scholarly journals Between Absorption, Abstraction and Exhibition: Inflections of the Cinematic Tableau in the Films of Corneliu Porumboiu, Roy Andersson and Joanna Hogg

2015 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 39-76 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ágnes Pethő
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Performative Space ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Film Style

Abstract The paper proposes to focus on the multiple affordances and intermedial aesthetic of the cinematic tableau seen as a performative space resulting in the impression of watching a painting, a theatre stage, a shop window, a diorama, or a photo-filmic installation in which the play between stillness and motion is accompanied by a reflexive emphasis on media and the senses. Such images, described extensively by David Bordwell in his writings on the evolution of film style, are being re-evaluated through debates on the “tableau form,” “absorption and theatricality” in modern art and photography (e.g. Jean-François Chevrier, Michael Fried). In particular, the aim of this paper is to examine inflections of the cinematic tableau in the films of three contemporary European authors, Corneliu Porumboiu (Romania), Roy Andersson (Sweden) and Joanna Hogg (UK), and relate them to the paradigm of the Dutch interior established in seventeenth-century painting.

scholarly journals ‘Colouring’ — Material Depiction in Flemish and Dutch Baroque Art Theory

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 243-265
Author(s):  
Lisa Wiersma
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Surface Effects ◽  
17Th Century ◽  
Art Theory ◽  
Generic Term ◽  
Baroque Art ◽  
Human Flesh

Seventeenth-century painters were masters at painting objects and beings that seem tangible. Most elaborate was painting translucent materials like skins and pulp: human flesh and grapes, for instance, require various surface effects and suggest the presence of mass below the upper layers. Thus, the viewer is more or less convinced that a volume or object is present in an illusionary space. In Dutch, the word ‘stofuitdrukking’ is used: expression or indication of material, perhaps better understood as rendering of material. In English, ‘material depiction’ probably captures this painterly means best: it includes rendering of surface effects, while revealing the underlying substance, and it implies that weight and mass are suggested. Simple strokes of paint add up to materials and things that are convincingly percieved. At first glance, material depiction hardly seems a topic in early-modern art theory, yet 17th-century painters are virtually unequalled as regards this elaborate skill. Therefore, 17th-century written sources were studied to define how these might discuss material depiction, if not distinctly. This study concerns one of many questions regarding the incredible convincingness of 17th-century material depiction: besides wondering why the illusions work (Di Cicco et al., this issue) and how these were achieved (Wiersma, in press), the question should be asked why this convincingness was sought after. Was it mere display of ability and skill? And how was material depiction perceived, valued and enjoyed? First, contemporary terminology is determined: the seemingly generic term ‘colouring’ signified the application of convincing material depiction especially — which is not as self-evident as it sounds. Second, and extensively, the reader will find that convincing or appealing material depiction was considered a reference to religion and natural philosophy.

Leonardo's Salvator Mundi and the Collecting of Leonardo in the Stuart Courts

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Kemp ◽  
Robert B. Simon ◽  
Margaret Dalivalle
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Auction House ◽  
The Public ◽  
Scientific Analysis ◽  
Media Spectacle ◽  
Art Dealers ◽  
Public Imagination

In Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi and the Collecting of Leonardo in the Stuart Courts the ‘Three Salvateers’—Robert Simon, Martin Kemp and Margaret Dalivalle—give a first-hand account of the discovery of the lost Renaissance masterpiece; from its purchase for $1,175 in a New Orleans auction house in 2005, to the worldwide media spectacle of its sale to a Saudi prince for $450 million in 2017. A behind-the-scenes view of the painstaking processes of identification, consultation, scientific analysis, conservation, and archival research that underpinned the attribution of the painting to Leonardo, the book presents a consideration of the place of the painting in Leonardo’s body of work. Exploring the meaning of the painting in terms of Renaissance theology, it considers the identity of its original patron or intended recipient. Unravelling networks of early modern art dealers and collectors in Europe, it traces the emerging reception of Leonardo during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It was in Enlightenment Britain that the idea of Leonardo as artist–scientist took hold of the public imagination. This book examines the ‘invention’ of Leonardo through the unique prism of the Stuart courts. The documented presence of three paintings of Christ attributed to Leonardo in the vicinity of the seventeenth-century British Royal Collection is both extraordinary and perplexing. Today, Leonardo’s five-hundred-year-old Salvator has not yet disclosed its secret history.

