Lecture 1, Introduction to History Painting

you hello everyone I'm Pam Franks I'm the deputy director for collections and education here at the gallery and I'm delighted to welcome you all here this afternoon today's lecture is the first in a semester long series being offered by John Walsh entitled let this be a lesson heroes heroines and narrative and paintings at Yale this series represents an exciting new direction for the gallery in our public program the educational offerings of our teaching here at the gallery consistently focus on close observation of specific works of art and prolonged engagement with the collection each fall John Walsh collaborates with the members of the gallery's education department and especially with Jessica sack the galleries Jan and Frederick Mayer senior associate curator of public education to teach graduate students from across campus to lead school groups that visit the gallery this innovative program is our Wordle gallery teacher program and is setting new standards in the pedagogy of teaching from original works of art thanks to John and Jessica's work along with many other colleagues from across the museum and indeed across campus who contribute to the training when we started to think about whether a multi lecture series on the collection might be a possibility our hope and intention was to extend the close focus on particular artworks and the extended engagement with the collection over time to a broader audience through the galleries galleries public programmatic offerings there are just a few business items that I'd like you to please note this lecture is being video recorded so if you wouldn't mind please turning off your cellphone's at this point or turning them to vibrate I'd also like to mention that John will take questions at the end of the lecture so kindly hold your questions until the end the invitations for this series and they're available at the back of the room include the list of the full schedule of lectures there's a stack of these and please do take as many as you'd like to distribute to your friends the invitation also has the very useful information of the website address ww art gallery led you and on this website you'll find a link to the lecture series on the home page the website includes the schedule of lectures of course but it also includes recommended readings for each lecture so that you can explore the ideas further the video recordings of each of each week's lecture will be posted online within a few days of being delivered so that if you miss one week you can still view the lecture online also finally I'd like to mention that John and our Wordle gallery teachers will be offering close looking in gallery sessions in front of the paintings before and after each lecture beginning next week the first session will be a held at 12:30 and the second at 3:00 p.m. and registration is required and if you look at that invitation with the schedule of lectures you can get the instructions on how to register there's still a few slots left for these sessions and I strongly encourage you to consider attending if you're available so again in planning to develop a more in-depth program about the collection through a lecture series complete with supplemental materials we were really thinking about how to extend some of what happens in Neal courses and school classes to a more open forum and thus we've structured this series as something of a public course it was immediately clear to us that no one would be better to inaugurate this new approach than John Walsh so let me just wrap up by taking one more moment to introduce him a bit more fully John Walsh is the director emeritus of the Jay paul Getty Museum he graduated from Yale College in 1961 and received his PhD from Columbia he was a paintings curator at the Metropolitan Museum and at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston he's taught the history of art at Columbia Harvard and more recently at Yale and as I mentioned before at the gallery he leads training sessions for graduate students serving as Wordle gallery teachers this is his seventh year at the gallery serving as an instructor and mentor for the gallery teachers showing them the art of closed looking by example and elucidating this looking with his abundant knowledge and wealth of experience as a scholar professor and curator John is also a longtime member of our galleries governing board most recently serving in a special capacity as chair of the boards Education Committee John has been instrumental in keeping the museum's teaching mission forefront in all of our planning he is a tireless advocate for the museum its collections and its people we thank him we thank you for your abundant generosity and for this very special opportunity to learn over the course of a full semester as you elaborate John on heroes heroines and narrative and paintings at Yale Pam thanks for the introduction thanks for the chance to give these lectures at Yale and thanks for this wonderful audience in these lectures I'm going to give you a careful look at some of the most powerful and interesting works of art at Yale one at a time helping them to reveal themselves to you not just by observing them but by also considering their context and their intended function I'm going to pay particularly attention in these lectures to subject matter particularly narrative subjects across four centuries when painting in its highest form served as a vehicle for stories I want to show you that painting a narrative picture was often like writing an opera where the raw material of a play is converted by poetry and music into something else into something stronger more concise as an expression of the essence of the story and its action so I've chosen pictures that illustrate stories it's my argument that if we're going to understand what the paintings were made to do and how they might still teach us something we need to know those stories otherwise it's as though we were at the Opera with no libretto enjoying the music but having no idea what's going on or what the words mean or what the music is trying to express the pictures were going to study in this series are part