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Lodovico Carracci wurde 1555 in Bologna geboren und starb dort 1619. Er arbeitete in Bologna mit seinen Vettern Agostino und Annibale Carracci zusammen, mit denen er die Accademia degli Incamminati (auch Accademia Carracci genannt) gründete, die sich gegen den damals vorherrschenden gekünstelten Manierismus wendete.
Das Bildnis in der Galleria Barberini zeigt eine ältere Dame in recht schonungsloser und realistischer Weise.
www.google.it/imgres?q=putti+michelangelo&num=10&...
nun ce posso crede, mica staronno a fa li guardoni ?
Full title: Susannah and the Elders
Artist: Ludovico Carracci
Date made: 1616
Source: www.nationalgalleryimages.co.uk/
Contact: picture.library@nationalgallery.co.uk
Copyright © The National Gallery, London
Annibale Carracci (1560-1609) - Christ appearing to St Anthony Abbot during his Temptation, c1598 : detail
The Pantheon is a former Roman temple and, since AD 609, a Catholic church (Basilica Santa Maria ad Martyres or Basilica of St. Mary and the Martyrs) in Rome, Italy. It was built on the site of an earlier temple commissioned by Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa during the reign of Augustus (27 BC – AD 14); then, after the original burnt down, the present building was ordered by the emperor Hadrian and probably dedicated c. AD 126. Its date of construction is uncertain, because Hadrian chose not to inscribe the new temple but rather to retain the inscription of Agrippa's older temple.
The building is round in plan, except for the portico with large granite Corinthian columns (eight in the first rank and two groups of four behind) under a pediment. A rectangular vestibule links the porch to the rotunda, which is under a coffered concrete dome, with a central opening (oculus) to the sky. Almost two thousand years after it was built, the Pantheon's dome is still the world's largest unreinforced concrete dome. The height to the oculus and the diameter of the interior circle are the same, 43 metres (142 ft).
It is one of the best-preserved of all Ancient Roman buildings, in large part because it has been in continuous use throughout its history. Since the 7th century, it has been a church dedicated to St. Mary and the Martyrs (Latin: Sancta Maria ad Martyres), known as "Santa Maria Rotonda". The square in front of the Pantheon is called Piazza della Rotonda. The Pantheon is a state property, managed by Italy's Ministry of Cultural Heritage and Activities and Tourism through the Polo Museale del Lazio. In 2013, it was visited by over six million people.
The Pantheon's large circular domed cella, with a conventional temple portico front, was unique in Roman architecture. Nevertheless, it became a standard exemplar when classical styles were revived, and has been copied many times by later architects.
In the aftermath of the Battle of Actium (31 BC), Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa started an impressive building program. The Pantheon was a part of the complex created by him on his own property in the Campus Martius in 29–19 BC, which included three buildings aligned from south to north: the Baths of Agrippa, the Basilica of Neptune, and the Pantheon. It seems likely that the Pantheon and the Basilica of Neptune were Agrippa's sacra privata, not aedes publicae (public temples). The former would help explain how the building could have so easily lost its original name and purpose (Ziolkowski contends that it was originally the Temple of Mars in Campo) in such a relatively short period of time.
It had long been thought that the current building was built by Agrippa, with later alterations undertaken, and this was in part because of the Latin inscription on the front of the temple which reads:
The Pantheon dome. The coffered dome has a central oculus as the main source of natural light.
M·AGRIPPA·L·F·COS·TERTIVM·FECIT
or in full, "M[arcus] Agrippa L[ucii] f[ilius] co[n]s[ul] tertium fecit," meaning "Marcus Agrippa, son of Lucius, made [this building] when consul for the third time." However, archaeological excavations have shown that the Pantheon of Agrippa had been completely destroyed except for the façade. Lise Hetland argues that the present construction began in 114, under Trajan, four years after it was destroyed by fire for the second time (Oros. 7.12). She reexamined Herbert Bloch's 1959 paper, which is responsible for the commonly maintained Hadrianic date, and maintains that he should not have excluded all of the Trajanic-era bricks from his brick-stamp study. Her argument is particularly interesting in light of Heilmeyer's argument that, based on stylistic evidence, Apollodorus of Damascus, Trajan's architect, was the obvious architect.
The form of Agrippa's Pantheon is debated. As a result of excavations in the late 19th century, archaeologist Rodolfo Lanciani concluded that Agrippa's Pantheon was oriented so that it faced south, in contrast with the current layout that faces north, and that it had a shortened T-shaped plan with the entrance at the base of the "T". This description was widely accepted until the late 20th century. While more recent archaeological diggings have suggested that Agrippa's building might have had a circular form with a triangular porch, and it might have also faced north, much like the later rebuildings, Ziolkowski complains that their conclusions were based entirely on surmise; according to him, they did not find any new datable material, yet they attributed everything they found to the Agrippan phase, failing to account for the fact that Domitian, known for his enthusiasm for building and known to have restored the Pantheon after 80 AD, might well have been responsible for everything they found. Ziolkowski argues that Lanciani's initial assessment is still supported by all of the finds to date, including theirs; he expresses scepticism because the building they describe, "a single building composed of a huge pronaos and a circular cella of the same diameter, linked by a relatively narrow and very short passage (much thinner than the current intermediate block), has no known parallels in classical architecture and would go against everything we know of Roman design principles in general and of Augustan architecture in particular."
The only passages referring to the decoration of the Agrippan Pantheon written by an eyewitness are in Pliny the Elder's Natural History. From him we know that "the capitals, too, of the pillars, which were placed by M. Agrippa in the Pantheon, are made of Syracusan bronze", that "the Pantheon of Agrippa has been decorated by Diogenes of Athens, and the Caryatides, by him, which form the columns of that temple, are looked upon as masterpieces of excellence: the same, too, with the statues that are placed upon the roof," and that one of Cleopatra's pearls was cut in half so that each half "might serve as pendants for the ears of Venus, in the Pantheon at Rome".
The Augustan Pantheon was destroyed along with other buildings in a fire in 80 AD. Domitian rebuilt the Pantheon, which was burnt again in 110 AD.
