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ART “4” “2”-DAY  18 July
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DEATHS: 1721 WATTEAU — 1610 CARAVAGGIO
BIRTH: 1871 BALLA — BAPTISM: 1659 RIGAUD
^ Born on 18 July 1871: Giacomo Balla, Italian Futurist painter, sculptor, stage designer, decorative artist, and actor, who died on 01 March 1958.
— He was one of the originators of Futurism and was particularly concerned with the representation of light and movement. His personal interest in scientific methods of analysis contributed to both the practical and ideological bases of the movement. His oeuvre from the Futurist period overshadowed the work of later years.
— Born in Turin in 1871, Balla moved to Rome when he was still young and died there. He joined the Futurist movement in 1910, when he signed both the Manifesto of Futurist Painters and the Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting. Balla's first works are characteristic of the Divisionism of Pelliza da Volpedo and Giovanni Segantini as well as French Post-Impressionism, an interest he delved into during a stay in Paris in 1900. In 1912 Balla's art took on decisively futuristic characteristics with his celebrated painting Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, an early affirmation of his way of objectively analyzing details, something that he had surely carried over from his strong interest in photography
— Balla was one of the founders of Futurism, signing the Futurist Manifesto which was published in 1910. In this document Balla, along with artists including Umberto Boccioni and Carlo Carrà, outlined their primary objective to depict movement, which they saw as symbolic of their commitment to the dynamic forward thrust of the twentieth century. Futurism celebrated the machine - the racing car was heralded as the triumph of the age - and early futurist paintings were concerned with capturing figures and objects in motion. In his Girl Running on the Balcony, Balla attempted to realize movement by showing the girl's running legs in repeated sequence. Other paintings, such as Dog on a Leash, got to grips with the problem of recreating speed and flight by superimposing several images on top of each other. Inevitably, the advances that were made by this short-lived movement were eventually to be overtaken by the art of cinematography. Futurism was finished by the First World War, after which Futurist ideals became increasingly associated with Fascism. Balla began to plough an independent path, at first toward abstraction and, after 1931, toward figuration.
— Balla's students included Umberto Boccioni, Enrico Prampolini, Gino Severini, Mario Sironi.
—      Nato a Torino, Balla si trasferisce in gioventù a Roma dove morirà nel 1958. Aderisce al Futurismo nel 1910, quando sottoscrive il Manifesto dei pittori futuristi (11 Feb 1910) e il Manifesto tecnico della pittura futurista. (11 Apr 1910). Gli esordi di Balla sono caratterizzati da una pittura influenzata dal divisionismo di Pellizza da Volpedo e Giovanni Segantini e dal postimpressionismo francese, interesse approfondito dall'artista durante un soggiorno a Parigi nel 1900.
      È nel 1912 con opere come il celebre Dinamismo di un cane al guinzaglio, che l'arte di Balla si delinea con caratteristiche decisamente futuriste, già affermando la sua peculiare attenzione all'analisi oggettiva del particolare, sicuramente legata al forte interesse dell'artista per la fotografia.
      L'idea del moto e il senso moderno della velocità, centrali nella poetica del Futurismo, sono resi da Balla mediante un linguaggio di dettagli ripetuti e dissociazioni cromatiche. Successivamente, la sua pittura si fa più astratta, per costruirsi su una rete di "linee andamentali", traiettorie che tracciano il movimento di corpi nello spazio a partire da un punto di vista mobile. Con le Compenetrazioni iridescenti, dipinte tra la fine del 1912 e il 1914, l'artista realizza una serie di composizioni liricamente astratte, scandite da forme triangolari pure e armonie di colori che aspirano ad un'idea di totalità.
      Nel 1916 firma insieme a Depero il manifesto Ricostruzione futurista dell'universo che delinea un programma di ricreazione del reale attraverso gli equivalenti astratti di tutte le forme pensati come complessi plastici mobili. In questo ambito si collocano l'ideazione e la creazione di congegni meccanici, musicali e rumoristici e poi di giocattoli, vestiti, concerti, edifici, secondo una logica che ispira anche la creazione di mobili ed interi arredamenti.
      A partire dagli anni Venti Balla si indirizza nuovamente verso una pittura figurativa, che conserva sfondi con motivi astratti di impianto dinamico, per affrancarsi definitivamente dal Futurismo intorno alla metà degli anni Trenta, con una serie di opere caratterizzate da una intensa ricerca luminosa ai limiti del misticismo.
— Balla was born in Turin. In 1891 he studied briefly at the Accademia Albertina di Belle Arti and the Liceo Artistico in Turin and exhibited for the first time under the aegis of the Società Promotrice di Belle Arti in that city. He studied at the University of Turin with Cesare Lombroso about 1892. In 1895 Balla moved to Rome, where he worked for several years as an illustrator, caricaturist, and portrait painter. In 1899 his work was included in the Venice Biennale and in the Esposizione internazionale di belle arti at the galleries of the Società degli Amatori e Cultori di Belle Arti in Rome, where he exhibited regularly for the next ten years. In 1900 Balla spent seven months in Paris assisting the illustrator Serafino Macchiati. About 1903 he began to instruct Gino Severini and Umberto Boccioni in divisionist painting techniques. In 1903 his work was exhibited at the Esposizione internazionale d’arte della città di Venezia and in 1903 and 1904 at the Glaspalast in Munich. In 1904 Balla was represented in the Internationale Kunstausstellung in Düsseldorf, and in 1909 exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in Paris.
     Balla signed the second Futurist painting manifesto of 1910 with Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, and Severini, although he did not exhibit with the group until 1913. In 1912 he traveled to London and to Düsseldorf, where he began painting his abstract light studies. In 1913 Balla participated in the Erste deutsche Herbstsalon at Der Sturm gallery in Berlin and in an exhibition at the Rotterdamsche Kunstkring in Rotterdam. In 1914 he experimented with sculpture for the first time and showed it in the Prima esposizione libera futurista at the Galleria Sprovieri, Rome. He also designed and painted Futurist furniture and designed Futurist “antineutral” clothing. With Fortunato Depero, Balla wrote the manifesto Ricostruzione futurista dell’universo in 1915. His first solo exhibitions were held that same year at the Società Italiana Lampade Elettriche “Z” and at the Sala d’Arte A. Angelelli in Rome. His work was also shown in 1915 at the Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. In 1918 he was given a solo show at the Casa d’Arte Bragaglia in Rome. Balla continued to exhibit in Europe and the United States and in 1935 was made a member of the Accademia di San Luca in Rome. He died in Rome.
— Nel 1895 si stabilisce insieme alla madre a Roma. Nel 1899 partecipa per la prima volta all'Esposizione annuale della Società degli Amatori e Cultori, manifestazione artistica alla quale sarà presente, costantemente, fino al 1914 ed alle edizioni del 1928 e del 1929. Nel settembre del 1900 parte per Parigi, dove visita l'Esposizione Universale, nella quale ha modo di vedere, oltre ai quadri dei divisionisti italiani, le opere dei pittori dell'Impressionismo e neoimpressionismo francesi, quelle della Secessione austriaca, e gli studi fotografici sul movimento di Etienne-Jules Marey. Durante il soggiorno parigino rimane colpito dagli effetti della luce notturna e dell'illuminazione artificiale delle strade, come dimostrano i numerosi quadri, realizzati tra il 1900 e il 1902, in cui rappresenta la città di notte.
      Nel 1903 viene ammesso, per la prima volta, alla Biennale d'Arte Internazionale di Venezia con il Ritratto di Roesler-Franz. In questi anni indirizza il proprio interesse nei confronti delle tematiche del verismo sociale e realizza le quattro grandi tele del ciclo, mai portate a termine, Dei Viventi. Nel primo decennio del '900 affianca a tele dipinte con la tecnica divisionista della scomposizione del colore, una serie di quadri monocromi, raffiguranti scene notturne ed interni, tra cui Il dubbio (1908, 57x40cm). A partire dal 1906 si interessa, soprattutto, allo studio di problemi luministici. L'11 febbraio del 1910 sottoscrive Il Manifesto dei Pittori Futuristi e, nell'aprile dello stesso anno il Manifesto tecnico della Pittura Futurista; tuttavia, almeno fino al 1912, non vi è sentore, nelle sue opere, della partecipazione al movimento di Filippo Tommaso Marinetti.
      Nel 1911 fa parte del comitato organizzatore dell'Esposizione Internazionale di Roma alla quale partecipa anche in veste di espositore con Il Ritratto di Nathan (1910, 86x95cm). Espone alcune tele alla Mostra Futurista allestita nel Foyer del Teatro Costanzi di Roma, dove figuravano anche opere di Umberto Boccioni, Carlo Carrà, Luigi Russolo, Gino Severini e Ardengo Soffici. In queste tele Balla analizza il movimento di un corpo vivente, rappresentando la sequenza degli spostamenti della figura nello spazio.
