"Caravaggio" by Andrew Graham-Dixon

This biography of the artist Michelangelo Merisi (1571 - 1610), known as Caravaggio from the town outside Milan where he was born, is subtitled 'A Life Sacred and Profane'. "Caravaggio's life is like his art, a series of lightning flashes in the darkest of nights" (p 3). As well as being a painter of startling originality and huge later influence he was repeatedly in trouble with the law for fighting in the streets; his murder of a man (probably during a duel) led to a capital conviction and his fleeing from Rome, eventually to Malta where he was soon again in trouble with the authorities requiring him to break out of jail in Valletta. So there was no shortage of incident during his 38 years and AGD tells a rattling good yarn. However, this is about a painter and the art was the most important thing in Caravaggio's life, and AGD describes and explains the masterpieces in a way that enhanced my appreciation of this fabulous artist. These masterpieces are illustrated by a surprisingly large number of high quality colour plates and it is not the fault of the book that Caravaggio's extremely tenebristic style makes it difficult to see many of the details described.

AGD attempts to explain C's style by describing the context of the world in which he grew up. Milan, a city notorious for pimps, prostitutes, thieves and violence, was in thrall to Archbishop Borromeo, a priest of a Savanorolan bent, who used the confessional to operate a hierocratic police state. He encouraged the practice of 'composition' recently made popular by Jesuit leader St Ignatius Loyola (revived from methods employed by St Francis of Assissi) which aimed to get believers to “visualize Christ's sufferings ... as if you were actually present at the very time ... you should regard yourself as if you had our Lord suffering before your very eyes, and that he was present to receive your prayers.” (p 32) Thus art was an aid to devotion. AGD suggests that these practices had led to the development of realism in early Renaissance art: "artists competed with each other to create convincing illusions of actual presence, developing new techniques such as mathematically calculated perspective to paint ever more convincing images of the life and sufferings of Christ. Painters made their pictures as realistic as they could in order to assist worshippers in their own acts of mental picture-building.” (33)

In particular Borromeo encouraged the practice of 'sacred mountains' which were places where pilgrims could go and encounter crib-like Biblical scenes in which usually terracotta figures were arranged in theatrically-set groupings. “The most skilfully carved and painted of the figures have a shocking actuality about them. This is not art that seeks to idealize nor generalize life; it is art that aspires to the condition of a simulacrum of life itself.” (p 39) “The way in which he [Caraviaggio] paints the wrinkled faces and bodies of his protagonists has its exact parallel in the wizened physiognomies conjured from clay by the masters of terracotta sculpture” (p 40)

Descriptions of Caravaggio's art include:

• "Caravaggio's life is like his art, a series of lightning flashes in the darkest of nights" (p 3)
• “His use of light and shade was so original that it gave painters nothing less than a new grammar and vocabulary.” (p 41)
• “The painter’s intense sensuality ... his feel for the flesh and blood of the human body and ... hius sensitivity to the suggestions implicit in the least exchange of glances.” (p 42)
• “an art of paroxysm and abandonment, filled with images of turmoil in dark places.” (p 52)
• “Tintoretto's brooding, monumental religious canvases, full of dramatic contrasts of light and dark - lightning strikes of supernatural illumination that shiver like spiritual electricity - are the only late sixteenth-century Italian paintings to prophesy elements of Caravaggio's own mature style.” (65)
• “Caravaggio is not merely the painter of rogues, crooks and the enchantresses of the street. He is the painter as vagabond.” (110)
• “Caravaggio seems to have had almost no interest in theories of art.” (118)
• “The transience of nature is linked to precariousness. Entropy and the fear of falling are connected in Caravaggio's mind.” (135)
• “Whomsoever the Medusa looks at, she freezes, preserving them forever in a single, charged instant of being. From the flux of life she takes a moment and makes it last for all time. That is what Caravaggio’s art does too.” (159)
• “In these later paintings he used a dark ground and worked from dark to light, a technique that he may have seen for the first time in the art of Tintoretto. It suited him in a number of ways. A dark ground enabled him to focus only on the essentials of the scene, as he imagined it. Dark paint creates an illusion of deep shadow around the principal forms and therefore also does away with the need to paint background detail.” (184)
• “Caravaggio’s habitual impatience is manifest too in his frequent practice of working wet-in-wet rather than waiting for each layer of oil paint to dry. He was unique among the painters of his time in making no preparatory drawing for his pictures, preferring to block out his compositions directly on the primed canvas. Having posed his models, he often marked the exact positions of heads and other contours by making light incisions in the base layer of paint ... No other artists of his time used such incisions.” (185)
• Bellori said: “he never showed any of his figures in open daylight, but instead found a way to place them in the darkness of a closed room, placing a lamp high so that the light would fall straight down, revealing the principal part of the body and leaving the rest in shadow so as to produce a powerful contrast of light and dark.” (186)
• “Caravaggio's dark and monumental oil paintings would certainly have looked extremely Venetian in the chapel of a Roman church in 1600, because only in Venice, where dampness and humidity discouraged fresco painting, was it common to see such large works of religious art carried out in oil on canvas.” (204)
• “God is light, so he announces his presence among men in the elusive forms of a shadowplay. The innkeeper cannot see it, it but by standing where he does he casts a shadow on the wall that gives Christ a dark but unmistakable halo.” (223)
• “Earlier artists had often envisaged the portrayal as a chaotic crowd scene, confusing the eye with a multitude of soldiers and panicking disciples. Caravaggio’s new technique of emphatic chiaroscuro was the perfect editing device for avoiding such unnecessary complications. He uses it here as a ruthless means of exclusion, spotlighting the figures at the very centre of the drama ... In his interpretation, the whole story becomes an elemental conflict between good and evil, innocence and malignity.” (229)
• “Michelangelo's prophets are nobly idealized figures, decorously draped, but Caravaggio’s Matthew is an ordinary, imperfect human being in working clothes that leave his arms and legs bare ... a simple man stunned by the directness of his revelation.” (236)
• “Many of the technical departures of the artist’s later work are related to his circumstances: he stops painting from models, in all but a few cases, because he has no time to find them or money to pay them, and he paints quickly because he has to move on.” (331)
• “Placing such emphasis on the proximity of one man's body to another is Caravaggio’s way of heightening the horror of the scene. Torture is a misbegotten form of physical intimacy.” (346)
• “The snapshot immediacy of the image, with its extremely innovative effects of cropping and occlusion, is suggestive of alienation and abandonment.” (538)
• “He painted as if the rich and the powerful were his enemies, as if he really did believe that the meek deserved to inherit the earth.” (438)
• “Pier Paolo Pasolini ... was profoundly influenced by Caravaggio’s sense of light, by his narrative directness, and by his casting of poor and ordinary working people in leading roles.” (441)