of a long tradition so-called history painting a species of narrative painting it was prefigured in antiquity it was defined during the Renaissance and after that was regarded as the most elevated category of art for 400 years and more it was officially recognized as the most important work a painter could do it was had the highest purpose to show people what was sacred and what their duties were to each other to society and god it was the most demanding branch of art the most prestigious and the best paid and it was only in the middle of the 19th century that that kind of history painting started to lose its place in the hierarchy in less than one person's lifetime the it was largely overshadowed by subjects that had always ranked much lower that his scenes of daily life landscape still life by large moral and ethical perched purposes for art gave way to the pleasures of observing and recognizing by World War one abstract art had made representative painting itself irrelevant this happened in the name of artistic progress in the last two lectures we'll look at how this radical change came about the ideas behind abstract art still affect the way many people see older art that was true of my teachers and their teachers and for a while true of me and probably most of yours I mean the idea that what really counts in a work of art is its design its shapes its colors its relationships and the idea that those formal elements can communicate with us spectators directly no matter whether they depict anything or recognizable or not let alone a story so why not just dispense with subjects altogether with a suited abstract art it also affected the way people saw older art they looked primarily for its abstract strengths and they found them but these ideas put blinders on several generations of people who came to assume consciously or unconsciously that subject matter was actually irrelevant to judging older art or taking pleasure in it I'll have more to say about how we lost our taste for narrative and art and didn't develop a familiarity with the subjects that artists expected us to recognize history painting didn't die it survived in altered form and was revived for particular purposes in our own most often when issues of social justice are involved I confess in this series I'm leaving a lot out because the art of visual narrative is a lot older and more widespread in the cultures of the world then you're going to see in these lectures and for one thing the deep background I won't have anything much to say about the earliest historical pictures may then more than four thousand years ago in ancient Mesopotamia like this box on the left inlaid with scenes scenes of war and peace or this stele a on the right with carving and relief that celebrates a military victory but while they're on the screen let me just say a bit more both of these were made in the era of the famous epic of gilgamesh the first epic literature that comes down to us in writing about the great Gilgamesh the king of Uruk modern Iraq one-third human and two thirds god of superhuman strength these pictures remind us that we are a storytelling species stories of great events like these victories had been memorized and recited and passed down from one generation to the next not unchanged but morphing and merging and being elaborated all the time long before they were compiled into written epics let alone picture and what functions did stories serve they carried vital information that the people of one generation knew they needed to pass on to the next how the world arose how people perished in a great flood what the gods expected of humans how heroes and wise men and seers behaved how the tribes won victories and suffered calamities the stories of the earliest literature embodied the rules and taboos of society they were the primary material for the education of children and they were a way for entire peoples to preserve a body of common experience and wisdom well back to what I'm not covering in these lectures for a moment that includes painted papyri made in ancient Egypt like this one made for the scribe Hoonah fair showing the events that he hoped were going to happen after he died he's being led into the Hall of judgment his heart is being weighed and he then gets presented to the god Osiris I will also not be dealing much of if at all with miniature painting not only in Persia is here but in the medieval West even though they're often really ingenious at the way they picture complex narratives and I'm going to neglect Chinese and Japanese narrative pictures like these Scrolls despite their tremendous force and delicacy instead of trying to present a global survey of narration and pictures I'll be focused on one long tradition in Europe and America the DNA of that tradition is in ancient Greece and Roman a painting we have only small fragments of Greek wall painting but we have thousands of painted vases like this one some of them with terrifically vivid episodes from the narratives like this one of King Phineas the blind prophet in the story of the Argonauts here who's tormented by harpies who fly in to steal his food every day many Roman wall paintings survived like this one these in the villa de Ville of the mysteries in Pompeii almost 1500 years before the Renaissance where there are large figures performing ritual actions in convincing poses and painted to appear weighty and grave the Romans also had a more fluent and expressive way of painting on walls that's best preserved in the rediscovered New Testament scenes by an unknown artist of the ninth century AD in this Carolingian church near varèse the strange and famous fact of course is that the revival in history painting in the Renaissance in Italy took place without the artists having any knowledge of the kind of pictures I've just showed you from antiquity all of them have disappeared were buried or plastered up Greek and wall painting Greek and Roman wall painting had to be summoned up from the ancient literature strangely enough and the man who did this was this man the intellectual father of history painting and the first person to describe it the 15th century Florentine Leon Battista Alberti