      Nel 1914 invia ventisette opere alla LXXXIII Esposizione di Belle Arti della Società degli Amatori e Cultori, suscitando la perplessità della critica, che lo trova eclettico. Nel 1915 firma con Fortunato Depero il Manifesto della Ricostruzione Futurista dell'Universo. Realizza anche alcune scenografie. Dal 1921 al 1928 si dedica all'esecuzione di opere decorative e alla progettazione di oggetti di arte applicata, mobili, paraventi, piatti, ceramiche e stoffe. Nel 1929 firma il Manifesto Aeropittura. Dal 1931 prende le distanze dal Futurismo e la sua produzione successiva testimonia un ritorno alla pittura figurativa.
— LINKS
— Il Sole e Mercurio — Velocità
— Dinamismo di un cane al guinzaglio (1912, 90x110cm)
— Form~Spirit Transformation — The Flight of the Swallows (1913) — Young Girl Running on a Balcony — XlinkXStreet Light (1909)
— Velocità astratta + rumore (1914, 55x77cm, including artist’s painted frame) _ In late 1912 to early 1913 Giacomo Balla turned from a depiction of the splintering of light to the exploration of movement and, more specifically, the speed of racing automobiles. This led to an important series of studies in 1913–1914. The choice of automobile as symbol of abstract speed recalls Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s notorious statement in his first Futurist manifesto, published on 20 February 1909, in Le Figaro in Paris, only a decade after the first Italian car was manufactured: “The world’s splendor has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. . . . A roaring automobile . . . that seems to run on shrapnel, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.”
      It has been proposed that Abstract Speed + Sound was the central section of a narrative triptych suggesting the alteration of landscape by the passage of a car through the atmosphere. The related XlinkXAbstract Speed and Abstract Speed—The Car Has Passed would have been the flanking panels. Indications of sky and a single landscape are present in the three paintings; the interpretation of fragmented evocations of the car’s speed varies from panel to panel. The present work is distinguished by crisscross motifs, representing sound, and a multiplication of the number of lines and planes. The original frames of all three panels were painted with continuations of the forms and colors of the compositions, implying the overflow of the paintings’ reality into the spectator’s own space. Many other studies and variations by Balla on the theme of a moving automobile in the same landscape exist.
— Feu d'Artifice (telai, acrilico su tela, plexiglas, lampade colorate, sonoro, 500x550x550cm) _ Gli elementi che compongono la scena di Feu d'artifice sono stati ricostruiti al Castello di Rivoli in occasione della mostra Sipario del 1997, dedicata allo stretto rapporto tra teatro e arti visive. Feu d'artifice, unico spettacolo realizzato, tra quelli progettati da Balla, andò in scena al Teatro Costanzi a Roma il 30 aprile 1917. Sulle note di Stravinsky per tre minuti Balla presentò il suo teatro del futuro, in linea con quanto proclamato nel 1915 da Filippo Tommaso Marinetti che promuoveva un teatro "Atecnico, Dinamico, Simultaneo", cioè brevissimo e capace in pochi minuti di condensare molteplici situazioni e idee (manifesto Il Teatro Futurista Sintetico, 11 gennaio 1915). Balla concepì Feu d'artifice come una serie di forme dall'architettura non-logica e dinamica destinate ad interagire con un gioco di luci in rapporto con gli accordi musicali. Al Museo della Scala di Milano sono conservati oltre venti fogli che recano i progetti per ciascun elemento dello scenario. Balla realizzò anche un autoritratto (perduto) nel cui sfondo erano riportate alcune delle forme di Feu d'artifice.
Caetani— Ritratto del sindaco Onorato Caetani (75x62cm) _ Firmato in alto a destra: Balla. Il dipinto, quasi sconosciuto agli studiosi di Balla, è stato segnalato soltanto in due occasioni: nella scheda comparsa negli Archivi del Divisionismo e nella monografia di Maurizio Fagiolo dell'Arco, che menziona il ritratto del duca Caetani, sindaco di Roma tra il 1890 e il 1892, senza riprodurlo e ne segnala anche l'abbozzo, dipinto su tela, nella collezione Balla. Il modo di segnare il fondo del dipinto, con tratti non omogenei, e l'impostazione della figura, che sembra esorbitare dai margini del quadro, avvicina l'opera ai ritratti della signora Ida Maini e di Bice Morselli, datati entrambi 1910, nella fase che precede di qualche anno il periodo futurista dell'artista.
^ Died on 18 July 1721: Jean-Antoine Watteau, French painter, baptized as an infant on 10 October 1684.
— Watteau typified the lyrically charming and graceful style of the Rococo. Much of his work reflects the influence of the commedia dell'arte and the opéra ballet (e.g. The French Comedy 1716).
—             Watteau was baptized at the church of St. Jacques in Valenciennes. He was the son of Jean-Philippe Watteau, master roofer and carpenter, who knew how to read and write, and was officially registered as a bourgeois. All we know about Watteau’s mother is the name: Michelle, née Lordenois; of Watteau’s three brothers that they continued his father’s enterprise. It is unknown whether his parents encouraged his artistic vocation. None the less they allowed the boy, on turning fifteen, to get some instruction from Jacques-Albert Gérin, the correct, mediocre official painter of Valenciennes.
            After the death of Gérin (in 1702), Watteau studied with another painter, who specialized in decorating theatres. Watteau accompanied this man to Paris, where he was called to decorate the Opera House. Watteau helped his master for a few months, then moved back to his native town. From this short experience Watteau derived various staging devices, a certain science of costume and setting, and theatrical poses, which lend his pictures the character of pantomime. Later in Paris at the print-shop of Pierre II Mariette and his son Jean, Watteau had ample opportunities to study the great masters in the collection there (Rubens, Titian, Bruegel, Callot and others). He met there (in 1703) Claude Gillot, who asked him to come and lodge together. Gillot had won some recognition with pictures drawn from the performances of the commedia dell’arte. It seems that Watteau borrowed from him the idea of the fêtes galantes. In 1707 Watteau left Gillot for obscure reasons. His new partner was Claude Audran.
            Before or after parting with Audran, at any rate between 1708 and 1711, he left for Valenciennes with some money paid him by the art dealer Sirois, Gersaint’s father-in-law, for a picture. The town was then in a zone of military operations. The warlike bustle and atmosphere inspired him. Such subjects were, in fact, quite current. Watteau did not work on commission but only as it pleased him, which did not prevent his pictures from being purchased. That accounts for the naturalness and vivacity of his military-scene sketches and for the free treatment of his paintings. Like veritable pieces of reportage, the painted scenes do not have usual solemnity of such pictures. Instead of celebrating grandees, they capture the truth of life.
            On his return to Paris Watteau competed for the Prize of Rome, which would have enabled him to go to Italy and study the great masters there. The attempts failed. Watteau was now living in Sirois’ house. He frequented the theatres and, abandoning the military scenes, began to paint fêtes galantes, quasi-pastoral idylls in court dress which became fashionable in high society. Still dreaming of Italy, he submitted a few works (Jealousy, or Pierrot Content, A Party for Four and A Jealous Harlequin) to the Royal Academy of painting, in the same hope of being sent to Rome. Once again he failed, but was asked to join the Academy.
            After 1712 Watteau disappeared for a while and this period is almost totally unknown. In 1717 he joined the Academy of Painting. Of the two versions of the Embarkation for Cythera, one in Berlin and one in the Louvre, the earlier one in Louvre was the enrollment picture which Watteau deposited with the Académie in 1717 – a little belatedly, as he had become an Academician in 1712.
            The tinge of melancholy in Watteau’s work is matched by his life. A lifelong sufferer from tuberculosis he went to London in 1719 partly in hopes that the famous Dr. Mead might cure his consumption, partly, perhaps from desire to extend his sphere of action. He was already, however, fatally ill. On his return to France (in 1720), he painted his last great work, depicting the interior of the shop of his art-dealer friend Gersaint, drawn from nature and intended as a signboard, but in fact the most classical and most perfectly composed of his paintings. L'Enseigne de Gersaint. As his death approached, he destroyed, being persuaded by the abbot of Carreau Abby, a large number of his more erotic paintings.
            Watteau never had his own house and moved from one friend, or patron, to another. Watteau died in Gersaint’s house on 18 July 1721, in the arms of Gersaint. He was 37.