Vijf kinderportretten door Dirck Santvoort

1990 ◽  
Vol 104 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 249-255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rudolf E.O. Ekkart
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Young Girl ◽  
National Gallery ◽  
In Series ◽  
Five Senses ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Cleveland Museum Of Art

AbstractA portrait of a young girl with a flute, painted by the Amsterdam artist Dirck Dircksz. Santvoort, has been in the Cleveland Museum of Art since 1975 (fig.1). An inscription on the back of the unsigned painting states that the portrayed child is 'Elisabeth Spiegel'. The museum catalogue relates this painting with two other portraits of children: another unsigned one of a girl with fruit (fig. 3) and a signed painting, dated 1639, of a girl with a dog and a mirror (fig. 2). A fourth work can be added to these three, a picture of a child with a bird perched on her hand, in the National Gallery in London (fig. 4). Contrary to previous assumptions that it was painted in 1630 or 1631, it can now be dated in 1639. The choice of attributes suggest, as was recently intimated by Peter Sutton, that these portraits belong to a series of the Five Senses, the Cleveland painting representing Hearing, and the girls with fruit, the dog and mirror, and the bird picturing Taste, Sight and Touch. The fifth sense, Smell, is probably symbolized in a painting in the museum in Rodez (fig. 5), showing a girl dressed as a shepherdess with a wreath of flowers. Parallels of all depictions of the Senses arc to be found in series of prints and paintings from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Pictures of the Senses in portraits are fairly rare, and were of course only painted when a series of exactly five portraits was required, for instance by a family with five children. An investigation of the Spiegel family confirms the identification given here, yielding the information that in 1638/1639 Elbert Dircksz. Spiegel and Petronella Rocters had five daughters. The portrayed children are Rebecca (fig. 3), Elisabeth (fig. I), Petronella (fig. 5), Margaretha (fig. 2) and Geertruyt Spiegel (fig. 4), born respectively in 1625, 1628, 1630, 1631 and 1635. Evidence that the descendants of the sisters portrayed by Santvoort upheld the tradition of the Five Senses theme in the late seventeenth century is supplied bv an old inventory of a series of portraits of five children from the Slicher family. The respective mothers of their parents, Elbert Slicher and Catharina dc Hochepied, were Elisabeth and Geertruyt Spiegel.

scholarly journals Towards an Archaeology of Everyday Aesthetics

2017 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 607-616 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Skeates
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Physical Properties ◽  
Modern Art ◽  
Qualitative Evaluation ◽  
Philosophical Study ◽  
Everyday Aesthetics ◽  
Anthropological Approach ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Greek Art

The concept of aesthetics has long been marginalized in archaeology. It was originally formulated in the eighteenth century as part of an appreciation of Greek art and was fundamentally concerned with appreciating a quasi-universal idea of beauty; and as archaeologists and anthropologists recognized the distortion created by applying it to material from non-Western and pre-modern art, it fell into disfavour. An alternative anthropological approach pioneered by Howard Morphy regards aesthetics as the study of the affects of the physical properties of objects on the senses and the qualitative evaluation of those properties; this converges with the emerging philosophical study of ‘everyday aesthetics’. This article explores how archaeologists could apply these concepts, particularly through a study of Maltese Neolithic everyday aesthetics.

Francis Bacon and His Fate in the History and Philosophy of Science, 2010–2020

2021 ◽  
Vol 58 (3) ◽  
pp. 206-220
Author(s):  
Doina-Cristina Rusu ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Philosophy Of Science ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Scientific Methodology ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Theory And Experiments

In this review I analyse new trends in Bacon-scholarship over the last decade. Bacon’s role in the history and philosophy of science has been the topic of debate since the second half of the seventeenth century. Scholars took him to be either a key figure in the emergence of experimental sciences, or the opposite of what science is supposed to be. However, most of these bold claims were based on distortions and misunderstandings of Bacon’s programme. Starting in the last couple of decades of the twentieth century, several studies offered a more nuanced account of Bacon’s philosophy and tried to refute some of the ‘unsound criticisms’. Moreover, over the last decade, we can notice a tendency to focus on Bacon’s more practical works, and not only on the more theoretical ones. In the context of these practical works, I identified several new trends: the role of the natural and experimental histories in the overall project of the Great Instauration, and their relation with natural philosophy; the function of mathematics and quantification; the employment of instruments and other devices to overcome the shortcomings of both the senses and the minds; the scientific methodology with an emphasis on the relation between theory and experiments, and the use of exploratory experiments; and finally Bacon’s use of sources and his influence on later early modern authors. As opposed to the idea that Bacon was interested either in collecting random facts or in inventing experimental reports to present his speculative ideas, Bacon is lately portrayed as a careful experimenter, meticulous in writing reports, ingenious in designing instruments and new experiments, and critical towards his own conceptions.

Herbert's Form

PMLA ◽  
1951 ◽  
Vol 66 (6) ◽  
pp. 1055-1072
Author(s):  
Joseph H. Summers
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Middle Way ◽  
The Senses ◽  
Religion And Art

There is a certain irony in the fact that the most formal of seventeenth-century Anglican poems have been so much enjoyed by the anti-formalists in religion and art. The appeal of George Herbert's poetry to the opponents of ritual was a justifying triumph for Herbert's conception of form: in poetry as well as religion Herbert tried to work out-a middle way between “slovenliness” and “superstition.” It was by means of form that the material could be used in the service of the spiritual, that the senses could be properly employed for the glorification of God.

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