this is his self-portrait in bronze looking every inch of forceful Roman of antiquity his treatise of 1435 de pictura on painting rested on classical authority the painters and the writers of more than a thousand years earlier it was a how-to book for artists it explained perspective and other tools of the trade and it was also a rulebook explaining the correct way to do things Alberti wrote that what he called Astoria Astoria are pictures based on texts Greek and Roman and Christian texts they don't necessarily depict actual historical events I'm showing you an episode from Christ's life by masaccio of about ten years earlier a large fresco that Alberti knew very well and admired the purpose of history painting was to edify the public to instruct them and only make them better people these pictures says Alberti have numerous figures he recommends nine or ten of different ages and attitudes which he says the painter should study in advance by making drawings the figures aren't subject are a subject rather to the rules of decorum that means that they're not common or everyday but instead they're elevated in costume and posture they're idealized in their proportions - and in their facial features the Alberti also says that the spectator should feel that he's entered into the space of a picture and the experience of the action that's being represented he says that the painter needs to give the picture a suitable subject or have once apply by his educated friends he needs to give the painting variety decorum that is appropriateness of appearance and expression and dignity so in creating this new very explicit rationale for painting Albert he turned to the ultimate authority for people of his times the writer of writers of classical antiquity he made a parallel with rhetoric the science of persuading people with words he said a painter should make a plan for the picture and he should aim to arouse the viewers emotions with figures who utterly demonstrate their feelings as clearly as possible just as a good speech does he says that painters should deliver beauty abundance and variety not only of humans but also landscape animals still life and so on the painting should be what he says charming and attractive enough to hold the eye of the learned and the unlearned with a sense of pleasure and emotion he mentions long-lost paintings by the famous artists of Greece and Rome like Appel ease and Timothy's pictures that were described by Pliny the Elder and encouraged painters to try their hands at reconstructing these lost pictures and they soon did the Three Graces by Raphael on the left is only the best-known of many examples Alberti also names a mosaic by a modern painter Jacques doe that was in st. Peter's Basilica and then later destroyed we know it from this drawing by a follower showing the calling of Saint Peter with the Apostles in a ship in the background one of the founding events of the Christian Church Albert II applied Astoria to relief sculpture as well as to wall painting the Rome Romans had mastered that art of relief sculpture for epic narratives the most spectacular when you know is on the column of Trajan in the forum in Rome it has a band of relief sculpture wound around it with scenes from the wars that the Emperor Trajan had been fighting in Dasia Rumania we see preparations for battle we see sieges battles itself speeches over and over and there are many appearances by the Emperor Trajan about 60 and all lively skillful but not sculpture that's intended for really close inspection which is hard to do anyway by the way this idea of band or scroll format was adopted about a thousand years later to depict the Norman conquest of England and 1066 in the so called by you a tapestry and embroider the embroidery that's two hundred and thirty feet long that tells the story of course from the winners side which is a pretty consistent feature of historical narrative that scenes though include the death of the English King Edward the Confessor the fateful oath of his successor to William the successor to William that is the oath William the shipping across the channel and even the appearance of Halley's Comet which is a very bad sign for the English we're apt to think of tapestry and embroidery as a lesser art form but until a 19th century tapestry was the most prestigious form of picture in fact the most expensive medium of all for narrative art when for example louis xiii of france here had to present an impressive gift to Cardinal Francesco and Barberini it wasn't a painting by Rubens painted painting it by Rubens exists but it wasn't the painting it was a seven seven different 25 foot wide tapestries woven from Rubens designed with gold and silver thread which cost much much more than paintings of the same size the idea was magnificence not just the story some of that actually is still that magnificence is still preserved in the stair Hall of the Philadelphia Museum where you can see these tapestries now the great sculptor Lorenzo Ghiberti used the term Astoria for the reliefs on the baptistry doors of the Cathedral of Florence I'm afraid I'm going to have very little say about sculpture including relief sculpture which is after all a pictorial art and which was regarded as at least equal to painting and more challenging for the artists and like tapestry much more expensive to get back to painting more than a century before Alberti Devine defined Astoria and masaccio realized his ideas a great masterpiece of monumental narrative painting had been made here in Padua in the chapel built for enrico scrovegni a banker and moneylender here is giving a chapel to the Virgin Mary and on the wall are life-sized frescoes of episodes from the life of Christ and these are a tremendous leap for narrative painting Jonah showed how you could give a flat surface the illusion of space and paint humans who look like they have actual volume and weight and even suggests that they have living breathing and vitality and individual personalities look for example of how Joseph and Mary hand over their whoops come back back to me back how how they the parents hand over their baby to the high priest in the temple story is from the Gospel