            During his 15-year artistic career, Watteau tacked a wide variety of genres, subjects and techniques: tapestry cartoons and ceiling decorations, wainscot, fans and harpsichord panels, also allegoric and satirical pictures, genre painting, military, theatrical and religious scenes, landscapes and rustic subjects, character heads and portraits. He gave his full measure, however, in his fêtes galantes. By the specificity he lent this theme, which is now strikingly associated with his name, Watteau succeeded in establishing it as a distinct genre. These fêtes galantes entirely crystallize the spirit of his painting. Essentially aristocratic in conception, Watteau’s paintings fell into disfavor at the Revolution, and it was not until the end of the 19th century that they regained popularity. Watteau is now regarded as a forerunner of the Impressionists in his handling of color and study of nature.
— Watteau was the greatest French painter of his period and one of the key figures of Rococo art. He was born at Valenciennes, which had passed to France from the Spanish Netherlands only six years before his birth, and he was regarded by contemporaries as a Flemish painter. There are indeed strong links with Flanders in his art, but it also has a sophistication that is quintessentially French.
      He moved to Paris in about 1702 and about 1703-1707 he worked with Gillot, who stimulated his interest in theatrical costume and scenes from daily life. Soon afterwards he joined Claude Audran, Keeper of the Luxembourg Palace, and thus had access to Rubens's Marie de Médicis paintings, which were of enormous influence on him, even though Rubens's robustness was far removed from the fragile delicacy that characterized Watteau's art. Rubens was one of the prime inspirations for the type of picture with which Watteau is most associated - the fête galante, in which exquisitely dressed young people idle away their time in a dreamy, romantic, pastoral setting. The tradition of lovers in a parkland setting goes back via Giorgione to the medieval type known as the Garden of Love, but Watteau was the first painter to make the theme his own, and his individuality was recognized by his contemporaries.
      In 1717 he submitted a characteristic work, The Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera (there is a slightly later variant), as his belated reception piece to the Academy, and owing to the difficulty of fitting him into recognized categories was received as a 'peintre de fêtes galantes', a title created expressly for him. He was, indeed, a highly independent artist, who did not readily submit to the will of patrons or officialdom, and the novelty and freshness of his work delivered French painting from the yoke of Italianate academicism. creating a truly 'Parisian' outlook that endured until the Neoclassicism of David. Watteau's world is a highly artificial one (apart from scenes of love he took his themes mainly from the theatre), but underlying the frivolity is a feeling of melancholy, reflecting the certain knowledge that all the pleasures of the flesh are transient. This poetic gravity distinguishes him from his imitators, and parallels are often drawn between Watteau's own life and character and the content of his paintings. He was notorious for his irritable and restless temperament and died early of tuberculosis, and it is felt that the constant reminder of his own mortality that his illness entailed 'infected' his pictures with a melancholic mood.
      In 1719 he travelled to London, almost certainly to consult the celebrated physician Dr Richard Mead, but the hard English winter worsened his condition. His early death came when he may have been making a new departure in his art, for his last important work combines something of the straightforward naturalism of his early pictures in the Flemish tradition with the exquisite sensitivity of his fêtes galantes: it is a shop sign painted for the picture dealer Edmé Gersaint and known as L' Enseigne de Gersaint (1721 ).
      Watteau was careless in matters of material technique and many of his paintings are in consequence in a poor state of preservation. A complete picture of his genius depends all the more, then, on his numerous superb drawings, many of them scintillating studies from the life. He collected his drawings into large bound volumes and used these books as a reference source for his paintings (the same figure often appears in more than one picture). In spite of his difficult temperament, Watteau had many loyal friends and supporters who recognized his genius, and although his reputation suffered with the Revolution and the growth of Neoclassicism, he always had distinguished admirers. It is perhaps as a colorist that he has had the most profound influence. His method of juxtaposing flecks of color on the canvas was carried further by Delacroix and later reduced to a science by Seurat and the Neo-Impressionists. Watteau's principal, but much inferior, followers were Lancret and Pater. He also had a nephew and a great-nephew (father and son) who worked more-or-less in his manner. They are both known as 'Watteau de Lille' after their main place of work - Louis-Joseph Watteau [1731-1798] and François-Louis-Joseph Watteau [1758-1823].
— Watteau is considered the greatest painter of early eighteenth-century France. He went to Paris in 1702 and became acquainted with Pierre Mariette, who enabled him to study the works of such artists as Jacques Callot, Titian, and Rubens. In the studio of Claude Gillot, he learned theatrical themes, and through Claude Audran, concierge of the Luxembourg Palace, he had the revelatory experience of studying Rubens's Marie de Medici cycle. Watteau returned to Valenciennes in 1710, where he produced scenes of military life. Upon arriving again in Paris, he met Pierre Crozat, a wealthy amateur, whose collection of drawings was to prove influential in the perfection of the artist's craR. In 1717 Watteau was elected to membership in the Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture with Pilgrimage to the Island of Cythera as a painter of fêtes galantes, a genre created especially for him, and. which he refined and amplified as his own pictorial invention. He went to England in 1719-1720, but poor health brought him back to France, where he died at the age of thirty seven. Watteau's personal style, characterized by a delicate palette and sensitivity to atmosphere, brought him great acclaim during his lifetime.

— LINKS
— The Fortune Teller
— L'Amour au Théâtre Français _ aka The French Comedy (1714, 37x48cm) _ In 1734 The French Comedy and The Italian Comedy were reproduced as copper engravings by C. N. Cochin. He named them respectively L'Amour au théâtre français and L'Amour au théâtre italien, thus making the artist's intentions clear.
      A shepherd and shepherdess in a park, surrounded by a company of people, form the focal point of the French Comedy. Bacchus is reclining on a stone bench, drinking to a huntsman, while musicians provide music for the dance. One must not assume that Watteau had any particular play in mind; he was probably aiming to portray the various characters of the Comedy. This does not mean that he never depicted real people or happenings; at all events he will have taken for granted that the observer or his patron would be able to recognize such details. The gentleman in black on the right is in all probability the well-known actor Paul Poisson.
      The theater plays an important part in Watteau's art. His teacher Gillot, with whom the twenty-year-old Flemish-born painter began his work in Paris, appears to have encouraged this interest in the theatre. Watteau's most famous portrait, the Gilles in the Louvre, is the portrayal of a stage character. Stage-play and reality are strangely interwoven, as they are also in his pictures of social occasions, the fêtes galantes, which Watteau originated and executed with such artistry. These gained for him recognition by the French Academy.
— Une Pause Pendant la Chasse — Réunion — Pierrot (Gilles) — La Leçon de Musique — Seated Woman
— Seated Woman Holding a Fan — 3 studies of a boy's head
— La Contredanse (1719, 45x55cm; half-size 220kb) _ full size (897kb)
— La partie carrée (1713, 50x63cm; half-size 195kb) _ full size (768kb) _ detail (double size) Pierrot and woman with fan _ detail (double size) woman with fan and woman next to her
— The Italian Comedy (1714)
— Les Charmes de la Vie (1718, 69x90cm; 538x738pix, 64kb) _ detail (694x597pix, 64kb) _ This painting, which shows a family of which only the two men (seen in the detail) seem to be listening to a guitar player next to an unattended cello, inspired the 1957 Les Charmes de la vie Op. 360 (Hommage à Watteau) pour piano ou orchestre by Darius Milhaud [04 Sep 1892 – 22 Jun 1974]
^ Baptized (as an infant) on 18 July 1659: Hyacinthe François Honoré Mathias Pierre André Jean Rigau y Ros “Rigaud”, French baroque era portrait painter who died on 29 December 1743.
— Baptized in Perpignan; awarded the Prix de Rome 1682; a prolific and successful artist of the Baroque period specializing in portraits and historical scenes; he painted royal portraits in France and England; became director of l'Academie in 1733; Trained at Montpellier before moving to Lyon and eventually to Paris in 1681, where he devoted himself to portrait painting. By 1688, when he received his first royal commission, he had a reputation among the wealthier bourgeoisie of Paris. From 1690 onward, his work, mostly for the court, consisted almost entirely of portraits. Gained admission to the academy as a historical painter in January 1700. Excelled in the great formal portrait, as in his famous painting of Louis XIV in robes of state (1701).
— Friend and rival of Largillière. He was born in Perpignan and after working in Montpellier he settled in Paris in 1681. His reputation was established in 1688 with a portrait (now lost) of Monsieur, Louis XIV's brother, and he became the outstanding court painter of the latter part of Louis's reign, retaining his popularity after the king's death. He was less interested in showing individual character than in depicting the rank and condition of the sitter by nobility of attitude and expressiveness of gesture. These qualities are seen most memorably in his celebrated state portrait of Louis XIV (1701), one of the classic images of royal majesty. Louis so admired this portrait that, although he had intended it as a present to Philip V of Spain, he kept it himself. Rigaud's unofficial portraits are much more informal and show a debt to Rembrandt (The Artist's Mother, 1695), several of whose works he owned. The output from Rigaud's studio was vast.

