Assyria to Iberia: Ancient Art at the Metropolitan Museum

Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age

September 22, 2014–January 4, 2015

Reviewed by Ed Voves

Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age is the third in a series of landmark exhibitions exploring the birth of Western civilization. Mounted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Assyria to Iberia traces the spread of writing, commerce, art, religion - and war - from Mesopotamia, the "land between the rivers" to distant shores as far away as Iberia, modern-day Spain.  

Assyria to Iberia highlights the role of two remarkable realms. The Phoenician city-states of Tyre and Sidon, located on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in modern-day Lebanon and Syria, are given pride of place in the exhibition.  But these merchant-adventurers share the stage with the menacing Assyrian Empire that eventually conquered the Middle East from Egypt to the Persian Gulf. 

The timeline of the exhibit extends from the collapse of Bronze Age civilization around 1100 B.C. to the revival of the fabled city of Babylon during the reign of Nebuchadnezzar II, 604–562 B.C.

Relief of a striding lion from Babylon

One could easily be tempted to view the story of the savvy, seafaring Phoenicians and the bloodthirsty Assyrians in terms of "good and evil." The Hebrew Bible, which began to be compiled during this period, certainly viewed the warlike Assyrians in negative terms. 

Among the first major works of art in the exhibit, a statue from the British Museum conveys the Bible's fearful estimation of the Assyrians. The image is of Ashurnasirpal II (883-859 B.C.), the king who set Assyria, then a modest state in the north of present-day Iraq, on the march of conquest. His statue, a rare example of a full-bodied sculpture rather than bas relief, projects the image of inhumanity that the Assyrians carefully cultivated. Predatory eyes, an implacable, resolute stance, hands gripping weapons of war - a sickle and a mace - these were the attributes of a model Assyrian monarch. 

Statue of Ashurnasirpal II

The inscription on the king's tunic, below his battlement-shaped beard, proclaims Ashurnasirpal II as "great king, strong king, king of the universe, king of Assyria ... conqueror from the opposite bank of the Tigris as far as Mount Lebanon [and] the Great Sea, all lands from east to west at his feet he subdued." 

The curators of the Met's Department of Ancient Near Eastern Art brilliantly manage to navigate a middle course between Biblical loathing and Assyrian bravado. They document events from multiple perspectives – such as the military campaign of Assyrian King Sennacherib against the Hebrew state of Judah in 694 B.C.

Lord Byron's 1815 poem, The Destruction of Sennacherib, memorably recounted the Bible's version of the event in which the Assyrian armies were thwarted by Yahweh's "Angel of Death."

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,                                                             And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;                                                             And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,                                                     When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee...

According to the Hebrew account, the legions of Sennacherib were decimated by plague, melting, as Byron proclaimed "like snow in the glance of the Lord." The Assyrians retreated and Jerusalem was saved. 

The exhibition, however, displays another treasure from the British Museum, the Taylor Prism. This baked clay cylinder records in cuneiform script the cities of Judah that Sennacherib's troops put to the torch and the thousands of captives they seized. Hezekiah, King of Judah, is derided as being besieged in Jerusalem “like a bird in a cage.”   
The Taylor Prism makes no mention of Assyrian casualties. In a strikingly similar manner to modern-day propaganda, the Assyrians always depicted themselves doing the killing - never being killed. A carved battle scene in the Metropolitan exhibit shows in gruesome detail Assyrian troops slaughtering opponents from Elam. This is a work of art that does not invite lingering contemplation.

Another Assyrian bas-relief from the British Museum, Relief Showing a Lion Hunt, is only a little less grisly. But it merits close study, for there may be a subtext in this and similar works which show Assyrian kings killing lions. In his book, The World of Art, Robert Payne wrote movingly of the contrast between Assyrian monarchs and the animals they hunted. 

"A pitiless empire produced pitiless art," Payne noted, "the faces of all men are alike. Individuality is reserved for the animals which appear in the hunting scenes... "

In contrast to the impassive, formalized features of the Assyrian hunters, every effort was made to convey the uniqueness of the lions. Likewise, the sculptors highlighted the vitality and vigor with which these wild animals confronted the "civilized" men killing them for sport. Describing another hunting scene not in the Metropolitan exhibit, Payne wrote:

 A wounded lioness with paralyzed hind legs tries to drag herself along by the forelegs, and every curve of the sagging back and belly, and every tendon of the forelegs suggest the awareness of death, and all the sympathy of the artist flows to the lioness.
                                                                                                                                                                                                                                               

                                                                                                                                                                       

Relief showing a lion hunt

In the lion hunting scene on view in Assyria to Iberia, the features of each dead lion in the row of feline corpses is clearly individuated. The faces of the Assyrian hunters, from king to servant lackey, are drained of humanity. Were the bas-relief sculptors, who were likely captives or hostages from conquered lands, inserting a subtle comment about the Assyrian overlords?

If so, the Assyrians missed the point. They never stopped killing until death stalked them. 

