Hunting grounds for painters

2022 ◽  
Vol 71 (1) ◽  
pp. 144-183
Author(s):  
Maurice Saß
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Artistic Practice

This article focuses on the intersection of the hunt and art as it is reflected in three early modern depictions of artists as successful hunters: Gabriel Metsu’s Hunter getting dressed after bathing, Ary de Vois’s Self-portrait as a hunter, and Rembrandt’s A dead bittern held high by a hunter. These three self-referential paintings show different ways in which the hunt and dead animals were used to characterise artistic practice, and to what extent they were underpinned by the semantics of other forms of ‘the chase’: the pursuit of love, knowledge, and power.

scholarly journals The Ise-e Tradition and Ise Manga

2021 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 215-242
Author(s):  
Joshua S. Mostow
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Young Male ◽  
Young Female ◽  
Japanese History ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Visual History

The Ise monogatari (The Ise Stories, aka Tales of Ise, tenth cen.) is the oldest continuously illustrated secular narrative in Japanese history. The present article explores to what extent, and how, contemporary manga artists engage with or use this rich visual tradition, examining three examples, in the seinen (young male-oriented), shōjo (young female-oriented), and gyagu (gag) genres, yet all arguably categorizable as gakushū, or educational, manga. Perhaps surprisingly, only the gag manga artist, Kurogane Hiroshi, takes advantage of the Ise’s long visual history, and the author of the article concludes by drawing parallels with the early modern artistic practice of mitate-e, or visual parody.

Music in the Margin of Indifference

2021 ◽  
pp. 129-146
Author(s):  
Bettina Varwig
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Test Case ◽  
Artistic Practice ◽  
Western Modernity ◽  
The Church ◽  
Modern Status

This chapter considers the role of a specific Lutheran idea of freedom in the emancipation of sacred music from liturgy during the early modern period. It proposes that the Lutheran appropriation of the classical notion of ‘adiaphora’, as a stance of indifference towards practices and objects not essential for salvation, opened up a quasi-autonomous space for musical elaboration, within which music could gradually acquire its modern status as a self-sufficient artistic practice. The eighteenth-century tradition of Passion performances in Protestant Germany offers a rich test case for this process of ecclesiastical divestment, in particular J.S. Bach’s St. Matthew Passion of 1727, which made claims for music that clearly outstripped its functional remit, and Carl Heinrich Graun’s immensely popular setting of Karl Wilhelm Ramler’s Der Tod Jesu of 1755, which consolidated the genre’s move from the liturgy to the concert hall. Yet this migration outside the church walls by no means provides straightforward confirmation of a standard secularization narrative of Western modernity. Rather, in absorbing and retaining crucial aspects of sacrality, these musical repertories and practices reveal the rootedness of the modern aesthetic sphere in that Lutheran margin of indifference.

scholarly journals A portrait of the artist as friend

2020 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 96-117
Author(s):  
Edward H. Wouk
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Artistic Practice

The Portrait of Lambert Lombard of circa 1560 is unique among early modern likenesses in its intimate portrayal of an artist as friend. This essay moves beyond the questions of attribution that have hitherto dominated discussions of the painting and focuses instead on the dialogic encounter the image establishes between sitter and beholder. That encounter, I contend, reflects a novel period concept of friendship as a social ideal and as a model for artistic practice. Working within humanist frameworks, Lombard’s pupils actively constructed an image of their teacher as scholar and affectionate pedagogue. While other images of Lombard emphasized the artist’s erudition at the expense of his personal warmth, this disarmingly nonchalant portrait negotiates a balance between the aloof scholar and engaged friend. Like Dominicus Lampsonius’s biography of the artist, published in 1565, the Portrait of Lambert Lombard envisions the artist as a friend who is both erudite and loving.

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