— LINKS
— Self-Portrait (1692, 81x65cm)
— Shakspeare - Henry IV~1.V.4 (engraving with hand coloring, 57x42cm; half-size. 256kb _ ZOOM to full size; 1046kb)
— Portrait of Phillippe de Couraillon (1702, 162x150cm) _ Phillippe de Couraillon, Marquis de Dangeau, is represented in the costume of the Grand Maître des Ordres.
— Portrait of Louis XIV (1694, 277x194cm) _ At the end of Louis XIV's reign the outstanding painter was Hyacinthe Rigaud. Although his activity continued well into the next century, the ethical quality of his figures and the aesthetic quality of his style are part of the spirit of the Louis XIV period. Guided by Le Brun, Rigaud created in painting, as Coysevox had done in sculpture, the portrait of the 'man of quality', whose value he conveyed by the nobility of the attitude, expressiveness of the gesture, and movement of the draperies - in short, by the passion of which he showed his generous temperament to be capable. The aim was less to depict and individual and a character, as Philippe de Champaigne had done in the preceding period, than to affirm the social rank and 'condition' of the sitter, who might be the King, a minister, a financier, or a soldier, but who was always of the Court. Rigaud thus started the Court portrait, which was to have a considerable importance in Europe during the next century.
— a different Portrait of Louis XIV (1701, 279x190cm; 1400x981pix, 351kb) _ This famous portrait is regarded as the very epitome of the absolutist ruler portrait. Yet it represents more than just power, pomp and circumstance. The sumptuous red and gold drapery is not only a motif of dignity, but also creates a framework that echoes the drapes of the ornate, ermine-lined robe. The blue velvet brocade ornamented with the golden fleurs-delis of the house of Bourbon is repeated in the upholstery of the chair, the cushion and the cloth draped over the table below it: the king quite clearly "sets the tone". A monumental marble column on a high plinth is draped in such a way that it does not detract from the height of the figure. Louis is presented in an elegantly angled pose, situated well above the standpoint of the spectator to whom he seems to turn his attention graciously, but without reducing the stability of his stance. Rigaud's consummate mastery of portraiture is particularly evident in the way he depicts the king's facial expression: his distanced unapproachability are not founded in Neoclassicist idealization, but in the candour of an ageing, impenetrable physiognomy. The lips are closed decisively and with a hint of irony, the eyes have a harsh, dark sheen, while the narrow nose suggests intolerance. This is a ruler who is neither good nor evil, but beyond all moral categories.
— Count Sinzendorf (1712, 166x132cm) _ Several artists, whose careers and styles form a transitional period between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, enjoyed enormous success under the patronage of Louis XIV. By far the best of them was Hyacinthe Rigaud. There is a strident quality of many of his best portraits which suggest a familiarity with Spanish painters like Zurbarán. Rigaud rigidly provided the court with exactly what it wanted - a splendid, opulent and yet tasteful glorification of its new-found power and wealth.
— Double Portrait of the Artist's Mother shown in two poses facing each other (1695, 83 x 103 cm) — His mother was Marie Serre (died after 1715), wife of painter Mathias “Rigaud” (died 1699).
— Marie Serre (1695; oval 1360x1072pix, 324kb)
— The Presentation in the Temple (83x68cm) _ The scene depicted is taken from the Gospel of St. Luke (2, 22-28): "And when the days of her purification according to the law of Moses were accomplished, they brought him to Jerusalem, to present him to the Lord; (As it is written in the law of the Lord, Every male that openeth the womb shall be called holy to the Lord; ) And to offer a sacrifice according to that which is said in the law of the Lord, A pair of turtle-doves, or two young pigeons . And, behold, there was a man in Jerusalem, whose name was Simeon; and the same man was just and devout, waiting for the consolation of Israel: and the Holy Ghost was upon him. And it was revealed unto him by the Holy Ghost, that he should not see death, before he had seen the Lord's Christ. And he came by the Spirit into the temple: and when the parents brought in the child Jesus, to do for him after the custom of the law, Then took he him up in his arms..."
— Portrait of a Scholar — Philippe V, roi d'Espagne [1683-1746] (80x62cm)
— Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet [1627-1704]
— Le Philosophe Bernard Le Bouyer de Fontenelle (1400x1120pix, 163kb) _ Bernard Le Bovier (or Bouyer), sieur de Fontenelle [11 Feb 1657 – 09 Jan 1757] was a French scientist and man of letters described by Voltaire as the most universal mind of the era of Louis XIV. His works set forth in embryonic form many of the characteristics ideas of the Enlightenment. His most famous book is Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (1686; 213kb _ at another site, 234kb), entertaining dialogues backing the Copernican system on the basis of the Cartesian theory of vortices which would be refuted by Newton's Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica (1687) of Isaac Newton [04 Jan 1643 = 25 Dec 1642 Julian – 31 Mar 1727 = 20 Mar 1727 Julian].
— Gaspard von Gueidan Playing the Bagpipe (1735; 1400x1102pix, 209kb)
— Fürst Wenzel Liechtenstein (1740; 1400x1102pix, 226kb)
— A Middle-Aged Man (1400x1090pix, 188kb)
^ Died on 18 July 1610: Michelangelo Merisi “Caravaggio”, Italian Baroque era painter born on 28 September 1573. His students included Juan Bautista Mayno.
—      Michelangelo Merisi, called later Caravaggio, was born in either Milan, or the town Caravaggio near Milan, the son of a ducal architect. His early training started in 1584 under Simone Peterzano, a little known student of Titian, and continued till 1588.
     In 1592, Caravaggio went to Rome. His contact with Giuseppe Cesare d’Arpino (1568-1640), the most popular painter and art dealer in Rome at the turn of the century, brought him recognition.  Through the art business Caravaggio met his first patron Cardinal Francesco Maria Del Monte, who not only held out the possibility of working independently, but also secured for him his first public commission: side paintings in the Contarelli Chapel, San Luigi dei Francesi. For Cardinal’s  Casino dell’Aurora he painted Jupiter, Neptune and Pluto (1600).
     From then on he was flooded by public commissions. Yet because of his violent temper he was constantly in trouble with the law. Since 1600, he is regularly mentioned in police records, is constantly under accusations of assault, libel and other crimes. In 1606, he became involved in murder and had to flee, finding refuge on the estates of Prince Marzio Colonna, where he painted Madonna of the Rosary (1607).
      On his wanderings he paused in Naples, painting exclusively religious themes: Seven Works of Mercy (1607), The Flagellation of Christ (1607). Not only these, but almost all of Caravaggio’s religious subjects emphasize sadness, suffering, and death.
    In Malta he was housed by the Knights of St. John and painted several portraits of the Grand Master, Alof de Wignacourt. The artistically fertile Maltese period brought him the title of a Knight of St. John of Malta in 1608, but was shortly interrupted by imprisonment for a passionate quarrel with a noble and a renewed flight.
    Going through Syracuse and Messina, where some major late works came into being, The Raising of Lazarus (1609) Caravaggio went on to Palermo and from there again to Naples. Here the news of the Pope’s pardon reached him but, on arriving at Porto Escole by ship, he was again arrested, though later released. By then the ship had sailed, carrying away all his possessions. Struck down by a fever, he died without setting foot in Rome again.
    Few artists in history have exercised as extraordinary an influence as this tempestuous and short-lived painter. Caravaggio was destined to turn a large part of European art away from the ideal viewpoint of the Renaissance to the concept that simple reality was of primary importance. He was one of the first to paint people as ordinary looking.
^
—      Caravaggio, byname of Michelangelo Merisi, Italian painter whose revolutionary technique of tenebrism, or dramatic, selective illumination of form out of deep shadow, became a hallmark of Baroque painting. Scorning the traditional idealized interpretation of religious subjects, he took his models from the streets and painted them realistically. His three paintings of St Matthew (1602) caused a sensation and were followed by such masterpieces as The Supper at Emmaus (1602) and Death of the Virgin (1606).
      Caravaggio was the son of Fermo Merisi, steward and architect of the Marquis of Caravaggio. Orphaned at age 11, Caravaggio was apprenticed in the same year to the painter Simone Peterzano of Milan.