In 612 B.C. a coalition of forces from Babylon, Persia and the Caucasus took advantage of a civil war among claimants to the throne of Assyria. They launched a devastating attack on Nineveh, capital of the over-stretched empire. With shocking suddenness, the "Thousand Year Reich" of the Assyrians was toppled, their trophy-laden cities sacked and set aflame. Like a mirage in the desert, the Assyrian empire vanished in the blink of an eye.

The seafaring Phoenicians lasted a lot longer and left a far richer cultural legacy. Instead of weapons of war, the chosen instruments of the Phoenicians were their navigational skills and monopoly of Tyrian red.  This purple dye made from seashells was in huge demand throughout the Mediterranean basin. With this export, the Phoenicians brought in annual shiploads of silver “tribute” to bribe the Assyrians and a little left over for themselves.

The distinctive feature of Phoenician art was the fusion of elements and influences from all over the Near East, Egypt and the Mediterranean to form an "Orientalizing" style. This was favored throughout the entire region. Greece and Italy, both emerging from the "Dark Age" following the collapse of the Bronze Age palaces, are prime sites for the discovery of "Orientalizing" art. Homer's Iliad extolled the ornate metal work traded by the Phoenicians.

A silver bowl, . . . that skilled Sidonian craftsmen wrought to perfection,
Phoenician traders shipped across the misty seas.

Bowl with Egyptianizing motifs 

Several of these Phoenician silver masterpieces are on display in the exhibit, including one found at Olympia, scene of the Greek Olympic Games beginning in 776 B.C. Another is this gilded silver Bowl with Egyptianizing Motifs. It was found in a 7th century B.C. grave in central Italy at Praeneste, a site associated with the Goddess of Fortune. 

It was another goddess, worshiped by the Phoenicians, whose image became a dominant motif of the age - and of the Metropolitan exhibit. Ishtar or Astarte, was the goddess of love and fertility. She appeared in many guises, including the face on the exhibition's signature piece, Plaque with Striding Sphinx. 

Usually shown wearing an Egyptian wig, Astarte was a beloved figure in almost all of the regions visited or colonized by the Phoenicians. These seafarers carried her image with them on their biremes, sometimes as a figurehead on these ships.

One of the most frequent poses of the goddess was in ivory carvings showing a beautiful woman peering through a window or between two columns. The Metropolitan exhibit displays a particularly exquisite example from the Louvre collection dating to the late 9th century - early 8th century B.C. 

Woman at the window ivory plaque

Scholars have debated - with some academic heat - whether these "women in the window" represent goddesses, temple prostitutes or simply beautiful women. There was an element of all three in Astarte. The ancient Hebrews, who feared and reviled the seductive power of Astarte as a threat to the worship of Yahweh, would have emphasized the second interpretation. But to the Phoenician mariners, sailing in their little ships, Astarte was their protectress. And the faces on these ivory carvings would also have also reminded them of their womenfolk back home.

The Phoenicians established colonies at Carthage in North Africa and Spain. Temples to Astarte were erected at these newly-occupied sites and one, recently found near Seville in Spain, has led to a major re-appraisal of the fabled Carambolo Treasure.

 Unearthed during building renovations back in 1958, the Carambolo Treasure consists of twenty-one pieces of 24-carat gold jewelry. These were initially thought to have been made by Iberian craftsman for rulers of the local Tartessos culture around 800 B.C. With the discovery of the temple to Astarte, this stunning necklace is now believed to have been part of the regalia of the high priest of Astarte's cult.

Necklace from the Carambolo Treasure

Astarte was not the only seductive woman whose dazzling face launched - or sank - a thousand ships during the age of the Phoenician mariners. 

Beguiling female heads also appear on several strange, flying creatures that once decorated the rims of bronze cauldrons which blazed with fire in palaces and temples. Part bird, part human, these are the Sirens described in Homer's Odyssey, whose melodious singing lured love-sick sailors to their doom. A hanging display of several of these bronze Sirens in the Met's exhibit brings home the dangers faced by Phoenician mariners and their Greek counterparts.

Cauldron and stand 

An impressive bronze cauldron, complete with its iron stand, was discovered in Cyprus, the "copper island" which was a prime trading destination of the Phoenicians. Dating to the 8th–7th century B.C., the cauldron testifies to the transition from the Bronze Age to the Age of Iron. The attached figures or protomes on the rim are male this time, Janus-headed bird men, and fearsome Griffins. The effect of viewing these extraordinary bronze visages set against leaping flames and smoke rising up from within the cauldron must have been mesmerizing.

Assyria to Iberia  is a worthy successor to its predecessors, The Art of the First Cities, presented at the Metropolitan Museum in 2003, and Beyond Babylon, the 2008 exhibit which surveyed the Bronze Age. However, despite the scale of the exhibit and the jaw-dropping beauty of some of the art works on display, there is a melancholy feel to this third installment of the Met's study of the rise of civilization. There are lessons here that should have been learned a long time ago - and still haven't been.

Along with the Assyrian battle and lion-hunting reliefs, the Metropolitan exhibit presents other works of art that evoke war lust and its consequences - ancient and modern.