The degree to which the decorative scheme should be credited to Hadrian's architects is uncertain. Finished by Hadrian but not claimed as one of his works, it used the text of the original inscription on the new façade (a common practice in Hadrian's rebuilding projects all over Rome; the only building on which Hadrian put his own name was the Temple to the Deified Trajan). How the building was actually used is not known. The Historia Augusta says that Hadrian dedicated the Pantheon (among other buildings) in the name of the original builder (Hadr. 19.10), but the current inscription could not be a copy of the original; it does not tell us to whom Agrippa's foundation was dedicated, and, in Ziolkowski's opinion, it was highly unlikely that in 25 BC Agrippa would have presented himself as "consul tertium." On coins, the same words, "M. Agrippa L.f cos. tertium", were the ones used to refer to him after his death; consul tertium serving as "a sort of posthumous cognomen ex virtute, a remembrance of the fact that, of all the men of his generation apart from Augustus himself, he was the only one to hold the consulship thrice." Whatever the cause of the alteration of the inscription might have been, the new inscription reflects the fact that there was a change in the building's purpose.
Cassius Dio, a Graeco-Roman senator, consul and author of a comprehensive History of Rome, writing approximately 75 years after the Pantheon's reconstruction, mistakenly attributed the domed building to Agrippa rather than Hadrian. Dio appears to be the only near-contemporaneous writer to mention the Pantheon. Even by 200, there was uncertainty about the origin of the building and its purpose:
Agrippa finished the construction of the building called the Pantheon. It has this name, perhaps because it received among the images which decorated it the statues of many gods, including Mars and Venus; but my own opinion of the name is that, because of its vaulted roof, it resembles the heavens.
— Cassius Dio History of Rome 53.27.2
In 202, the building was repaired by the joint emperors Septimius Severus and his son Caracalla (fully Marcus Aurelius Antoninus), for which there is another, smaller inscription on the architrave of the façade, under the aforementioned larger text. This now-barely legible inscription reads:
IMP · CAES · L · SEPTIMIVS · SEVERVS · PIVS · PERTINAX · ARABICVS · ADIABENICVS · PARTHICVS · MAXIMVS · PONTIF · MAX · TRIB · POTEST · X · IMP · XI · COS · III · P · P · PROCOS ET
IMP · CAES · M · AVRELIVS · ANTONINVS · PIVS · FELIX · AVG · TRIB · POTEST · V · COS · PROCOS · PANTHEVM · VETVSTATE · CORRVPTVM · CVM · OMNI · CVLTV · RESTITVERVNT
In English, this means:
Emp[eror] Caes[ar] L[ucius] Septimius Severus Pius Pertinax, victorious in Arabia, victor of Adiabene, the greatest victor in Parthia, Pontif[ex] Max[imus], 10 times tribune, 11 times proclaimed emperor, three times consul, P[ater] P[atriae], proconsul, and
Emp[eror] Caes[ar] M[arcus] Aurelius Antoninus Pius Felix Aug[ustus], five times tribune, consul, proconsul, have carefully restored the Pantheon ruined by age.
In 609, the Byzantine emperor Phocas gave the building to Pope Boniface IV, who converted it into a Christian church and consecrated it to St. Mary and the Martyrs on 13 May 609: "Another Pope, Boniface, asked the same [Emperor Phocas, in Constantinople] to order that in the old temple called the Pantheon, after the pagan filth was removed, a church should be made, to the holy virgin Mary and all the martyrs, so that the commemoration of the saints would take place henceforth where not gods but demons were formerly worshipped." Twenty-eight cartloads of holy relics of martyrs were said to have been removed from the catacombs and placed in a porphyry basin beneath the high altar. On its consecration, Boniface placed an icon of the Mother of God as 'Panagia Hodegetria' (All Holy Directress) within the new sanctuary.
The building's consecration as a church saved it from the abandonment, destruction, and the worst of the spoliation that befell the majority of ancient Rome's buildings during the Early Middle Ages. However, Paul the Deacon records the spoliation of the building by the Emperor Constans II, who visited Rome in July 663:
Remaining at Rome twelve days he pulled down everything that in ancient times had been made of metal for the ornament of the city, to such an extent that he even stripped off the roof of the church [of the blessed Mary], which at one time was called the Pantheon, and had been founded in honour of all the gods and was now by the consent of the former rulers the place of all the martyrs; and he took away from there the bronze tiles and sent them with all the other ornaments to Constantinople.
Much fine external marble has been removed over the centuries – for example, capitals from some of the pilasters are in the British Museum. Two columns were swallowed up in the medieval buildings that abutted the Pantheon on the east and were lost. In the early 17th century, Urban VIII Barberini tore away the bronze ceiling of the portico, and replaced the medieval campanile with the famous twin towers (often wrongly attributed to Bernini) called "the ass's ears", which were not removed until the late 19th century. The only other loss has been the external sculptures, which adorned the pediment above Agrippa's inscription. The marble interior has largely survived, although with extensive restoration.
Since the Renaissance the Pantheon has been the site of several important burials. Among those buried there are the painters Raphael and Annibale Carracci, the composer Arcangelo Corelli, and the architect Baldassare Peruzzi. In the 15th century, the Pantheon was adorned with paintings: the best-known is the Annunciation by Melozzo da Forlì. Filippo Brunelleschi, among other architects, looked to the Pantheon as inspiration for their works.
Pope Urban VIII (1623 to 1644) ordered the bronze ceiling of the Pantheon's portico melted down. Most of the bronze was used to make bombards for the fortification of Castel Sant'Angelo, with the rest used by the Apostolic Camera for other works. It is also said that the bronze was used by Bernini in creating his famous baldachin above the high altar of St. Peter's Basilica, but, according to at least one expert, the Pope's accounts state that about 90% of the bronze was used for the cannon, and that the bronze for the baldachin came from Venice. Concerning this, an anonymous contemporary Roman satirist quipped in a pasquinade (a publicly posted poem) that quod non fecerunt barbari fecerunt Barberini ("What the barbarians did not do the Barberinis [Urban VIII's family name] did").
