The Deaths of the Saints

Not for the Faint-Hearted
I was browsing for images of St Blaise today, and stumbled across this surprsing image of the saint. Now, it's not pious iconography, but I'm sure that at least some of my readership will enjoy the Deaths of the Saints blog. (Maybe this comes under the Punk Catholic heading...) If you're not squeamish, you should probably check out St Agatha, St Theobald and St Bartholomew.

St Joan of Arc
More in tune with the Hermeneutic of Continuity, the excellent Matt Alderman has recently completed two images of St Joan of Arc - here and here.

QE1 Portrait Discovered...

Via the Telegraph:

A lost portrait of a young Elizabeth I that was discovered in the attic of a country house has intrigued historians after X-rays revealed that it was painted over an earlier picture of the monarch.
The painting, which had lain unnoticed in the dirty loft for more than a century, depicts the Queen as a pale, pious and austere young woman, and is one of the few pictures to show the 16th century royal in the early years of her reign.
Elizabeth, who is dressed in simple black clothes and clutches a Bible, was believed to have been around 26 when the portrait was painted.
But X-ray scans of the canvas have uncovered an earlier portrait of the monarch, in which she was drawn without the Bible and with a more ostentatious ruff.
"The assumption is that the artist – and we do not know who he is - did an intitial portrait, and either he or the Queen did not like it," said Philip Mould, the London art dealer who owns the work.

300 BC Cup

I love found artifact stories - and this one is exceptional:

The grandson of a rag and bone man who acquired a small metal cup is in line for a windfall after discovering it is a pure gold vessel dating back to the third or fourth century BC.
The piece could be worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.
The 5½ in cup, believed to be from the Achaemenid empire, has two female faces looking in opposite directions, their foreheads decorated with a snake motif.
Experts were baffled by the piece, but laboratory analysis of the gold put it in the third or fourth century BC. The Achaemenid empire was based around Persia, but at its height stretched from Iran to Libya. It was wiped out by Alexander the Great in 330BC.

There's a picture on the Telegraph's website.

Trinity Sunday

Andrea del Sarto's Disputation on the Holy Trinity. The saints shown are Sts Augustine, Laurence, Peter Martyr, Francis, Mary Magdalen and Sebastian.

From the conclusion of St Augustine's De Trinitate:

O Lord our God, we believe in You, the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit. For the Truth would not say, Go, baptize all nations in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, unless You were a Trinity. Nor would you, O Lord God, bid us to be baptized in the name of Him who is not the Lord God. Nor would the divine voice have said, Hear, O Israel, the Lord your God is one God, unless You were so a Trinity as to be one Lord God. And if You, O God, were Yourself the Father, and were Yourself the Son, Your Word Jesus Christ, and the Holy Spirit your gift, we should not read in the book of truth, God sent His Son; nor would You, O Only-begotten, say of the Holy Spirit, Whom the Father will send in my name; and, Whom I will send to you from the Father. Directing my purpose by this rule of faith, so far as I have been able, so far as You have made me to be able, I have sought You, and have desired to see with my understanding what I believed; and I have argued and labored much. O Lord my God, my one hope, hearken to me, lest through weariness I be unwilling to seek You, but that I may always ardently seek Your face. Do Thou give strength to seek, who has made me find You, and has given the hope of finding You more and more. My strength and my infirmity are in Your sight: preserve the one, and heal the other. My knowledge and my ignorance are in Your sight; where You have opened to me, receive me as I enter; where You have closed, open to me as I knock. May I remember You, understand You, love You. Increase these things in me, until You renew me wholly. I know it is written, In the multitude of speech, you shall not escape sin. But O that I might speak only in preaching Your word, and in praising You! Not only should I so flee from sin, but I should earn good desert, however much I so spoke. For a man blessed of You would not enjoin a sin upon his own true son in the faith, to whom he wrote, Preach the word: be instant in season, out of season. Are we to say that he has not spoken much, who was not silent about Your word, O Lord, not only in season, but out of season? But therefore it was not much, because it was only what was necessary. Set me free, O God, from that multitude of speech which I suffer inwardly in my soul, wretched as it is in Your sight, and flying for refuge to Your mercy; for I am not silent in thoughts, even when silent in words. And if, indeed, I thought of nothing save what pleased You, certainly I would not ask You to set me free from such multitude of speech. But many are my thoughts, such as You know, thoughts of man, since they are vain. Grant to me not to consent to them; and if ever they delight me, nevertheless to condemn them, and not to dwell in them, as though I slumbered. Nor let them so prevail in me, as that anything in my acts should proceed from them; but at least let my opinions, let my conscience, be safe from them, under Your protection. When the wise man spoke of You in his book, which is now called by the special name of Ecclesiasticus, We speak, he said, much, and yet come short; and in sum of words, He is all. When, therefore, we shall have come to You, these very many things that we speak, and yet come short, will cease; and You, as One, wilt remain all in all. And we shall say one thing without end, in praising You in One, ourselves also made one in You. O Lord the one God, God the Trinity, whatever I have said in these books that is of Yours, may they acknowledge who are Yours; if anything of my own, may it be pardoned both by You and by those who are Yours. Amen.