of st. Luke Mary is doing her sacred duty under the Jewish law completing her ritual purification 40 days after child's birth the old man Simeon here shown as the high priest had been promised that he wouldn't die before seeing his Savior here he's just said his famous prayer now let thy servant depart in peace for mine eyes have seen thy salvation and he's telling Mary that a sword will pierce her soul the child looks at the hairy stranger just as any baby would and tries to get away reaching for his mother just as she reaches impulsively for him we're not just seeing the emotional bond of babies and mothers we're not just seeing the old law and the new genre is actually showing the terrible conflict that exists for this mother and child between human love and divine duty that fresco is 12 feet high now here's John Oh again the same subject on the right on a tiny panel about the size of an iPad concentrated on Christ's attempt to escape this this time but this time he gives Simeon the back of his hand and not incidentally spreads his arms and a kind of innocent spontaneous reminder of the crucifixion in the future a lot of the expressive vocabulary that John who invents here for century and for centuries to come is here already in in in Giotto in the 14th century there there are figures here of persuasive gravity variety there's a tone of high seriousness there are legible poses and expressions and there's a high purpose to illustrate the crux of an important story without a caption we understand what's going on and we understand at a human level empathetically with our emotions we may have forgotten the passage in the gospel but the images how people looked and felt and behaved those things may well be unforgettable in our minds that's the great potential of narrative painting images that are indelible and we will see it reached over and over again in these series it is pictures in these series another Florentine antonio del pollo lo 440 years after Giotto pushes the expressive possibilities farther studying the nude body and more and more difficult attitudes he invents a new kind of Hercules not an overdeveloped bodybuilder but instead a construed character with a tough rupee body that says tightly strong as his bow and it's a story of a new kind draw from the drawn from the life of Hercules ones one that the artists contemporaries knew from Roman literature bodies get more convincing and expressive and so do the settings and narratives this scene of Hercules is set just above the Arno Valley so that you can actually see the dome of the cathedral of Florence in the distance the painter brings the story home to the audience and makes it relevant to them the Flemish painter Roger van der Weyden was an exact contemporary of Albert II and masaccio in Florence he paints st. Luke the patron saint of artists at work in a portrait of the Virgin and Child st. Luke's studio window looks out on a landscape of a River City in contemporary Flanders he places the legend of Saint Luke in the world of the painter and his patron into the very particular here and now soon artists of narrative scenes are inventing ways to suggest a more complex inner life for the actors in Venice in the early 16th century a new generation of painters was producing states of mind that hadn't been seen before in the entire history of art ambiguous shifting dreamy unknowable and they reinforced the elusive moods of the characters by painting settings that are not sharply defined like Roger father Wyden but softened by subtle light and atmosphere for instance Dada see this is this eccentric brilliant painter of Ferrara presents a young man in armor with a halo he stares out at us with a troubled expression brow contracted mouth open if you take a second look you see a head here up against his chest that sort of like the west spaniel might put his head there but it's it's a dragon's head and you notice that he's holding a pole here that's been broken off at the top this adds up he realize who this has to be it has to be st. George but it's in a completely different aspect than what you expect which is really the knight on horseback in broad daylight spearing the dragon while the maiden watches and prays for her hero this is Raphael's little picture in the National Gallery it also imagines George after the battle alone at Twilight looking at us as though he were troubled and wanted reassurances about what he had done here's another isolated participant this is a girl in exotic costume with a drum mouth open evidently singing an educated spectator spectator around 1600 could probably tell you who this is and probably tell you who's not in the picture but as part of the story and again a conventional version clears this up she is the daughter of jetha the ambitious Israelite general in the book of Judges who challenged the enemy to battle only after he swore to God that if he won he'd sacrifice the first person he saw coming out of the door of his house he returns victorious of course and out the door rejoicing comes his only daughter what Peter Davila paints here is what movie people call a tight shot we see what the victorious general saw his beloved daughter happy oblivious that's it his horror his remorse for what his ambition would cost these things we have to imagine this is very sophisticated storytelling well all this leads me to make some general points about narrative painting using some of the pictures at Yale that we're going to be talking about it greater length in this series it's kind of overture medley of tunes that you'll hear later later at greater length the first point is that telling a story with a single picture is doing it the hard way is definitely hard compared to prose and poetry and drama on stage you need some techniques to do it but the single picture has great advantages which I'll be pointing out there is the problem of time a story unfolds in time and may have many episodes in a novel those episodes are described one after the other as you turn pages perhaps with interludes of commentary by the author and there's often their author's voice or somebody else's to guide you a player a film also presents the episodes successively