beside the easel

Portrait of a Man (possible self-portrait?), ca.1518 click here for zoomable version One of my favourite Renaissance painters, Andrea Del Sarto, who was called by Vasari as the artist "senza errori"—without errors—represents a Classicism with a poetic sensibility that borrows from Raphael and Da Vinci but evolved into his own brand of genius. Michelangelo was a good friend and one of his biggest fans, ultimately recommending him as a teacher to Vasari himself. Del Sarto has a way of synthesizing beauty and perfection with vivid color and a full-range of values that may have had an influence on Baroque painters much later on. Although another underrated artist today, his work really does have few faults. In fact, he would have made a formidable sculptor, judging by his confident anatomy and figures, with real facial and hand expressions that are hypnotic. The above portrait shows a young man of uncertain identity, yet somehow the prevailing art historians believe it is ...

The Virgin and Child with St. Anne, ca.1510 Yesterday was the 560th birthday of history's greatest artistic genius and polymath, the legend that intrigues and astonishes half a millenium after his time. Leonardo da Vinci. It is difficult to understate the influence this single human being had on art and the world itself, and to still fascinate scientists and artists (and Dan Brown) alike after such a period of time is obviously a testament to his very unique greatness. I want to talk here about why the hype of a centuries old artist is still amazing. (The Dan Brown theories you can read about elsewhere.) His name alone is interesting in itself. Born in a modest farmhouse actually a couple of miles away from the small comune of Vinci, east of Florence— at a time when surnames were already being used for a few centuries— it is indeed interesting that his father and Leonardo's grandfather lived in Vinci all their lives, hence the namesake. Leonardo was the bastard son of h...

Drawing is not the form; it is the way of seeing the form. Degas A male nude from behind, c.1630 Gian Lorenzo Bernini In this blog I talk about painting but the importance of drawing cannot be understated of course, and I believe we can learn just as much from studying their techniques of line and strokes as we can from brushstrokes...more in most cases as the drawing is more expressive and intimate. It reveals the personality and character of the artist. The above drawing apparently comes from the period of Bernini's teaching at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome, one of four from the exact same model. This drawing is fairly big for a study, at 55.6 x 42cm (21 x 16 inches). Consider Michelangelo's study for Libyan Sibyl , is only 28.9 x 21.4 cm (11 3/8 x 8 7/16 inches), a small study for a fresco which would be painted several times larger than life size. I can only guess that Bernini was teaching a big class and that maybe his work was on display for students to stud...

I don't think there is any other artist in history who is as well known for painting a massive fresco by himself.The loner. The genius. The perfectionist. The terribilitá. The homosexual (if he was indeed gay, which is still being debated). We think we know him, but we really don't know him at all. His genius was based on a solid training with a fanatical attention to anatomy. His perfectionism comes from a father who was probably pretty hard on him for most of his life. His personality was probably not as dramatic as history conveys him— in fact, I suspect he was quite introverted, preferring to observe rather than talk excessively. Just don't piss the guy off. Even so, the labours of his art reveal he had to have had an inordinate amount of patience, or he would not have been able to deal with the many projects from Pope Julius II and their problems. Although I do love sculpture very much, it's painting that I want to talk about in this blog, and since Michelangelo...