Art History Guide

I’m not much of a fan of the phrase “fun fact”, yet I don’t know how else to concisely express factual information that are truly and deliciously enjoyable other than through a thesaurus. Anyway, here is an agreeable actuality on famed Mannerist Bronzino: information about his life and work can be found here.

Also, here are two videos of his work:

Bronzino

Sure, art movements are time period specific, but the criteria of Mannerism made me think of comic books. Exaggerate beauty, distorted or elongated bodies (sometimes overmuscularized), heightened movement and tension, and unrealistic lighting. The sloping shoulders and long necks of Il Bronzino?

Some of these descriptions remind me of “sequential artists” like Mike Mignola…

Adam Pollina…

and Stephen Platt…

Bronzino, Mignola, Adam Pollina, Stephen Platt

Here’s a Mannerist for you who, with the help of his surviving diary, was seen as sane as Rosso. You could see that in the expressions of his figures, there is a paranoid and anxious tension happening. Pontormo was a death obsessed hypochondriac who lived on the top floor of a tall house. You could only access his house through a ladder, too. He also used strange colors and perspectives.

That’s all.

Ten points for my title.

It’s funny that this purposely sexualized (at the time) painting of Mary and Joseph has a guy measuring Joseph’s penis.Thanks, monk, for doing that. Oh Rosso.

Artists aren’t weirdos, they’re just heavy boned. For example, the Mannerist painter, Rosso, lived with a baboon and he supposedly studied corpses with the fascination of the decomposition process. There would be a dark quality in his work, looming with sinisterness, which went with the chaos of the political landscape of the time, and as a reaction to the previous movement’s harmony.

Read what this site had to say about this painting (also note how demanding the passage is of the reader):

The entire structure of the painting is “hanging” on the cross by the ladder. It’s an explosive, dynamic painting: everybody moves. Il Rosso created chaos but he could also control it. We can compare it with El Greco: look at the screaming man, the figure on the left. Joseph of Arimatea is on top of the cross. Look at the expression of Jesus face: he has a strange smile, totally inexplicable. It is a confusing figure to the onlooker, nobody has ever done this before in the tradition. Look at Mary Magdalene: her body is turned in a “cubic” structure, it’s a “box like” figure. The distortion of light bridles and gives sharp edges. All the previous figures from Giotto to Leonardo are here, but Il Rosso increases and distorts emotions, see for example the elongated faces.

Yeech…

Rosso was controversial and devilish, but the Church still put up his work. Thanks for being a good sport, Church.

Mary and Joseph, penis, Mannerist, Rosso, Church

I was thinking of the ways I could eat breakfast, and also coming up with a posthumous to do list on OnMyList.com, when I was reminded of the ninja turtles using artist names. There was also a ninja turtle character that tried to capture the commercialized subculture of the Californian skateboarder, who was a mutated gecko.

My point is this: it kind of reminded me of El Greco (real name Domenikos Theotocopoulos, which is probably why they gave him a nickname), from the Late Renaissance. He was influenced by Raphael and Michelangelo (he claimed to be better than Michelangelo), but also of the Mannerists–enough that many people include him as a Mannerist. A lot of the technical characteristics of Mannerism is covered in his work, but he held enough of his own to stand out. What he strived for was an emotion driven ecstasy from the heavens.

He disliked walking in the sunlight, saying “the daylight blinds the light within.” This eerie inner light that shone from the canvases is what gave him his edge. Ties to the Ninja Turtles is what gave Mondo Gecko his.

OnMyList, ninja, turtles, El Greco, Mondo, Gecko

Do you like manners? What about Mannerists? What about that time period between High Renaissance and the Baroque period? Did you know that’s when Mannerism happened? What’s that? You like the music of Justin Timberlake and Roy Hargrove? Ok.

So you know how the era of Michelangelo and Raphael achieved the expression of harmony and reality in nature? Yeah well, what do you do after that? Especially when the world was going from stable times to disorder? Wouldn’t you exaggerate their ideal beauty? Wouldn’t you go from symmetrical compositions with centered weight to oblique compositions with figures away from the center? Abandonment in real nature became the new originality.

Do you want to know where Mannerism came from? Would you believe me if the word came from the Italian term “de maniera”, meaning work done with a developed style over a strict depiction of nature? Did you know common characteristics of Mannerism involved distorted and elongated bodies, lurid colors, heightened tension and movement, and unrealistic lighting?

Well, there you go. More later.

I was going to explode upon you a couple days of Mannerism, but I need to take a nap. Here’s a video of one of my favorite artists, Degas (of “Another Degas By” fame).

Ok, have this silent art history video playing while you read this post.

In yesterday’s post, it was mentioned that artists managed to squeeze out profound quotes that lasted through time. So how does this work? Are they all done through letters, or is there a guy who actually follows people around, looking for good quotes to write down?

I would call them quote artists, and they would be unsung observers of “profound” people. They would be paid nothing, and have nothing of their own to say. But if they did I wonder if they would quote themselves, (”Quoting is such sweet sorrow…” -Me!), or they would have to find someone else to quote them.

“Hey Wes!”

“Yo.”

“Can you quote me on this?”

“Sure. Quote, me, on, this… gotcha.”

“No, not that. I came up with something clever that I want to be quoted in text books of the future. It’s ‘Quoting is such sweet sorrow…’”

“I don’t get it.”

“Don’t worry, it will make sense in the future. Anyway, credit it as Darnell Q. Jones. No, just Q. Jones. A Q. Jones sounds like someone who would have profound things to say. For all they’d know, the Q could stand for Quotemaster.”

“What does it stand for?”

“Quotemaster.”

“Ok. Is sorrow with one or two R’s, I forget.”

Throughout the timeline of art, a historical figure would make a profound statement that would outlast the artist’s lifespan and nestle in the warm embrace of timelessness. And what boggles me is that this was before recording devices, like news crews and PR, who will wring you of a soundbyte whether you like it or not.

Even the earliest artists had quotes. The artist of one of the first prehistoric celebrations of women cut in stone even had a quote.

“Jesus, women are like, nature’s rubik’s cube. Or a bagel,” said the artist of Venus of Willendorf, which is dated around 24,000-22,000 B.C.E.

Before Pop art officially emerged, Robert Rauschenberg had his own thing going, which he called Combines (basically half painting, half sculpture). He would put together a piece like “Monogram” — a goat wearing a tire on top of a collaged canvas — and did two things: 1. point out all materials are worthy of art; and 2. free the artist from the idea of having to record their own emotions.

Instead of putting them into context, here’s a list of some quotes:

“A pair of socks isn’t less suitable to make a painting with than oil on canvas.”

“I wanted the images to still have the feeling of the outside world rather than cultivate the incest of studio life.”

“A picture is more like the real world when it’s made out of the real world.”

“If art isn’t a surprise it’s nothing.” (in regards to how he would buy label-less house paint, not knowing the colors until he opened the lids to begin painting)

“It’s the sport of making something I haven’t seen before. If I know what I’m going to do, I don’t do it.”

Although I’m sure many people have seen tires on angora goats.

Click here for a summary of his piece, “Bed”, which he’s said is “one of the friendliest pictures I’ve ever painted. My fear has always been that someone would want to crawl into it.”

Rauschenberg, goat