      At some time between 1588 and 1592, Caravaggio went to Rome. He was already in possession of the fundamental technical skills of painting and had acquired, with characteristic eagerness, a thorough understanding of the approach of the Lombard and Venetian painters, who, opposed to idealized Florentine painting, had developed a style that was nearer to representing nature and events. Caravaggio arrived in Rome and settled into the cosmopolitan society of the Campo Marzio. This decaying neighbourhood of inns, eating houses, temporary shelter, and little picture shops in which Caravaggio came to live suited his circumstances and his temperament. He was virtually without means, and his inclinations were always toward anarchy and against tradition.
      These first five years were an anguishing period of instability and humiliation. According to his biographers, Caravaggio was "needy and stripped of everything" and moved from one unsatisfactory employment to another, working as an assistant to painters of much smaller talent. He earned his living for the most part with hackwork and never stayed more than a few months at any studio. Finally, probably in 1595, he decided to set out on his own and began to sell his pictures through a dealer, a certain Maestro Valentino, who brought Caravaggio's work to the attention of Cardinal Francesco del Monte, a prelate of great influence in the papal court. Caravaggio soon came under the protection of Del Monte and was invited to receive board, lodging, and a pension in the house of the cardinal.
      Despite spiritual and material deprivations, Caravaggio had painted up to the beginning of Del Monte's patronage about 40 works. The subjects of this period are mostly adolescent boys, as in Boy with a Fruit Basket (1593), The Young Bacchus (1593), and The Music Party. These early pictures reveal a fresh, direct, and empirical approach; they were apparently painted directly from life and show almost no trace of the academic Mannerism then prevailing in Rome. The felicitous tone and confident craftsmanship of these early works stand in sharp contrast to the daily quality of Caravaggio's disorderly and dissipated life. In Basket of Fruit (1596) the fruits, painted with brilliance and vivid realism, are handsomely disposed in a straw basket and form a striking composition in their visual apposition.
      With these works realism won its battle with Mannerism, but it is in the cycle of the life of St Matthew in the Contarelli Chapel that Caravaggio's realistic naturalism first fully appears. Probably through the agency of Del Monte, Caravaggio obtained, in 1597, the commission for the decoration of the Contarelli Chapel in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome. This commission established him, at the age of 24, as a pictor celeberrimus, a "renowned painter," with important protectors and clients. The task was an imposing one. The scheme called for three large paintings of scenes from the saint's life: St Matthew and the Angel, The Calling of St Matthew, and The Martyrdom of St Matthew. The execution (1598-1601) of all three, in which Caravaggio substituted a dramatic contemporary realism for the traditional pictorial formulas used in depicting saints, provoked public astonishment. Perhaps Caravaggio was waiting for this test, on public view at last, to reveal the whole range of his diversity. His novelty in these works not only involves the surface appearance of structure and subject but also the sense of light and even of time. The first version of the canvas that was to go over the altar, St Matthew and the Angel, was so offensive to the canons of San Luigi dei Francesi, who had never seen such a representation of a saint, that it had to be redone. In this work the evangelist has the physical features of a plowman or a common labourer. His big feet seem to stick out of the picture, and his posture, legs crossed, is awkward almost to the point of vulgarity. The angel does not stand graciously by but forcefully pushes Matthew's hand over the page of a heavy book, as if he were guiding an illiterate. What the canons did not understand was that Caravaggio, in elevating this humble figure, was copying Christ, who had himself raised Matthew from the street.
      The other two scenes of the St Matthew cycle are no less disconcerting in the realism of their drama. The Calling of St Matthew shows the moment at which two men and two worlds confront each other: Christ, in a burst of light, entering the room of the toll collector, and Matthew, intent on counting coins in the midst of a group of gaily dressed idlers with swords at their sides. In the glance between the two men, Matthew's world is dissolved. In The Martyrdom of St Matthew the event is captured just at the moment when the executioner is forcing his victim to the ground. The scene is a public street, and, as Matthew's acolyte flees in terror, passersby glance at the act with idle unconcern. The most intriguing aspect of these narratives is that they seem as if they were being performed in thick darkness when a sudden illumination revealed them and fixed them in memory at the instant of their most intense drama.
      Caravaggio's three paintings for the Contarelli Chapel not only caused a sensation in Rome but also marked a radical change in his artistic preoccupation. Henceforth he would devote himself almost entirely to the painting of traditional religious themes, to which, however, he gave a whole new iconography and interpretation. He often chose subjects that are susceptible to a dramatic, violent, or macabre emphasis, and he proceeded to divest them of their idealized associations, taking his models from the streets. Caravaggio may have used a lantern hung to one side in his shuttered studio while painting from his models. The result in his paintings is a harsh, raking light that strikes across the composition, illuminating parts of it while plunging the rest into deep shadow. This dramatic illumination heightens the emotional tension, focuses the details, and isolates the figures, which are usually placed in the foreground of the picture in a deliberately casual grouping. This insistence on clarity and concentration, together with the firm and vigorous drawing of the figures, links Caravaggio's mature Roman works with the classical tradition of Italian painting during the Renaissance.
      The decoration of the Contarelli Chapel was completed by 1602. Caravaggio, though not yet 30, overshadowed all his contemporaries. There was a swarm of orders for his pictures, private and ecclesiastical. The Crucifixion of St Peter (1601) and The Conversion of St Paul, The Deposition of Christ (1604), and The Death of the Virgin (1606) are among the monumental works he produced at this time. Some of these paintings, done at the high point of Caravaggio's artistic maturity, provoked violent reaction. The Madonna with Pilgrims, or Madonna di Loreto (1606), for the Church of San Agostino, was a scandal because of the "dirty feet and torn, filthy cap" of the two old people kneeling in the foreground. The Death of the Virgin was refused by the Carmelites because of the indignity of the Virgin's plebeian features, bared legs, and swollen belly. At the advice of Rubens, the picture was bought by the Duke of Mantua in April 1607 and displayed to the community of painters at Rome for one week before removal to Mantua.
     Artists, men of learning, and enlightened prelates were fascinated by the robust and bewildering art of Caravaggio, but the negative reaction of church officials reflected the self-protective irritation of academic painters and the instinctive resistance of the more conservative clergy and much of the populace. The more brutal aspects of Caravaggio's paintings were condemned partly because Caravaggio's common people bear no relation to the graceful suppliants popular in much of Counter-Reformation art. They are plain working men, muscular, stubborn, and tenacious.
      Criticism did not cloud Caravaggio's success, however. His reputation and income increased, and he began to be envied. The despairing bohemian of the early Roman years had disappeared, but, although he moved in the society of cardinals and princes, the spirit was the same, still given to wrath and riot.
      The details of the first Roman years are unknown, but after the time of the Contarelli project Caravaggio had many encounters with the law. In 1600 he was accused of blows by a fellow painter, and the following year he wounded a soldier. In 1603 he was imprisoned on the complaint of another painter and released only through the intercession of the French ambassador. In April 1604 he was accused of throwing a plate of artichokes in the face of a waiter, and in October he was arrested for throwing stones at the Roman Guards. In May 1605 he was seized for misuse of arms, and on29 July he had to flee Rome for a time because he had wounded a man in defense of his mistress. Within a year, on 29 May 1606, again in Rome, during a furious brawl over a disputed score in a game of tennis, Caravaggio killed one Ranuccio Tomassoni.
      In terror of the consequences of his act, Caravaggio, himself wounded and feverish, fled the city and sought refuge on the nearby estate of a relative of the Marquis of Caravaggio. He then moved on to other places of hiding and eventually reached Naples, probably in early 1607. He remained at Naples for a time, painting a Madonna of the Rosary for the Flemish painter Louis Finson and one of his late masterpieces, The Seven Works of Mercy, for the Chapel of Monte della Misericordia. It is impossible to ignore the connection between the dark and urgent nature of this painting and what must have been his desperate state of mind. It is also the first indication of a shift in his painting style.
     At the end of 1607 or the beginning of 1608, Caravaggio traveled to Malta, where he was received as a celebrated artist He worked hard, completing several works, the most important of which was The Beheading of St John the Baptist for the cathedral in Valletta. In this scene of martyrdom, shadow, which in earlier paintings stood thick about the figures, is here drawn back, and the infinite space that had been evoked by the huge empty areas of the earlier compositions is replaced by a high, overhanging wall. This high wall, which reappears in later works, can be linked to a consciousness in Caravaggio's mind of condemnation to a limited space, the space between the narrow boundaries of flight and prison. On 14 July 1608, Caravaggio was received into the Order of Malta as a "Knight of Justice"; soon afterward, however, either because word of his crime had reached Malta or because of new misdeeds, he was expelled from the order and imprisoned. He escaped, however.
