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ART “4”
“2”-DAY 10 December
v.4.61 |
| BIRTH:
1867 ROUSSEL — BAPTISM: 1610 VAN OSTADE |
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Died on 10 December 1761: Johann
Georg Platzer (or Plazer), Austrian painter and draftsman
born on 25 (24?) June 1704. — He came from a family of painters in South Tyrol, studying first with his stepfather Josef Anton Kessler [–1721] and then with his uncle Christoph Platzer, court painter in Passau. In 1724 he painted an altarpiece for the church of Saint Helena in Deutschnofen. Probably after 1726 he went to Vienna, where he enrolled at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste and became a friend of Franz Christoph Janneck. Perhaps because of a stroke that impeded his work, he returned to Saint Michael in Eppan by 1755. Platzer produced a great number of small paintings, mostly on copper. He was the most important master of the conversation piece in 18th-century Austria, and his cultivated embourgeoisé public was fascinated by the virtuoso manner, lively colors and innumerable details of his compositions. According to the principles of decorum, he chose his models and style to suit the subject-matter: for histories and allegories he took his models from antiquity, the Renaissance and Italian and Flemish Baroque art, as in Samson’s Revenge. In his genre scenes and especially his conversation pieces, influences of the French Rococo and the Netherlandish cabinet painters are evident, while in his scenes of artists’ studios, such as Sculptor’s Workshop, his academic knowledge is revealed. The repeated use of architectural motifs in his work is derived from northern Italian quadratura painting. Although his work is eclectic, it has a characteristic personal touch that distinguishes it from the comparable, though calmer and less detailed work of Janneck. — LINKS — The Pleasures of the Seasons: Autumn (main detail) (877x1188pix, 134kb) _ ZOOM to full picture (1730, 38x55cm; 1354x2000pix, 318kb) — The Pleasures of the Seasons: Winter (main detail) (865x1230pix, 128kb) _ ZOOM to full picture (1730, 38x55cm; 1363x2000pix, 276kb) — The Pleasures of the Seasons: Summer (main detail) (862x1218pix, 119kb) _ ZOOM to full picture (1730, 38x55cm; 1359x2000pix, 268kb) — Latona Turning the Lycian Peasants into Frogs (1730, 21x30cm; 842x1166pix, 115kb) |
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Born on 10 December 1867: Ker~Xavier Roussel,
French Nabi
painter, printmaker, and decorative artist, who died on 06 June 1944 (D-Day).
He was the brother-in-law of Edouard
Vuillard [11 Nov 1868 – 21 Jun 1940]. — {Etait-il un descendant
de Guillaume “Cadet” Roussel [30 Apr 1743 – 26 Jan 1807]?
Ah ! Ah ! Ah oui, vraiment? - En tout cas ce n'est pas lui, mais Benoit
A. Côté qui, en 1996, a peint les
3 maisons de Cadet Roussel.} — While still at the Lycée Condorcet in Paris, he met Édouard Vuillard (whose sister Marie he married in 1893), Maurice Denis [25 Nov 1870 – 13 Nov 1943] and Paul Sérusier [09 Nov 1864 – 06 Oct 1927]; once they had finished their studies, they all went together to the Académie Julian, where Pierre Bonnard [03 Oct 1867 – 27 Jan 1947], Georges Lacombe [18 Jun 1868 – 29 Jun 1916], Paul Ranson [1864 – 20 Feb 1909], and Félix Valloton [28 Dec 1865 – 28 Dec 1925] were already enrolled. Dissatisfied with the teaching of William-Adolphe Bouguereau [30 Nov 1825 – 19 Aug 1905] and Jules Lefèbvre [14 Mar 1836 – 24 Feb 1911], they left the Académie in 1890, two years after they had begun to meet together as the Nabis. Roussel took part in the exhibitions at the Café Volpini in 1889 and the Le Barc de Boutteville gallery in 1891. At that time his pictures applied the rules of Synthetism outlined by Sérusier — flat planes of repeated color encircled by dark lines forming a harmonious rhythm; a typical example of his oil paintings of this period is Ma Grand-mère (1888). Like the other Nabis, he did not restrict himself to easel painting but also produced murals, stained glass and lithographs: the color lithograph L'éducation du chien, which he contributed to the anthology Amours (1892-1898) published by the dealer Ambroise Vollard, was the first of several such projects in which he developed the Symbolist character of his work. The 12 lithographs he contributed to another Vollard publication, Album de Paysages (Paris), vividly expressed the pantheist vision of nature that was to characterize his later work. — LINKS — Mythological Scene (1903, 47x62cm; 575x754pix, 192kb) — Rural Festival (1913; 575x408pix, 140kb) — L'éducation du chien (33x19cm color lithograph; 2/3 size) — Paul Cézanne au Travail sur le Chemin des Lauves (1906 print, 600x559pix, 144kb) _ looks like a black-and-white photo. |
