COLLEAGUES AND RIVALS: In this case, not fellow painters, but an architect, Brunelleschi, and a sculptor, Donatello. Together, the three ushered in the Renaissance in the visual arts. RAPHAEL (RAFFAELLO SANZIO)
(1483-1520)
Raphael’s The School of Athens
Button up your overcoat. That chill you’re feeling, coupled with the fact that, if you took History of Art 101, he was the one you got hit with the week before Christmas vacation, means that it’s impossible to smile brightly when the name Raphael comes up, the way you do with Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo— the two contemporaries with whom he forms a trinity that is to the High Renaissance what turkey, ham, and Swiss are to a chef’s salad. That said, the thing about Raphael is—and has always been—that he never makes mistakes, fails to achieve desired effects, or forgets what it is, exactly, he’s supposed to be doing next Thursday morning. He perfected picture painting, the way engineers perfected bridge building or canal digging or satellite launching; each of his canvases is an exercise in balance, in organization, in clarity and harmony, in coherence and gracefulness. For four hundred years, right through the nineteenth century, Raphael was every painter’s idol; lately, though, he’s begun to seem a little bland, as well as a lot sticky-fingered, absorbing and assimilating and extracting from other artists (especially Michelangelo) rather than trying to figure things out for himself. Note: With the High Renaissance, painting packs its bags and moves from Florence to Rome, where the papacy will take over the Medicis’ old Daddy Warbucks role, and where Raphael—handsome, tactful, and possessed of a good sense of timing—will earn his reputation as the courtier among painters, a fixture at the dinner parties of popes and princes.
KEY WORKS: The early Madonnas (e.g., Madonna of the Goldfinch, Uffizi, Florence), the portrait of Pope Leo X (Pitti Palace, Florence), the murals in the Stanza della Segnatura (Rome), then the Pope’s private library, especially the one entitled The School of Athens.
COLLEAGUES AND RIVALS: Michelangelo and, to a lesser extent (at least they weren’t constantly at each other’s throats), Leonardo. TITIAN (TIZIANO VECELLIO)
(1477-1576)
Welcome to Venice—opulent, voluptuous, pagan, on the profitable trade route to the Orient, given to both civic propaganda and conspicuous consumption— where light and color (as opposed to Florence’s structure and balance) are the name of the game. With Titian, the most important of the Venetians, painting becomes a dog-eat-dog profession with agents and PR people and client mailings, a business in which religious and political demands are nothing next to those of the carriage—make that gondola—trade. Titian was versatile (he did everything an oil painter could do, from altarpieces to erotica, from straight portraits to complex mythologies) and obscenely long-lived (it took the plague to bring him down, at something like ninety-nine), and he dominated the art scene for seventy-five years, with his flesh-and-blood, high-wide-and-handsome ways. He presided at the divorce of painting from architecture and its remarriage to the easel, and assured that the primary medium of the new union would be oil on canvas. Don’t expect rigor or even real imagination from the man, though; what’s on display here are energy and expansiveness. Prestige point: In his old age, Titian, whose eyes weren’t what they used to be, began painting in overbold strokes and fudged contours, encouraging modern critics to praise his newfound profundity and cite him as the first Impressionist, a man who painted how he saw things, not how he knew them to be.
Titian’s Venus of Urbino
KEY WORKS: It’s the corpus, not the individual canvas, that counts. Right up there, though: Madonna with Members of the Pesaro Family (Frari, Venice), Rape of Europa (Gardner Museum, Boston), Venus of Urbino (Pitti Palace, Florence), and Christ Crowned with Thorns (Alte Pinakothek, Munich).
COLLEAGUES AND RIVALS: Giorgione, who played sensualist, die-young Keats to Titian’s long-lived, Spirit-of-the-Age Wordsworth. EL GRECO
(DOMENICOS THEOTOCOPOULOS)
(1541-1614)
He was, in the words of Manet, “the great alternative.” Though of late El Greco’s been positioned as the seasoned thinker, rather than the God-happy wild man, either way he was too much of an anomaly to have real impact on his contemporaries—or to found a school of Spanish painting. (Both of those would have to wait for Velázquez to come along, a few years later.) In fact, it was the twentieth century that made El Greco’s reputation, applauding his distortions— especially those gaunt, tense, strung-out figures—and his creation of an inward, fire-and-ice world, complete with angst and hallucination. From Van Gogh through the young Picasso and the German Expressionists, up to the American Abstract Expressionists of the Forties and Fifties, all of whom had a big I-gotta-be-me streak, El Greco has served as a patron saint. A little history: “El Greco” was the nickname given to this footloose Greek (“Greco,” get it?) by the citizens of rarefied, decaying Toledo, Spain, when he arrived there after a boyhood spent among Byzantine icons, followed by stints in Venice (where he glanced at the Titians) and Rome (where he offered to redo Michelangelo’s Sistine Ceiling). Which is funny, inasmuch as we tend to think of his vision as more Spanish than anybody’s but Cervantes’. For art historians, he holds two records: “Last of the Mannerists” (those anticlassical eccentrics who knew you couldn’t top Raphael at the perfection game, and decided to put all their chips on weirdness instead) and “most disturbingly personal painter ever.” Critics go into raptures over his “incandescent”—some prefer “phosphorescent”—spirituality. Whatever: Here’s a painter you’ll always be able to recognize on any wall in any museum in the world.
El Greco’s Toledo in a Storm
KEY WORKS: First and foremost, Burial of Count Orgaz (Santo Tomé, Toledo), the largest and most resplendent El Greco. Also: Toledo in a Storm and Cardinal Niño de Guevara (both at the Metropolitan, New York), the latter a portrait of Spain’s menacing, utterly unholy-looking Grand Inquisitor.
COLLEAGUES AND RIVALS: Like we say, none among his contemporaries. But forms, with Velázquez and Goya, the trinity of Great Spanish Painters. PETER PAUL RUBENS (1577-1640)
Not an anal retentive. From factory headquarters in Antwerp (now Belgium, then still the Spanish Netherlands), Rubens, the “prince of painters,” purveyed his billowy, opulent, robust, and sensual portraits, altarpieces, landscapes, historical tableaux, and mythological treatments to the Church, the town fathers, private patrons, and virtually every royal household in Europe. (It helped that he was as much a diplomat as an artist, entrusted with secrets of state by, among others, the Infanta of Spain, and hence provided with entrée to all the best palaces.) To be associated with the name Rubens: First, success beyond anybody’s wildest dreams: financial, professional, and personal. Second, Flemish painting, which began with the restrained van Eyck, proceeded through Bosch and Brueghel, and reached its culmination now, an art that was drumming up a full-tilt Catholic sumptuousness even as its north-of-the-border Dutch cousin was becoming more and more Protestant and bourgeois. Third, the concept of the baroque, the organizing principle behind all seventeenth-century art— dynamic, emotional, exuberant, and asymmetrical in all those places where the classicism of the High Renaissance had been static, poised, and balanced; a principle that, among other things, decreed that the work of art was greater than the sum of its parts. Anyway, Rubens created and created and created, and if his altarpieces didn’t seem particularly mystical or his bacchanals all that wild and crazy, still, there was enough sheer activity in each of them that you couldn’t really squawk. For the conscientious: There’s always the chance that you’ll forget which painting is Rubens’ and which is Titian’s (and anyone who tells you that’s impossible because the two men are separated by a hundred years and half of Europe is lying). Just remember that Titian subordinated the whole of his painting to its parts, Rubens the parts to the whole; that Titian valued serenity, even in an orgy scene, Rubens tumult; and that Titian painted the equivalent of Vassar coeds, Rubens Ziegfeld showgirls.