Judith and Holofernes...

I was chatting with Cnytr recently, about the manner in which Judith slaying Holofernes is usually painted. Knowing her prejudices about the religious art of the Renaissance, I proposed that it normally wasn't painted as religious art at all, but served as a particularly dramatic scene from scripture which gave the artist a chance to show their mettle. For instance, I argued, this painting of Artemisia Gentileschi has nothing particularly religious or devotional about it at all.

In fact, I added, it could just as easily be from the director's cut of a 21st Century Version of Pride and Prejudice - Jane and Lizzy getting revenge on that cad Wickham.
The Cnytr disagreed. She suggested I search for some illustrated manuscripts in order to see the Slaying of Holofernes presented in a devotional form. So, I did a bit of googling and found the following extraordinary comparison.

I've read a fair bit of patristic and some medieval exegesis, and so I'm fairly familiar with the typological parallels between the Old and New Testament. However, I'd never come across this one before. Judith slaying Holofernes is presented as a prefigurement of the Virgin Mary defeating the Devil by giving birth to Christ.
Pretty cool, no?

Dying for Art...

Interesting news story:

German artist Gregor Schneider has come up with the idea of putting dying people on exhibition as a way of normalizing the issue of death.
"Unfortunately today, death and the road to death are about suffering. Coming to terms with death as I plan it can take away the pain of dying for us," said the country's most controversial artist.
"I want to display a person dying naturally in the piece or somebody who has just died," he said, claiming this way a taboo could be done away with.
Justifying the bizarre proposal, he added an artist can contribute something to this issue by building places where people can die with dignity.
The artist achieved prominence at the 2001 Biennale Venice Film Festival where he received the Golden Lion award for his "totes Haus ur" or "Dead House Ur", a complex of 22 rooms and dead-end paths, and is of domestic and international renown for his morbid interior installations.

Setting aside the whole voyeuristic aspect, what's especially thought-provoking about this story is that it's a symptom of modern society's desire to hide death. Assuming this guy is sincere (rather than simply sensationalistic), he's certainly reacting against a tendency to deny the reality of death.
Of course, despite this, his approach is fundamentally unsatisfactory - his attempt to normalize death misses one of the central Christian insights about death. It's a scandal. We're not supposed to die. Death is linked directly to sin. Therefore, we can never truly understand it as something we can be neutral towards, something we can treat as fully natural. However, because of Christ's death on the Cross, we can understand the evil of death as being an evil which can be turned to a good end. Meditating on our mortality puts life in its proper perspective; facing the evil of death with hope, confidence and resignation to God's will has ever been the Christian path from this life to the next.

14th Century Frescoes from SS Quattro Coronati

Click to enlarge any of the images


Three saints


St Peter



Christ


St Bartholomew - martyred by being flayed


Note the two monks talking at the bottom of the picture. One of them is Magister Rainaldus. It seems that this might be a picture of the rector of the church discussing things with the architect.


