Renaissance Revolution - Hyeronimus Bosch

Hyeronimus Bosch, The garden of earthly delights (1505), Museo del Prado

Nowadays, when we look at a painting from five hundred years ago we use to give for granted the knowledge we carry on from our cultural heritage. This make us ignore every revolutionary aspect that painting may have. To understand art in its real sense and with an honest scene, we must go back in time when some things were not so common, when there was a very different tradition around the artistic expressions. 

The Garden of earthly delights (1505) painted by Hyeronismus Bosch (best known as “El Bosco”), is one of those works of art that make us wonder. To see this magnificent painting from a fair point of view, Matthew Collings take us to the world of this mysterious Netherlandish artist through the TV documentary Renaissance Revolution (BBC). 

Dare to feel what a viewer from the 16th Century would have felt. Let’s leave behind our prejudices of modern observers and immerse our minds in this astonishing cosmos created when religion ruled the lives of every man.

Equality leading the people

Eugene Delacroix, Liberty leading the people, 1830

Last night I was reading a little bit of Théophile Thoré's review of the 1848 Salon exhibition. The year 1848 was a very important year in European history. It was the year that Marx's Communist Manifesto was published, and the year that socialist revolutions broke out all over Europe. Thoré was commenting on the contemporary political sentiment and fervor, and implied that similar political fervor is found in Liberty Leading the People (a painting by Delacroix that was made earlier, around the time of the national French revolution in 1830). Thoré wrote, "It is said that [Delacroix] has just begun an Equality Leading the People, for our recent revolution is the true sister of that national one to which he paid homage eighteen years ago. . . . One can only hope that Delacroix makes haste, and that both paintings will soon be on display, hanging side by side."1

From what I can tell, Delacroix never made Equality Leading the People, and Thoré may have been discussing only hearsay. Nonetheless, this got me thinking. What type of figure would Delacroix have picked to represent Equality? Given the context of the 1848 socialist revolutions, I'm guessing that he would have picked some type of proletarian (member of the working class).

I think that Equality Leading the People would have contained an interesting idea that is still relevant with current issues. What if Equality Leading the People was being painted today? What figure would you pick to represent Equality? My first thought was Martin Luther King, Jr. or Rosa Parks. What person (or generalized type of figure) would you choose?

(1) Théophile Thoré, "Salon of 1848" in Art in Theory: 1815-1900, edited by Charles Harrison, Paul Wood and Jason Gaiger, (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, Ltd., 1998), 181.

[Originally published on Tuesday, February 16, 2010, by Alberti's Window ©]

How to make a facsimile of a masterpiece

A facsimile of the Wedding at Cana by Paolo Veronese from factum-arte on Vimeo.

In the autumn of 2006, the Musée du Louvre reached an agreement with Fondazione Giorgio Cini and granted Factum Arte access to record Veronese's great painting les Noces De Cana. The conditions were carefully specified: the recording must be completely non-contact, all equipment must meet the highest conservation specifications and be approved by Veritas, no external lighting or scaffolding could be used, work could only happen when the museum was closed and no equipment could be left in the room when the public was present. In defining each condition the safety of the painting (and the other paintings in the room) was always the definitive factor.

Paolo Veronese, Wedding at Caná, 1563, Museé du Louvre, París 

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