This statue of a scorpion bird-man is one of the Tell Halaf Sculptures that the German archeologist Baron Max von Oppenheim (1860–1946) excavated in Syria during the 1920's. This mythological character derives from the Gilgamesh epic, the sacred text of Mesopotamia and the "Fertile Crescent" lands that extended through Syria to the Hebrew kingdoms and the Phoenician port cities. Oppenheim brought this fearsome gate guardian and other sculptures from Tell Halaf to an iron foundry in Berlin which he converted into a museum.

On November 18, 1943, the British air force launched a devastating series of incendiary bombing attacks on Berlin and on November 22 the Tell Halaf Museum was set ablaze. When the cold water of the fire hoses struck the superheated basalt of the statues, the ancient sculptures literally exploded into thousands of fragments. Oppenheim rescued these shards and pieces and they were stored in a museum located in Communist East Berlin. After German re-unification, in an amazing reconstruction effort lasting nine years, many of the shattered sculptures were restored.

Statue of scorpion bird-man

From a purely artistic standpoint, the Tell Halaf rescue effort provides an up-beat conclusion to Assyria to Iberia. It certainly validates the dedication, skill and scholarship of the Metropolitan curators and their colleagues around the world. Their efforts deserve the highest praise.

Yet, it needs to be remembered that the November 22, 1943 air raid killed 2,000 Berliners, many of them women and children, as well as destroying the Tell Halaf Museum. Perhaps it was the latest news of murder and mayhem from the Middle East that oppressed my spirits upon leaving the wonderful Assyria to Iberia exhibition.  

But what does it say about civilization in the twenty-first century that we can restore war-shattered statues from the age of the Assyrians and still go on killing fellow human beings with the cold, heartless demeanor of Sennacherib and Ashurnasirpal?

Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved 

Images Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Introductory Image:

Openwork plaque with a striding sphinx Ivory Excavated at Nimrud (ancient Kalhu), Fort Shalmaneser, Room NW 21 Neo-Assyrian period, South Syrian style, 9th–8th century B.C. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rogers Fund, 1964 (64.37.1)
Image: © The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Relief of a striding lion Glazed and molded brick  Babylon, Processional Way Neo-Babylonian, 604–562 B.C. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Vorderasiatisches Museum Image: bpk, Berlin/Vorderasiatisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin/
Art Resource, NY (Photograph by Olaf M. Tessmer)

Statue of Ashurnasirpal II  Statue: magnesite; base: reddish stone Nimrud, Ishtar Sharrat-niphi temple Neo-Assyrian, ca. 875–860 B.C. The Trustees of the British Museum, London Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum

Relief showing a lion hunt  Gypsum alabaster Nineveh, North Palace Neo-Assyrian, ca. 645–640 B.C. The Trustees of the British Museum, London Image: © The Trustees of the British Museum

Bowl with Egyptianizing motifs  Gilded silver Praeneste, Colombella necropolis, Bernardini Tomb Phoenician or Orientalizing, early 7th century B.C. Museo Nazionale Etrusco di Villa Giulia, Rome Image: Bruce White

Woman at the window  Ivory and gold Arslan Tash, Bâtiment aux Ivoires, room 14
Late 9th–early 8th century B.C. Musée du Louvre, Paris, Département des Antiquités Orientales Image: © RMN-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY (photograph by Raphael Chipault)

Necklace from the Carambolo Treasure Gold El Carambolo (Camas, Seville)
7th century B.C.Museo Arqueológico de Sevilla; On permanent loan from the Municipal Collection of Seville Image: Bruce White

Cauldron and stand  Cauldron: bronze; stand: iron Salamis, Tomb 79 Cypro-Archaic I, ca. 8th–7th century B.C. Cyprus Museum, Nicosia Image: Bruce White

Statue of scorpion bird-man  Basalt Tell Halaf Citadel, Western Palace, “Scorpion Gate” Syro-Hittite, early 9th century B.C. Max Freiherr von Oppenheim-Stiftung, Cologne Image: bpk, Berlin/Vorderasiatisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin/Art Resource, NY (Photograph by Steffen Spitzner)

Eakins to Tiffany: 19th Century Masterpieces at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Eakins to Tiffany:    

 The Return of The Gross Clinic to the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Reviewed by Ed Voves

America during the decades following the Civil War entered what Mark Twain memorably called the Gilded Age. Many historians dispute Twain’s irony.  "Gilded" like another term of that period, "shoddy," casts a negative estimation upon the society of the United States between 1865 to 1900 that is largely undeserved.

Political corruption - symbolized by "Boss" Tweed of Tammany Hall and the "Whiskey Ring" bribery scandal that reached into the highest levels of the U.S. Government - was rampant. However, the 1870's and 1880's also witnessed an amazing outburst of artistic creativity. This was the era of Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer, John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt.

The Philadelphia Museum of Art recently re-opened the dialog on American art during the post-Civil War era. The occasion for this re-appraisal was the return of The Gross Clinic by Thomas Eakins to the museum's American galleries. The Gross Clinic portrays the great surgeon, Dr. Samuel Gross, lecturing to medical students at the Jefferson Medical College while operating on a young patient afflicted with an infected thigh bone. 

The Gross Clinic is arguably the greatest American painting of the nineteenth century. It is likewise one of the nation's most significant works of art when viewed from the perspective of America's social development.