Other great moments:

• “Nowhere was the misogynistic cult of celibacy stronger than in Lombardy. It did not necessarily entail sexual abstinence, merely a refusal to be yoked to any single woman.” (p 16)
• “While Bacchus symbolises inspiration, he also stands for disorder, anarchy, an unruly surrender to the senses. He is passion, opposed to the reason embodied by Apollo.” (84)
• “Counter-Reformation Rome was a city in which all manner of thieves, rogues and scoundrels thronged. Their presence was a symptom of social crisis. Recurrent plague not only destroyed lives, but ravaged economies in the cities and states where it struck.” (100)
• “Aristotle's distinction between tragedy and comedy ... held that tragedy should focus on the actions of the elite - kings and princes - while comedy should concern itself with the behaviour of those at the very bottom of the social heap.” (107) This comes from Aristotle's Poetics.
• “The polyphonic and monodic modes are at opposite ends of music’s emotional spectrum. Polyphony subsumes the individual voice within a choral harmony, reflecting the desire to conjure up an essentially otherworldly sound, such as the singing of the angelic host. Words are hard to distinguish in the layers of polyphonic singing. Syntax dissolves and sense is sacrificed for an effect of transcendence. By contrast, monody puts precise meaning and specific human emotions at the heart of music. The single melodic line, the solo voice, is easily understood ... It might be said that while polyphony aspires to heaven, monody expresses man.” (128)
• “According to the Neoplatonic thought of the Renaissance, classical myth was alive with shadowy anticipations of Christian truth. The legend of Dionysus, who died to be reborn, was regarded as a pagan prophecy of the coming of Christ.” (155)
• “The centre of the city was dark. Overshadowed by unbroken lines of tall buildings, its congested lanes and alleys were rarely penetrated by direct sunlight. Despite the sunshine of southern Italy, most daily life took place in deep shadow, in a form of civic space not unlike the bottom of a well.” (338)

As I think you can see, I thoroughly enjoyed this brilliant book.

July 2020; 444 pages

"Lives of the Great Artists" by Giorgio Vasari

Vasari was a renaissance artist and a friend of Michelangelo who had the idea of publishing a book of biographies of those great Italian artists, mostly from Florence, who, as he saw it, had returned painting, sculpture and architecture to the glories these arts had attained in the classical world.

The biographies are riddled with mistakes (he gets one date wrong by nearly a thousand years) and often little more than hagiographical descriptions of the listed works of that artist that Vasari has seen, but there are moments of anecdote and insight which make the reading worth while.

There are personal anecdotes:

• Giotto, the shepherd boy, being discovered by Cimabue scratching pictures of sheep on stones in the field
• Giotto, asked by a papal courtier for a drawing from the pope, received a freestyle perfect circle
• Michelangelo the forger: “Michelangelo also copied the works of other masters, with complete fidelity; he used to tinge his copies and make them appear black with age by various means, including the use of smoke, so that they could not be told apart from the originals.”

There are insights into character of an artist:

• “Cimabue ... had outstanding ability, but he was so arrogant and disdainful that if anyone remarked any fault or defect in his work or if he had noticed any himself ... he immediately rejected it, no matter how precious it might be.”
• Apropos Paolo Uccello: “Artists who devote more attention to perspective them to figures develop a dry and angular style because of their anxiety to examine things too minutely; and, moreover, they usually end up solitary, eccentric, melancholy, and poor.”
• “Masaccio ... refused to give any time to worldly cares and possessions, even to the way he dressed.”
• “Fra Filippo was so lustful that he would give anything to enjoy a woman he wanted”. Locked in his room to work by Cosimo de Medici “his animal desires drove him one night to seize a pair of scissors, make a rope from his bed-sheets and escape through a window to pursue his own pleasures for days on end.”
• “Botticelli was a follower of Savanarola’s, and this was why he gave up painting and then fell into considerable distress as he had no other source of income.”
• “Leonardo ... would have been very proficient at his early lessons if he had not been so volatile and unstable; for he was always setting himself to learn many things only to abandon them almost immediately.”
• “Leonardo ...  was always fascinated when he saw a man of striking appearance, with a strange head of hair or beard; and anyone who attracted him he would follow about all day long and end up seeing so clearly in his mind’s eye that when got home he could draw him as if he were standing there in the flesh.” 
• “Raphael ... was indeed a very amorous man with a great fondness for women whom he was always anxious to serve. He was always indulging his sexual appetites.”
• “Rafael kept up his secret love affairs and pursued his pleasures with no sense of moderation.” 