In 1747, the broad frieze below the dome with its false windows was "restored," but bore little resemblance to the original. In the early decades of the 20th century, a piece of the original, as far as could be reconstructed from Renaissance drawings and paintings, was recreated in one of the panels.
Two kings of Italy are buried in the Pantheon: Vittorio Emanuele II and Umberto I, as well as Umberto's Queen, Margherita. It was supposed to be the final resting place for the Monarchs of Italy of the House of Savoy, but the Monarchy was abolished in 1946 and the authorities have refused to grant burial to the former kings who died in exile (Victor Emmanuel III and Umberto II). The National Institute for the Honour Guard of the Royal Tombs of the Pantheon was originally chartered by the House of Savoy and subsequently operating with authorization of the Italian Republic, mounts as guards of honour in front of the royal tombs.
The Pantheon is in use as a Catholic church, and as such, visitors are asked to keep an appropriate level of deference. Masses are celebrated there on Sundays and holy days of obligation. Weddings are also held there from time to time.
in LACMA
Guido Reni (1575 - 1642)
Guido Reni was born in Bologna. He studied there at the Carracci Academy and later traveled to Rome in 1600, where classical masters such as Raphael influenced his work. He early displayed for life drawings and was interested in classical and mythological themes. When he came back to Bologna Reni was commissioned to paint frescoes; the most famous of these was Aurora and the Hours, done for the Borghese family. Reni was rather eccentric. He disliked and feared women, whom he barred from his house even as servants, yet he was devoted to his mother and renowned for his heartfelt Madonnas.
When Annibale Carracci died, Reni took over as the most desired painter in Bologna, established his own studio and his fame spread all over Europe. Withe fame came the money, lots of money. He charged huge amounts for commercial portraits and constantly increased prices. His "commercial" work affected the quality since at times he would complete a painting in less than 3 hours. All of this money was spent however to support his addiction: Reni was a compulsive gambler. At the end of his life while on a gambling spree he came down with fever and died. He was deep in debt but was buried with a great pomp in the church of St. Domenico. It is ironic that the first advice this conflicted artist gave to his pupils was "The fear of God".... Reni's legacy is his masterful lighting and composition, and the influence on later Italian artists.
Caravaggio was contracted to paint two large lateral paintings for the Cerasi chapel, to the left of the main altar of Santa Maria del Popolo. The large central painting of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary by Annibale Carracci was acquired at the same time. Both Carracci and Caravaggio were successful and highly rated artists at the time but it is without doubt that visitors mainly visit Santa Maria del Popolo to see the Caravaggios.
Both paintings are typical Caravaggios — light and dark but the former only shows when visitors feed coins into the box to switch on the lights.
This painting shows Saint Peter being crucified upside down. According to tradition, Peter claimed that he was not worthy to die on the cross in a similar fashion to Jesus Christ. The apostle Peter, by now an old man, is shown already with his hands and feet nailed to the cross.
Three workers leverage the cross upright. The three anonymous men in workers’ clothes and dirty feet show no emotions or reverence — it is all in a day’s work.
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The church of Santa Maria del Popolo in Rome is filled with art but most visitors come to see the two Caravaggio paintings: Crucifixion of St Peter and Conversion of St Paul). The church also has a fine chapel designed by Raphael while Bernini gave the church a Baroque makeover that was stripped back somewhat in the early 20th century to restore the Renaissance appearance.
"The Conversion of Saul (St-Paul)" (1600-1601), a relatively large painting (230x175 cm) by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (29 September 1571, Milan, Duchy of Milan, Spanish Empire -18 July 1610, Porto Ercole, State of the Presidi, Spanish Empire)
is one of two of his paintings depicting the Conversion of St. Paul and the Crucifixion of St. Peter adorning the side walls in the Cerasi Chapel (1601-1606), designed by architect Carlo Maderno inside the
Parish Basilica of Santa Maria del Popolo (1472-1477)
Piazza del Popolo 12
00187 Roma RM
ITALY
Tiberio Cerasi (1544, Rome – May 3, 1601, Frascati, Papal States) was a Roman jurist and Treasurer-General to Pope Clement VIII, who commissioned two side paintings on cypress wood from Caravaggio and a central painting depicting "The Assumption of the Virgin" (1600-1601) by Annibale Carracci (November 3, 1560, Bologna, Papal States - July 15, 1609, Rome, Papal States).
Engravings by and after Annibale Carracci, Agostino Carracci and Lodovico Carracci. Album compiled by Pietro Fancelli. [Bologna] : [before 1850]
Wellcome Library no. 29876i
Someone finally wrote about this painting without referring to the woman depicted as “a Slave”, and it’s about effing TIME. (Annibale Carracci; Baroque Portrait Of Elegantly Dressed African Woman Discovered) This is something that has vexed me considerably for a very long time now, because here’s the problem: unless I give the most-used or common title of the painting here, those of you trying to do further research on these works will be unable to find them. Sometimes, these titles range from questionable to outright horrendous. I try to do the best I can to be responsible about it, but racism is a system where the same people always lose, guaranteed. Where is there to walk except to step on the same people, always? How can we move at all without harming? We have so much work to do on this. And in my opinion, it’s not busywork, and it’s not even a little bit trivial. In face, if you read the notes on this post about the Rijksmuseum’s title policy changes, you’ll see tons of emotionally invested white people violently defending racist titles as if they are some kind of sacredly racist blessing given by some Impartial History Goddess unto posterity. *eyeroll* These images and histories do NOT arrive to us untouched by the intervening centuries. By ignoring that context, we are actively supporting racism that was attached to these works much later than they were created. If we pretend that “objectivity” means absolving ourselves of the responsibility to investigate the marks left by those who did not share that particular compunction about changing things, that is still a choice and an action. It’s an action that says that racism and misinformation is good and should be preserved. History is not static, nor should it be. This isn’t about mincing words, it’s about how and why we assign value, importance, and humanity to people. Moreover, examining the “middle”, the “medieval”, as it were, without looking at what came before or after, is to imagine a disembodied torso of history that makes little sense and can serve any purpose. European Medievalism in a vacuum leads to the hijacking of history by white supremacy and white nationalism, a sort of Mr Potato Head that can be dressed up and made to serve the purpose of whoever feels like evoking the concept of medieval whiteness, originary and pure. But there is no “Racial Reset Button”, and periodization is too often the enemy of historical truths. When power is used to label entire swaths of humanity with retroactive dehumanization, when this is repeated by the supposedly credible ad nauseum, and when we make any engagement with this evidence contingent on reinforcing that dehumanization, how can we recover? How can we be just, without justifying ourselves? I believe there can be an answer, and I believe in being able to do better. I want to do better. And this is the kind of question I post to myself, and to all of you, at the dawning of this year.