Thomas Eakins, The Gross Clinic, 1876

Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross, as it is officially known, was painted in 1876, after exhaustive research and intensive preliminary studies. It is a very big painting, measuring 8 feet (240 cm) by 6.5 feet (200 cm). Originally purchased by admiring students of Dr. Gross for $200, the painting was redeemed for the hefty sum of $68 million, produced in a dramatic 2007 fund-raising campaign that saved The Gross Clinic from being sold away from Philadelphia. 

An art work of this magnitude surely deserves a gallery all to itself.

This is exactly what the curators of the Philadelphia Museum of Art did not do when they re-hung The Gross Clinic this summer. Instead, The Gross Clinic was closely integrated with other major American masterpieces of the period to create a visually and intellectually stimulating display.

Technically speaking, this revamped presentation of Eakin's 1876 masterpiece is a "reinstallation." The Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA) share ownership of The Gross Clinic, which rotates between the two institutions for presentation to the public.  

When it was recently displayed at PAFA, The Gross Clinic was positioned in a way to heighten its singular, almost majestic, individuality. In its present setting at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Gross Clinic shares the gallery walls with other works of art in very close proximity. During the nineteenth century, paintings were hung floor-to-ceiling and the Philadelphia Museum of Art evokes this Victorian era-approach to art to perfection.

Ironically, The Gross Clinic was rejected by the art jury of the Centennial Exposition, the "world's fair" that celebrated the one hundred year anniversary of America's independence in 1876. Eakin's painting was relegated to the back wall of the U.S. Army’s exhibit of a model military hospital, hanging above camp beds draped with mosquito netting. 

In a way, The Gross Clinic is a sublimated Civil War picture. It depicts heroic measures undertaken by Dr. Gross to rescue a threatened human body, just as Lincoln and the Union forces had saved the endangered body politic during the war. But few of the ten million visitors to the Centennial Exposition held in Philadelphia wanted to be reminded.

Progress and prosperity interested Americans in 1876. Across the room from The Gross Clinic, another huge masterwork by Eakins captures the contrast between the accepted standards of American society at the beginning and at the culmination of the so-called Gilded Age. 

Eakins’ The Agnew Clinic depicts Dr. Hayes Agnew performing a mastectomy in 1889 before students of the University of Pennsylvania's Medical Department. The parallel theme with The Gross Clinic was deliberate. But there the similarities end. Dr. Agnew and his team of surgeons are dressed in spotless surgical smocks, using sterilized instruments and have a professional nurse in attendance. 

An actual nurse at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania modeled for Eakins. Her name was Mary U. Clymer. The look of knowing compassion on her face makes Eakin's depiction of Miss Clymer one of his most appealing portraits. 

Thomas Eakins, The Agnew Clinic, photogravure print

This bond between nurse and patient, however, did not save The Agnew Clinic from a storm of controversy. Perhaps anticipating the outcry over the unflinching realism of the scene, Eakins went to the exceptional length of painting a black-and-white version of the work to insure that photogravure prints made from the painting would be of exceptional quality.

The Agnew Clinic was displayed in 1893 at Chicago’s World’s Columbian Exposition. It won a gold medal - but not much public approval. That went to a painting entitled Breaking Home Ties which was voted the most popular painting at the Chicago exhibition.

A poignant narrative scene, Breaking Home Ties shows a young man beginning his life's journey as he bids farewell to his family. Sadly, the painter of this work, Thomas Hovenden, was nearing the end of his life's journey. In 1895, Hovenden died trying to save a little girl who had wandered on to train tracks near his home in Philadelphia's suburbs. Hovenden and the child were struck and killed by a rail locomotive, the supreme symbol of nineteenth century progress. 

Thomas Hovenden, Breaking Home Ties, 1890

The Irish-born Hovenden had painted Breaking Home Ties in 1890. That year, a report from the U.S. Census Department revealed that westward frontier development had ceased, "there can hardly be said to be a frontier line." Young Americans like the central figure in the painting were no longer being urged to "go West." Instead, they were heading to America's booming industrial cities.   

"The frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history,” announced historian Frederick Jackson Turner in an influential lecture presented in Chicago in 1893 that later became known as the Frontier Thesis.

José Maria Velasco, Valley of Oaxaca, 1888.

American painters had long been fascinated with the West. Grand Canyon of the Colorado River, by Thomas Moran, and a similar, if smaller, work, Valley of Oaxaca, painted in 1888 by Mexican artist José Maria Velasco, highlight the frontier "thesis" of American art. Other works in the gallery by John Singer Sargent and Mary Cassatt reveal that the geographic trend noted by the U.S. Census was also taking place in the American art world. Indeed, it had started well before 1890.

Sargent and Cassatt were American artists who responded to the call of Western civilization in Europe rather than the Western frontier. They were joined by the talented African-American painter, Henry Ossawa Tanner, who went on to create some of the greatest religious art ever painted by an American artist.

Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Annunciation, 1898

Sargent, Cassatt, Tanner and other Europe-bound artists were thus pioneers of a different sort, helping to create a global, international focus for American art.