St Bernard and a little Cisterican

The Jerome K Jerome Fresco

From the Church of SS.Quattro Coronati.

What is Mannerism?

The ever-erudite Cranky Professor explains with the help of a Vasari fresco in Rome's Palazzo della Cancelleria... the Sala dei Cento Giorni to be precise:

The name of the room comes from the funniest anecdote in Renaissance art history (a field of striking solemnity and self-importance, I usually find). Vasari, now better known as a biographer than a painter, showed the room to his old master MIchelangelo and bragged that he had completed the work in 100 days. Michelangelo said, "It shows." I rather liked it, but then I have decadent tendencies. Paul III surveying New St Peter's dressed as the Jewish High Priest really made me happy! There was a scene of the distribution of cardinals hats to semi-nude men in advanced states of ascetical skinniness that made no sense at all - that's Mannerism for you!

Not finding any pictures of that on the web, I managed to snap one myself. Apologies for the quality... the lighting in the room is really unusual and my primitive digital camera did the best it could. Click on the picture to enlarge.
Note the little stack of mitres and galleros in the bottom right hand corner, the cornucopia pouring forth gold coins and the unusual snake-eating nude. Anyone willing to explain this picture of Paul III creating Cardinals is welcome to do so in the comments.

Station at Santa Balbina

Today's Lenten Station is the much-overlooked church of S.Balbina on the Aventine. There are some lovely remains of frescoes on the left wall of the church.


St Peter being crucified - to avoid the inevitable question, I'd better point out that he's said to have been crucified upside-down.


Christ.

At S.Maria Maggiore

During the week, I blogged about the tomb of Bartolomeo Sacchi, also known as Platina and asked for help in translating the Greek inscription. Anyway, I've taken another picture of the Greek (click to enlarge) which should help any friendly 'Grecian' (thanks Petellius!) to translate it.

I also thought I'd share with you this marble relief (Lirioni, c.1730) which is on one's left as one enters the Basilica.
It commemorates the attempted assassination of Pope Marinus I (882-884) during Mass. However, as soon as the assassin crossed the threshold of the church he was stricken blind and rendered incapable of fulfilling his task.

Jean Preston

I've blogged previously about Jean Preston, the deceased Oxford woman in whose attic were found two Fra Angelicos. One of her relations said: "Auntie Jean knew everything there was to know about medieval literature, but not a lot about art." The Cranky Professor and I found that statement dubious at best.
Well, there's an update to the story, and it seems that Jean Preston was quite the collector:

A collection of paintings found in a pensioner's modest house was worth more than £2.7 million.
After Jean Preston died two years ago, two paintings by the Renaissance artist Fra Angelico were found behind the door of the spare room in her two-up, two-down terraced home in Oxford. The works sold for £1.7 million at auction, a record for a sale outside London.
Guy Schwinge, of Duke's auction house in Dorchester, Dorset, said: "Her family told us that there may be some interesting works of art inside her house. That was something of an understatement.
"In almost every room there were works of art that were quite staggering in their sheer quality and importance."
A rare edition of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, worth nearly £100,000, was found in her wardrobe.
Two pre-Raphaelite masterpieces worth more than £1 million were also discovered - a painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti in the kitchen and a work by Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones in her sitting room.

Personally, the pre-Raphaelites leave me cold.

A question

In Spe Salvi the Pope makes the following point:

In the arrangement of Christian sacred buildings, which were intended to make visible the historic and cosmic breadth of faith in Christ, it became customary to depict the Lord returning as a king—the symbol of hope—at the east end; while the west wall normally portrayed the Last Judgement as a symbol of our responsibility for our lives—a scene which followed and accompanied the faithful as they went out to resume their daily routine. As the iconography of the Last Judgement developed, however, more and more prominence was given to its ominous and frightening aspects, which obviously held more fascination for artists than the splendour of hope, often all too well concealed beneath the horrors.