Domenico Zampieri (or Domenichino) (October 21, 1581 – April 16, 1641) was an Italian Baroque painter of the Bolognese School, or Carracci School, of painters.
Quelle: FAZ, Ausgabe 8. April 2009
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"Michelangelo Merisi, nach dem Herkunftsort seiner Eltern kurz Caravaggio genannt (* 29. September 1571 in Mailand; † 18. Juli 1610 in Porto Ercole am Monte Argentario), war ein italienischer Maler des Frühbarock, der sich durch seine neuartige und realistische Bildgestaltung auszeichnete. Vornehmlich in der Behandlung christlicher Themen ging er durch Verknüpfung des Sakralen mit dem Profanen neue Wege. Er gilt zusammen mit Annibale Carracci als Überwinder des Manierismus und Begründer der römischen Barockmalerei. Schon früh nach seinem Tod bildeten sich Legenden, die ihn zum „Archetypen des verruchten Künstlers“ werden ließen. Bis heute ist der „Mythos Caravaggio“ ungebrochen. Nachhaltigen Einfluss übte er auf viele italienische, niederländische, französische, deutsche und spanische Maler seiner Zeit aus, die teilweise auch als Caravaggisten bezeichnet werden." Quelle und weitere Informationen: Wikipedia: Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio
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Weiterführende Links:
Homepage: www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/html/c/caravagg/index.html
45info: de.45info.com/video/Michelangelo+Merisi+da+Caravaggio
eyeplorer: de.eyeplorer.com/show/me/Michelangelo+Merisi+da+Caravaggio
Church of San Michele in Bosco – Bologna, Italy
The octagonal cloister or “de’ Carracci” was erected at the beginning of 1600 based on Pietro Fiorini’s design and was decorated by Ludovico Carracci and the apprentices of his school, together with a number of master of that time, such as Alessandro Tiarini, Guido Reni, Francesco Brizio and Lucio Massari.
The Lamentation, ca. 1582
Ludovico Carracci (Italian, Bolognese, 1555–1619)
Oil on canvas; 37 1/2 x 68 in. (95.3 x 172.7 cm)
Purchase, Lila Acheson Wallace and The Annenberg Foundation Gifts; Harris Brisbane Dick, Rogers, and Gwynne Andrews Funds; Pat and John Rosenwald, Mr. and Mrs. Mark Fisch, and Jon and Barbara Landau Gifts; Gift of Mortimer D. Sackler, Theresa Sackler and Family; and Victor Wilbour Memorial, Marquand, The Alfred N. Punnett Endowment, and Charles B. Curtis Funds, 2000 (2000.68)
... as I was walking neere a poore solitary thatched house, in a field in our parish, nere Says Court. I found him shut in, but looking in at the window I perceiv'd him carving that large cartoon or crucifix of Tintoret, a copy of which I had myselfe brought from Venice, where the original painting remaines. I asked if I might enter; he open'd the door civilly to me, and I saw him about such a work as for ye curiosity of handling, drawing, and studious exactnesse, I never had before seene in all my travells. I questioned him why he worked in such an obscure and lonesome place; he told me it was that he might apply himselfe to his profession without interruption ...
The writer was John Evelyn and the craftsman was Grinling Gibbons, then unknown. The "obscure and lonesome place" was Deptford.
Evelyn tried to get Charles II to buy the carving but it was eventually sold to Sir George Viner for £80. It is uncertain what happened to it in the following 80 or 90 years.
It has been at Dunham since 1758.
(For the print see: www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_data...)
property of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
for educational purpose only
please do not use without permission
Roman, Marble, 1 AD - 99 AD
The British Museum, London
Description (from Google Cultural Institute)
Together with a statue of Apollo, this sculpture once framed the central doorway of the gallery in the Palazzo Farnese in Rome. The Farnese family assembled one of the most important Renaissance collections of antiquities in the city. Cardinal Alessandro Farnese, later Pope under the name of Paul III, commissioned the family's magnificent palace. Begun by the architect Antonio di Sangallo (about 1455-1534) and finally completed by Michelangelo (1475-1564), it housed the most splendid antiquities owned by the family and became one of the prime destinations for visitors to Rome. Its centrepiece was a great gallery over the arcades of the back part of the palace, completed in 1589. The gallery contained fine sculptures integrated with wall and ceiling frescoes, added by Annibale Carracci (1560-1609) after 1597, into a carefully thought-out iconographic program.
This statue of Hermes, identified by his winged sandals and the herald's staff in his left hand, is a Roman copy of a famous type created in the school of the Greek sculptor Praxiteles in the fourth century BC. Another Roman copy after the same type was in the Vatican, where it was known as the 'Belvedere Antinous'.
The Postcard
A postally unused postcard that was published by the Victoria and Albert Museum.
The Cottge in a Cornfield is an oil on canvas by John Constable (1776 - 1837). It was painted in England between 1817 and 1833.
John Constable
John Constable RA, who was born on the 11th. June 1776, was an English landscape painter in the Romantic tradition. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for revolutionising the genre of landscape painting with his pictures of Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home – now known as "Constable Country" – which he invested with an intensity of affection.
In 1821 he wrote to his friend John Fisher:
"I should paint my own places best.