      Caravaggio took refuge in Sicily, landing at Syracuse in October 1608, restless and fearful of pursuit. Yet his fame accompanied him; at Syracuse he painted his late, tragic masterpiece, The Burial of St Lucy, for the Church of Santa Lucia. In early 1609 he fled to Messina, where he painted The Resurrection of Lazarus and The Adoration of the Shepherds, then moved on to Palermo, where he did the Adoration with St Francis and St Lawrence for the Oratorio di San Lorenzo. The works of Caravaggio's flight, painted under the most adverse of circumstances, show a subdued tone and a delicacy of emotion that is even more intense than the overt dramatics of his earlier paintings.
      His desperate flight could be ended only with the pope's pardon, and Caravaggio may have known that there were intercessions on his behalf in Rome when he again moved north to Naples in October 1609. Bad luck pursued him, however; at the door of an inn he was attacked and wounded so badly that rumours reached Rome that the "celebrated painter" was dead. After a long convalescence he sailed in July 1610 from Naples to Rome, but he was arrested enroute when his boat made a stop at Palo. On his release, he discovered that the boat had already sailed, taking his belongings. Setting out to overtake the vessel, he arrived at Port'Ercole, a Spanish possession within the Papal States, and he died there a few days later, probably of pneumonia. A document granting him clemency arrived from Rome three days after his death.
      The many painters who imitated Caravaggio's style soon became known as Caravaggisti. Caravaggio's influence in Rome itself was remarkable but short-lived, lasting only until the 1620s. His foremost followers elsewhere in Italy were Orazio Gentileschi, Artemisia Gentileschi, and the Spaniard José de Ribera. Outside Italy, the Dutch painters Hendrick Terbrugghen, Gerrit van Honthorst, and Dirck van Baburen made the city of Utrecht the foremost northern centre of Caravaggism. The single most important painter in the tradition was the Frenchman Georges de La Tour, though echoes of Caravaggio's style can also be found in the works of such giants as Rembrandt van Rijn and Diego Velázquez.
^
— LINKS
— Boy Peeling a Fruit (1593, 75x64cm) _ This is probably a copy from a lost original. There are several other copies, but all of these copies are derived from an original by Caravaggio. In none of them does the boy peel a pear, as sources indicate, but another fruit, perhaps a nectarine; the same fruit lies on the table before the boy. There is a remarkable resemblance between the facial types of these copies and those of the angel in the Saint Francis and the boy on the left in The Musicians at the Metropolitan Museum, New York.
— Boy with a Basket of Fruit (1593, 70x67cm) One of the sure signs of an early painting by Caravaggio is the patent influence of northern Italian art. The boy with a fruit basket has analogies with The Fruitseller (1580: detail) by the Lombard painter Vincenzo Campi, painted about 1580, but Caravaggio is not content to follow the traditions on which he draws. Instead of the young women favored by his predecessors, he has chosen a teenage boy; and he has brought his subject almost to the front of the picture plane, so that the boy seems to offer himself as well as the fruit to the spectator's gaze. There is a sign of uncertainty in the awkward way that the boy's long thick neck rises out of his shoulder blades, yet there is compensation in the poetic device which places his weary eyes partially in the shade. Once again Caravaggio has used the diagonal 'cellar' light which was to become a hallmark of his style. Against a near-blank ground, attention is focused on the right side of the boy's upper body, the classical drapery on his right arm and the marvellously realized fruit, displaying (detail) succulent peaches and bunches of grapes against a near-blank ground.
— Boy Bitten by a Lizard (1594, 66x50cm) This picture is wrongly said by Mancini not to be one of Caravaggio's earliest pictures, and since he also states that the picture was sold for less than Caravaggio expected, it must have been painted as a speculative venture. One of the most effeminate of his boy models, with a rose in his hair, starts back in pain as his right-hand middle finger, which he has put into a cluster of fruit, is bitten by a lizard. The rose behind the ear, the cherries, the third finger and the lizard probably have sexual significance - the boy becomes aware, with a shock, of the pains of physical love. What was novel was not the theme so much as its dramatic treatment, evident in the boy's foreshortened right shoulder, the contrasting gestures of his hands and the leftward sloping light. What lingers most in the memory is found in the foreground: the gleaming glass carafe containing a single overblown rose in water, together with its reflections. _ detail _ To be able to paint light reflecting in glass is one of the hallmarks of a virtuoso still-life artist. Mystically-inclined interpreters see it as a suggestion of supernatural light. As his early biographers commented, Caravaggio's painting of drapery, skin and objects manage without reflected light. This distinguished him from the Mannerist painters of the preceding generation. And it makes it all the more interesting to observe how unusually he renders the round crystal-vase in this picture - he flattens it. In so doing, he inverts the lighting of the whole picture, by concentrating the light areas on the left and the dark ones on the right.
— a minutely different Boy Bitten by a Lizard (1594, 66x52) _ almost identical to the previous one. Their equally high quality suggests that Caravaggio himself painted them both.
— St. Francis in Ecstasy (1595, 92x128cm) This is one of the artist's first works. It has a perfectly Lombard air: the broad lines of the composition recall mannerist motives. But Caravaggio's characteristic approach to reality is already at work, and his brushstroke shows a magic that could be obtained only by a thorough analysis of Venetian painting. _ detail _ The angel comes from the same repertoire as the early pictures of boys. As Cupid, he is familiar from The Musicians. In the St Francis scene he forms part of an arrangement set against an almost black background, which may well have been painted direct from life and transmutes the spirit of pictures of boys into the sphere of sacred art.
— The Musicians (1596, 92x118cm) _ The two figures seen frontally are undoubtably portraits, and this fact disorients those who would like to make a conventional reading of the scene and concentrate on the noble, classical character of the composition, organized around the traditional opposition between the figure of the lute player and the corresponding figure whom we see from behind. The face between these two is Caravaggio's; the figure on the left is taken from an earlier composition (Young Peeling a Pear) which we know only from copies.
— The Fortune Teller (1596, 115x150cm) _ The youth abandons his reserve, leans over towards the gypsy-woman and looks into her smiling face, as if he idolized her, and as if the woman was enticing a very willing man. We cannot be absolutely sure this picture is an original Caravaggio. Its authenticity has recently been based on two arguments. The genre-scene has been painted over a praying female saint, perhaps the Virgin Mary, and the most likely painter is the Cavaliere d'Arpino. The painting also carries the same indication of provenance from Cardinal del Monte's Collection as the Cardsharps. The same subject-matter recurs in Narcissus. In the case of this not-undisputed picture, the smooth way in which the paint is applied suggests a Caravaggesque artist of some note.
— a different The Fortune Teller (1597, 99x131cm) _ detail 1 _ detail 2
— The Cardsharps (1596, 90x112cm) _ The Cardsharps, lost for almost a century, has been found and is now in Texas, and helps to fill in an important stage in the development of Caravaggio's art. Behind a table that protrudes into the spectator's space, a youthful innocent studies his cards, overlooked by a sinister middle-aged man, whose fingers signal to another, younger scoundrel to his right, who holds a five of hearts behind his back. To the left-hand side of the canvas is the object of their conspiracy, a pile of coins. This low-life scene links Caravaggio's discreet dramas to the genre paintings favoured by his followers. It was to have many imitators - within a few years of the painter's death an early variant had been painted by the Franco-Roman Valentin de Boulogne - but few equals. Caravaggio was less melodramatic than many of the artists known as the Caravaggisti who painted in his style, and he suggests only enough of the interaction between the three actors to imply the sequel.
— The Lute Player #1 (1600, 100x126cm) _ Two pictures (this and the next) of almost the same dimensions depict a boy with soft facial features and unusually thick brown hair, pouting lips, a half-open mouth and a pensive expression beneath sharply-drawn broad eyebrows. His white shirt is open at the front, revealing the artist's intention to paint a nude. This figure has the same dimensions in both pictures, which suggests that Caravaggio traced one on to oil-paper. In this case only one picture was completed from a fresh study of a model.
      A sort of ribbon woven into the figure's hair emphasizes its almost androgynous features. The same applies - in the New York version - to a broad yoke which divides his shirt under his chest like a woman's dress. This is undoubtedly why Bellori saw this as a female lute-player, although recently it has been suggested that the model was a castrato. Light falls from a high window above left, creating a narrow triangle of brightness in the upper right-hand corner. That said, the brightly illuminated figure stands out boldly against the shadowy background.
      The strongly foreshortened lute with its bent key-board demonstrates Caravaggio's virtuoso handling of perspective. Tactile elements project towards the viewer more successfully than in the New York Concert. As in the Uffizi Bacchus, the artist places a broad table-top in front of the figure - in version #2 it is made of marble, and in version #1 covered with an oriental carpet.
