Hot of the Presses: Major Mona Lisa news

There is a new, super exciting, art history story in the news these days.  Have you heard?  A second Mona Lisa has been found in the vaults of the Prado.  This second painting is not a fake or a copy made by some talented but crooked art scammer, it was painted simultaneously with the "original", in Leonardo da Vinci's studio.  (Sorry for all the bolded words -this is just really exciting!)

Leonardo da Vinci Mona Lisa from the Louvre 1492-1519, and Leonardo's apprentices? Mona Lisa from the Prado 1492-1519, details [image source]

The work had been stuck in a vault a long time ago.  The painting was old and dusty, and the background which matches the Louvre Mona Lisa had been painted over for unknown reasons with black, so art historians did not notice its importance until recently.

But now, the layer of black paint over the background has been removed by art restoration experts.  The painting was carefully analyzed (with scientific techniques of which I am regretfully rather ignorant), and art historians are quite sure it was painted at the same time as the other Mona Lisa.  They theorize that both works were painted on easels next to each other, and evolved together, the apprentices carefully following the work of Leonardo.

[image source]

What does this mean?
- Well, that we to take a closer look at the workings of Leonardo's studio practices.  We know it was standard in the Renaissance for masters to have a whole slew of apprentices who did a lot for the success of the studio, from cleaning up, to mixing paint, to painting the less important parts of major paintings. But allowing them to make a project on the same level as the master?  This is something unexpected.
- The new find also changes our understanding of the the Louvre Mona Lisa. We know the painting's colors have aged.  Maybe its yellows and browns were originally more like the Prado Mona Lisa in color scheme.
- Finally, it brings up major questions about originals and copies.  These were made simultaneously, so one is not really a copy of the other.  But the Louvre Mona Lisa is arguably the most famous, prized painting in western art.  Should this other Mona Lisa also be given such an exalted status, or does this new find call into question the status of the Louvre Mona Lisa?

Keep up with this exciting story:
The story in: daily mail
The story in: New York Times blog
The story in: LA Times blog

This is not a photograph...

Whew!  Last week was heavy with complicated questions and thoughts on this blog: thoughts about elitism in art history, appropriate use of public spaces, and sexist objectification in paintings.  Today's post should be much more relaxed and fun.

Tromp l'oeil (i.e. trick the eye)

Andrea Mantegna, Camera degli Sposi, Mantua, fresco, 1471-74

This might be one of the most famous examples of tromp l'oeil in the Renaissance (Tromp l'oeil was a favorite Renaissance style -they were really into capturing challenging perspectives back then). Don't be fooled; this ceiling is actually flat.  

Johann Heinrich Füssli, Tromp l'oeil, oil on canvas, 1750, currently at Ermitage, St. Petersburg

Some things just don't go out of style, and tromp l'oeil is something that has successfully thrilled viewers for centuries.  There's a whole sub-genre of paintings that are meant to look like other art and paper forms, like the painting above.  I find I have to remind myself that this is in fact a painting of a sketch tacked to a wooden board, and not a real sketch tacked to a wooden board.    

After the invention of the camera in the 1839 and the beginning of its widespread popularity in the second half of the nineteenth century, theorists predicted an end to ultra-realistic types of paintings, realism in paintings had been usurped by photography.  Luckily, this was not the case, and there was a revival, (and updating) of tromp l'oeil in the art movement photorealism that began in the 1970s.  

Richard Estes, Bus Interior, 1981, currently at Smithsonian American Art Museum

Art and the Super Bowl

For many Americans, the year's biggest sports event is this weekend.  I'm not going to watch the super bowl, but last weekend was a big sports weekend for me, because US figure skating national championships were on!!!  I used to be a skater myself, and have now comfortably retired into the role of avid fan.

Anyway, what do sports have to do with art history?  Why am I even mentioning them on this blog?

