365 Days at the Met

 March 22, 2021 Gallery 624 transports us back to Italy in the 14th and early 15th centuries. All the paintings are religious in theme, with many depicting the Madonna and Child, the Crucifixion, or some saint or other. Many were wrested from altarpieces whose panels were split up and sold separately, and while it's nice to be able to see them at the Met, it's a loss not to know what the fully assembled works looked like.  While the subjects are spiritual, I'm struck by how decorative many of the paintings are. My eye is drawn over and over to brilliant red and blue garments and elaborately patterned surfaces. The gold backgrounds accentuate the high seriousness and holiness of the scenes being represented,  but they also must have brought pleasure to the viewers. Some of the works are by painters whose names are familiar to me (small pieces by Giotto, Fra Filippo Lippi, and Fra Angelico, for example), and others are by painters whose names I'd heard before but really d...

March 12, 2021 Gallery 623 contains oil sketches from the 16th and 17th centuries. Many of these works appear quite finished to me, but the two I want to discuss today really are sketches, in which outlines  and/or color schemes are only barely indicated. The first,  painted by Tintoretto around 1577,  is a sketch for a large painting that was to be placed in the Doge's Palace. The sketch, approximately seven feet long and four feet high, shows, at the center and kneeling, the Doge Alvise Mocenigo, who headed the Venetian Republic at the time of the Venetian fleet's victory over the Turks at Lepanto in 1571. Mocenigo also served as doge during the plague year of 1576, after which he pledged to build the church of the Redentore. Appropriately, in the sketch Mocenigo is presented to the Redeemer, the latter clad in flowing blue robes and suspended in the air by angels. There are other bits of Venetian iconography packed into the sketch: ships representing the victorious fle...

 March 1, 2021 I've mentioned that the Met has the largest collection of works by Giovanni Battista Tiepolo outside of Venice, and many of them, including small sketches in oil for larger paintings, are in Gallery 622. Tiepolo is not my favorite, perhaps because his paintings are so   high Baroque - full of swirling garments and forms and self-importance  - and because I am not enamored of his palette. But today I want to write about two of his paintings. One of these I like a lot, the other I don't.  The one I like, which measures about 36 inches high and 21 inches wide,  is entitled "Saint Thecla Praying for the Plague-Stricken" and was completed around 1758-9. The work is a sketch for a large altarpiece for a cathedral in Este, near Padua, where the work commemorated the plague 0f 1630.  I'd never even heard of Saint Thecla until recently - she was a first-century acolyte of Paul - and perhaps the fact that she's new to me makes any painting showing...