Monday, December 26, 2016

Paintings from the 1620s

Domenico Zampieri (Bologna)
St Ignatius Loyola's Vision of Christ & God the Father at La Storta
ca. 1622
oil on canvas
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

"At the beginning of the modern era, in Ignatius's century, one fact seems to begin to modify the exercise of the imagination: a reordering of the hierarchy of the five senses. In the Middle Ages, historians tell us, the most refined sense, the perceptive sense par excellence, the one that established the richest contact with the world, was hearing: sight came in only third place, after touch. Then we have a reversal: the eye becomes the prime organ of perception (Baroque, art of the thing seen, attests to it). This change is of great religious importance. The primacy of hearing, still very prevalent in the sixteenth century, was theologically guaranteed: the Church bases its authority on the word, faith is hearing: auditum verbi Dei, id est fidem; the ear, the ear alone, Luther said, is the Christian organ. Thus a risk of a contradiction arises between the new perception, led by sight, and the ancient faith based on hearing. Ignatius sets out, as a matter of fact, to resolve it: he attempts to situate the image (or interior "sight") in orthodoxy, as a new unit of the language he is constructing."

 from Sade / Fourier / Loyola by Roland Barthes, translated by Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976)

Simon Vouet (France)
Virginia da Vezzo, the artist's wife, as the Magdalene
ca. 1627
oil on canvas
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Daniele Crespi (Milan)
Mocking of Christ
ca. 1624-25
oil on canvas
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Hendrick ter Brugghen (Netherlands)
Boy playing a recorder
1621
canvas
Staatliche Museen, Kassel

Hendrick ter Brugghen (Netherlands)
Annunciation
1624-25
canvas
private collection

Hendrick van Balen (Flanders)
Holy Trinity
1620s
oil on panel
Sint Jacobskerk, Antwerp

Hendrick van Balen (Flanders)
Minerva and the Nine Muses
1620s
oil on panel
private collection

Gerrit van Honthorst (Netherlands)
Concert on a balcony
1624
canvas
Louvre

Gerrit van Honthorst (Netherlands)
Granida and Daifilo
1625
oil on canvas
Centraal Museum, Utrecht

Alessandro Turchi (Verona)
St Agnes protected by an Angel
ca. 1620
oil on marble
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Domenichino (Bologna)
Erminia among the Shepherds
ca. 1622-25
oil on canvas
Louvre

Frans Francken the Younger (Flanders)
Crucifixion of St Andrew
ca. 1620
oil on copper
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Clara Peeters (Flanders)
Still-life with cheese, artichoke, cherries
ca. 1625
oil on panel
Los Angeles County Museum of Art

"Perturbations and passions which trouble the phantasy, though they dwell between the confines of sense and reason, yet they rather follow sense than reason, because they are drowned in corporeal organs of sense. They are commonly reduced into two inclinations, irascible and concupiscible. The Thomists subdivide them into eleven, six in the coveting, and five in the invading. Aristotle reduceth all to pleasure and pain, Plato to love and hatred, Vives to good and bad. If evil, we absolutely hate it; if present, it is sorrow, if to come, fear. These four passions Bernard compares to the wheels of a chariot, by which we are carried in this world. All other passions are subordinate unto these four, or six, as some will: love, joy, desire, hatred, sorrow, fear; the rest, as anger, envy, emulation, pride, jealousy, anxiety, mercy, shame, discontent, despair, ambition, avarice, etc., are reducible unto the first; and if they be immoderate, they consume the spirits, and melancholy is especially caused by them."

 from The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) by Robert Burton

Hendrick Pot (Netherlands)
Portraits of Jacob van de Merckt & his wife Petronilla Witson
1628
oil on panel
private collection