In Volume Two there are some more stories, this time of artists contemporary to Vasari, many of whom he knew. Again there are some great moments:

• There is murder. Andrea del Castagno was so jealous of  Domenico Veneziano that one night he laid in “wait for him unseen around a street corner, and when Domenico came across him on his way home, he ruptured both his lute and his stomach at the same time with some lead weights ... he then beat him wickedly about the head with the same weapon. and then, leaving him lying on the ground, Andrea returned to his room ... where he left the door ajar and sat down to draw just as he had been left doing by Domenico.” After, alerted by the commotion, he ran to Domenico and “kept crying out inconsolably: ‘Oh alas, my brother, alas, my brother!’ Finally Domenico died in his arms.” He got away with it, only being discovered when he confessed on his death bed.
• There is theft by an ape. Giovanni Batista Rosso kept a pet Barbary ape who “fell in love” with one of his assistants and was dangled over a certain garden wall to plunder a vine and, when caught, was sentenced to be shackled to a weight so it could not attack the vines but instead it climbed onto the roof of the vine garden and, by jumping up and down, broke the rooftop tiles.
• There is eccentricity. Piero di Cosimo had some strange habits: “Having fallen in love with painting, he cared nothing for his creature comforts and reduced himself to eating only boiled eggs which, to economize on fire, he used to cook whenever he was boiling glue, not six or eight, but fifty at a time, keeping them in a basket and eating them one by one.” Furthermore “He could not stand babies crying, men coughing, bells ringing, or friars chanting; and when the rain was pouring down from the sky, he loved to watch it as it ricocheted off the roof-tops and hurtled on to the ground. He went in terror of lightning, and when the thunder roared he would wrap himself up in his cloak, shut fast the doors and windows, and crouch in a corner of the room till the storm abated.”
• Jacopo Pontormo liked working by himself:  Wanting to work by himself on a chapel, he “closed off the chapel with walls, hoardings, and curtains, and given himself over to complete solitude, he kept it for the space of eleven years so firmly locked up, that no living soul except himself ever went in there.”
• Francesco Mazzuoli (Parmigianino) gave up art to practise (unsuccessfully) alchemy: “Would to God that he had always pursued his studies in painting, and not indulged in fantasies of solidifying quicksilver to make himself richer than he had been created by Nature and Heaven!”
• Some artists have amazing imaginations. “He would sometimes stop to contemplate a wall at which sick people had for ages been aiming their spittle, and then he described battles between horseman, and most fantastic cities, and the most extensive landscapes ever seen: and he experienced the same with the clouds in the sky."

Some great moments from Volume 1:

• “Almighty God ...fashioned the first forms of painting and sculpture ... the ideas of softness and of unity and the clashing harmony made by light and shadow were derived from the same source.”
• “The first men were more perfect and endowed with more intelligence, seeing that they lived nearer the time of the Creation”
• “It goes without saying that the arts must have been discovered by some one person”
• “Christianity ... strove to cast out and utterly destroy every least possible occasion of sin; and in doing so it ruined or demolished all the marvellous statues, besides the other sculptures, the pictures, mosaics and ornaments representing the false pagan gods.”
• “The best historians have tried to show how men have acted wisely or foolishly, with prudence or with compassion and magnanimity; recognising that history is the true mirror of life, they have not simply given a dry, factual account of what happened to this prince or that republic but have explained the opinions, counsels, decisions, and plans that lead men to successful or unsuccessful action.” 
• “Some men become great artists by diligent application and others by study; some by imitation, somebody knowledge of the sciences .... and some by combining all or most of these things.”
• “Anyone who does violence to his nature by fanatical studies may polish one facet of his genius but cannot produce work with the facility and grace associated with artists who can put each stroke in its place temperately and with a calm and judicious Intelligence.”
• “He portrayed a dead body, foreshortened, with a crow picking out its eyes, and a drowned child, whose body, sodden with water, is arched up grotesquely.”
• “He lived to a ripe but disgruntled old age.”
• “The appearance of a man of outstanding creative talent is very often accompanied by that of another great artist at the same time and in the same part of the world so that the two can inspire and emulate each other.”
• “There are many men whom nature has made small and insignificant, but who are so fiercely consumed by emotion and ambition that they know no peace unless they are grappling with difficult or indeed almost impossible tasks and achieving astonishing results.”
• “Lumps of earth often conceal veins of gold”
• “One of the worst things that can happen to a man is for him to work and study hard in order to benefit others and make his own name, and then be prevented by sickness, or perhaps death itself, from finally completing what he has begun.”
• “When a man becomes a priest for the wrong reasons the outcome is invariably shameful and unhappy.” 
• “True wealth consists in being content with just a little.”
• “The artist himself must decide after careful consideration what to reject and what to accept, using his own judgement and not relying on the theories of others.”
• “He lived honorably from his work and he spent extravagantly on his love affairs.”
• “To produce perfect work, painters and sculptors need both application and natural talent”
• “Men of genius sometimes accomplish most when they work the least; for ... they are thinking out inventions and forming in their minds the perfect ideas which they subsequently express and reproduce with their hands.”
• “He was a slow thinker, and when the wax is hard it does not take a good impression.”
• “If life was found to be agreeable than so should death, for it came from the hands of the same master.”

