Giotto, The Gothic Giant

The Kiss of Judas by Giotto

Prior to the Renaissance and during the last three centuries of the Middle Ages art was produced chiefly for religious purposes - the Gothic Period. The Gothic masters created images of great spiritual purity and intensity. But there was one man who transformed the art of the period. Giotto di Bondone, known simply as Giotto, created a revolutionary approach to form and his way of depicting realistic space so that his figures are in scale in relation to his buildings and surrounding landscape marked a great leap forward in the story of painting.

Giotto was born in 1267 in a village near Florence, the son of a small landed farmer. At the age of 12 he became a pupil of Cimabue, the last great painter in the Byzantine tradition. He was short and homely, had a great wit and was a practical joker. He married and had six children. Unlike most artists of his time he saved his money and was a rich man at the time of his death in 1337.

In common with other artists of his day, Giotto lacked the technical knowledge of anatomy that later painters learned but he had a grasp of human emotion and what was significant in human life. By concentrating on these essentials he created compelling pictures of people under stress, of people caught up in crisis. His approach to the human experience remains valid today.

Giotto's frescoes in the Arena Chapel in Padua are his greatest surviving work and decorate the the complete interior of the chapel. One of the most famous, The Kiss of Judas, reveals his startling power to organize the excitement of a scene around a central image. Each actor is alive and functioning. Torches blaze and weapons whirl. But at the heart there is only a tragic stillness as Jesus looks into the mock-friendly eyes of His disciple Judas, and truth confronts falsehood with sorrowful love. What a moving scene!

Giotto's skill and mastery of emotion launches the next generation of aritsts into a whole new atmosphere - the Italian Renaissance.

Just paint it!

The Ecole des Beaux-Arts

The Concert by Jan Vermeer, 1665

The Ecole des Beaux-Arts, or School of Fine Arts, resides in Paris. It grew out of the Academie des Beaux-Arts which was formed by Cardinal Mazarin in 1648. Its purpose was to educate the most talented students in drawing, painting, architecture, and sculpture. The curriculum was divided into the "Academy of Painting and Sculpture" and the "Academy of Architecture" and focused on the classical arts from ancient Greek and Roman culture. It was a most rigorous five-year program with students having to prove their skills with basic drawing tasks before advancing to figure drawing and painting.

Students first drew from engravings, also called "drawing from the flat." When they had this mastered they moved on to drawing from plaster casts ("drawing in the round"), then finally progressing to drawing from live models.

The Ecole was steeped in tradition and produced classical painters which we are familiar from the French and Italian Renaissance. It's great attraction was that instruction at the Ecole was free, making it possible for students from all social backgrounds to attend. In 1863, Napoleon granted the Ecole independence from the government and women were finally admitted in 1897.

King Louis XIV selected graduates from the Ecole to decorate the royal apartments at Versailles.

Students usually began their studies between the ages of 15 and 18 years of age. The art student's day began early, around 7 am, where they practiced drawing until around 1 pm. The afternoons were spent in the painting and drawing collections of the Louvre, making copies from the Old Masters. This was a crucial element in the Ecole program. Copying was intended to familiarize students with the techniques of the past, and to inspire them to emulate the ideas and devices of the great masters. Advanced students began drawing again around 4 pm and worked until dark.

This training, largely forgotten in art schools of the present United States, was able to produce artists the likes of which we may never see again.

Just paint it!

Art Gallery Showing

Prairie Barn by Richard Edde

I am excited! I have been accepted as a guest artist at the 50 Penn Place Art Gallery in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma and my artwork will be on display during the months of July/August. I will have several western and landscape oil painting scenes available for viewing. There will be an open house the evening of July 10.

This is a great opportunity for me to show my work. I may even sell a painting or two. This would get them out of the studio collecting dust.

The above painting is one of the ones which will be shown at the gallery.

If you are interested in checking out the 50 Penn Place Art Gallery you can at: 50pennplacegallery.com.

Just paint it!

The Rogue of Italy

Calling of St. Matthew by Caravaggio

Why is it that in movies and literature we are drawn to the rogue, the misfit, the renegade? I don’t know why but it is certainly so. It is also true in the lives of artists; men who have taken a different path and wound up living a tragic life. Take, for instance, the life of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, known simply as, Caravaggio.

He was born September 29, 1571, in Milan, Italy, the son of middle-class parents. After serving a lackluster four-year apprenticeship in Milan, he fled to Rome after wounding a police officer. Early in his career he developed an intense realism or naturalism for which Caravaggio is now famous. He preferred to paint his subjects as the eye sees them, with all their natural flaws and defects instead of as idealised creations. This allowed a full display of Caravaggio's virtuosic talents. He quickly became the most famous and celebrated artist in Europe and the greatest representative of the Baroque school of painting.

His friends thought him rebellious and dangerous. After a week’s work he would swagger through town picking fights with anyone he met. In 1606, he killed a man in a brawl and fled Rome with a price on his head. He landed in Malta where he was involved in another tragic fight. On he fled to Naples where he was accosted by unknown enemies. During the fight he injured several men. While in Naples he received many commissions for religious paintings and became the official painter for the Knights of Malta. But he battered down the door of a Knight, attacked him, and was expelled from the Order “as a foul and rotten member.”

In spite of his fame, Caravaggio was always one step ahead of the long arms of the law. Between 1600 and 1606 he was brought to trial eleven times, usually for violence. Once, while in Sicily, a famous friend offered to help him secure a pardon from Pope Paul V so he could return to Rome. But after being expelled from the Order of the Knights of Malta his friend withdrew his help.

In 1610, still in hopes of receiving a pardon, Caravaggio boarded a boat and headed north. With him were his last three paintings which he hoped to give the cardinal as thanks for help. But this time there was no hiding place. The knights, known for their relentlessness, pursued him, and Caravaggio, now thirty nine, in an attempt to seek forgiveness and refuge in Rome, tried to get there, but died at Porto Ercole, in Tuscany, apparently of a fever.

Caravaggio achieved one of the most important revolutions in the history of painting. He inherited a world where the classical idealism of Michelangelo was still normative, especially in the depiction of the human body. Caravaggio rejected this idea and painted with an intensity of realism unknown up to then. His impact was so immediate, profound and lasting that it affected all the great painters of the first half of the seventeenth century.

Just paint it!