses the new art of perspective with eagerness, but he does not exploit it as Uccello did to show off the new effect which could be achieved by means of this magic. Rather, he uses perspective to create the stage on which his figures seem to stand and move like solid, tangible beings. He distributes them as a skilled theatrical producer might have done, so as to convey the significance of hte moment and the course of the episode.
We can see what is happending, the procession escorting St James has halted for a moment because one of the persecutors has repented and has thrown himself at the feet of the saint, to receive his blessing. The saint has turned round calmly to bless the man, while the Roman soldiers stand by and watch, one of them impassirvely, the other lifting his hand in an expressive gesture which seems to convey that he, too, is moved.
Tradition and Innovation Ii – later 15th century in the North
The German painter Stefan Lochner (1410 – 1451) was somewhat like a northern Fra Angelico. His charming picture of hte virgin in a rose-bower surrounded by little angels who make music, scatter flowers, or offer fruit to the christ child, shows that the master was aware of the new methods of Van Eyck, just as Fra Angelico was aware of the discoveries of Masaccio.
It was paintings like those by Lochner and Fra Angelico which first captured the imagination of the romantic critics of the 19th century, men such as Ruskin and the painters of Pre-Raphaelite brotherhoood. They saw in them all the charm of simple devotion and a childlike heart.
# Light and Color – Venice and northern Italy in early 16th century
At first sight the arrangement looks quite artless and casial. The crowded scene on the left does not seem to be balanced by any corresponding group on the right. It is only balanced throuh the emphasis which the light gives to the group of the virgin and the child.
Correggio even more than Titian exploited the discovery that colour and light can be used to balance forms and to direct our eyes along certain lines.
There is one eature of Correggio’s works which was imitated throughout the subsequent centuries; it is the way in which he painted the ceilings and cupokas of churches. He tried to give the worshippers in the nave below the illusion that the ceiling had opened and that they were looking straight into the glory of Heaven.
# The new learning spreads – Germany and Netherland, early 16th century
The only German painter who can be compared with Durer for greatness and artistic pwoer is Matthias Gruenewald of Aschaffenburg, called “German Correggio”.
The reason why we know so much about Durer is precisely taht he saw himself as a reformer and innovator of the art of his country. Gruenewald’s works afford no indication taht he strove like Durer to become sth different from a mere craftsman or that he was hampered by the fixed traditions of religious art as it had developped in teh late Gothic period. Art for him did not consist in the search for the hidden law of beatuy- for him it could have only one aim, the aim of all religious art in the middle ages- that of providing a sermon in pictures, of proclaiming teh sacred truths as taught by the church.
This altar panel shows that he sacrificed all other considerations to this one ovrerriding aim. Of beauty, as the Italian artists saw it, there is none in the stark and cruel picture of hte crufified saviour. With a stern and commanding gesture St John the Baptist points towards the Savior, and over hime are written the words that he speaks, he must increase, but i must decrease. Perhaps he even wanted us to see how Christ must grow and we diminish.
We need only compare the hands of St Mary Magdalene under the Cross with those of Christ to become fully aware of the astonishing difference in their dimensions. It is clear in these matters he rejeted the rules of modern art as it had developped since the renaissance, and that he deliberately returned to the principles of medieval and primitive painters, who varied teh size of their figures accoridng to their importance in the picture.
His works may thus remind us once more that an artist can be very great indeed without being “progressive”, because the greatness of art does not lie in new discoveries.
The painter Albrecht Altdorfer of Regensburt (1480 – 1538) went out into the woods and mountains to study the shape of weather-beaten pines and rocks. This painting tells no story and contain no human being. This is quite momentous change. Even the Greeks with all their love of nature had painted landscapes only as settings for their pastroal scenes. Only when the painter’s skill as such began to interest people was it possibler for him to sell a painting which served no other purpose but that of recording his enjoyment of a beautiful piece of scenery.
# A Crisis of Art – Europe later 16th century
Tintoretto (1518 -94) was perhaps the greatest of all masters of the latter part of the 16th century.
He too had tried of the simple beauty in forms and colours which Titian had shown to the Venetians- but his discontent must have been more than a mere desire to accomplish the unusual. He seems to have felt that, however incomparablre Titian was as a painter of beauty, his pictures tended to be more plaeasing than moving; that they were not sufficiently exciting to make the great stories of the Bible and the sacred legends live for us.
He must at any rate, have been resovled to tell these stories in a different way, to make teh spectator feel the thrill and tense drama of hte events he painted, and he did indeed succeed in making his pictures unusual and captivating.
A man like Tintoretto wanted to how things in a new light, he wanted to explore new ways of representing the legends and myths of the past. He considered his painting complete when he had conveyed his vision of the legendary scene. A smooth and careful finish did not interest him, for it idd not serve his purpose.
A painter from Greek Island of Crete, El Greco (1541- 1614), found nothing shocking in Tintoretto’s art, but much taht was fascinating. For he too, it seems , was a passiionate and devout man, and he felt an urge to tell the sacred stories in a new and stirring manner. His art surpasses even Tintoretto’s in its bold disregard of natural forms and colours, and he had learned much from Tintoretto’s unorthodox method of lopsided composition.
He lived in Spain, where religion had a mystic fervour found hardly anywhere else. In this atmosphere, the sohiscated art of Mannerism lost much of its character of any art of connoisseurs. Though his work strikes us as incredibly modern, his contemporaries in Dpain do not seem to ahve raised any objections such as Vasari did to Tintoretto’s works. He seems to have engaged a number of assistants to cope with the many orders he received, and that may explain why not all the works that bear his name are equally good.
XIUMI
扫二维码｜关注我们
公众号｜水彩乐章