And volume II

• “No one ever achieved excellence in any occupation who did not, when still a child, start to put up with heat and cold, and hunger and thirst, and other discomforts. and so those people utterly deceive themselves who come to believe that they can reach an honourable level while enjoying all the world's ease and comforts; success comes from continuous study and wakefulness, not from falling asleep.”
• “Very often work in the rough, brought to birth in an instant from the art’s inspired frenzy, can express its makers concept in just a few strokes, whereas, in contrast, excessive diligence and labour often remove the force and understanding of those who never know how to lift their hands from what they are doing.”
• “If all those alive in this world believed they would still be alive after they could no longer work, many of them would not come to beg in their old age for what they consumed so unsparingly in their youth, when rich and plentiful rewards clouded their common sense and made them spend recklessly beyond their need. For seeing how harshly we regard someone who has fallen from prosperity to poverty, everyone should strive, albeit steering a decent middle course, not to have to beg a living in old age.”
• “Florence deals with its craftsman as Time does with its own works, which, which once they are done, it then undoes and consumes bit by bit.”
• “When someone teaches us excellence and gives us a good way of life, he puts us no less in his debt and must be no less regarded as a true father than the one who begets us and simply gives us life.”

June 2019; Volume 1 = 462 pages; Volume II = 373 pages

"The Secret Lives of Colour" by Kassia St Clair

This is one of those books which are heaven for the determined trivia collector like myself. Seventy-five different colours from beige to acid yellow, from nude to shocking pink, from dragon's blood  to mauve to Prussian blue to celadon to khaki to pitch black, are included. You learn about their history, how they are made, and their properties such as how well the dye material and whether they are good in oil and if they fade. But best of all you learn the fascinating facts:

• Lead poisoning from cosmetics used to make skin whiter may have been in part responsible for the collapse of the Shogun regime in Japan in 1868. On the other hand the use of Kohl as an eye liner results in a 240% boost to the production of nitric oxide by the surrounding skin which might significantly reduce the risk of skin infections.
• Vermilion was once as costly as gold when it was used as the red in mediaeval illuminated manuscripts; "it was glazed with a revolting mixture of egg yolk and ear wax." Meanwhile the use of minium for red applied by miniators onto early mediaeval manuscripts led to our word miniature."
• Neanderthals have been found with ginger hair.
• No one really knows how Indian yellow used to be made; there is a tale that it comes from the urine of cows fed only on mango leaves and water in Mirzapur, Bengal.
• Beige "could be the concept-colour of the bourgeoisie: conventional, sanctimonious and materialistic." Khaki (from the Urdu word for dusty) was invented by Sir Harry Lumsden in Peshawar, Pakistan, for the uniform for a corps of guides to make them "invisible in a land of dust".
• Despite being up to 2,500 times cheaper than the real thing, artificial ultramarine was initially resisted by artists: "Because the particles were the same size and reflected light in the same way, it lacked the depth, variety and visual interest of the real thing."

This book works both as a reference work and as a dip-in-for-pleasure book. June 2019; 285 pages

"Enduring Creation" by Nigel Spivey

Spivey starts with a visit to Auschwitz. This leads to his reflecting on the maxim of Theodor Adorno that “All culture after Auschwitz is trash". This book is an attempt to suggest that even in these post-holocaust days it is important to continue to produce art. “We are compassionate by habit, not from birth. Pity is something that we learn to feel." he states. So we need art to visit the awful things that human does to human so that we can learn to feel pity. Therefore he has written "a book about horror, fear, death, ghastliness and grievous bodily harm ... about pain lodged at the core of human experience. Pain feared; pain avoided; pain inflicted; pain endured; pain savoured; and pain regarded"

It is a riveting read. And the illustrations, selected from the work of the greats and analysed brilliantly, are sometimes horrifying but always breathtaking. 

For example, one of his suggestions is that the classical statue group the Laocoon was used as a model in later forms so that he shows the same basic figure in, for example, Michelangelo's Haman on the ceiling of the Sistine chapel (a ceiling which El Greco once offered to overpaint to remove the blasphemous mixture of classical/pagan images with Christian ones). He also adapts Alberti's On Painting to create a "pathos formula" 

Some great quotes:

• “Reporters, with notebooks and lenses, thrive in zones of human disaster - scouting and jabbing like crows over carrion. The compulsion to hurry to the view of a kill seems an Instinct in us all.”
• “The early Christians ... did not seek to diminish or deny the existence of human suffering. Quite the opposite, Christianity thrived because it mind for virtue in striations of distress.”
• “Why, when the literature of Christian martyrdom was so adoringly descriptive of fleshly pain and the Hell-quenching conduits of blood, images of martyrs so anodyne, so clean?”
• "The successful institutionalization of cruelty rests upon a rationale of just deserts; also upon the species classification of certain humans as sub-human.”
• “The Damned do not go gently to their fate. Their apprehension of imminent horror is made palpable and panicky. Eager blue-black beaky demons will hustle the process, clawng or shovelling their victims towards flames, or some mouthy tunnel: images of swallowing and regurgitation often prevail.”
• “A painter will gain honour by making pictures of figures which by their attitudes credibly represent extremes of human emotion.”
• “There is a period in the history of Catholic Europe when it seems that no painter’s career could move forward until some graphic scene of martyrdom has been proved as part of his repertoire.”
• “The legend of Caravaggio says he slept every night wearing his Dagger (credible of a artist once charged with using a plate of artichokes as an offensive weapon).”
• “Only in Giorgio Vasari’s bourgeois imagination does the great artist care nothing for cash."
• “The classical ideal of female beauty was firmly but generously fleshed, and Rubens had carried that generosity to new extremes of cellulite celebration: but neither Rubens not any classical artist ever showed a ‘model’ slumped in flabbiness such as Rembrandt drew.”
• “We live in bodies. Each of us is a carcass: made up, in Genet’s words, ‘of blood, tears, sweat, shit, intelligence and tenderness’.”
• Adam Smith argued: “Though our brother is upon the rack, as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers ... iI is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his sensations.”
• “Smith was never the champion of completely unfettered market forces, or laissez-faire. Beneath all measures of deregulation lay the groundwork of moral and legal codes that sympathy must construct.”
• “If photography compiles a visual list of everything in the world, it is always a passing permanence. When the lens falls shut the flux goes on. For seconds, or fractions of a second, we clutch at eternity.”
• “It may amount to a gesture of some pardon to remember that One hundred and twenty days of Sodom was composed by a man with no access to carnal extravagance beyond his own imaginary fantasies.”

A fascinating perspective on Art. May 2019; 249 pages

Also read other works by Nigel Spivey:

• The Ancient Olympics
• How Art Made the World

Also read these other books about art:

• Seven Days in the Art World by Julia Thornton: a look at the institutions of the art world such as an auction, a fair, a magazine and the Biennale.
• Think Like an Artist by Will Gompertz which includes such insights as 'artists think big picture and fine detail' and 'artists steal'
• Ways of seeing by John Berger which is particularly good at sexism in art
• The Judgement of Paris by Ross King which is about the rise of the Impressionists
• Leonardo and the Last Supper by Ross King which is particularly good about the techniques of oil painting
• The Story of Art by E F Gombrich, a fascinating historical tour through art

“The Story of Art” by E H Gombrich

From cave paintings to Picasso, Gombrich endeavours to make us understand how “Artists of all periods have tried to put forward their solution of the essential paradox of painting, which is that it represents depth on a surface.” (C 27) To do this he tries to explain what was important to the artists of each period: “The Egyptians had largely drawn what they knew to exist, the Greeks what they saw; in the Middle Ages the artist also learned to express in his picture what he felt.” (C 8)

But Gombrich starts with the assertion that “There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists.” (Introduction). So he charts the history of art by considering the masters and by showing the techniques they developed. In the end, he argues, you can only judge an artist in terms of what he (or she) is trying to achieve, by assessing to what extent they have achieved their goal. Thus one artist may be a master of perspective and another a master of foreshortening, a third may be a master of using light and shade and a fourth a master of arranging a composition so that it is pleasing while a fifth is concerned primarily with colour.

I learned that the Greeks more or less invented foreshortening; that Brunelleschi (his work on the Duomo of Florence is recorded in Brunelleschi's Dome) invented perspective; that Van Eyck invented painting with oils so he could “achieve smooth transitions by letting the colours shade off into each other” (C 12); that Leonardo invented sfumato, and many other things.

This book was an absolutely fascinating travel through the history of this topic. I feel I understood more about art than I have ever understood before although, as Gombrich quotes Picasso: ‘Everyone wants to understand art. Why not try to understand the song of a bird?” (C 27)

Some great, often illuminating, quotes:

