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Aztec Codex. Unknown. Early 17th Century.
Among the many Spanish adventurers who came to the new world seeking gold, renown, and the conversion of heathens, there were a few who took pains to preserve traces of the cultures they were eradicating. The Codex Azcatitlan is illustrated in the Native style and penned in Nahuatl and Latin. It tells the story of the Aztecs from from their mythical beginnings to their conquest by the Spanish. -
Elizabeth I, Rainbow Portrat. Attributed to Isaac Oliver.
An idea advanced by Clive Bell, namely that art should hit the viewer at the level if aesthetic fascination, removed from the emotions of life, is of special interest in this case, because here the subject, the ageless beauty of the monarch, occupies a similar remove. Should we see her as a guide to meditation, like Yama of the Tibetan piece, a model of the cool, aesthetic rapture? Are we fit to behold her with baser eyes? -
Summer, Pieter Brueghel the Younger
Hieronymus Bosch’s bizarre, proto-surrealist landscapes were alternately sensuous and horrible caricatures of human society and spiritual condition. They convey an essentially medieval worldview, pessimistic and world-scorning. His disciple, Pieter Brueghel the Elder, employed similarly nightmarish imagery and ethos. The son of that Brueghel, called Pieter the Younger, used similar arrangements to show scenes of everyday peasant life. This shows the advance of humanism within a generation. -
Hamlet
Shakespeare’s longest, most enigmatic, and arguably greatest play has become the supreme example of literary art, and has been the object of endless debate. It opens with the question “Who’s there?”, and is, perhaps most fundamentally, an inquiry into the nature of the self. It is fitting that such a disquietingly modern question should open the 17th century, for it was a time when the traditional answers to that question were more than ever in doubt. -
The Incredulity of Saint Thomas. Caravaggio.
Caravaggio poses a special challenge to Tolstoy’s view that artists should be moral people. He was a brawler, a counterfeiter, and a killer, yet his greatness as a painter of the late Renaissance is undisputed. His realistic style is well suited to the subject of Saint Thomas (called Doubting Thomas) who must probe and prove the flesh reality of the risen Christ. He looks as if he is having trouble standing, and the hand of Jesus stays him. The four heads together imply the cross. -
Onna-Kabuki
Kabuki theater was invented by the daughter of a blacksmith in early Edo-period Kyoto. Izumo no Okumi was a talented and prolific beauty who neglected her duties at a local shrine to head up a troupe of female performers. Their art was a form of dance/drama, performed in the dry riverbeds of Kyoto, and quickly became popular. The authorities chaffed at the erotic themes and atmosphere, and in 1623 the Shogun banned women from the very art form they'd invented. -
The Vision of Saint John. El Greco
El Greco’s scene is from Revelation (6:9-11). An air of agitation and primitive mystery prevails. The Vision of Saint John can be taken as an allegorical commentary on art itself. Like the prophet, the artist is taken by a vision (an emotion or insight that he feels as peculiar to himself), and struggles through representation to make it known (this is Tolsoy's view). -
Winter Landscape. Hendrick Avercamp.
Another landscape in the style of Brueghel the Younger, this one by Hendrick Avercamp. Clive Bell would probably dismiss such compositions as “descriptive drawing,” but they do convey something of the human condition, even across the ages. Against the charge that such treatment borders on kitsch, it should be noted that Brueghel and Avercamp both sprinkle their picturesque human worlds with images of quarrels, sex, and bodily functions. Nonetheless it is slightly idealized and sentimental. -
Dog Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes
Schopenhauer called Cervantes’ masterpiece one of the greatest novels ever written. If Hamlet questions the nature of the self, Don Quixote takes on the self’s relation to social reality. Don Quixote’s imagined world is a grotesque, farcical delusion, yet at the same time he creates phenomenal realities (what Shcopenhauer would call World as Will and Representation). Poetic imagination and will dub Don Quixoti is a knight. Society sees him as a clown. Both are correct. This is paradox. -
Samson Captured by the Philistines. Guercino (Giovanni Francesco Barbieri)
The artist reportedly wanted to avoid a sensational composition of this famous biblical scene wherein Sampson is captured and blinded. His solution is to make Sampson’s straining back the focal point, pitched as it is against the dark, violent opposition of his enemies. The wrestler’s virility, even at bay, is impressive, and his outthrust arms prefigure the moment when he will tear down the temple pillars and burry the Philistines with their god. -
French Parade Helmet
Heidegger would argue that proper art is not useful in the same way that other things are useful, that its function is to disclose usefulness as a function of being. Another question we might ask then: is it possible to view a helmet in terms of pure form, like a sculpture, representing only itself? What if it were welded to a fire-hydrant? -
Allegorical Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I. Unknown.