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Died on 10 December: 1928 Charles
Rennie Mackintosh, Scottish Art Nouveau designer born on
07 June 1868. — Born in Glasgow, the son of a police superintendent, Mackintosh is the most famous of the Glasgow Style designers and has become something of a cult figure of international importance. He studied at the Glasgow School of Art while being apprenticed to the architect John Hutchinson, transferring to the firm of Honeyman and Keppie in 1889. In 1891 a travelling scholarship enabled him to visit Italy, France and Belgium, and in 1902 he began to paint a series of mystical watercolors. Meanwhile his furniture designs were establishing a repertoire of forms which became the hallmarks of the Glasgow Style and his reputation as an architect was confirmed by his famous designs for Glasgow School of Art (1897-1909). In 1900 he married Margaret MacDonald, who collaborated with him closely and encouraged his painting. Although his work was highly acclaimed abroad, Glasgow proved increasingly restrictive, and in 1914 he left to concentrate on painting in watercolors. He lived in Chelsea until 1923 and thereafter in France. — In the pantheon of heroes of the Modern Movement, he has been elevated to a cult figure, such that the importance of his late 19th-century background and training in Glasgow are often overlooked. He studied during a period of great artistic activity in the city that produced the distinctive Glasgow Style. As a follower of A.W.N. Pugin and John Ruskin, he believed in the superiority of Gothic over Classical architecture and by implication that moral integrity in architecture could be achieved only through revealed construction. Although Mackintosh’s buildings refrain from overt classicism, they reflect its inherent discipline. His profound originality was evident by 1895, when he began the designs for the Glasgow School of Art. His decorative schemes, particularly the furniture, also formed an essential element in his buildings. During Mackintosh’s lifetime his influence was chiefly felt in Austria, in the work of such painters as Gustav Klimt and such architects as Josef Hoffmann and Joseph Maria Olbrich. — LINKS — Fetges (1927, 46x46cm; 413x409pix, 40kb) — Yellow clover (1901 watercolor, 22x13cm; 522x316pix, 214kb) _ Watercolor botanical studies such as this have a long history in European art, and by Mackintosh's day were a necessary part of the training of artists and designers. Meticulous drawings of plant forms and an understanding of their basic structure were an essential source of ideas for students of design and tested their drawing skills. Mackintosh has almost a cult status as a Scottish architect and designer, and his work prefigured many developments in art and design throughout Europe in the 20th century. In his architectural work Mackintosh had used stylized patterns derived from a careful study of flowers and plants. He was a very skilled artist as well as an architect, and towards the end of his career concentrated only on painting. From 1901 he had made a collection of botanical studies of individual flowers and shrubs, usually sketched during holidays in England. Although often spare and linear, they have a powerful emotional appeal. Mackintosh took the traditional form of botanical drawing and modernized it. — (Batik-like furnishing fabric) (1922 roller printed cretonne, 78x88cm; 585x750pix, 565kb) _ The pattern mimics the compartmentalized areas filled with small-scale decoration found in Indonesian batik designs. The technique involves applying wax to the textile to protect the patterned areas before placing it in a dye bath. The process can then be repeated by removing areas of wax and dyeing the exposed parts with further colors. — (Furnishing fabric) (1918 printed cotton, 88x78cm; 680x513pix, 413kb) _ The purple and green colors are typical of the era. Mackintosh was ahead of his time in experimenting with geometrization and the flattening of forms. These were features that later became characteristic of Art Deco. From 1915 to 1923 Mackintosh lived in London, where he was unable to attract commissions as an architect. So he created designs for textiles. — Photo of Mackintosh and 7 architectural drawings (small images) |
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Baptized as an infant on 10 December
1610: Adriaen van Ostade, Dutch painter,
draftsman, and engraver who died on 27 April 1685. |
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Died on 10 December 1475: Paolo
“Uccello” di Dono, Italian painter born in 1397.
