Archives: Baroque
Julie Heffernan on El Greco
El Greco emphasizes this theme of separation—head from body, conceptual realm from sensorial realm, upper half from lower half, white from black.
Dear Weather: Buzz Spector on Hobbema, Gainsbourough, & Vermeer
Little popcorn puffs or higher, more distant, cirrus… a shorthand for how the duration of a painting allows for some time.
David Reed on Caravaggio: Whirlpool – The Martyrdom of St. Ursula
The strange pattern of forms that now obsessed me implied a resolution of that split in consciousness between St. Ursula’s and Caravaggio’s portrait…
Rackstraw Downes on Hercules Segers at the MET
Once you get into his weird scale and murmuring color a whole world opens up.
Luke Murphy on Robert Fludd
What it tries to contain — an unimaginable nothingness — is so beyond its simple means…
James McGarrell on Jan Vermeer
Its entry is inevitably from the bottom edge because it is from there that, as crawling infants, we all enter spaces.
And then the Real Nature Showed Up: Emilie Clark on Rubens
Last week I went to the Met to pick out a painting to write about for Painters on Painting. I had initially thought that I would write about a contemporary work, always feeling that I need to broaden my knowledge of contemporary painting. But then the election happened and I wanted to be in the Met.
Raoul Middleman on Rembrandt
The most puzzling aspect of the The Night Watch is the figure of the small girl, the so-called mascot of the civic guard…
John Bowman on Gian Antonio Fumiani
Venice has a surfeit of amazing examples of painting, and one is reluctant to choose a favorite from the stunning array of this kind of art on view.
Margaret McCann on Diego Velazquez’s ‘Las Meninas’
Sphinx-like, Diego Velazquez’s Las Meninas (1656) questions more than it answers. Whether the picture is about the painter with a brush in the mirror, or the princess…