During the various discussions that have been happening on various 'blogs today, it's been pointed out that the Last Judgement is painted on the western wall of the Sistine Chapel. Now, it's not at all unusual for 'liturgical East' to be 'geographical West', I'm curious as to how it came about that the altar in the Sistine Chapel faces geographical west, towards something that iconographically belongs at the 'liturgical West'. Is there an interesting historical explanation?

Medieval Nativity Scene?

Via The Times:

Books on medieval art will have to be rewritten after an ivory carving long dismissed as a forgery was confirmed as a masterpiece of the 12th or 13th century.
For more than a century, scholars could not believe that the exquisite Nativity and Last Judgment diptych was genuine. They assumed it to have been carved in the 18th or 19th centuries, when Gothic-style ivories were made. Carbon14 dating tests done in Britain and France have now placed it firmly in the 12th or 13th century.
John Lowden, of the Courtauld Institute of Art, London – where it will have its first public display next month – said: “There was nothing else like it, therefore it wasn’t medieval.”
Throughout the 20th century it was in a private collection. Its previous provenance is unknown. In 1924 it was published by the great scholar Raymond Koechlin, who thought it too architectural to be medieval.
Professor Lowden said: “If you accept as genuine something that’s a fake, you distort the historical record. If you reject something that is genuine, that does more damage to historical records. What you’re saying, in this case, is that because it’s so beautifully carved, it can’t be medieval. If it is medieval, we have to change our view of ivory carving. It is really beautiful, extraordinarily detailed and lively. It draws you in to construct a narrative.”
He pointed to details such as angels announcing the birth of Christ to the shepherds, one of whom has been playing bagpipes: “He has taken the pipe out of his mouth and turned to express astonishment.” There are remarkable carvings of figures rising from tombs.
Two years after it was sold in Paris for €3,000 to the former owner of The Times, the late Lord Thomson of Fleet, it is now worth millions. Its first public show will be as part of an exhibition drawing on Lord Thomson’s magnificent collection formed over more than half a century. The display will feature about 45 of the finest medieval ivories.
There include statuettes of the Virgin and Child intended to stand on altars in chapels, small versions for the home and folding tablets or diptychs with scenes from the life of Christ, and a richly narrative 15th-century ivory comb, decorated with a carriage drawn by horse and mule, taking two couples to the fountain of youth.
A folding ivory tabernacle would have been used for personal devotion while travelling. Working with a block of ivory taken from the centre of the tusk, the sculptor cut away the material to form a standing Virgin and Child under a canopy supported on columns.
He then sliced thin panels off the sides and front of the block and carved them with scenes from Christ’s life in low relief. The hinged panels serve as small to protect the carved surfaces when closed and act as wings of a miniature altarpiece when open.

My scepticism about the media and their expertise means that I suspect the impact of this discovery is being somewhat exaggerated, however it's an interesting story. I'm also curious as to whether the Carbon 14 tests actually prove this to be medieval work.

The Preaching of St Stephen (Carpaccio)

More Leonardo Tomfoolery...

There's something about Leonardo da Vinci that brings out the cranks. Via the Telegraph we have the lastest crackpot theory:

A new storm is brewing in the world of Da Vinci theorists after a mysterious group claimed it has used mirrors to uncover hidden biblical images in some of the great master’s most famous works.
In recent years, art history scholars have unveiled Templar knights, Mary Magdalene, a child and a musical script hidden in the Italian’s paintings.

I'm tempted to say that 'scholars' is too strong a word.

It is well-documented that Da Vinci, who lived between 1452 and 1519, often wrote in mirror writing, either in an attempt to stop his rivals stealing his ideas or in a bid to hide his scientific theories, often deemed as subversive, from the powerful Roman Catholic Church.

There we go! A Leonardo story wouldn't be complete without a reference to the powerful Church... so powerful that 'mirror writing' would befuddle her secret agents.