• “There is no greater obstacle to the enjoyment of great works of art than our unwillingness to discard habits and prejudices. A painting which represents a familiar subject in an unexpected way is often condemned for no better reason than that it does not seem right.” (Introduction)
• “Works of art ...  every one of their features is the result of a decision by the artist.” (Introduction)
• “When it is a matter of matching forms or arranging colours an artist must always be ... fastidious to the extreme. He may see differences in shades and texture which we should hardly notice.” (Introduction)
• "It is this balance between an adherence to rules and a freedom within the rules which has made Greek art so much admired in later centuries.” (C 3)
• “Chinese ... artists were less fond of rigid angular forms than the Egyptians had been, and preferred swerving curves. When a Chinese artist had to represent a prancing horse, he seemed to fit it together out of a number of rounded shapes.” (C 7)
• “We think of an artist as a person with a sketchbook who sits down and makes a drawing from life whenever he feels inclined. But we know that the whole training and upbringing of the medieval artist was very different ... Never in his career would he be faced with the necessity of taking a sketchbook and drawing something from life.” (C 10)
• Byzantine art preserved Hellenistic discoveries: “How the face is modelled in light and shade and ... a correct understanding of the principles of foreshortening.” (C 10)
• “Light not only helps to model the the forms of the figures, but is equal in importance to perspective in creating the illusion of depth.” (C 13)
• “Only Leonardo found the true solution to the problem. The painter must leave the beholder something to guess. If the outlines are not quite so firmly drawn, if the form is left a little vague, as though disappearing into a shadow, this impression of dryness and stiffness will be avoided.” (C 15)
• In the Mona Lisa: “Expression rests mainly in two features: the corners of the mouth, and the corners of the eyes. now it is precisely these parts which Leonardo has left deliberately indistinct, by letting them merge into a soft shadow.” (C 15) Furthermore the two sides don’t match so that “when we focus the left side of the picture, the woman looks somehow taller or more erect than if we focus the right side. And her face, too, seems to change.” (C 15)
• “The sacred scenes from the Bible were crowded out by what appeared to be a training team of young athletes.” (C 189)
• “Great innovators in art have often concentrated on the essential things and refused to worry about technical perfection in the usual sense.” (C 18)
• “This is a common mistake which we are apt to make about artists. We are often inclined to confuse their work with their person.” (C 18)
• “Goya asserted his Independence of the conventions of the past. ... The most striking fact about Goya's prints is that they are not illustrations of any known subject, either biblical, historical or genre. Most of them are fantastic visions of witches and uncanny apparitions.” (C 24)
• “It really comes to this - that where there is no choice there is no expression.” (C 25)
• “The word Art has acquired a different meaning for us ... the history of art and the nineteenth century can never become the history of the most successful and best paid masters of that time. We see it rather as the history of a handful of lonely men who had the courage and the persistence to think for themselves, to examine conventions fearlessly and critically and thus to create new possibilities for their art.” (C 25)
• “The longing of Victorian masters for Innocence was too self-contradictory to succeed.” (C 25)
• “Manet and his followers brought about a revolution in the rendering of colours which is almost comparable with the revolution in the representation of forms brought about by the Greeks. They discovered that, if we look at nature in the open, we do not see individual objects each with its own colour but rather a bright medley of tints which blend in our eye or really in her mind.” (C 25)
• “We call ‘picturesque’ such motifs as we have seen in pictures before.” (C 25)
• “The critics who had laughed has proved very fallible indeed. Had they bought these canvases rather than mocked them they would have become rich. Criticism therefore suffered a loss of prestige from which it never recovered. The struggle of the Impressionists became the treasured legend of all innovators in art.” (C 25)
• “Ever since artists had become self-conscious about ‘style’ they felt distrustful of conventions and impatient of mere skill.” (C 26)
• “Frank Lloyd Wright ... saw that what mattered in a house was the rooms, and not the facade.” (C 27)
• “This search had revealed the conflict between pattern and solidity.” (C 26)
• “The legend has sprung up that all great artists were always rejected and derided in their time and so the public now makes the laudable effort no longer to reject or deride anything.” (Postscript)
• “Art differs from other forms of creation in being less dependent on intermediaries. Books must be printed and published, plays and compositions must be performed; and this need of an apparatus applies a certain break to extreme experiment.” (Postscript)

There are also a huge number of illustrations of wonderful art, some of which I had other appreciated before; others I had never even seen before.

An eye-opening read. April 2019; 501 pages

This is one of a selection of books I am reading to help me understand more about art. Others reviewed on this blog include:

• Seven Days in the Art World by Julia Thornton: a look at the institutions of the art world such as an auction, a fair, a magazine and the Biennale.
• Think Like an Artist by Will Gompertz which includes such insights as 'artists think big picture and fine detail' and 'artists steal'
• Ways of seeing by John Berger which is particularly good at sexism in art
• How art made the world by Nigel Spivey  which proposes that art has changed the way we think and altered our civilisations
• The Judgement of Paris by Ross King which is about the rise of the Impressionists
• Leonardo and the Last Supper by Ross King which is particularly good about the techniques of oil painting

"Michelangelo and the Pope's Ceiling" by Ross King

How the Sistine chapel was painted with a side order of Raphael working in the Papal Apartments.

The great thing about a Ross King book is that you learn history and history of art and at the same time you find out about the details of an artist's life. For example, originally the Sistine chapel ceiling was covered with stars, typical for vaults of that period, but subsidence led to cracking and an ugly white line of Polyfilla (or its Roman contemporary) across it so they had to repaint it. When Michelangelo started (on the flood scene) he had great problems with discolouration and mildew until someone reviewed the formula for the plaster he was using (which included Volcanic ash rather than sand) and realised he was using too much water. Michelangelo made sketches all the time of everything he saw and regularly reused things from other works of art: he seems to have stolen David's pose from a statue in Rome. Raphael also 'borrowed' often from Leonardo: the contrapposto pose of Eve in his Temptation seems to be a version of a sketch he made of Leonardo's Leda which is perhaps just as well since the original was destroyed Madam de Maintenon, the second wife of Louis XIV. Even just discovering what contrapposto means and why artists use it made the book worth reading! Another example is Botticelli's Venus.

This book is actually three stories woven into one. Michelangelo and his team of assistants are toiling away on their scaffold frescoing the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel (standing, bending backwards, not lying on their backs which myth arose from a mistranslation of the Italian). Meanwhile Raphael is frescoing the Pope's private apartments with scenes such as The School of Athens. And il papa terribile, the warmongering Julius II, is fighting the Venetians and the French for mastery of the Papal States.