Sargent (1856-1925), who was born in Florence, Italy, spent almost his entire life in Europe. Sargent's "swagger" portraits of the rich and famous of Europe - and rich Americans visiting there - made him rich and famous. Likewise, Cassatt (1844–1926), after training at PAFA and briefly working in Chicago, joined the celebrated circle of the Impressionists.

The two paintings in the Philadelphia gallery by Sargent and Cassatt are transitional works, pointing in the direction they and American art would take in the years to come. 

John Singer Sargent, Portrait of Frances Sherborne Ridley Watts, 1877

Sargent's painting of a young lady with an imposing name, Frances Sherborne Ridley Watts, was in fact the portrait of his childhood friend, "Fanny" Watts (1858-1927). Sargent and his sisters had a network of friends from American families like their own, who lived and traveled extensively in Europe. Sargent painted Miss Watts while he was still studying with Carolus-Duran, one of the leading portrait painters of the era. The work retains much of Carolus-Duran's polished style. Otherwise, it is pure Sargent, a patron-pleasing likeness with acute psychological insight.

I recently attended an exhibition of nineteenth century society portraits at the New York Historical Society. The Sargent portrait among the group was unmistakable. It almost jumped off the wall. One could not say that about Mary Cassatt's On the Balcony, painted during a trip to Spain in 1873. Cassatt was still struggling to find her own voice as an artist when she returned to Europe in the autumn of 1871. She had received a commission to paint copies of the Renaissance artist, Corregio. On the Balcony is a derivative work too and only a Cassatt scholar would readily identify it as a Cassatt.

Mary Cassatt, On the Balcony, 1873

However, there is a very telling detail of On the Balcony that shows that the young Mary Cassatt was an artist with a great future ahead. 

There was a mania for Spanish painting during the mid-nineteenth century. Cassatt, like Sargent and Eakins, traveled to Spain to study the great masters of Spain's seventeenth century Golden Age. Cassatt's 1873 visit was an important step toward creating her own independent style. If On the Balcony is only an apprentice-caliber work, another painting done by Cassatt at this time, Spanish Dancer Wearing a Lace Mantilla, (Smithsonian Collection) was more revealing of her talent as a portrait painter.

Another American artist travelling in Europe around this time was Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933). Tiffany originally was motivated to be a painter. But after returning to the United States, where he exhibited Snake Charmer at Tangier, Africa, at the 1876 Centennial Exposition, Tiffany focused on decorative arts.

Fascinated with creating works of art in glass, Tiffany explored the range of effects, from jewel-like brilliance to subtle shades of opalescence. Then, in the 1890’s, Tiffany teamed with Arthur Nash, a master glass worker and chemist from England, to create one of the most exquisite forms of objets d'art of modern times.

Blending metallic oxides with molten glass to create iridescent art glass  - stained glass windows, lampshades, vases - Tiffany patented the process in 1894 under the  trademark name, Favrile. This brand name was based on the Old English word, fabrile, which means hand-wrought. 

Louis Comfort Tiffany, Flower Form Vase, c. 1900.

Tiffany’s Favrile glass pieces were deemed collectable treasures almost from the moment of creation. Louisine and Henry Osborne Havemeyer, pioneers in the collection of Impressionist painting, donated over fifty works of Favrile glass to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1896, an amazingly short time span in art appreciation. The Philadelphia Museum of Art has a breathtakingly beautiful example of its own on display, Flower Form Vase, which has been part of its collection since 1931.

There is incredible diversity of art works on display in this major installation of late nineteenth century works at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Hearkening back to the heroic age of Dr. Gross, American art of the period also looked forward to bold experimentation with color and form as exemplified in Favrile glass.

As the old American frontier faded, compelling democratic vistas emerged into view. A new age of American art and culture arose, neither golden nor gilded, but Modern to its core.

***

Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved 

Images Courtesy of the Philadelphia Museum of Art

Introductory Image:

Thomas Eakins, American, 1844 1916. Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic), 1875.  (Detail)

Thomas Eakins, American, 1844 1916. Portrait of Dr. Samuel D. Gross (The Gross Clinic), 1875.  Oil on canvas, 8 feet x 6 feet 6 inches (243.8 x 198.1 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of the Alumni Association to Jefferson Medical College in 1878 and purchased by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 2007 with the generous support of more than 3,600 donors, 2007

Thomas Eakins, American, 1844 1916. The Agnew Clinic, 1889. Photogravure,  7 7/8 x 11 inches (20.0 x 27.9 cm) Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Samuel B. Sturgis, 19y

Thomas Hovenden, , American (born Ireland), 1840 1895. Breaking Home Ties, 1890. Oil on canvas, 52 1/8 x 72 1/4 inches (132.4 x 183.5 cm) Framed: 76 1/8 × 96 1/4 inches (193.4 × 244.5 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Ellen Harrison McMichael in memory of C. Emory McMichael, 1942.