      The objects in the picture include an open book of music lying on another which bears the inscription "Bassus" in Gothic script, whilst the body of a violin serves to hold the book open at the right page. In both versions Caravaggio has painted the scores of older compositions clearly enough for us to read them. The music in question is the base voice-part of a popular collection, the "libro primo" of Jacques Arcadelt, which contains other compositions as well as works by this composer. Although the artist has cut off one row of notes, he has reproduced the initial notes so exactly that in version #2 we can recognize the Roman printer, Valerio Dorica, whereas in the version #1 we can see that the book was published in Venice by Antonio Gardane.
      In version #2, the violin bow lies across the strings and the open book of music - a prominent object for the observation of light and shade. In version #1 it is handled in a much less interesting way. Placed underneath the violin scroll, the bow can scarcely be distinguished from the brownish pattern of the carpet. In this version, a stout recorder and a triangular keyboard instrument are the other objects we see. The X-ray picture shows that they were painted over a still-life. The bird-cage motif in the left-hand corner (barely visible on the photo) shows what unusual motifs Caravaggio liked to select - motifs similar to those preferred by Caravaggesque painters in the Netherlands.
      Version #2, on the other hand, plays with the motifs of Caravaggio's other early arrangements of still-life and individual figures. Pieces of fruit lie on the marble slab, extremely brightly colored and brilliantly painted. A crystal vase contains a bunch of flowers, which would have made even Jan Bruegel the Elder jealous. The colors are applied uninhibitedly with a loaded brush - with a richness and precision we do not see elsewhere in Caravaggio's work.
— a minutely different Lute Player #2 (1596, 94x119cm) This painting, mentioned in Del Monte's inventory, shows a single lutanist singing a love song; and a related 'carafe with flowers' is also listed in the catalogue of the Del Monte sale. From the seventeenth century there have been uncertainties about the gender of the singer. Baglione and the Del Monte inventory call him a boy; Bellori, who knew only a copy, calls him a girl. There are reasons for this confusion. One is the Renaissance fascination with androgyny - the singer is not much older than Shakespeare's Rosalind, who renamed herself Ganymede, and Viola, who renamed herself Cesario - and another is the Italian fashion for castrati. The lutanist, with parted lips, sings of love from the madrigal Voi sapete ch ['io v'amo] (you know that [I love you]) by the Flemish composer Arcadelt. In front of him are a violin and bow which invite the spectator to take part in a duet with him; the fruit and the vegetables, and indeed the music itself, imply the harmony that should exist between lovers. Among the early works this painting must count as a virtuoso performance. The glass carafe and its flowers are painted with assured mastery, and Caravaggio is also aware of the problems of perspective that lutes and violins could cause; and he spotlights the the solo player and his instruments so as to make them the main focus of attention, the carafe of flowers so that they are a secondary focus. One of his most talented followers, Orazio Gentileschi, was to paint a girl Lute Player (1626) with a more beguiling sense of poetry, but without the sense of immediacy that was the hallmark of his master's craft. _ detail _ The open song book depicts the composition of Jacques (Jacob) Arcadelt, the bass voice of a popular madrigal Voi sapete ch ['io v'amo]. The inscription can be read as "Gallus" or "Bassus".
— Bacchus (1596, 95x85cm) In order to understand the historical position of Caravaggio's art, we have to be aware of his peerless and revolutionary handling of subject matter. This is true not only of his religious themes, but also of his secular themes. His Bacchus no longer appears to us like an ancient god, or the Olympian vision of the High Renaissance and Mannerism. Instead, Caravaggio paints a rather vulgar and effeminately preened youth, who turns his plump face towards us and offers us wine from a goblet held by pertly cocked fingers with grimy nails. This is not Bacchus himself, but some perfectly ordinary individual dressed up as Bacchus, who looks at us rather wearily and yet alertly. On the one hand, by turning this heathen figure into a somewhat ambiguous purveyor of pleasures, Caravaggio is certainly the great realist he is always claimed to be. On the other hand, however, the sensual lyricism of his painting is so overwhelming that any suspicion of caricature or travesty would be inappropriate. _ detail 1 (25x20cm) Bacchus offers us wine from a goblet held by pertly cocked fingers with grimy nails. _ detail 2 (25x23cm) _ the glass carafe in the lower left corner.
— Sick Bacchus (1593, 67x53cm) _ Among Caravaggio's early works, this painting, in which the pose of the arm may recall his debt to the kneeling shepherd in a fresco by Peterzano, belongs to the small group which has always been seen as self-portraits. The livid colors of the subject's face, his teasing smile and the mock seriousness of his mythological dignity all reinforce the attempt to undermine the lofty pretensions of Renaissance artistic traditions. Here is no god, just a sickly young man who may be suffering from the after-effects of a hangover. There is no mistaking the artist's delight in the depiction of the fine peaches and black grapes on the slab, the white grapes in his hand and the vine leaves that crown his hair, but the artist is not content merely to demonstrate his superb technique: he wishes to play an intimate role and only the slab separates him from the viewer. His appearance is striking rather than handsome: he shows both that his face is unhealthy and that his right shoulder is not that of a bronzed Adonis, as convention required, but pale as in the case of any man who normally wears clothes.
— Basket of Fruit (1597, 31x47cm) _ Caravaggio is reported to have claimed that he put as much effort into painting a vase of flowers as he did into painting human figures. Such an attitude not only calls into question the hierarchy of pictorial genres that had prevailed since Alberti, but also marks the beginning of a tradition of European still-life painting that was to develop continuously from then on. Whereas, until then, there had only been occasional cases of "pure" object paintings one by Carpaccio, a hunting trophy by Barbari and a message (1506) about one Antonio da Crevalcore, who is said to have made a "painting full of fruit" - from Caravaggio onwards, still-life was to be the most popular of genres. It is a response to the increase of private art collections and their demand for profane and virtuoso painting. Caravaggio compensated for the apparent loss of contentual gravity in an astonishing way. The basket is at eye level and juts out over the edge of the table into the real space of the spectator. In this formal exaggeration and with a viewpoint liberated from all attributive connotations, the otherwise trivial object takes on an unheard of monumentality that renders the secret lives of objects, the play of light on their surfaces and the variety of their textures worthy of such painting.
      The intensification of agriculture from the early 16th century onwards was accompanied by the promotion of the botanical sciences. These new insights then influenced the 'pater familias' literature, which also included advice on the improvement of fruit farming. It is worth noting that early market, kitchen and pantry paintings (e.g. by Joachim Beuckelaer, Frans Snyders and Adriaen van Utrecht) displayed not only vegetables piled up in baskets, but also fruits of all kinds, bulging out over the edge of the plate. Fruit included everything that grew on trees, such as apples, pears, nuts, cherries, plums, peaches, apricots, quinces, chestnuts, etc., as well as shrub fruit, such as blackberries, raspberries and currants. Fruit was always one of the last courses in a banquet. In the cuisine of the landed gentry and the merchant classes, great emphasis was therefore placed o the more refined fruits: wild fruit from the woods, fields and meadows were considered inferior, as they were smaller and had less taste. Every larger household therefore had an orchard that was laid out and cultivated according to the latest knowledge, where summer and winter fruits were grown that had to be frost-resistant and suitable for longer storage. Similar to nowadays, people valued firmness and a rich, juicy consistency, brought about by hybridization and special methods of cultivation. In earlier still-lifes the different fruits were still neatly separated, and depicted either as market products or freshly harvested and straight from the trees or shrubs, as in Vincenzo Campi's paintings. Later, the motif of the market or pantry with its emphasis on variety was increasingly given up in favour of isolated fruit baskets where different fruits were put together like flower arrangements. One of the first example is Caravaggio's Fruit Basket from about 1596.
— Martha and Mary Magdalene (1598) _ This painting has an iconographically very unusual theme. It shows Martha reproaching Mary Magdalene for her vanity, a subject that we know through a series of copies. This version has recently been recognized as the original. The religious theme is treated in a substantially profane manner. It is a pretext for making passages of highly intensive painting and for constructing an image that, seen in the context of the usual dichotomy of Caravaggio's early years, is more of a genre scene than a religious one.
