365 Days at the Met

 April 9, 2021 Gallery 627 spotlights the rise during the 17th century of two new kinds of subjects for paintings: still lifes and genre scenes.  Interestingly, the signage notes that a number of women artists took to painting still lifes because training for this form did not require drawing and painting the male nude, activities forbidden to women. I don't recognize most of the artists whose works are hung in the gallery, with the exception of a small portrait whose loose brushwork unmistakably marks it as a Franz Hals (and which seems out of place among the other works, I must say). I'm especially drawn to two of the still lifes, for opposite reasons. The first is a small (approximately 21 inches high and 16 inches wide) oil on wood by Clara Peters, a Flemish painter whose dates are approximately 1587-1637.  It shows a variety of flowers, painted in luminous, harmonious shades of red and rose, blue,  yellow, and white, casually arranged in a black vase, all agains...

 April 5, 2021 Although Gallery 626 houses a number of paintings with religious themes, including Lucas Cranach the Elder's painting of Saint Maurice (shown as a Black knight in armor), it centers on 16th century portraiture north and south of the Alps. The signage notes the efforts of painters to infuse these portraits with a vital sense of the sitter's presence. I'm particularly drawn to two portraits by Giovanni Battista Moroni (1524-1578), an artist I'd barely heard of before who came from the town of Albino, near Bergamo. The first work, executed in oil on canvas and measuring about 40 inches high and 32 inches wide, is of Bartolomeo Bonghi, a legal scholar and professor.  Seated sideways in a wooden chair with red (velvet?) upholstery and brass fittings, Bonghi turns to look outward at the viewer,  his face framed by a three-cornered black hat. His reddish mustache and luxuriant beard are similar in color, but differentiated in texture, from the fur collar that to...

  April 2, 2021 Gallery 625 is devoted to 16th century landscapes, both northern and Italian There are interesting works by Patinir,  Piero di Cosimo, and a follower of Bosch, among others, but I want to focus on a painting I've always loved, Pieter Bruegel the Elder's "The Harvesters."   As many times as I've seen the work, I evidently never stopped to read the caption. Otherwise, I would have known that this was one of a series of six paintings commissioned by an Antwerp merchant to decorate his suburban home - a fact that, as much as anything, brings home to me the rising power and wealth of the haute bourgeoisie. Four of the other panels are in that room I adore in the Kunsthistorisches Museum. Even at a time when I'm saddened by Charly's illness and the possibility that we will never again enjoy travel together, I realize how lucky I've been to have seen so much, including that wondrous room.   Completed in 1565, the panel, executed in oil on wood...

 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...

February 26, 2021 The theme of Gallery 620 is The Grand Tour - what the well-off, well-bred young man might see if he made this excursion in the 18th century. Since Italy was the principal destination of The Grand Tour, most of the paintings are by Italian artists and depict Italian scenes. There are lots of Canalettos and Guardis, and the surprise of my visit is to discover that the two artists, far from being interchangeable, as I had previously supposed, had quite distinctive styles: Canaletto painted with almost photographic precision, while Guardi's brushstrokes are much freer, almost impressionistic.  But inevitably, the two paintings I've chosen to write about are by Giovanni Paolo Panini, who was born in Piacenza in 1691 and died in Rome in 1765. I suspect the entry is an homage to Panini's painting of the interior of the Pantheon, now in the National Gallery in Washington, a nicely framed repro of which hung in my office for many years. ("I work so that I can ...