— {uccel di bosco?} — Florentine painter whose work attempted uniquely to reconcile two distinct artistic styles - the essentially decorative late Gothic and the new heroic style of the early Renaissance. Probably his most famous paintings are three panels representing The Rout of San Romano (1455). His careful and sophisticated perspective studies are clearly evident in The Flood (1448). By the time Paolo was 10 years old he was already an apprentice in the workshop of the sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti, who was then at work on what became one of the supreme masterpieces of the history of art - the bronze doors for the Baptistery of the Florence cathedral, which consisted of 28 panels illustrating New Testament scenes of the life of Christ. In 1414 Uccello joined the confraternity of painters Compagnia di San Luca, and in the following year he became a member of the Arte dei Medici e degli Speziali, the official guild to which painters belonged. Though Uccello must by then have been established as an independent painter, nothing of his work from this time remains, and there is no definite indication of his early training as a painter, except that he was a member of the workshop of Ghiberti, where many of the outstanding artists of the time were trained. Uccello's earliest, and now badly damaged, frescoes are in the Chiostro Verde (so called because of the green cast of the frescoes) of Santa Maria Novella; they represent episodes from the creation. These frescoes, marked with a pervasive concern for elegant linear forms and insistent, stylized patterning of landscape features, are consistent with the late Gothic tradition that was still predominant at the beginning of the 15th century in Florentine studios and have given rise to the hope that Uccello's artistic origins may yet be found in some of these studios. From 1425 to 1431, Uccello worked in Venice as a master mosaicist. All his work in Venice has been lost, and plans to reconstruct it have been unsuccessful. Uccello may have been induced to return to Florence by the commission for a series of frescoes in the cloister of San Miniato al Monte depicting scenes from monastic legends. While the figural formulations of these ruinous frescoes still closely approximate the Santa Maria Novella cycle, there is also a fascination with the novel perspective schemes that had appeared in Florence during Uccello's Venetian sojourn and with a simplified and more monumental treatment of forms deriving from the recent sculpture of Donatello and Nanni di Banco. In 1436 in the Florence cathedral, Uccello completed a monochrome fresco of an equestrian monument to Sir John Hawkwood, an English mercenary who had commanded Florentine troops at the end of the 14th century. In the Hawkwood fresco, a single-point perspective scheme, a fully sculptural treatment of the horse and rider, and a sense of controlled potential energy within the figure all indicate Uccello's desire to assimilate the new style of the Renaissance that had blossomed in Florence since his birth. Following the Hawkwood monument, in 1443 Uccello completed four heads of prophets around a colossal clock on the interior of the west façade of the cathedral; between 1443 and 1445 he contributed the designs for two stained-glass windows in the cupola. After a brief trip to Padua in 1447, Uccello returned to the Chiostro Verde of Santa Maria Novella. In a fresco illustrating the Flood and its recession, Uccello presented two separate scenes united by a rapidly receding perspective scheme that reflected the influence of Donatello's contemporary reliefs in Padua. Human forms in The Flood, especially the nudes, were reminiscent of figures in Masaccio's frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel (c. 1425), perhaps the most influential of all paintings of the early Renaissance, but the explosion of details throughout the narrative again suggests Uccello's Gothic training. More than any other painting by Uccello, The Flood indicates the difficulties that he and his contemporaries faced in attempting to graft the rapidly developing heroic style of the Renaissance onto an older, more decorative mode of painting. Perhaps Uccello's most famous paintings are three panels representing the Battle of San Romano. These panels represent the victory in 1432 of Florentine forces under Niccolò da Tolentino over the troops of their arch rival, Siena. There are Renaissance elements, such as a sculpturesque treatment of forms and fragments of a broken perspective scheme in this work, but the bright handling of color and the elaborate decorative patterns of the figures and landscape are indebted to the Gothic style, which continued to be used through the 15th century in Florence to enrich the environments of the new princes of the day, such as the Medici, who acquired all three of the panels representing the rout of San Romano. Uccello is justly famous for his careful and sophisticated perspective studies, most clearly visible in The Flood, in the underdrawing (sinopia) for his last fresco, The Nativity, formerly in S. Martino della Scala in Florence, and in three drawings universally attributed to him that are now in the Uffizi. These drawings indicate a meticulous, analytic mind, keenly interested