Men of the Renaissance

1. Explain why you selected each of the TWO videos you choose from the selection listed above.

Velazquez self portrait (circa 1630)
Oil on canvas 

Portrait of Michelangelo (1550-1555)
by Daniele da Volterra

     I selected the video on Velázquez because I saw one of his paintings when I took a trip to Spain a few years ago and I thought this was an opportunity to learn more about an artist whose works I have long admired without knowing much about him.  

      I picked The Drawings of Michelangelo because no discussion of art is complete without a mention of this great artist. I especially wanted to see the drafts that led to his finished works. His rough drawings offer a glimpse into his inner mind and so I wanted to see how his created process unfolded.

2. For each video list/discuss the key concepts you learned.
      I learnt that Velazquez spent most of his professional life in the Spanish royal court and therefore most of his works were influenced by the daily goings on in the palace. A majority of his subjects are members of the royal household and staff.

Pablo de Valladolid (circa 1635)
By Diego Velazquez
Oil on canvas

   I also learnt that he was one of the first major painters of his age to experiment with figures of mythology although he didn’t do this for long. He instead preferred to paint works that emphasized the now as opposed to the past or the future. This seems to have been his greatest strength. He was also an artist who was deeply influenced by other artists, both living and dead and often based his paintings on other paintings. Never afraid to experiment, he was also a slow painter who took his time and this may have given him his keen eye for detail.
      I find his paintings to be rather colorless with their bleak, dark, solemn and unimaginative backgrounds, as if those backgrounds were meant as afterthoughts. The dull shadowy spaces behind the human subjects are barely discernible or remarkable as if the artist didn’t want to draw too much attention to them. 

Portrait of Sebastian de Morra ( circa 1645)
By Diego Velazquez
Oil on canvas

     As mentioned in the video and as I agree, Velasquez always strived to create a balance that incorporated the outer flaws of his characters with the humanity within them. His portraits of court jesters, some deformed on a physical level or spiritually (they just stand there looking foolish or buffoonish), was an attempt by him to capture the humanity that the eye can’t see. This depth is achieved, as the video narrator says, “through an interplay of soft and strong colors” and through the use of “detail and lack of detail” which makes it possible to look not at the subject but inside the subject.

Christ Crucified (1632)
 By Diego Velazquez 
Oil on canvas

     Not surprisingly, Velázquez was criticized for this excessive use of realism perhaps by those who thought a royal painter was supposed to gloss over certain facts and paint the royal household in the best imaginable light. But it seems Velázquez was never really concerned with the superficial. Although he considered himself a courtier whose first loyalties were to his friend King Phillip IV, much of his subject matter often veered away from the grandiosity of royal life, which in itself is a contradiction in the great artist’s priorities.

      Velázquez understood better than most people that the purpose of painting is not to “imitate nature but to guide the eye of the beholder to see what the painter had discovered.” In other words, Velázquez was not interested in capturing beauty per se. Rather, he was interested in capturing not a moment of time, but a moment in time.

      In the The Drawings of Michelangelo, the artist’s early influences are examined through his early life as an apprenticeship and how this experience shaped his artistic mind. His struggle for creative identity is alluded to in the video when it is said that although he denied the influence of his teacher Ghirlandaio, his rough sketches show this not to be the case.

David (1501-1504)
By Michelangelo
Carrara marble

     Michelangelo used these drawings as one would use an archive, or a bank account, as a place to store his ideas and inspirations for future reference. He also used them as sounding boards for his experiments. For example, in one of the drawings, he reimagines a Roman statue that he saw and gives it movement and emotion in an effort to “improve” it.

Pieta (1498-1499)
By Michelangelo
Marble

     Although he had great respect for sculptors of antiquity, he was always trying to outdo these old masters either, I suspect, because he thought he was better than them, or because he suffered from a sense of inferiority. This might also explain his reluctance to admit being influenced by his old master Ghirlandaio.

     He eventually came into his own as a genius sculptor through his carving of the statue of David. In this and other works, he managed to express such feelings as spirituality and emotion by making the body move and pose in unnatural ways and also by trying to create as perfect looking a body as only he could. The whole effect is said to have been a turning point in how the art of that time came to be viewed. The male nude figure, which he used extensively, seemed to become an obsession for him.

The Last Judgement (1536-1541)
By Michelangelo
Fresco

     The drawings tell of the challenges and processes he faced and went through in creating such great works as the paintings inside the Sistine Chapel. That he had to transfer his ideas from small pieces of paper to the massive mediums he used in his final artwork was a truly monumental achievement in itself.

2. How do the videos relate to the readings in the text?     The text devotes little space to Velázquez and only spends a paragraph or two discussing his masterpiece Las Meninas (The Maids of Honor). The importance of light and shadows is emphasized in both. The use of these elements to draw attention to his subjects and organize scenes seems to be something the artist was very good at doing. Spotlighting is used to create ambiguity and gives an observer of the painting an enhanced sense of intimacy with the subjects.

Las Meninas (1656)
By Diego Velazquez
Oil on canvas

    The text is very thorough in its analysis of Michelangelo as a renaissance man while the video is mostly concerned with his drawings and how they translated to his finished works. Both the video and the text trace his artistic journey through the period in which he lived and the influences he incorporated into his work. The "why" of his obsession with the nude male form is not fully explained in the book although the video does suggest, in passing, that Michelangelo may have had a male lover which may very well explain his liking for this subject.

The Creation of Adam (circa 1512)
By Michelangelo
Fresco

3. What is your opinion of the films? How do they add depth to understanding of the readings and art concepts?

    Both the films are very detailed in their explanations of Renaissance art. The background information is very detailed and the accompanying imagery allows the viewer to follow along with the different works that are being discussed. This combination of imagery and narration makes the films a powerful and effective method of appreciating these masters.