Painting is but another word for feeling".
Constable's most famous paintings include Wivenhoe Park (1816), Dedham Vale (1828) and The Hay Wain (1821).
Although John's paintings are now among the most popular and valuable in British art, he was never financially successful. He was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts at the age of 52.
His work was embraced in France, where he sold more than in his native England, and where he inspired the Barbizon school.
-- John Constable - The Early Years
John Constable was born in East Bergholt, a village on the River Stour in Suffolk, to Golding and Ann (Watts) Constable. His father was a wealthy corn merchant, owner of Flatford Mill in East Bergholt and, later, Dedham Mill in Essex.
Golding Constable owned a small ship, The Telegraph, which he moored at Mistley on the Stour estuary, and used to transport corn to London.
Although Constable was his parents' second son, his older brother was intellectually disabled, and John was expected to succeed his father in the business. After a brief period at a boarding school in Lavenham, he was enrolled in a day school in Dedham, Essex.
John worked in the corn business after leaving school, but his younger brother Abram eventually took over the running of the mills.
In his youth, Constable embarked on amateur sketching trips in the surrounding Suffolk and Essex countryside, which was to become the subject of a large proportion of his art. He recalled:
"These scenes made me a painter,
and I am grateful. The sound of water
escaping from mill dams etc., willows,
old rotten planks, slimy posts, and
brickwork, I love such things."
He was introduced to George Beaumont, a collector, who showed him his prized Hagar and the Angel by Claude Lorrain, which inspired Constable. Later, while visiting relatives in Middlesex, he was introduced to the professional artist John Thomas Smith, who advised him on painting, but also urged him to remain in his father's business rather than take up art professionally.
In 1799, Constable persuaded his father to let him pursue a career in art, and Golding granted him a small allowance. Entering the Royal Academy Schools as a probationer, he attended life classes and anatomical dissections, and studied and copied old masters.
Among works that particularly inspired him during this period were paintings by Thomas Gainsborough, Claude Lorrain, Peter Paul Rubens, Annibale Carracci and Jacob van Ruisdael.
John also read widely among poetry and sermons, and later proved a notably articulate artist.
In 1802 he refused the position of drawing master at Great Marlow Military College (now Sandhurst), a move which Benjamin West (then master of the RA) counselled would mean the end of his career. In that year, Constable wrote a letter to John Dunthorne in which he spelled out his determination to become a professional landscape painter:
"For the last two years I have been running after
pictures, and seeking the truth at second hand...
I have not endeavoured to represent nature with
the same elevation of mind with which I set out,
but have rather tried to make my performances
look like the work of other men.
There is room enough for a natural painter. The
great vice of the present day is bravura, an
attempt to do something beyond the truth."
John's early style has many qualities associated with his mature work, including a freshness of light, colour and touch, and reveals the compositional influence of the old masters he had studied, notably of Claude Lorrain.
Constable's usual subjects, scenes of ordinary daily life, were unfashionable in an age that looked for more romantic visions of wild landscapes and ruins.
By 1803, he was exhibiting paintings at the Royal Academy. In April he spent almost a month aboard the East Indiaman Coutts as it visited south-east ports while sailing from London to Deal before leaving for China.
In 1806 Constable undertook a two-month tour of the Lake District. He told his friend and biographer, Charles Leslie, that the solitude of the mountains oppressed his spirits, and Leslie wrote:
"His nature was peculiarly social, and could not
feel satisfied with scenery, however grand in
itself, that did not abound in human associations.
He required villages, churches, farmhouses and
cottages."
Constable adopted a routine of spending winter in London and painting at East Bergholt in the summer. In 1811 he first visited John Fisher and his family in Salisbury, a city whose cathedral and surrounding landscape were to inspire some of his greatest paintings.
To make ends meet, Constable took up portraiture, which he found dull, though he executed many fine portraits. He also painted occasional religious pictures but, according to John Walker:
"Constable's incapacity as a religious
painter cannot be overstated."
Another source of income was country house painting. In 1816, he was commissioned by Major-General Francis Slater Rebow to paint his country home, Wivenhoe Park, in Essex. The Major-General also commissioned a smaller painting of the fishing lodge in the grounds of Alresford Hall, which is now in the National Gallery of Victoria.
Constable used the money from these commissions to help pay for his wedding to Maria Bicknell. This period of Constable's painting is heavily populated with idyllic country scenes with heavy detail, notably his 1816 work The Wheat Field.
-- John Constable's Marriage
From 1809, his childhood friendship with Maria Elizabeth Bicknell developed into a deep, mutual love. Their marriage in 1816 when Constable was 40 was opposed by Maria's grandfather, Dr. Rhudde, rector of East Bergholt.
He considered the Constables his social inferiors, and threatened Maria with disinheritance. Maria's father, Charles Bicknell, solicitor to George IV and the Admiralty, was reluctant to see Maria throw away her inheritance.
Maria selflessly pointed out to John that a penniless marriage would detract from any chances he had of making a career in painting. Golding and Ann Constable, while approving the match, held out no prospect of supporting the marriage until Constable was financially secure.
However after his parents died in quick succession, Constable inherited a fifth share in the family business. This enabled John and Maria to wed in October 1816 at St. Martin-in-the-Fields (with Fisher officiating).
The ceremony was followed by time at Fisher's vicarage and a honeymoon tour of the south coast. The sea at Weymouth and Brighton stimulated Constable to develop new techniques of brilliant colour and vivacious brushwork. At the same time, a greater emotional range began to be expressed in his art.
While on honeymoon, Constable began to experiment with works exploring nature's grandeur, characterized by dominating skies, such as Osmington Bay.
-- Flatford Mill
Three weeks before their marriage, Constable revealed that he had started work on his most ambitious project to date. In a letter to Maria Bicknell he wrote:
’I am now in the midst of a large picture
here which I had contemplated for the
next exhibition."
The picture was Flatford Mill (Scene on a Navigable River). It was the largest canvas of a working scene on the River Stour that John had worked on to date, and the largest he would ever complete largely outdoors.