but we see them in sequence in real time painters of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance could deal with a long narrative by presenting individual episodes in many separate scenes the life of Christ for example here in this big altarpiece by GWAR en toe there are a dozen episodes each occupying a separate panels small panel on either side of this large coronation of the virgin a story unfolds in each row left to right top to bottom and there are four more events on top they're all framed in a structure that's something like the cross section of a church with the episodes fitted together as support for the central nave like zone that shows the object of devotion Christ crowning his mother in heaven all these choices would have been worked out with the artist and a frame maker by a man who was paying the bill whose name was probably Nicholas we can guess that because there's a picture of Saint Nicholas up top and probably with the help of a priest in charge of the church in the town of Padua dedicated to Saint Martin who which is also he's also up there at the top so longer narratives can be spun out in a series of discreet episodes like this word can be compressed into a single image that's what we have in this Dutch painting here in the gallery up front in the garden here is the Virgin and Child but also Saint Anne prominently Mary's mother with and the picture is really about Mary's lineage so we got family flashbacks over at the left outside the garden is Mary's elderly father Joachim Anna had been barren for twenty years and in the distance Joachim is pleading for a child with God who appears in the form of an angel when Anna then becomes pregnant she and Joachim meet at the golden gate of Jerusalem and rejoice which is what's happening here at the top so the events of a year happen in a single frame another familiar subject lives leads itself to a sequence in a single image this is the stratsi altarpiece by Gentilly da Fabriano the action as you can see I hope snakes around the top starting with the magi standing on a mountain and seeing the star they take horse they travel to Jerusalem the top and there we don't see this part they ask Herod about the birth of a king to the Jews which worries Herod since he's the king so he asks them to go out and report back at the upper right they come out again and they follow the star and at the bottom they've arrived on a page you can see is taking off the Spurs of one of the kings as the others crouch and then kneel down to be blessed the biblical story is stretched into a ribbon that moves through a vast landscape that makes it clear that the whole world involved in this event and most dramatic contrast I can imagine is on tania's viewer the same version of the same version of the same subject which again is a tight close-up all the pageantry is gone there's no tour of the Holy Land no sequence of events here the focus is the theological crutch of the story the crux of the story that the wise and powerful men who represent the old order of the world come to render homage to the new order Christ in this compressed format our attention goes to the faces of the kings to the terrific solemnity of their expressions as though they already knew the fate of the baby as his mother does there's nothing in the New Testament accounts that suggests this possibility the artist invented it like Giotto he imagines the intense human emotions felt by everybody here in a couple of weeks we'll look at this picture of the conversion of Saul by the Italian painter gareth fellow it also shows why a single image can be so effective at putting a story across he's chosen the key moment in the long story of Saul's life the turning point when he's knocked down and struck blind chosen by God without having done a thing to deserve it he's been solved the persecutor before this now he'll be Paul the preacher it's a strong and beautiful painting but to get its full force you have to know the biblical accounts of Saul's life before he got on the road to Damascus life before what he was doing what happened afterward the painter assumed you would know all that he assumed that his picture of this one incident would summon up the rest of the story in your mind that's going to be true of almost every painting that we look at whether the subject comes from the classical mythology or from the old New Testament or from recorded history my first point was that telling a story with a single image is the hard way the painter first needs to choose the episode well and we spectators have to be equipped to see it second point narrative painting has a lot in common with drama on stage and even more with opera the skills involved are similar you have a story you choose an incident or an episode from it call it a scene you cast it with suitable actors you block out their movements on stage and you coach them with expressions and gestures there's a whole repertory of body language that's common to both theatre and painting and is for several centuries well known not surprisingly since actors and directors often use the same Illustrated textbooks in expressive expressing the the passions many of you heard Robin Simon's marvelous lectures on that subject at the Yale Center for British art earlier this year you need to have a setting of course and scenery and props you need lighting to heighten the action to put the emphasis where you want it painters do without words and music but they have all those other expressive devices and they make a stationary thing they create something that doesn't change stand still and invites close slow looking and immersion in the image the painter also often picks a scene because it's the heart of the matter with a turning point of the story light like this that the oath that leads to the creation of the Roman Republic or the moment of decision justice in theatre the scene is often chosen because it displays the character of the heroine or hero or the villain here the widow Agrippina displays her virtue as a faithful spouse by bringing home her murdered husband's ashes her virtue is a prolific mother with her children and she displays her virtue as a brave citizen