But now a group known as The Mirror of the Sacred Scriptures and Paintings World Foundation believes that he applied the same technique to some of his best-known creations, including the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper, to conceal mysterious faces and religious symbols.
When applied to the sketch The Virgin and Child with Saint Anne and Saint John the Baptist, which hangs in London’s National Gallery, the authors say the mirror image reveals the ancient Old Testament god Jahveh, who "protects the soul of the body’s vices" and wears the Vatican’s crown.
Their theory would explain why many of Da Vinci’s characters seem to be pointing or staring into space, as if searching for the Divine.

Uh-huh.

The group claims they are indicating where the mirror should be placed to reveal the painting’s secrets.

I see. And what's the result? Darth Vader lives in Mona Lisa's sleeve.

According to the group, the same technique was used by Michelangelo and Raphael, in artwork exhibited in the Vatican, and Renaissance artists including the neoclassicist Jacques Louis David. Similar images have also been found in famous paintings and sculptures of Buddha.

Yes! It's a giant conspiracy, including not only Michelangelo and Raphael, but the much later French artist David and those crazy Buddhists.

The study’s authors wrote to the Vatican last year to explain their discovery, but received a lofty reply saying that while their findings would no doubt be the object of much discussion in the art history world, their ideas required "solid proof" and needed to be supported by a general consensus among art critics before they could be taken seriously.

A lofty reply, eh? They've reproduced it on their website. Not especially lofty, in my opinion. Maybe they were expecting the Pope to write back with pictures of himself traipsing around the Vatican museums with a mirror.

The latest theory, expounded by The Mirror of the Sacred Scriptures and Paintings group, whose website www.mirrorandart.com, is owned by the Sacred and Divine Reason and Foundation Corp, follows the revelation in July by an Italian amateur scholar that the Last Supper contained a hidden image of a woman holding a child.
The figure, he said, appeared when the fresco was superimposed with its mirror image and both were made partially transparent.

Music in Da Vinci's Last Supper?

From the Telegraph, another story purporting to report a discovery in Leonardo's Last Supper:

A computer technician claims to have discovered a real da Vinci code after finding music hidden in Leonardo's masterpiece, The Last Supper.

Giovanni Maria Pala said that the hands of Jesus and the Apostles, and the loaves of bread in the picture each represented a note, which formed a 40-second composition.

He made the discovery after superimposing a stave - the five lines used in sheet music - on the painting. The composition emerges when the "notes" are read right to left, following Leonardo's own technique.

Mr Pala, who will publish his findings in a book next week, said: "It sounded really solemn, almost like a requiem."

Alessandro Vezzosi, of Tuscany's Leonardo museum, said the theory was "plausible", but added: "There's always a risk of seeing something that is not there, but it's certain that the spaces [in the painting] are divided harmonically.

"Where you have harmonic proportions, you can find music."

*Rolls eyes*

Women in Art

500 Years of Female Portraits in Western Art

Blind Date Raphael for Sale

From the Telegraph:

One of the last great paintings by Raphael still in private hands is to be sold at Christie's next month with a guide price of up to £15 million.
The portrait of Lorenzo de Medici, scion of the wealthy but cruel dynasty that dominated Florence from the 14th century to the 17th century, is the most important work by Raphael, an Italian Old Master, to be sold at auction for decades.
Lorenzo ruled Florence from 1513 until his death in 1519. His uncle, Pope Leo X, had found him a wife - Madeleine de la Tour d'Auvergne, a cousin of Francois I, King of France - who was an ally of the Vatican against the Holy Roman Empire.
As the couple had never met, an exchange of portraits was arranged. Raphael, one of the greatest High Renaissance painters and then working for Leo X in Rome, was commissioned to show Lorenzo, then aged 25, in his best light.
The portrait shows the subject in a fur-necked red and gold cape.
It must have done the trick because the couple were married in 1518.
(snip)
The portrait, which is owned by an American art dealer, has not been seen in public for 40 years. It will be sold at Christie's in London on July 5.

Bernini Angels

Yesterday evening, as sunset/dusk was just about to happen, I was walking across the Ponte S.Angelo and was admiring the Bernini angels and noticed just how differently the light was hitting each one of them depending on what direction they were facing, and whether they were in the shadow of Castel S.Angelo or not. It's quite striking how different the colour of each angel can be.