As made obvious by their art, the Byzantines and Renaissance-era Italians loved Jesus. They enjoyed making visual tributes to him in a plethora of scenes, but by far the most popular was the ‘Madonna and Child’. We saw an absurd amount of Madonna and Child paintings, all with baby Jesus sitting in the crook of his mother’s right arm and/or resting on her leg. While not particularly enthused by the subject material (or lack of it…the same concept was repeated over and over again) it was interesting to see how people’s concept of how Mary and Jesus evolved over time. The paintings grew less flat and stylized over the centuries and infant Jesus started to look more like an infant (in the early byzantine renderings, he looked like an adult face on a weird baby body….it was not, in my opinion, the most attract look for the young savior).
The painting I enjoyed most in the Flemish section was Wolf and Fox Hunt. Part of a series of hunting scenes, the painting was made and sold to Sir Dudley Carleton in the 1610s or 1620s. I liked the detail and vivacity present in the painting of the animals; there is a realism in them that was less apparent (or at least I thought) in many of the people painted by the old Flemish masters. While I think that the idea of mixing mother of pearl into their paint certainly achieved the luminosity they were looking to create, I was not so keen on how it worked in the context of the painting. I believe this may be because standards of beauty have changed over time. The grandmasters painted their subjects with pale, opalescent skin because it seemed to connote the angelic for them; when I look at these paintings I see an iridescence that seems bizarre as a skin tone. This strive for the heavenly is also visible in the shapes of their models. All the women and children, regardless of age seem cherubic, painted with soft lines; angular features and deep shadows are relegated to men, and often not even then are they utilized by the Flemish masters. This ties back to why Wolf and Fox Hunt was my favorite in the grouping, because their were heavy lines and a sense of action that was not present in most of the other Flemish paintings.
Wolf and Fox Hunt
Also, on a related note, a quasi-animated rendering some of you all might like:
http://www.lukasweb.be/splash.html Art in Flanders, (in 3-D?)