Three immensely contrasting personalities. Julius is larger than life, growing a white beard in defiance of canon law, hunting pheasant with guns in defiance of canon law, and eating, drinking and making love to excess (in defiance of canon law). Meanwhile, Raphael is a sweet young man with an incredibly sunny disposition, beloved by everyone, especially women, from baker's daughters to high class courtesans. And Michelangelo is slovenly, depressive, ugly, and probably chaste, moping about on his own. There is a story that an isolated Michelangelo met Raphael and his crowd of admirers one day and sneered at him for being a 'bravo'; Raphael returned by pointing out the Michelangelo was friendless like a 'hangman'.

There is so much of interest in this story told as usual with Ross King's easy-to-read narrative style. It's wonderful.

March 2016; 296 pages

Other great Ross King books I have read include:

• Leonardo and the Last Supper: a wonderful description of how a great but wayward artist produced a masterpiece
• Brunelleschi's Dome: about how the dome of the Duomo in Florence was built
• The Judgement of Paris: the rivalry between Meissonier (I'd never heard of this great artist before!) and Monet which led to the triumph of Impressionism

"The Judgement of Paris" by Ross King

This is a book about Meissonier, the highest paid artist in the world in the 1860s, whom almost no one knows now, and Manet, who sold almost nothing in the 1860s but is now regarded as the father of Impressionism. It is set in Paris between the years 1863 and 1873 and most of the action revolves around the attempts by the Parisian artists to exhibit their work in the annual Salon, the equivalent of the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition in London.

Whch makes the book sound dry as dust. But the genius of Ross King is that he can take this tiny little bit of history and weave a story which incorporates so many other things. Because this was the Paris of the Second Empire when Emperor Napoleon III ruled over a city which had been transformed by the Boulevards of Baron Haussman; the Paris of cafes, artists, prostitutes (one in six Parisians was a sex worker) and the demi-monde; the Paris of the Universal Exposition, of glamour and glitter and industrialisation; the Paris of the secret police, of censorship, of political repression. And in 1871 it was the Paris which was beseiged as France lost the Franco-Prussian war and the Emperor fled; it was the Paris of the Commune.

This was a fascinating time, a revolutionary time, and art underwent its own revolution. But, as always, the opponents in the revolution were so much more interesting than their stereotypes.

Meissonier painted tiny oil paintings of incredible and exacting detail. He had made his fortune with pictures of Bonhommes (a bit like the Laughing Cavalier) but he longed to do more heroic work. He toiled for years over (slightly) larger works depicting the glories (and the tragedies) of the first Napoleon. He was a studio painter who rarely painted outdoors but his preparations and research were meticulous. He attended the Battle of Solferino for research and he had a train track laid in his garden so that he could move alongside galloping horses and study them precisely.

Manet really wasn't an impressionist and he certainly shouldn't be confused with Monet, who was. Manet's inspiration came from the old masters. His controversial Dejeuner sur l'Herbe featured a riverscape inspired by a Titian in the Louvre, a female nude inspired by Rubens and a clothed man who reclines in the same position as Adam on the Sistine chapel ceiling, albeit reversed. His even more controversial Olympia was a copy of another Titian. But both paintings owed much of their daring and their notoriety from the clever visual hints added by Manet (such as a black cat with an erect tail hinting at pussy); even the name Olympia hinted that the woman was a prostitute and the position of the left hand suggests that she isn't just being modest (and did you know that our word pudenda for female genitalia comes from the Latin pudens which means shame).

Manet must have been a resilient man with enormous self-belief. Year after year he exhibited to howls of derision. People laughed at his paintings, they said he was useless. It must have been hard for his models. Victorine posed naked for Dejeuner sur l'Herbe; many horrible comments were made about her ugliness; it was assumed she was a prostitute; she was laughed at. Next year she posed again, naked again, as Olympia (clearly a prostitute), and again was on the receiving end of ridicule and scorn. It wasn't even as if the pay was good and Manet took hours and hours over his models!

I learned so much from this book, from the controversial career of Napoleon III (two failed coups before he came to power including escaping from a French prison by dressing as a workman and walking out of the door with a plank across his shoulders) to the derivation of pompous (the French called the overblown toga-and-sandals paintings of David and fellows 'pompiers' because the helmets of the heroes resembled the helmets of French firemen) to Baudelaire, notorious author of Fleur du Mal, who so courted notoriety that on a visit to Belgium he pretended that he had killed and eaten his step-father to Whistler who had been expelled from West Point by Robert Lee to Manet who failed his naval training (proved by the fact that on one seascape the flags and sails of one of the boats are being blown in opposite directions) to the fact the landscape painting only really took off after oil paints began to be available in metal tubes rather than the much less wieldy pig's bladders ....

Written in 38 short chapters, this is a very easy read. It is so packed with characters and incidents that it never flags. It is brilliant and deserves a wide readership.

Ross King also wrote (reviewed in this blog):

• The wonderful Leonardo and the Last Supper about Da Vinci's iconic painting
• The even more brilliant Brunelleschi's Dome; the history of the second largest dome in the world atop the Duomo in Florence
• The excellent Michelangelo and the Pope's ceiling about the Sistine chapel, what else?