José Maria Velasco, Mexican, 1840 1912. Valley of Oaxaca, 1888.  Oil on canvas, 41 7/8 x 63 1/4 inches (106.4 x 160.7 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of the Mauch Chunk National Bank, 1949

Henry Ossawa Tanner, American (active France), 1859 1937. The Annunciation, 1898. Oil on canvas, 57 x 71 1/4 inches (144.8 x 181 cm) Framed: 73 3/4 x 87 1/4 inches (187.3 x 221.6 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Purchased with the W. P. Wilstach Fund, 1899.

John Singer Sargent, American (active London, Florence, and Paris), 1856 1925. Portrait of Frances Sherborne Ridley Watts, 1877. Oil on canvas, 41 11/16 x 32 inches (105.9 x 81.3 cm) Framed: 46 1/4 × 37 3/8 × 3 1/2 inches (117.5 × 94.9 × 8.9 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Wharton Sinkler, 1962

Mary Stevenson Cassatt, American, 1844 1926. On the Balcony, 1873. Oil on canvas, 39 3/4 x 21 1/2 inches (101 x 54.6 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of John G. Johnson for the W. P. Wilstach Collection, 1906.

 Louis Comfort Tiffany, American, 1848 1933. Flower Form Vase, c. 1900. Favrile glass, 16 3/4 x 5 3/8 inches (42.5 x 13.7 cm). Philadelphia Museum of Art, Gift of J. Stogdell Stokes, 1931

Art Eyewitness Book Review: Michelangelo, a Life in Six Masterpieces

Michelangelo, a Life in Six Masterpieces

By Miles J. Unger

Simon & Schuster/$29.95/432 pages

Reviewed by Ed Voves


Michelangelo Buonarroti towers over the story of Western art the way that his great statue, David, once loomed above the heads of the citizens of Florence as they walked about the Piazza della Signoria.

Il Gigante, the Florentines called the statue of the biblical hero who symbolized the Republic of Florence. The Giant.

Michelangelo was a giant too. Everything about Michelangelo is epic in scope. His life and legend confound any appraisal that attempts to interpret him based on the standards of other artists or the art theory of his time.

In his insightful new biography of Michelangelo, Miles J. Unger comes to grips with the powerful inner forces that motivated Michelangelo. Wisely, Unger lets Michelangelo’s own works of art open the door to his soul.

Unger, who previously wrote accomplished biographies of Lorenzo de Medici and Machiavelli, focuses on six masterpieces by the great Florentine: the Pietà  of 1498-99; David, 1501-04; the frescos on the Sistine Ceiling, 1508-1512; the Medici Tombs in the Church of San Lorenzo, Florence, 1520-34; The Last Judgment, 1536-41; a decisive role as chief architect of St. Peter's Basilica, 1547-64.

One of the key insights that Unger emphasizes about Michelangelo's character was his determination to raise the tattered banner of the Buonarroti family. According to the family tradition, the Buonarroti were the descendants of the counts of Canossa, leaders of some note in medieval Tuscany. Things had changed by the birth of Michelangelo - Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni, to give him his full aristocratic-due. In 1475, it was the Medici, not the Buonarroti, who ruled Florence. The inflated self-image of Michelangelo's clan was little more than a pathetic delusion.

Michelangelo inherited a brittle, bristling sense of family honor from his cantankerous father. Unger begins his investigation of Michelangelo with a telling quote from a 1548 letter in which Michelangelo peevishly rejected the idea that he was a commercial artist.

"I was never a painter or a sculptor," Michelangelo expounded to his nephew, Lionardo,"like one who keeps a shop."

 

Daniele da Volterra, Portrait of Michelangelo Buonarroti, ca. 1544

Unlike his haughty father and feckless brothers, Michelangelo was an obsessive workaholic who did not mind getting his hands dirty. He gladly labored alongside the intrepid scarpellini who cut the blocks of Carrara marble that he later sculpted into works of transcendent art.

Michelangelo was equally content to sculpt or paint all by himself - even if he did not grind and mix his own paint as fawning biographers later contended.

None-the-less, Michelangelo was telling the truth. He never was "one who keeps a shop."

When you examine the first of the six masterpieces, the Pietà, it is clear that Unger has gained the measure of Michelangelo from the very first.  Rome, where Michelangelo went to sculpt the Pietà, was the headquarters of a resurgent Papacy. The Pope and the prelates of the Vatican possessed “the resources and thirst for public display," Unger notes perceptively, that could match "Michelangelo's own ambition."

Michelangelo, Pietà, 1498-1499

Beautifully sculpted, the Pietà was intended to make a statement rather than merely register a sale. The only work of art that Michelangelo ever signed, the Pietà struck a resounding note in the debate over the relative merits of art from antiquity and from the contemporary age.  The Pietà was - and remains - an affirmation that the artistic hegemony of the classical Greeks had ended. The Moderns had trumped the Ancients - thanks to Michelangelo!

There was much more than a display of ambition taking place with the creation of the Pietà. For the first time, the deep-rooted elements of paradox in Michelangelo's character surfaced.

Like all the great Italian artists of his time, Michelangelo shared in the Renaissance enthusiasm for Greek and Roman art. His previous work to the Pietà had been a statue of the god Bacchus that was initially mistaken for an ancient sculpture. Michelangelo, beset by strong homosexual yearnings, was clearly enamored by the classical cult of the male nude.