coming back to Italy to seek justice from a corrupt Benjamin West used it used dramatic devices that he shared with directors of contemporary theater the use of the include of vocabulary of poses big gestures that signal grief piety horror despair all things that the audience can read easily from the back seats stagers stage designers also create illusions like this one of deep space in the background and they use light that rakes across the stage from an unseen source and picks out those figures that they need to have visible for expressive purposes painters helped to make new kinds of theatrical experiences possible to not only drama on stage but particularly silent movies when they began to tackle historical stories and got serious about set building the first film epic was from the novel Quo Vadis set in Nero's rome and what better model could you possibly find for the decor of the Colosseum and for the gladiators in this and a dozen other Roman movies of the same type than the paintings of Jerome like the one here at Yale speaking of decor we will be exploring this picture and others by the most astonishing creator of theatrical settings for historical events in painting John Martin almost a century later when DW Griffith was planning his three-and-a-half-hour epic intolerance in 1916 and needed to reproduce Babylon at the time of King Belshazzar near the corner of Hollywood and Sunset boulevards he had to go no farther than Martin's wonderful painting or the print reproducing it and take whatever he needed which was actually quite a lot in the last couple of lectures I'll have more to say about how movies and TV and other media displaced painting as a vehicle for storytelling but some contemporary artists have combined ticular intensity of history paintings and the narrative techniques of film come find them with startling results this stills are from a 12-minute video piece by the artist bill viola who is used old master paintings as the starting point for silent scenes in slow motion of mysterious new narratives my third point is that spectators tell the story history painting gives us work to do we need to look carefully at what the painter included and how its treated making sense of a narrative picture is akin to reading and for us that can mean reading a foreign language furthermore as I've said before they we need to know the story all this work is complicated by the truth that all of us looking at the same picture of a narrative subject see it differently each of its each of us reads its content differently because we differ my version of this picture by marco pinot that we'll be talking about my version of it is not going to be yours the same is truth of true fiction plays dance opera it's true whether we know the story or not I can tell you a lot about what the gospel of st. John says about the raising of Lazarus and I will but none of you will process my words or the text or the picture in the same way as others we each receive information through multiple filters of life experience age education gender many more these differences are going to turn up in the conversations that we have in front of the pictures themselves starting next week I said that the spectator tells the story to help us spectators do that the artist puts us in our imaginations into the picture he paints the subject for example seeing from a particular vantage point which becomes our vantage point and which conditions our experience here we see saul and his horse from close-up as though they had been almost passing us on the road just as the horse took just just a horse and rider nobody else when it's staged this way the event is personal almost private when Pieter Bruegel paints the same subject we see it entirely differently Bri Oracles sets it in a great steep Alpine landscape where there's an army toiling up toiling up the slope everybody just getting on with the job we're far away and off to one side which means we don't even see what's going on right away and neither do a lot of other people Saul's accident hardly interrupts the March and there are just a few rays of light to suggest that what we're witnessing is a divine act the point of putting this scene in a huge crowd is partly that it's not a private event the message is that the choice of this man who was the scourge of Christians to become the greatest Christian missionary affects everybody though nobody knows that yet the effect of the setting is also to suggest that its importance importance of the event is as broad and sweeping as the landscape itself artists can put us in the picture by including our alter egos this is a device that Leon Battista Alberti recommended to painters saying it's a good idea to include somebody in the picture looking out at the spectator where is he looking out at the spectator establishing a connection there's a man here who does that and his costume in his face looked very much to be of Pinos own time the sixteenth century not crisis time he's there as a witness to an important event and he invites us to be one too and to learn from it in history paintings the painter will sometimes show how a spectator can be a good witness and suggests how he or she should feel this is an engraving of a painting by a van Dyck for which the original is lost the French 18th century writer Denis Diderot reported an argument he had with learned friends about this painting which shows the Roman general Belisarius here who was treated unjustly by the Emperor Justinian so the legend goes he was blinded abandoned to beg for alms and then recognized by one of his former soldiers who lamented his cruel fate Dida rose friends judged there was a fault of the painter that he gave that soldier so much prominence Diderot said no that's not a fault that's actually the point he said that it's just that which made the painting moral and that the soldier was playing my role soldier is completely absorbed in what he's seeing what he's doing is absorbing the moral of the story he's learning the learning has always been a primary purpose of most history painting I'm making the point that we spectators tell the story I'm going to give a few more instances of pictures that