in the application of scientific laws to the reconstruction of objects in a three-dimensional space. In these studies he was probably assisted by a noted mathematician, Paolo Toscanelli. Uccello's perspective studies were to influence the Renaissance art treatises of artists such as Piero della Francesca, Leonardo da Vinci, and Albrecht Dürer. Uccello apparently led an increasingly reclusive existence during his last years. Uccello was long thought to be significant primarily for his role in establishing new means of rendering perspective that became a major component of the Renaissance style. The 16th-century biographer Giorgio Vasari said that Uccello was "intoxicated" by perspective. Later historians found the unique charm and decorative genius evinced by his compositions to be an even more important contribution. Though in ruinous condition, they indicate the immense difficulties faced by artists of his time in taking advantage of new developments without giving up the best in traditional art. — LINKS — Five Portraits (1450, 43x210cm) _ This painting, attributed to Paolo Uccello, portrays five famous men, Giotto (representing painting), Uccello (representing the principles of perspective and animal painting), Donatello (representing sculpture), Manetti (representing mathematics), and Brunelleschi (representing architecture). _ detail 1: Giotto _ detail 2: supposed to be a self-portrait of Uccello. — The Battle of San Romano [ Left _ Center _ Right _ Panel] _ The three paintings of the Battle of San Romano are universally attributed to Paolo Uccello. The three scenes are: Niccolò da Tolentino Leads the Florentine Troops — Bernardino della Ciarda Thrown Off His Horse — Micheletto da Cotignola Engages in Battle. Together with the stories from the life of Noah these are undoubtedly Uccello's most famous works. In all three panels the battle scene is interpreted in terms of a chaotic mêlée of horsemen, lances and horses in a desperate struggle, portrayed through an endless series of superimposed and intersecting perspective planes. As in the stories from the life of Noah in Santa Maria Novella, here too the movement which should animate the scenes appears to be frozen, as it were, by the isolation of the individual details, all realistically portrayed. See, for instance, the elaborate heavy armour, the leather saddles, the gilded studs, the horses' shiny coats, and of course the splendid "mazzocchi', the huge multifaceted headgear that Uccello often included in his pictures due to the specific difficulty of painting it in proper perspective. The three panels commemorate the celebrated Battle of San Romano in which the Florentines, under the leadership of Niccolò da Tolentino, defeated the Sienese led by Bernardino della Ciarda. They were intended as decoration for the large hall on the ground floor of the Medici Palace, called Lorenzo's room. The three incidents from the Battle of San Romano shown are: Left: Niccolò da Tolentino Leads the Florentine Troops _ detail Center: Bernardino della Ciarda Thrown Off His Horse _ This is the central panel of the three paintings representing the battle won by Florence against Siena allied with Visconti, the ruling family of Milan. It took place on June 1st 1432 in San Romano, half way between Florence and Pisa. The picture shows the conclusive combat between the captains of the two armies: Niccolò da Tolentino unseating Bernardino della Ciarda. Uccello's obsession with displaying his mastery of perspective (such as the long white and red lances or the exceptional horses that have rolled over on the ground) and the dramatic nature of the clash between the knights combine with his almost magical story telling. This is underpinned by the use of unreal colors and light as if describing some fabulous tale of chivalrous adventure. _ detail 1 _ detail 2 _ Particularly lovely are the background landscapes, especially in this panel, with scenes of grape harvesting and hunting. _ detail 3 Right : Micheletto da Cotignola Engages in Battle _ In this panel there is a formal subtext created by strong decorative elements, such as the tights of contrasting colors worm by the soldiers on the left, or the arrangement of the lances, which form a series of patterns and movements that echo the horses and their riders. As could be expected, foreshortening and perspective are devices favored by the artist. The landscape has been sacrificed to the action of the figures. _ detail — Adoration by the Magi (1440, 20x82cm; 520x1939pix 173kb) _ detail (750x1039pix 172kb) — Saint George and the Dragon (1456, 57x73cm; 900x1171pix, 184kb) — a different Saint George and the Dragon (1460, 52x90cm; 705x1250pix, 153kb) == Miracle of the Desecrated Host (1469, each panel 43x58cm): — (1) a woman sells the Host to a Jewish merchant (700x1227pix, 152kb) — (2) when the merchant tries to burn the Host, It begins to bleed (650x1166pix, 121kb) — (3) religious procession to reconsecrate the Host (650x1161pix, 117kb) — (4) the woman is punished and an angel descends from heaven (680x1236pix, 146kb) — (5) the Jewish merchant and his family are burnt at the stake (650x1158pix, 119kb) — (6) two angels and two devils fight over the woman's body (647x1161pix, 119 Kb) |
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