Michelangelo, however, was a very devout Christian. The Pietà exudes Christian virtue and faith. Michelangelo depicted the body of the crucified Christ as a nearly perfect human form, but it is the love in the Blessed Mother's face that compels our attention.

The timing of the Pietà’s creation was significant too. As Michelangelo set to work, sculpting the statue in 1498, Church authorities suppressed the puritanical faction of Girolamo Savonarola. This firebrand Dominican monk had challenged the sensual, Greek-inspired humanism of the Medici in Florence. Silenced by the Church, Savonarola's evangelical fervor merely "went to ground," rising again in Germany with the preaching of an Augustinian named Martin Luther.

There is an additional religious subtext to the Pietà, which Unger cogently discusses. Mary, the mother of Jesus, is impossibly youthful to be holding the corpse of such a mature son in her arms. That was not a problem for Michelangelo, who had studied neo-Platonic philosophy under Pico della Mirandola at the Medici court. The Pietà, in Michelangelo's interpretation, is a symbolical work, testifying to the divine mysteries of love, sacrifice and redemption.    
  
The impact of Pico della Mirandola upon Michelangelo was profound. For Michelangelo, evoking the human form was never merely a representational undertaking. Higher truths were always involved. In the case of the David, Unger writes:

Critically for Pico, Man's place in the universe was not fixed but determined through the choices he made, for good or ill. In fact, man's unique attribute was his capacity to shape his own destiny... Michelangelo's David embodies the abstract notion of Man as the architect of his own destiny ...he represents a state of becoming rather than of being, defined by a supreme act of will. His identity is not complete but forged in battle driven by a fierce spirit.

Michelangelo's David, like the Pietà, is a powerful expression of religious conviction - Michelangelo's version, not necessarily the Church's. It was fortunate for Michelangelo that he sculpted the David a decade before Luther's 1517 protest sparked the Protestant Reformation. With his later fresco paintings in the Sistine Chapel, Michelangelo's unorthodox version of Christian doctrine brought him perilously close to charges of heresy.

Michelangelo’s own “fierce spirit” would be tested in a battle of wills with Pope Julius II over the painting of the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Temperament, however, not theology, dictated the course of their famous confrontations. Unger ably recounts this familiar saga. But once again, close inspection of this famous work reveals telling details about Michelangelo that are easy to otherwise miss.

Art historians of the 1500's like Giorgio Vasari noted that Michelangelo alone succeeded in all three artistic disciplines - sculpture, painting and architecture - at the highest caliber of achievement. In his page of studies for the Libyan Sibyl of the Sistine Chapel ceiling, we can see Michelangelo uniting all three in powerful, harmonious combination.

 Michelangelo, Studies for the Libyan Sibyl, ca. 1510-11

Michelangelo's mastery of painting and sculpture are clearly apparent in this beautiful preliminary draft, now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. The architectural role of the Libyan Sibyl and her counterparts needs to be emphasized, as well. Michelangelo created an elaborate structure for the central narrative panels of Old Testament scenes. As Unger notes, there is no proper perspective from which to view the Sistine Chapel ceiling. But Michelangelo’s supporting cast, prophets and sibyls, the ignudi and ancestors of Christ, are positioned to secure the explosive, disorienting depiction of cosmic drama from the Book of Genesis.

The Creation of Adam, with the electric spark of life passing from the outstretched index finger of God to the hand of Adam, is the supreme statement of life as "a state of becoming rather than of being." This scene marked the great turning point in the Sistine Chapel frescos, in Michelangelo's art and indeed in the very course of the Renaissance as a cultural phenomenon.

Adam at the moment of creation is a model of perfection. The remainder of the scenes on the Sistine ceiling show human degradation, ending in the drunkenness and shame of Noah. As in art, so in life. The years following the triumphant completion of the Sistine ceiling frescos in 1512 were filled with frustration and difficulty for Michelangelo. For Europe, the early hope that the Reformation would purify Christendom ended in horrifying campaigns of religious warfare, climaxing in the sack of Rome in 1527.

By the time Michelangelo returned to the Sistine Chapel in 1535 to paint the Last Judgment on the wall behind the altar, he was a man transformed. Fits of melancholy, family anxieties and weariness, mixed with a sense of human sinfulness, blighted his outlook. And this dark vision is clearly apparent in Michelangelo's disturbing depiction of the Apocalypse.

In spirit, the Last Judgment is exactly what its title states. It is a work about passing judgment, rather than redemption. Christ raises his arm in reproach of the doomed souls of the damned, like David hurling his sling against Goliath. Christ is coldly taking aim against the wicked. It is a hugely disturbing expression to see on the face of the Redeemer, as the looks of fear in the eyes of the saved bear witness.

Michelangelo, The Last Judgment, The Central Portion, 1536 -1541.

Perhaps the most striking and terrifying element of the Last Judgment is the image of the cowering Blessed Mother. Mary, the beloved intercessor for God's mercy, looks away, powerless to intervene. Unger writes that early drafts show Mary with "her arms outstretched in a gesture of supplication." But Michelangelo abandoned these plans, relegating Mary to a helpless bystander.