— Magdalene (1597, 122x98cm) _ This picture and The Rest on the Flight into Egypt must have been painted around the same time, for the same girl sat for the Magdalene and the Madonna. On this occasion, however, there are none of the usual signs of a religious scene such as a halo. A young girl, seen from above, is seated on a low stool in one of Caravaggio's favorite cave-like settings, with a triangle of light high up on the wall behind her. Discarded jewellery (detail 36x30cm) — a string of pearls, clasps, a jar (perhaps holding precious ointment) — lies on the floor. The girl's hair is loose, as if it has just been washed. Her costume, consisting of a white-sleeved blouse, a yellow tunic and a flowery skirt, is rich. Bellori, who gives a careful description of this picture, which he came across in the collection of Prince Pamphilj, regards its title as an excuse; for him it is just a naturalistic portrayal of a pretty girl. This seems to show a willful failure to understand Caravaggio's intention or the wishes of the man who commissioned it, Monsignor Petrignani. The repentant Mary Magdalene, like the repentant Peter, was a favourite subject of Counter-Reformation art and poetry, which valued the visible expression of the state of contrition 'the gift of tears'. Caravaggio's heroine is sobbing silently to herself and a single tear falls down her cheek. She is, as it were, poised between her past life of luxury and the simple life she will embrace as one of Christ's most faithful followers. It is a sign of the painter's skill that he makes this inner conflict moving at the same time as he makes its representation delectable. Although nothing painted in the sixteenth century is as emotive as the statue in wood of the haggard Penitent Magdalene carved by Donatello (1456), by the time Titian's bare-breasted Mary Magdalene of 1533 had become his more modest and affecting Penitent St. Mary Magdalene of 1565, there had been a move in religious sensibility towards the humble and pathetic, a change which thirty years later Caravaggio could take for granted.
— Rest on Flight to Egypt (1597, 133x166cm) The story of the Holy Family's flight was one of the most popular apocryphal legends which survived the prohibitive decrees of the Council of Trent and often appeared in painting from the end of the sixteenth century. Caravaggio's idyllic painting is an individualistic representation of this. The artist ingeniously uses the figure of an angel playing the violin with his back to the viewer to divide the composition into two parts. On the right, before an autumnal river-front scene, we can see the sleeping Mary with a dozing infant in her left; on the left, a seated Joseph holding the musical score for the angel. The natural surroundings reminds the viewer of the Giorgionesque landscapes of the Cinquecento masters of Northern Italian painting, and it is fully imbued with a degree of nostalgia. Contrasting the unlikelihood of the event is the realistic effect of depiction, the accuracy of details, the trees, the leaves and stones, whereby the total impression becomes astonishingly authentic. The statue-like figure of the angel, with a white robe draped around him, is like a charmingly shaped musical motif, and it provides the basic tone for the composition. It is an interesting contradiction — and at the same time a good example for the adaptability of forms — that this figure of pure classical beauty is a direct descendant of Annibale Carracci's Luxuria from the painting The Choice of Heracles. It has not been clearly decided what was the textual source for the music-playing angel in the story of the flight into Egypt. Charming is Caravaggio's decision to actively involve St Joseph in the music-making. _ detail 1 (61x48cm) _ The composition fans out from an exquisite angel who is playing music. Joseph is wearing clothes of earth-color and is holding a book of music, from which the angel is playing a violin solo, whilst the donkey's large eyes peeps out from under the brown foliage. The Angel is playing a motet in honour of the Madonna, Quam pulchra es..., composed by Noël Bauldewijn to the words of the Song of Songs (7,7) with the dialogue between Groom and Bride (understood in the painting not so much as Joseph and Mary, but as Jesus Christ and the Madonna, i.e. the church): "How fair and pleasant art thou, O love, for delights! This thy stature is like to a palm tree, and thy breasts to clusters of grapes." In the Gospel according to the pseudo-Matthew (20,1), significantly dedicated to the Flight into Egypt, the same metaphorical image of the palm tree laden with fruit returns. The principal motif of Caravaggio's Flight into Egypt is that of the music that can be heard on earth, considered by the Fathers of the Church to be a copy of music in heaven. The intermediary between these two worlds is the invisible sound, which in art takes the form of an Angel playing music, a divine messenger that stands at the border between material and spiritual reality. God communicates with men through Angels, who are his go-betweens: "[it is the] Angel who spoke to me," says Zachariah and for Ezekiel, the Angel is "the man dressed in linen," just as Caravaggio depicts him. _ detail 2 (60x48 cm) The golden section splits the composition into two parts: the left-hand one, with St Joseph, the donkey, and stones, is dedicated to earthly life, while the right-hand area, which includes the Madonna and Child among living plants, is devoted to the divine world. On this detail we can see before an autumnal river-front scene the sleeping Mary with a dozing infant in her left.
— St Catherine of Alexandria (1598, 173x133cm) _ Here we see a single female figure in an interior devoid of architectural allusions. The image appears with a boldness and an immediacy that combine the nobility of the subject (St Catherine of Alexandria was a king's daughter) with the almost plebeian pride of the model (no doubt a Roman woman of the people, who appears on other paintings of the artist, too). The breadth of conception and realization, and the perfect mastery of a very difficult composition (the figure and objects completely fill the painting, in a subtle play of diagonals) are striking. Caravaggio here chose a "grand" noble approach that heralds the great religious compositions he would soon do for San Luigi dei Francesi. The extraordinary virtuosity in the painting of the large, decorated cloth is absorbed as an integral part of the composition. This is something his followers would not often succeed in doing, for they frequently dealt with the single components of the painting individually, with adverse effects on the unity of the whole.
— Ragazzo morso dal ramarro (66x52cm; 920x681, 113kb) — Bacchino malato (1594, 67x53cm; )
— 79 images at ARC

Died on a 18 July:

1894 Jan Bedys Tom, Dutch artist born on 04 March 1813.

^ 1760 Pierre-Philippe Mercier, French painter and etcher, active in England, born in Berlin in 1689, son of Huguenot tapestry-worker Pierre Mercier [–1729]. Philippe Mercier studied painting at the Berlin Akademie and under Antoine Pesne, who had arrived in Berlin in 1710, and afterwards he traveled in Italy and France before arriving in London — recommended by the Court at Hannover —probably in 1716. He married in London in 1719 and lived in Leicester Fields, whence he sold some pictures in 1724 which he had collected abroad. — LINKS — The Belton Conversation Piece — Frederick, Prince of Wales and his Sisters at Kew — School for Boys (1738)

1638 Odoardo Fialetti (“Édouard Viallet”), Italian painter and printmaker born on 18 July 1573. He was apprenticed in his native Bologna to Giovanni Battista Cremonini [–1610] and after a short period in Rome moved to Venice, where he entered Tintoretto’s workshop. By 1596 he was listed as a printmaker and from 1604 to 1612 is recorded as a member of the Venetian Fraglia dei Pittori. His work, although it reveals hints of the Carracci and the influence of Flemish art, remains within the tradition of late Mannerism. His works for Italian churches include Saint Agnes and scenes from the Life of Saint Dominic, which can be dated to the first decade of the 17th century. Four portraits of doges and a picture of the Sala del Collegio, which shows a session of the Doge’s council, demonstrate Fialetti’s interest in portraiture and in combining vedute with elements of genre. — MarcoBoschini was a student of Fialetti.


Born on a 18 July:

^ 1868 Thorvald Erichsen, Norwegian painter who died on 23 December 1939. He began his studies in 1888 at the painting school of Knud Bergslien [1827–1908] in Kristiania (now Oslo); at the same time he attended the Royal School of Design there. In 1892 he studied for a few months under Kristian Zahrtmann in Copenhagen and the next year under Fernand Cormon in Paris. Erichsen's paintings from the 1890s show how his naturalism yielded to more synthetic and symbolic tendencies, in keeping with the general trend. The summer landscape From Telemark (1900) marked a turning-point in his career and introduced a new era in Norwegian art. The subject is a typical Norwegian valley with wooded hillsides and cultivated patches between scattered farm buildings. In the background can be seen bluish mountains under a lightly clouded sky. With its forms tending towards abstraction, conveyed with paint-laden brushstrokes in a wide range of colors, the landscape shimmers with light and warmth. Here Erichsen’s earlier experiences, including that of Impressionism and of Cézanne, are fused into a coherent unity.

^ 1741 Johann-Jakob Dorner I, German painter who died on 22 May 1813. He became a student of the Freiburg painter Franz Joseph Rösch [1724–1777] in 1753. In 1759 Dorner moved to Augsburg to learn fresco painting from Joseph Bauer, then went to Venice. In 1760 Dorner worked with Joseph Mages [1728–1769] in Augsburg as a façade painter and in 1761 went to Munich, where he was employed copying the Dutch paintings at Schloss Schleissheim. Following his portrait of Elector Max III Joseph at the Lathe with Graf Salern (1765), he was appointed a court painter in 1765. Between 1766 and 1769 he visited Düsseldorf and the Netherlands. After nine months at the Antwerp academy he was awarded first prize in history and genre painting. He also studied etching (1769) in Paris under Jean-Georges Wille. He was presumably the father (or uncle?) of Johann-Jakob Dorner II [07 Jul 1775– 14 Dec 1852]. — The Hard Landlady (1787; 312x400pix, 29kb)

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