imply a sequence of episodes only one of which we see the rest we can deduce in Jerome's in Jerome's arena scene all that happens is that the gladiators salute the Emperor before they start to fight but there's evidence all over the place about what's just happened is blood in the sand a pair of dead or dying men is there in the foreground there's another one farther back and farther back still a bunch of bodies is being dragged out of there ahead of them two actors playing the roles of the gods of the underworld are leading them towards the portal through which they're going to be dragged and disappeared so the artist shows by these clues what's happened just before and we spectators know like the Romans and the Colosseum's know what's going to happen again very shortly as soon as the player introductions are over with in other 19th century paintings there's an even more explicit invitation for us to do the storytelling it's a new kind of narrative painting like the novels that appeared in serial form every week that Victorian exhibition and Victoria exhibition go lovers go loved here's a favorite here at the Yale gallery the painting by Millay of a woman of marriageable age standing at a desk with a letter and an empty vase she's holding a portrait of a man behind her and she's deep in thought the title of the artist gave it was yes or no with a question mark at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1871 the critics thought it was marvelous and they hoped for a sequel answering the question Millie held out for three years and after a lot of discussion the picture of the picture in the press he exhibited a sequel called no I have to show you a color engraving of that one because the original is lost and it was more controversy and finally two years later Neil exhibited this painting yes for the next time Asian point showing the guy showing up showing up with a travelling a cloak and carrying a beat-up suitcase he's been away more difficult to follow and certainly more serious is this Enigma by Gustave Courbet one of the major paintings at Yale but when I couldn't really justify as a narrative painting for these lectures still a story is implied there has been action and we can see it in the snow a rider leans back in the saddle as his horse lowers his head towards the tracks of course himself and also the tracks of a small animal with spots of blood we don't know is this a trapper is it a poacher possibly he doesn't have any gun or traps and not even an expression that we can read in the shadow just body language too exhaustion at the end of a pursuit the horse and rider are in the same is evidently in some situation that involves tracking a wounded animal but despite the clues we don't know what the story was or is and whether it might express some condition of Kirby's own spirit we have to think about it that's the invitation to us a fourth point about narrative pictures is that they need to be compared with others that's how we understand better what the artists added to the tradition of representing the same subject or altered or just borrowed from art history thrives on comparisons and art historians love these exercises like a climber loves Rock Benjamin West gave the scene of a group inés landing a tremendous severity the central group has white robes here to distinguish it and moves solemnly across from the ships towards the temples and the city a picture on the right here by Gavin Hamilton of the same rare subject painted a little bit earlier gave West the same the basic layout that he used but it's the changes that West introduces that are important he eliminated the pointless climb up the steps on the right his colors are more somber the tone is more grave the figures are more numerous and smaller and the architectural setting here is much grander all of this pulls our attention to the heart of the matter which is a group inés defenseless confrontation with official Rome these aren't just differences of form in other words they're differences of meaning we saw that in the case of the st. Paul pictures verticals Longview vs. Garofalo as close up here's another striking case there's an amazing large painting in the gallery which you've probably seen by the Dutch painter Abraham bloom art of the flood in Genesis we know that the waters must be rising but we don't see that in fact we don't see much else except the doomed sinners most of them struggling to higher ground all struggling gracefully others perform a kind of ballet of dismay and despair showing off their amazing physiques the emphasis here is not on the 40-day storm or on the flood waters or the Ark of Noah but on the individuals of the offending race of humans who are shortly to be wiped out and across the street in the British Art Centre is a huge painting of the same event by John Martin whose Belshazzar feast you saw a few minutes ago the contrast could hardly be greater if it pictured a different subject his deluge is a terrifying vision of nature nature gone mad the earth cracking open and belching fire great waves about to sweep everybody away we don't look at all this from high ground but it's not going to be high enough to save us from what's already happening to the crowds of tiny people trying to climb to safety our visceral reaction comes from nature turned murderous here in the Martin whereas with bloom our reaction is to the fear that we read in the individual bodies and painting there are many different ways to tell a story in other words the same story and my fifth point at last is about narrative painting especially history painting it always has a message for its intended audience and often has a motive the question is for us what were those messages and what if anything is left for us to think about now that might apply to our lives let's look at a few scenes of war to sharpen the point John Trumbull knew exactly what he was saying in his record recreation of the Battle of Bunker Hill and to whom and why he was saying to posterity that the United States had won its independence from England by the concerted of people of all classes binding to themselves together being brave enough to fight against great odds and