This is one of a selection of books I am reading to help me understand more about art. Others reviewed on this blog include:

• Seven Days in the Art World by Julia Thornton: a look at the institutions of the art world such as an auction, a fair, a magazine and the Biennale.
• Think Like an Artist by Will Gompertz which includes such insights as 'artists think big picture and fine detail' and 'artists steal'
• Ways of seeing by John Berger which is particularly good at sexism in art
• How art made the world by Nigel Spivey  which proposes that art has changed the way we think and altered our civilisations
• The Story of Art by E F Gombrich, a fascinating historical tour through art

November 2015; 374 pages

"50 Art ideas you really need to know" by Susie Hodge

This is another book in the '... ideas you really need to know series'. I have found these of mixed value. Some of them have been brilliant, others tedious

My main problem with this title is that it doesn't deliver, for me, what it says in the title. These are 50 art movements, which I think are separate from ideas, and there is an extraordinary emphasis on art movements since 1900. Impressionism, for example, is idea 19 in a chronologically arranged book. I felt that I did not 'really need to know' the intricate details of Colour Field painting and Mexican Mural art; many of these merited a line or at best a paragraph under the heading of Modern art rather than the two page spread each received. In this way of doing things Minmalism, which seems to have lasted a truly minimal seven years, receives the same space as the Early Renaissance (170 years) or Byzantine art (over a thousand years).

I wanted a book that went into art ideas. My needs were best met by the glossary. Why not a two page spread on Perspective, or Chiaroscuro, or Sfumato, or Oil painting? Actually Perspective and Oil painting don't even get into the glossary!

I felt I earnt little of value from this book. August 2014; 203 pages

"Leonardo and the Last Supper" by Ross King

Ostensibly a history of a painting, this book has so much more. We learn about the wars between the Italian city states of the renaissance as the French armies sweep south (successful because warfare in mediaeval Italy was an almost bloodless affair of mercenary posturing) through Florence to take Naples, only to be defeated by Syphilis. We learn of the hothead preacher Savanorola and his cataclysmic regime in Florence. We learn of the Dominicans and the Franciscans and of Pope Alexander Borgia and his warlord son Cesare.

Most of all, of course, we learn about Leonardo. He was an illegitimate left-hander, probably gay, who was so enthusiastic about everything that he was almost constitutionally unable to actually finish anything. However, he had such enormous talent that his patrons continued to patronise him and the few artworks he actually produced were revolutionary in their impact upon art (even if, with the Last Supper, his experimental techniques meant that it deteriorated within a few years of its unveiling). And we learn about his models, including his apprentice whom he nicknamed 'devil' for his thieving and bad behaviour but whom he tolerated till his death, probably because he had a crush on him. We learn about his belief that you can tell a story from hand gestures and how he collected those gestures from watching people having arguments and how he used them in the painting. We learn about the techniques of fresco and the new use of oils that Leonardo pioneered. We learn how he composed the painting, about the religious ideas that went into it. We investigate the iconography of fruit.

By the way we watch the iciest of cold water being cascaded upon the Da Vinci code. Sophie sees the figure on Jesus' right is a woman and believes it to be Mary Magdalene rather than St John. "Leonardo was skilled at painting the difference between the sexes" states the DVC. In fact, as King shows, Leonardo rejoices in androgynous figures including another St John who is a dead ringer for the St John in the Last Supper. Both may be women, or both may have used the devilish apprentice; Leonardo seems to have liked effeminate looking young men.

This is a brilliant, fantastic and absorbing study in which the painting of a single work of art is used to enlighten a whole historical period. Wonderful. May 2014; 275 pages

Also read these reviewed books by Ross King:

• Brunelleschi's Dome about the building of the dome over the Duomo in Florence, but also lots about renaissance Florence
• The Judgement of Paris: as the Second Empire dies Impressionism is born: Meissonier, Manet, Monet and the rest; Napoleon III, the Franco-Prussian war, the Paris Commune and much much more!

This is one of a selection of books I am reading to help me understand more about art. Others reviewed on this blog include:

• Seven Days in the Art World by Julia Thornton: a look at the institutions of the art world such as an auction, a fair, a magazine and the Biennale.
• Think Like an Artist by Will Gompertz which includes such insights as 'artists think big picture and fine detail' and 'artists steal'
• Ways of seeing by John Berger which is particularly good at sexism in art
• How art made the world by Nigel Spivey  which proposes that art has changed the way we think and altered our civilisations
• The Story of Art by E F Gombrich, a fascinating historical tour through art

"The Pocket Encyclopaedia of Impressionists"

The Impressionists were an brilliantly talented bunch of artists who happened to meet in Paris  and studied together and worked together and exhibited together and in some cases lived together.

This books explains their incredible history and then gives an authoritative analysis of some of the leading lights including the incomparable Monet, anarchist Pisarro, unwillingly controversial Manet, balletophile Degas, working class Renoir and gentle landscapist Sisley. It explains about their key beliefs, such as painting landscapes in the open air and their use of brilliant colours and concentrating on patches of light but it also explains which artists followed which styles.

My only complaint about the formidably impressive book is that the illustrations rarely co-ordinate with the text so that you are reading about one painting while seeing another or you are flicking through the book to understand what they are talking about. Perhaps a slideshow version of the book might be the answer.