Constable was determined to paint on a larger scale, his objective not only to attract more attention at the Royal Academy exhibitions, but also to project his ideas about landscape on a scale more in keeping with the achievements of the classical landscape painters he so admired.
Although Flatford Mill failed to find a buyer when it was exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1817, its fine and intricate execution drew much praise, encouraging Constable to move on to the even larger canvases that were to follow.
-- The ‘Six-Footers’
Although he managed to scrape an income from painting, it was not until 1819 that Constable sold his first important canvas, The White Horse, described by Charles Robert Leslie as:
"On many accounts the most
important picture Constable
ever painted."
The painting (without the frame) sold for the substantial price of 100 guineas to his friend John Fisher, finally providing Constable with a level of financial freedom he had never before known.
The White Horse marked an important turning point in Constable’s career; its success saw him elected an associate of the Royal Academy, and it led to a series of six monumental landscapes depicting narratives on the River Stour known as the ‘six-footers’ (named for their scale).
The extraordinary size of the works helped Constable attract attention in the competitive space of the Academy's exhibitions. Viewed as "the knottiest and most forceful landscapes produced in 19th.-century Europe", for many they are the defining works of the artist's career.
The series also includes Stratford Mill, 1820 (National Gallery, London); The Hay Wain, 1821 (National Gallery, London); View on the Stour near Dedham, 1822 (Huntington Library and Art Gallery); The Lock, 1824 (Private Collection); and The Leaping Horse, 1825 (Royal Academy of Arts, London).
The following year, his second six-footer Stratford Mill was exhibited. The Examiner described it as having:
"... a more exact look of nature than
any picture we have ever seen by an
Englishman."
The painting was a success, acquiring a buyer in the loyal John Fisher, who purchased it for 100 guineas, a price he himself thought too low. Fisher bought the painting for his solicitor and friend, John Pern Tinney.
Tinney loved the painting so much, he offered Constable another 100 guineas to paint a companion picture, an offer the artist didn’t take up.
Constable's growing popularity in turn led to more lucrative commissions, such as Malvern Hall (1821, Clark Art Institute).
In 1821, John's most famous painting The Hay Wain was shown at the Royal Academy's exhibition. Although it failed to find a buyer, it was viewed by some important people of the time, including two Frenchmen, the artist Théodore Géricault and writer Charles Nodier.
According to the painter Eugène Delacroix, Géricault returned to France ’quite stunned‘ by Constable’s painting, while Nodier suggested French artists should also look to nature rather than relying on trips to Rome for inspiration.
The Hay Wain was eventually purchased, along with View on the Stour near Dedham, by the Anglo-French dealer John Arrowsmith, in 1824. A small painting of Yarmouth Jetty was added to the bargain by Constable, with the sale totalling £250.
Both paintings were exhibited at the Paris Salon that year, where they caused a sensation, with the Hay Wain being awarded a gold medal by Charles X. The Hay Wain was later acquired by the collector Henry Vaughan who donated it to the National Gallery in 1886.
Of Constable's colour, Delacroix wrote in his journal:
"What he says here about the
green of his meadows can be
applied to every tone".
Delacroix repainted the background of his 1824 Massacre de Scio after seeing the Constables at Arrowsmith's Gallery, which he said had done him a great deal of good.
A number of distractions meant that The Lock (1824) wasn't finished in time for the 1823 exhibition, leaving the much smaller Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds as the artist's main entry. This may have occurred after Fisher forwarded Constable the money for the painting.
This both helped John out of a financial difficulty and nudged him along to get the painting done. The Lock was therefore exhibited the following year to more fanfare and sold for 150 guineas on the first day of the exhibition, the only Constable ever to do so.
The Lock is the only upright landscape of the Stour series, and the only six-footer that Constable painted more than one version of. A second version, now known as the ‘Foster version,’ was painted in 1825, and kept by the artist to send to exhibitions.
A third, landscape version, known as ‘A Boat Passing a Lock’ (1826) is now in the collection of the Royal Academy of Arts. Constable’s final attempt, The Leaping Horse, was the only six-footer from the Stour series that didn’t sell in Constable’s lifetime.
-- John Constable - The Later Years
Constable’s pleasure at his own success was dampened after his wife started displaying symptoms of tuberculosis. Her growing illness meant that Constable took lodgings for his family in Brighton from 1824 until 1828, hoping that the sea air would restore her health.
During this period Constable split his time between Charlotte Street in London and Brighton. This change saw Constable move away from large scale Stour scenes in favour of coastal scenes. He continued painting six-foot canvases, although he was initially unsure of the suitability of Brighton as a subject for painting. In a letter to Fisher in 1824 he wrote:
"The magnificence of the sea, and its (to use
your own beautiful expression) everlasting
voice, is drowned in the din & lost in the
tumult of stage coaches - gigs - “flys” etc.,
and the beach is only Piccadilly (that part of it
where we dined) by the sea-side."
In his lifetime, Constable sold only 20 paintings in England, but in France he sold more than 20 in just a few years. Despite this, he refused all invitations to travel internationally to promote his work, writing to Francis Darby:
"I would rather be a poor man in
England than a rich man abroad."
In 1825, perhaps due partly to the worry of his wife's ill-health, the uncongeniality of living in Brighton ("Piccadilly by the seaside"), and the pressure of numerous outstanding commissions, he quarreled with Arrowsmith and lost his French outlet.
Chain Pier, Brighton was his only ambitious six-foot painting of a Brighton subject; it was exhibited in 1827. The Constables persevered in Brighton for five years to aid Maria’s health, but to no avail.
After the birth of their seventh child in January 1828, they returned to Hampstead where Maria died on the 23rd. November at the age of 41. Intensely saddened, Constable wrote to his brother Golding:
"Hourly do I feel the loss of my departed
Angel — God only knows how my children
will be brought up ... the face of the World
is totally changed to me".
Thereafter, he dressed in black and was, according to Leslie:
"A prey to melancholy and anxious thoughts".
He cared for his seven children alone for the rest of his life. The children were John Charles, Maria Louisa, Charles Golding, Isobel, Emma, Alfred, and Lionel.
