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Tag: C15th
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"It's a dazzling day, the sun is a fiery phoenix, the birds let loose with craps of joy, and the Phelps crazies are here in town to protest. Time to make a damn sign."
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'manual of templates and/or practice book… partially completed sketches, painted and calligraphy initals, stylised floral decorative motifs, plant foliage tendrils, fantastic beast border drolleries, together with gold and silver illumination work.'
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Renaissance Siena at the National Gallery
I went to the Renaissance Siena: Art for a City exhibition today. It’s late C15th and early C16th art. I gathered from the audio-guide that by then, Siena had already had its golden age, and was dropping behind places like Florence and Rome as an artistic centre.
So the artists in the show—Matteo di Giovanni, Francesco di Giorgio, Benvenuto di Giovanni, the Master of the Legend of Griselda, Signorelli, Pintoricchi, Beccafumi—aren’t household names. I hadn’t heard of any of them. And if someone who was a fan of the Italian Renaissance was passing through London for the first time and considering going to the exhibition, I’d recommend they bypass it and visit the National Gallery’s permanent collection, which has some superb Renaissance paintings.
Nonetheless, I did enjoy it. I find these early Renaissance works extremely likeable, although I couldn’t easily articulate why. There’s something very human about them, both in scale and style, which makes them more approachable than grander works by people like Michelangelo. They draw you in to look closely and enjoy the details.
And I had a very nice lemon tart in the National Gallery café.
» the two details above are both from paintings which are in the Gallery’s permanent collection and are currently in the Siena show. The first is ‘The Story of Patient Griselda, Part I’ by the Master of the Story of Griselda; the other is ‘Saint Dorothy and the Infant Christ’ by Francesco di Giorgio.
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Just a little Memling
Do you like Memling? I don’t know, I’ve never tried it. [boom boom]
Gotta love that Northern Renaissance.
I went to a lecture about fabric and fashion in art recently which used as an example a painting which I think wasn’t actually this one, but was very very similar. Possibly Memling painted various versions of it. Anyway, I can tell you that the black and gold cloth behind the Virgin and on the skirt of one the kneeling saints would have been made in Italy.
While I’m here posting about nothing in particular, I’ll throw in one of my occasional plugs for my photoblog, Clouded Drab. There’s a cute cat picture on the front page…
» The painting, Virgin and Child with Saints Catherine of Alexandria and Barbara, is in the Met, and this photo is from their website. It was painted in 1479 by the Netherlandish painter Hans Memling as an altarpiece.