365 Days at the Met

  December 31, 2024 \Gallery 615 takes us outdoors again. The introductory signage points out that Dutch landscape painting of the mid-17th century reflected a new sense of nationhood that developed as part of the struggle for independence from Spain. I wonder if landscapes painting, emphasizing as it did expanses of land and even more dramatic expanses of sky, also helped to forge that sense of national identity,  But I'm surprised that so many of the scenes show hillocks and rises in the land - quite different from my flat-as-a-pancake vision of the Netherlands. At first, I thought I'd write about a van Ruisdael painting that immediately caught my eye because of its large size and prominent placement in the gallery, and because it exemplifies the scenes of immense, lowering skies that I associate with van Ruisdael.   But as I'm finishing making my rounds of the gallery, I spot a small (perhaps 14 inches wide and 10 inches high) painting by an artist I've never hear...

  December 28, 2024 Gallery 613 dealt with the outdoors, so perhaps it's inevitable that Gallery 614 focuses on interiors.  Helpful introductory signage explains that during a period of economic prosperity,  wealthy burghers came to emulate the behavior of aristocrats. "High-life" genre paintings depicted amorous encounters and elevated pursuits,such as music-making. The gallery houses five Vermeers - that is, almost one-seventh of all the Vermeers known in the world! Some of these are famous, including "Young Woman with a Lute," "Young Woman with a Water Pitcher," and "Study of a Young Woman."  But two paintings were previously unknown to me. One, to my surprise, is an allegorical painting that depicts the Catholic faith as a young woman, her foot atop a globe to symbolize the religion's dominion over the entire world,  while in the foreground the cornerstone of a church crushes evil, represented, natch, as a snake. I never knew that Ver...

  December 16, 2024 As I walk toward Gallery 613, the thought hits me that I usually make a beeline to the gallery that's my destination for the day, looking neither to the right nor to the left - and that this single-mindedness has led me to miss so much. It's rather late in the game, but I vow in my remaining visits to pause and look carefully at something that catches my eye en route.  Since my habitual path to the Old Masters galleries involves a trek through a couple of very long galleries with changing exhibits of prints and photographs, I have scores, if not hundreds, of works from which to choose. Today one that catches my eye is a photograph by Alexander Rodchenko made in Moscow in the mid-1920s showing a middle-aged woman who sits isolated on the sidewalk selling cigars as city life swirls around her. Gallery 613 takes as its theme the development of landscape painting in the 16th century. Perhaps inevitably, it's where Bruegel's "The Harvesters," th...

 December 9, 20124 Gallery 612 is devoted to portraits from many countris in Western Europe, including Germany, the Netherlands, France, and Italy. The two Moroni portraits discussed on Day 244 have found their home here. So has a Bronzino portrait of a young man, hand on hip, who I assumed to be a member of the Medici family, Bronzino being their court painter par excellence.   Turns out, though, the subject was a member of Bronzino's circle of literary friends.  I thought I'd write about a Veronese portrait of a young man with his greyhound, but I decided instead to focus on the last work I looked at, which is mounted separately in the middle of the gallery rather than hung on a wall.  Entitled "Christ Blessing, Surrounded by a Donor Family," the painting was made around 1571-1582 by an unknown German painter. It depicts Christ, who raises the index and middle fingers of his right hand in a gesture of blessing, seated in the middle of a family grouping. The identit...

 December 7, 2024 Gallery 611 takes as its theme court painters in Italy. This seems a bit silly to me because so many painters had court patronage at some point in their careers. This said, the rubric provides a rationale for grouping together works by late 15th century and early 16th century artists working in Ferrara and Milan.   All but two of the works have religious themes. One of the exceptions is a small portrait of a scion of the Este clan. The second is today's work, an oil on canvas measuring about 44 inches high and 28 inches wide, by Dosso Dossi, a Ferrara painter whose dates are ca. 1486-1541-2. It's entitled "The Three Ages of Humans" (although I suspect that before the Met became so politically correct in its labeling, it was called "The Three Ages of Man"), and I think I'm drawn to it precisely because its subject is decidedly non-religious.  The painting shows a wonderfully lush bower in the middle of which a couple is embracing; our ey...

  December 2, 2024 Gallery 610 contains five paintings and a marble relief created by Lombard artists, none of whom I'd  heard of before, including Vincenzo Foppa, Andrea Solario, Girolamo Romanino, Marco d’Oggiono, and Giampetrino. The introductory wall placard discusses these artists’ “search for truth” - their close observation of nature and the sharp contrast in their works between the beautiful and the ugly- but I’m not sure I could draw much of a distinction between these painters and their counterparts in other regions of Italy. Two paintings, both rather small in format (perhaps 22 inches wide and 26 inches high) capture my attention. One is an oil-on-wood panel showing Salome with the head of Saint John the Baptist painted by Solario around 1508. As many times as I’ve seen this subject depicted, the composition here strikes me as highly original. Its most unusual element is the disembodied right forearm of the executioner, which emerges from the dark background. In hi...