Only Charles Golding Constable produced offspring.
Several of Constable's children also painted, notably his son Lionel. While Lionel eventually gave up painting for photography, several of his works are within the collection of the Clark Art Institute.
Shortly before Maria died, her father had also died, leaving her £20,000. Constable speculated disastrously with the money, paying for the engraving of several mezzotints of some of his landscapes in preparation for a publication.
He was hesitant and indecisive, nearly fell out with his engraver, and when the folios were published, could not interest enough subscribers. Constable collaborated closely with mezzotinter David Lucas on 40 prints after his landscapes, one of which went through 13 proof stages, corrected by Constable in pencil and paint. Constable said:
"Lucas showed me to the public
without my faults."
However the venture was not a financial success.
This period saw John's art move from the serenity of its earlier phase to a more broken and accented style. The turmoil and distress of his mind is clearly seen in his later six-foot masterpieces Hadleigh Castle (1829) and Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows (1831), which are amongst his most expressive pieces.
John was elected to the Royal Academy in February 1829, at the age of 52. In 1831 he was appointed Visitor at the Royal Academy, where he seems to have been popular with the students.
He began to deliver public lectures on the history of landscape painting, which were attended by distinguished audiences. In a series of lectures at the Royal Institution, Constable proposed a three-fold thesis: firstly, landscape painting is scientific as well as poetic; secondly, the imagination cannot alone produce art to bear comparison with reality; and thirdly, no great painter was ever self-taught.
John also spoke against the new Gothic Revival movement, which he considered mere "imitation".
In 1835, his last lecture to students of the Royal Academy, in which he praised Raphael and called the Academy the "cradle of British art", was "cheered most heartily".
John died at the age of 60 on the night of the 31st. March 1837, apparently from heart failure, and was laid to rest with Maria in the graveyard of St. John-at-Hampstead Church in London. (His children John Charles Constable and Charles Golding Constable are also buried in the family tomb.)
-- John Constable's Art
Constable quietly rebelled against the artistic culture that taught artists to use their imagination to compose their pictures rather than nature itself. He told Leslie:
"When I sit down to make a sketch from
nature, the first thing I try to do is to forget
that I have ever seen a picture".
Constable attributed his gift "to all that lay on the Stour river", however, biographer Anthony Bailey attributed his artistic development to the influence of his well-to-do relative, Thomas Allen and the London contacts to whom he introduced Constable.
Although Constable produced paintings throughout his life for the "finished" picture market of patrons and R.A. exhibitions, constant refreshment in the form of on-the-spot studies was essential to his working method. He was never satisfied with following a formula.
John wrote:
"The world is wide, no two days are alike,
nor even two hours; neither were there
ever two leaves of a tree alike since the
creation of all the world; and the genuine
productions of art, like those of nature,
are all distinct from each other."
Constable painted many full-scale preliminary sketches of his landscapes in order to test the composition in advance of finished pictures. These large sketches, with their free and vigorous brushwork, were revolutionary at the time, and they continue to interest artists, scholars and the general public.
The oil sketches of The Leaping Horse and The Hay Wain convey a vigour and expressiveness missing from Constable's finished paintings of the same subjects. Possibly more than any other aspect of Constable's work, the oil sketches reveal him in retrospect to have been an avant-garde painter, one who demonstrated that landscape painting could be taken in a totally new direction.
Constable's watercolours were also remarkably free for their time: the almost mystical Stonehenge, 1835, with its double rainbow, is often considered to be one of the greatest watercolours ever painted.
When he exhibited it in 1836, Constable appended a text to the title:
"The mysterious monument of Stonehenge, standing
remote on a bare and boundless heath, as much
unconnected with the events of past ages as it is
with the uses of the present, carries you back
beyond all historical records into the obscurity of a
totally unknown period."
In addition to the full-scale oil sketches, Constable completed numerous observational studies of landscapes and clouds, determined to become more scientific in his recording of atmospheric conditions.
The power of his physical effects was sometimes apparent even in the full-scale paintings which he exhibited in London; The Chain Pier, 1827, for example, prompted a critic to write:
"The atmosphere possesses a characteristic
humidity about it, that almost imparts the wish
for an umbrella".
The sketches themselves were the first ever done in oils directly from the subject in the open air, with the notable exception of the oil sketches Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes made in Rome around 1780.
To convey the effects of light and movement, Constable used broken brushstrokes, often in small touches, which he scumbled over lighter passages, creating an impression of sparkling light enveloping the entire landscape.
One of the most expressionistic and powerful of all his studies is Seascape Study with Rain Cloud, painted about 1824 at Brighton, which captures with slashing dark brushstrokes the immediacy of an exploding cumulus shower at sea.
Constable also became interested in painting rainbow effects, for example in Salisbury Cathedral from the Meadows, 1831, and in Cottage at East Bergholt, 1833.
To the sky studies he added notes, often on the back of the sketches, of the prevailing weather conditions, direction of light, and time of day, believing that:
"The sky is the key note, the standard of
scale, and the chief organ of sentiment in
a landscape painting."
In this habit he is known to have been influenced by the pioneering work of the meteorologist Luke Howard on the classification of clouds; Constable's annotations of his own copy of Researches About Atmospheric Phaenomena by Thomas Forster show him to have been fully abreast of meteorological terminology.
Constable wrote to Fisher on the 23rd. October 1821:
"I have done a good deal of skying.
I am determined to conquer all
difficulties, and that most arduous
one among the rest".
Constable once wrote in a letter to Leslie:
"My limited and abstracted art is to be
found under every hedge, and in every
lane, and therefore nobody thinks it
worth picking up".
He could never have imagined how influential his honest techniques would turn out to be. Constable's art inspired not only contemporaries like Géricault and Delacroix, but the Barbizon School, and the French impressionists of the late nineteenth century.
In 2019 two drawings by Constable were found among the possessions of the late playwright and poet, Christopher Fry; the drawings later sold for £60,000 and £32,000 at auction.
