Archives: Renaissance

I first saw Titian’s Flaying of Marsyas in the winter of 1984. I had moved to Brooklyn from the Bay Area just 5 months before, when I heard the Flaying of Marsyas was at the Royal Academy in London for an exhibition on 16th Century Venetian painting. I quit my job, got a cheap flight and flew over.

Peter Bruegel, Wine of St. Martin's Feast Day, 1566 - 1567, Tempera on linen, 148 x 270.5 cm. Restored by El Prado The Wine of Saint Martin’s Day by Pieter Bruegel has preoccupied me since 2009, after coming across it in the fifth Bruegel book I ever purchased. For...

Ask me what my favorite painting is — a very hard question since there are so many — and I’ll eventually come up with An Old Man and his Grandson by Domenico Ghirlandaio…

Hieronymus Bosch, Christ Carrying the Cross, 1515, Oil on panel, 29 × 32 inches Everything is in the face, and the face in turn is dominated by the eyes…the face is the mirror of the soul…for this is the only part of the body capable of as many expressions as there...

Yet this is the prospect given in Bruegel’s “St. John the Baptist Preaching.” Jesus is there, but as a presence he hardly counts and John is too far away to be heard distinctly.

Through the double doors that open into the Met Breuer’s inaugural exhibition, I fell into the familiar vortex of a painting I have loved for decades…

The challenge to an artist to think about his or her influences is such a central one that it immediately sends a stream of thoughts about a seemingly endless number of artists through one’s head.

First off, let’s get one thing straight. The Low Countries are aptly named. They’re low. No mountains at all. None!

I know its an absurd statement to say – “Masterpiece” or “Greatest Painting Ever Made”. It’s obscene, and not in a good way, I admit this.

I grew up seeing the paintings of Munch and minor works of Northern European artists in the flesh, most of them tipping the scale at maudlin/austere.

Turn left outside the Jules Maidoff Palazzo in Florence†, walk to the first traffic light, turn left and walk up the hill until you reach via della Collona. Go right, soon you will arrive at # 9.

This rather battered old reproduction hangs in my studio. I’ve owned it since I was five, which is when I first and last saw the original.