With sunken eyes, weary gaze, and deathly pallor sits the queen, attended by Time and Death. The symbolism is just as heavy handed as in the Rainbow Portrait, and we may read a certain continuity between the two. If the first portrait shows the monarch in health, fully inhabiting the eternal majesty of her reign, this second shows the mortal woman, nearly used up by the same great powers that occasioned her greatness. The angels lifting her crown are simultaneously letting her down into death -
Medusa Head, Gianlorenzo Bernini
The more common treatment shows Perseus triumphant, brandishing the severed head of Medusa. In Bernini’s sculpture the beautiful gorgon is shown alive, with an anxious aspect, as if her writhing head of snakes were the outward sign of her inner torment. Bernini may have been having a bit of fun by making a stone bust of Medusa, whose gaze turned men into stone. Does this not illustrate Heidegger’s argument that art abstracts and then re-naturalizes its subject through the material medium? -
The Battles of Hogen and Heiki, Unknown.
By the time these panels were made in the early Edo Period, the beginning of the so-called Pax Tokagawa, the battles they commemorated were well in the past. On a field of painted gold the chaotic, almost clownish hurly burly of the battle sprawls. Valor is in great abundance and the fear of men running from arrows appears comical. Clearly the aesthetic treatment has somewhat distanced the work from any truth to be found in realism. -
Myōryū-ji (Ninja Temple)
In the 17th Century the Shogun decreed that buildings could not exceed three stories, a way of keeping powerful provincial clans under control. Provincials got creative. Built like a Chinese puzzle-box, the Ninja Temple at Kanazawa looks like a two-story building, but the interior is four stories with seven inter-nested levels.These spaces are filled with secret rooms, hidden passages, pitfalls and ambush points.There was even a secret suicide room where a fugitive lord might commit sepuku. -
The Taj Mahal
Completed in 1643, this Wonder of the World was built as a tomb for the Mughal Sha’s favorite wife. It displays a blend of Persian and Indian architectural styles, and its white marble lavishly decorated with Arabic calligraphy, carvings and inlays. The builders followed a strict interpretation of Islamic law and made no use of representational art, but the creativity of their patterns is such that recognizable figures are hardly missed. -
The Genius of Castiglione, Giovanni Benedetto Castiglione
Here we see the artist as a sort of happy savage, himself, reposing in the pagan warmth and wild, tropical lassitude of his genius. One thinks of Shakespeare’s Prospero, who was also in exile and somewhat weary of his own power, conjuring storms out of idle angst. There is something vain and futile in human striving—so this image suggests—and we maroon ourselves where we make ourselves the object of veneration. Is there an idolatry of sorts in the worship or art? -
Death Carrying a Child. Stefano Della Bella.
Clive Bell inveighs strongly against sentimental art such as Sir Luke Fildes’s The Doctor. Stefano Della Bella’s Death Carrying a Child has a similar subject of death and the child. Bell would categorize this work as “descriptive drawing,” and might even call it “emotional propaganda.” There is something in the old Medieval motif of the Dance Macabre that is more grim and fatalistic than sentimental. A guide to meditations, perhaps. -
Yama. Unknown. Mid 17th Century.
Yama, the Buddhist personification of Death who assailed the Buddha beneath the bodhi tree, is the subject of this Tibetan painting. Sharp, clean colors, dramatic postures and complex compositions characterize these panels, which serve as guides to meditation. Western apocalyptic art often shows angels and demons similarly arrayed, the oppositional duality is absolute. In Tibetan Buddhism, the energetic aspects of demons are drafted into spiritual service. This wrathful deity is calld protector.