Art History is in some ways a very traditional discipline.  Founded in its modern form by the German scholar Johann Joachim Winckelmann with his 1764 book History of Ancient Art, it has since then mostly concerned itself with "high arts".  You can imagine those grand old art historians, with their noses in the air, discussing the aesthetics of marble sculptures, masterpiece paintings and the architecture of monuments.

Even today there are things we classify as "high" culture, and things we classify as "low" culture.  Just a few examples:

High Culture                vs.                Low Culture
Opera                                                Pop music
Ballet                                                Breakdancing
Art in museums                                Graffiti
Literature "classics"                          "Trashy" Romance Novels
Philosophy                                        Sporting Events
High Fashion                                    Quilting and Knitting
Monumental architecture                   Household furniture

Recently, more and more scholars are agreeing that these dividing lines show a classist hierarchy that should be strongly questioned, and more and more artists have been blurring the dividing lines in their work (ballet choreographers using breakdancing moves, museum curators displaying quilts etc.)

For those for whom Art History is too stuffy and elitist, a new discipline was founded in the 1960s, called Cultural Studies.  Cultural Studies concerns itself with both sides of the list.

The debate about high culture and low culture in Art History continues, but I think we are moving more and more in the direction of being much more inclusive in what we discuss and analyze.  At least, I hope so.

The Gaze

Doing research for this blog, I discovered to my surprise that there was another meaning to the phrase "new Art History" then the meaning I meant to imply by my blog title.  According to A Short Guide to Writing about Art, by Sylvan Barnet:

"The study of the social and political history of art, especially of matters of class, gender and ethnicity, in a context of Marxist, feminist, and psychoanalytic theory, and most especially when conducted in a somewhat confrontational manner, is sometimes called the New Art History to distinguish it from the earlier art history that was concerned chiefly with such matters a biography, connoisseurship, history of style, and iconography." 


In other words, questions such as "What does this painting tell me about the relationship between men and women in the culture in which it was produced?" or "Why do all famous artists seem to be white males?" are the questions that interested those studying the New Art History.  


Despite my surprise, I was actually quite happy to discover this meaning to New Art History.  My interests in Art History are broad, but topping the list is definitely the interest in questioning and critiquing artworks for values they represents, consciously or unconsciously, which may not all be so positive and universally appealing.   


So let me introduce you to an concept of great importance to the New Art History school of thought, the concept of The Gaze.  (For an introductory article on The Gaze in psychoanalytic theory, click here)

Jean-Léon Gérôme, La Grande Piscine de Brousse, 1885

This painting shows an imaginary scene inside a woman's bath house set in the city of Bursa (today, in Turkey), during the Roman/Byzantine era.  Although the details of anatomy and architecture are impeccable, we cannot forget that the painting is a fiction, not a reality; the artist Gérôme was a 19th century Frenchman, who had never been to Turkey.  


How do we talk about the gaze in this painting?  There are a number of gazes going on in this scene, from one woman to another, but the gaze that dominates is the one that is not pictured: the gaze of the painter/viewer aimed at the unsuspecting women, going about their baths.  I think it's fair to say that by viewing this painting, we at least play at being voyeurs (people who gain pleasure from viewing and inspecting others sexually), even if we sympathize with these women, or are aware of and try to avoid seeing them as sexual objects.  We, the viewers, are actively looking, and the women in the painting can do nothing but be passively looked at.  We can imagine that this voyeurism would have had an even more poisonous role in the painting's original context: in a 1885 salon in Paris, looked at by admiring viewers who had even less consciousness than we have of the demeaned position these women are placed in, in relationship to the viewer.  


Some art historians have gone so far as to argue thus:  The women in this painting do not realize our presence, so we have total power over them.  Looking at this painting is not innocent, it is an act of violent objectification.  


Now, this is a strong and rather unpleasant thesis. (Remember, those New Art History folks like being confrontational).  So I'm curious: do you buy it?  If you do buy it, could art historians use the concept of the gaze to analyze the relationship of the viewer to any painting, and how is this concept complicated if the person in the painting is looking back at the viewer?  Does it make a difference if the viewer is male or female?  If the painter is male or female?