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Nicholas Poussin (1593-1665)

The Martyrdom of St. Erasmus, 1628

Erasmus was a bishop executed by the Romans in the early Fourth Century. He would later become the patron saint of sailors. This image shows him being disemboweled, his intestine being wound up on a windlass, a device used for winding up a ship’s anchor. Poussin got this commission for this 13′ tall St. Peters altar painting through the influence of Castiano del Pozzo, the collector, ancient literature enthusiast and secretary to Cardinal Francesco Berberini (Berberinna would later become Pope Urban VIII).

Poussin is especially important because he was one of the first artists to express his intentions in writing. His ideas, mostly expressed in letters, became influential to the development of French Classical taste in academic art of the 19th Century. Poussin was well-educated; he could read Latin and knew of the authors whose works he cited in his paintings. Poussin came from Normandy, but spent the majority of his career in Italy. He moved to Rome in 1624, where he was popular among the literati, especially del Pozzo.

Guido Reni (1575-1642)

Cleopatra, 1638

While Reni was far more influential than Artemesia Gentileschi, this painting shows evidence that Reni had very little understanding of the female torso. The elite taste of the 17th Century was trained to look at the female figure in terms of ancient Roman statuary. The female form was considered at that time to be an imperfect derivative of the male form.

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Comments on Thomas McEvilley: Sculpture, Painting and the Post-Modern Reversal of Values

In the second chapter of his book, Sculpture and the Age of Doubt, Thomas McEvilley delineates the role of sculpture within the mid 20th Century modern/postmodern sea change. He presents an amalgam of “post cultures� (post-historical, post-Enlightenment, post-industrial, and post-Modern) as all sharing the goal of creating a disjunct between the present and the epistemological influences of the very recent, tragically misdirected past. The unprecedented bloodletting of the First World War, followed by the horrific machination of the Holocaust and the finality of atomic warfare in the Second, left little to be imagined of the destruction to which supposedly civilized, Enlightened people could be motivated. Modernist ideals, such as the essential goodness of technological progress, and the Enlightenment-derived notion of teleological historical progression, were irrevocably shattered, and the post-cultures that appeared in the wake of the first two World Wars were all attempts to push beyond this paradigm.

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Annibale Carracci (1516-1569)

The Triumph of Bacchus and Ariadne

Commemorates the marriage of Bacchus to Ariadne. Bacchus took pity upon Ariadne, who had been rejected by Thesius, lord of Athens, after she helped him to escape from the labrynth beneath the palace of King Minos. Thesius left her weeping on the island of Naxos. The procession is led by satyrs and woodland creatures.

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Artemesia Gentileschi

Susanna and the Elders, 1610

From the book of Daniel. Susanna is having her virtue compromised by two lascivious older men who threaten to expose her as an adultress if she does not comply with their sexual demands. The figure is on display, a pyramid bears down on her. Pre Caravaggio influence. Compared with other contemporary and previous depictions of this story, (Guido Reni, 1620; Tintoretto, 1555; Hanshorst, 1655) Gentileschi was one of the first artists to accurately depict the female form. The tastes of the time did not care especially for the female figure in painting, and tradition had long held against using live female models.

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Michaelangelo Maurici da Caravaggio (1573-1610)

Bacchus, c.1596

This seduction painting, made for Cardinal del Monte, is the most successful of several Bacchus paintings. Bacchus, with his sensuous, full mouth and dreamy eyes, offers the viewer a drink while he pulls at the knot on his robe. The basket of rotting fruit presents a subtext of moralization; the boy will also age as time passes. Although Caravaggio did not paint what can be seen through the glass as it would be realistically distorted, he is considered to be more of a Baroque realist than a Baroque classicist (such as Carracci). This distinction is not due to an especially accurate technical rendering, for there are many examples such as the one previously stated throughout his work, but to the subject matter Caravaggio used.

Baroque Art Class Notes - Intro

“Baroque” is a term that was introduced during the late 18th Century revival of interest in Classical Greek and Roman art and architecture (Neoclassicism). “Baroque” now refers, in a general sense, to all European art of the 17th century, but originally denoted that art which emulated a Renaissance-era interpretation of Classical style. The term was originally used in a derogatory context to describe art that was regarded as showy, vulgar, and overdecorated. Today, the term is sometimes used to describe a person with an flamboyant or overly-dramatic personality.

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Rosalyn Krauss and Rodin

Gates of Hell, 1880-1917

In Narrative Time: The Question of the Gates of Hell, Rosalyn Krauss states that Rodin represents the first great artistic attack on classical rationalism. She contrasts the formal and conceptual innovations of Rodin with a detailed formal analysis of François Rude’s La Marseillaise and Antonio Canova’s The Three Graces.

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