Final Thoughts From John Constable
"I never saw an ugly thing in my life: for let the
form of an object be what it may - light, shade,
and perspective will always make it beautiful."
"It is the soul that sees; the outward eyes
Present the object, but the Mind descries.
We see nothing till we truly understand it."
"The sky is the source of light in Nature,
and it governs everything."
"Still I should paint my own places best; painting
is with me but another word for feeling, and I
associate "my careless boyhood" with all that lies
on the banks of the Stour; those scenes made me
a painter, and I am grateful; that is, I had often
thought of pictures of them before ever I touched
a pencil, and your picture ['The White Horse'] is
one of the strongest instance I can recollect of it."
"Painting is a science, and should be pursued as
an inquiry into the laws of nature. Why, then, may
not landscape painting be considered as a branch
of natural philosophy, of which pictures are but the
experiments?"
"Light - dews - breezes - bloom - and freshness;
not one of which has yet been perfected on the
canvas of any painter in the world."
"Painting is with me but another word for feeling."
"An artist who is self-taught is taught by
a very ignorant person indeed."
"Speaking to a lawyer about pictures is something
like talking to a butcher about humanity."
"I am anxious that the world should be inclined
to look to painters for information about painting.
I hope to show that ours is a regularly taught
profession; that it is scientific as well as poetic;
that imagination alone never did, and never can,
produce works that are to stand by a comparison
with realities."
"I do not consider myself at work unless
I am before a six-foot canvas."
"Shakespeare could make everything poetical;
he tells us of poor Tom's haunts among "sheep
cotes and mills." As long as I do paint, I shall
never cease to paint such places. They have
always been my delight."
"The first impression and a natural one is, that
the fine arts have risen or declined in proportion
as patronage has been given to them or withdrawn,
but it will be found that there has often been more
money lavished on them in their worst periods than
in their best, and that the highest honours have
frequently been bestowed on artists whose names
are scarcely now known."
"Annibale Carracci (* vor 3. November 1560 in Bologna; † 15. Juli 1609 in Rom) war ein italienischer Maler und Kupferstecher. Neben Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio gilt er als Begründer der italienischen Barockmalerei." Wikipedia.
rudegyalchina: medievalpoc: Annibale Caracci Portrait of an Enslaved Woman Italy (c. 1580s) Leeds, England Walters Museum [source] [source] She doesn’t look enslaved to me …. Which is interesting, especially in the context of this post. What does an enslaved person look like? How do we know? Here’s what the Walters Museum had to say (one of the sources above): Paintings representing real individuals in servitude show them primarily in domestic roles, as the maid in the fragment (p. 1, fig. 1) of a larger portrait by a North Italian artist, or children depicted virtually as exotic pets as in Titian’s stunning portrait of Laura dei Dianti and her black page, and Portrait of Juana of Austria with her Black Slave Girl (fig. 11) by Cristovao de Morais. Probably all the extant studies of Africans drawn from life, such as those by Michelangelo, Carracci, and Veronese (fig. 12) are of slaves. We will be straight-forward about the paucity of documentation in attempting to reconstruct something of their lives. Here, the astonishing sensitivity of great artists (Veronese, Titian, Michelangelo, Durer, and others) comes through most poignantly in bringing these men, women, and children to life. Why are they so sure about that, when they admit the documentation is sparse? But the fact is, that is the given title of this painting, and if you want to look it up, that is how it will be indexed. How do you think that affects our perception of the woman in the painting, and what her life would have been like?
Full title: The Vision of Saint Francis
Artist: Ludovico Carracci
Date made: about 1583-6
Source: www.nationalgalleryimages.co.uk/
Contact: picture.library@nationalgallery.co.uk
Copyright © The National Gallery, London
The Finding of Moses, early 1630s, Orazio Gentileschi, The Virgin and Child Embracing, 1660-85, Sassoferrato, The Virgin at Prayer 1640 -50 Sassoferrato, Susannah and the Elders
1620-5, Guido Reni, Susannah and the Elders
1616, Ludovico Carracci, The Rape of Europa
1637-9, Guido Reni
The canvas was extended by the artist, evidently sometime between 1630 and 1635. These additions betoken extensive rethinking of the design. The original concept was to have been contained within the central section and is recorded in a drawing in Stockholm (National Museum). This was preceded by a study in Berlin of motifs occurring in the right half of the composition. These drawings show that the horseman on the right was at first balanced on the left by a woman standing with a child, forms which can still be discerned between the trunks of the two trees and which are even more obvious by X-ray. They were omitted, however, when the composition was enlarged, possibly because they did not constitute a sufficiently strong counterpoint. The other elements of the composition, especially on the right, were merely rearranged on a broader scale. It is conceivable that some iconographical refinements were also made in order to sharpen the allegorical meaning. What remains of this central part is of good quality, particularly the flickering evening light and damp atmosphere so characteristic of the Thames Valley, and can be assigned to Rubens himself. The additions, however, are less adroitly handled and may have been left to studio assistants. The initial composition perhaps relates to the engraving of the same subject by Lucas van Leyden. The works of Pordenone, Titian, Polidoro da Caravaggio, Veronese and the Carracci family all inspired the artist in carrying out this political allegory which, in the context of the reign of Charles I, clearly has religious connotations with particular reference to Saint George.
Drawing, black chalk on pink laid paper
22,7x15,7 cm
Unsigned
No watermark
Collectors marks:
John Auldjo (Lugt 48) - Cursive "A" in black ink
Victor Winthrop Newman (Lugt 2540) - drystamp "VWN"
A woman appears to be feeding a Baroque ornamental tripod brazier with her right hand while gathering up her garments with her left.
Tentatively Italian School as this may have been part (Lot 49?) a sale of Italian drawings at Christie's 14 July 1859 that also included works by the Carracci brothers, Carlo Maratta (Maratti),Lanfranco, Albano (Francesco Albani?), Rubens, Salvator Rosa, and others, and it also looks like a study like that of "Dido's Sacrifice To Juno" by Giovanni Francesco Romanelli (Italian, 1610-1662) .