sacrifice their lives if you had to and there's another message about decency and restraint in warfare something that Trumbull believed in even to the point of inventing an incident of battlefield gallantry will see that these ideas are these are ideas about war that we 250 years later might be thinking about 40 years later the Dutch born French painter Ari Shaffir had a different view of warfare he painted the scene of the retreat of Napoleon's army from Russia in the winter of 1812 making it clear that this was not a moral victory but instead a horrific defeat it was the result of many blunders Napoleon had already left and returned to Paris leaving his best general in charge of getting the remains of the army out of Russia out of every 200 men who went into Russia one came out chef Aires picture is without hope and it's without Heroes it's about sacrifice for nothing it's an answer to the many images of Napoleon's victories and it's a general statement about the futility and barbarity of war a kind of never again aimed at an audience of liberals and undecideds in Paris people who could remember the ideals of revolutionary France before Napoleon hijacked it and turned it into an overweening empire and a base for military adventurism you get some hints from mocking my rhetoric about what I think a modern audience could learn from such pictures this pair by the Victorian painter Augustus Leopold egg hangs across the street it set two centuries earlier sitting in the center of a sumptuous room full of gorgeous women and obsequious looking men is a radiant young man in white he is the second Duke of Buckingham the favorite of charles ii and he rose to be the most powerful man at court in his peak at his peak the richest man in England except for the king and a famously dissolute character right over its head out the window you can see Buckingham star the moon proverbially fickle the companion painting on the right shows the once glorious Buckingham dead at the age of 29 alone in what Alexander Pope called the worst ins worst room his white silk jacket thrown off the Order of the Garter there at his knee this is all vivid and plausible but I made it all up not only the party scene but also the death of Buckingham he was actually back at his grand country estate in Yorkshire when he died where he went hunting and caught a chill then died in the cottage of one of his tenant farmers but squalor works a lot better if you're showing rise and fall and Lord knows this was a period for moralizing in public the more graphic the punishment for sin the better sometimes the target audience for painters was very small and helps to know exactly who that audience was this is a Van Dyke again painting them a communist of religious subjects the Madonna and Child here with a donor figure in adoration he is the a base gaya a former ambassador of the dukes of savoy a wily operator who'd been put out of his job by the new duke sky a new the Duchess however Christine Marie of France and he had Van Dyck paid him praying to the Virgin whose face is that of the Duchess Scalia wanted to be reinstated and he'd evidently had the painting made to be presented to her speaking of Flemish painters commissioned by Italian political figures to show them in a good light in order to regain political advantage at a foreign court here's the most famous case of all really a kind of epic of flattery Rubens's cycle of Maria de Medici in the 1916 20s Maria de Maeda chief was the Queen Mother of France who's a Florentine and a widow of King Henry the fourth got Rubens to paint her story in 21 very large pictures the story itself was fraught since she was regent for her young son louis xiii and wanted power for herself well others did too notably the Cardinal Richelieu and she had years of deadly struggle with these people after attempting a coup or two and being banished Maria succeeded in getting back in favor and in a position to have her side of the story told Rubens used the allegorical language of his time to make it as a heroic story this for example is obscene come back here this is Maria and Henry her King King Henry who died but made her a widow Maria and Henry meeting for the first time like Jupiter and Juno in the sky Maria's role in the battle of the siege really of yudish and in Germany was actually nil but she did visit once and Rubens paints her as the victor giving her the trappings of equestrian portraits of men and she becomes the conquering hero of yudish her reconciliation with her son king louis xiii was a political expedient to stable but Rubens paints it as a divine event where the devil's of envy here the rival courtiers are cast down mm-hmm the story hung on the walls of Maria's Great Palace it looks and bore in looks and work palace for visiting ambassadors and courtiers and the king himself to look at this is a fully political rewriting of history it was propaganda with a capital P and painting like history itself has often been a tool of politics to finally I think we need to look at paintings of historical events as a species of fiction and just like historical fiction it needs to have themes like the rise of democracy the fall of tyranny crime and punishment and so on themes determine the choice of what episodes get shown and what are eliminated it's a mix of actual invented actual and invented of fact of spin and invention not truth in a literal sense but what that wise philosopher and observer Stephen Colbert called truth truthiness to be coherent both historical novels and history paintings need to be structured to get their points across to be credible and to be vivid to capture attention and hold it and to be remembered next week we will examine this picture showing one of the many Adventures of Hercules its historical fiction about the most durable hero of all and one of the last episodes of his legendary life the most fateful episode of all so try to be here if you can thank you

Channel: YaleCourses

Views: 257,929

Rating: 4.8990827 out of 5

Keywords: Yale University Art Gallery, YUAG, John Walsh, Art History, Lecture

Id: FbZ_MOWLMu8

Length: 63min 8sec (3788 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 15 2013