Nearly a half century separates Michelangelo’s tender portrayal of Mary in the Pietà from the "passive mourner" in the Last Judgment. The Renaissance has passed. The Counter-Reformation has begun.

Yet, it would be entirely mistaken to think of Michelangelo's works being determined by current events. He was obviously affected by the temperament of his times. But Unger's astute study clearly shows that Michelangelo always remained an artist in command of his powers. He vigorously responded to and creatively reshaped the world around him from youth to old age.

Michelangelo, Unger notes in this wonderfully humane biography, was "simply a man, mortal and very flawed." In many ways, Michelangelo remained a "roughed-out" and unfinished figure like his self-portrait as Nicodemus in the late Florentine Pietà. This work had been intended for his tomb and it is very fitting that it is not placed there.

Michelangelo Buonarroti died on February 18, 1564. Michelangelo's art is still very much alive.

***

Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved

Images Courtesy of Simon & Schuster Company and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

Introductory Image: Michelangelo, The Creation of Adam, Sistine Chapel ceiling fresco, 1508-1512. Credit Erich Lessing - Art Resource, NY, Courtesy of Simon & Schuster

 Michelangelo, A Life in Six Masterpieces, 2014 (cover) Image credit: Simon & Schuster

Daniele da Volterra, Portrait of Michelangelo Buonarroti, ca. 1544, oil on wood, 34 3/4 x 25 1/4 in. (88.3 x 64.1 cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Clarence Dillon, 1977, Accession Number: 1977.384.1

Michelangelo, Pietà, 1498-1499. Courtesy of Simon & Schuster

Michelangelo, Studies for the Libyan Sibyl (recto); Studies for the Libyan Sibyl and a small Sketch for a Seated Figure (verso),  ca. 1510–11, red chalk, with small accents of white chalk on the left shoulder of the figure in the main study (recto); soft black chalk, or less probably charcoal (verso). Dimensions: sheet: 11 3/8 x 8 7/16 in. (28.9 x 21.4 cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art,  Purchase, Joseph Pulitzer Bequest, 1924, Accession Number: 24.197.2


Michelangelo, The Last Judgment, The Central Portion, Sistine Chapel fresco, 1536 -1541. Credit Ultreya Takashi Okamura, Courtesy of Simon &Schuster



Art Eyewitness Essay: Mother of Inspiration - Icons of the Virgin Mary and the Rise of Western Art

Mother of Inspiration 

Icons of the Virgin Mary and the Rise of Western Art

By Ed Voves

Inspiration often comes in the unlikeliest of places.

I was recently moved to reflect on the importance of paintings of Mary, the mother of Jesus, by the massed displays of Mother's Day cards at the local supermarket. The flowery designs of these cards hardly rank comparison with Giotto and Raphael. Yet modern ideals of motherhood, like Renaissance Madonnas, trace their origin to a common source, to the ancient images or icons of Mary.

Icons are one of the most profoundly moving art forms of all time. These religious images remain a hallowed feature of the Orthodox Christian churches and are associated historically with the Eastern Roman Empire or Byzantium during the Middle Ages.

Icons devoted to the Virgin Mary, especially in the form known as the Theotokos Hodegetria, were based on the tradition that St. Luke had painted a portrait of the mother of Jesus during her lifetime. St. Luke was also the author of the gospel that contains the Nativity narrative in which Mary so prominently features.

The Walters Museum in Baltimore, one of the finest privately endowed art museums in world, has a rare, ivory triptych showing the Theotokos Hodegetria. Dated to the ninth century, this icon was once painted and is thought to have been modeled on the reputed painting by St. Luke. During the ninth century, this venerated work of art was housed in a monastery in Constantinople, capital of the Byzantine Empire. The original painting has disappeared, leaving the Walters Museum ivory icon as a link with the ancient past. 

 

Triptych Icon of the Virgin and Child with Saints, (tenth century)

The Byzantine icon, then, is a living legacy of early Christianity. Among other themes, icons established a convention for visualizing and honoring motherhood, female spirituality and the sufferings endured by women in times of war and persecution.

This essay will certainly have more to say on the icons of Mary from Byzantium. However, the greatest icon and image of motherhood that I have ever seen was not created in Constantinople. It is Arshile Gorky's The Artist and his Mother.

The Artist and his Mother was painted sometime between the late 1920's and 1936. Gorky's heart-searing work exists in two forms, the somber double portrait, executed in gray, brown and ochre, now in the collection of the Whitney Museum in New York, and a more lightly-hued version in the National Gallery in Washington, D.C.

Both paintings are based on a 1912 photograph of Shushaniq Adoian and her son, Vosdanik, before they fled from Armenia to escape the Turks. The photograph survived their perilous escape attempt in 1915. Vosdanik made it to safety, later changing his name in honor of Maxim Gorky, the Russian writer who championed the cause of the Armenian people.

Shushaniq Adoian died from starvation so that her son could live. She expired in her son's arms.

An estimated one million other "starving Armenians" perished in the Turkish genocide that is obscured by the widespread suffering of World War I and the 1918 Influenza pandemic. The Turkish government still denies it ever happened. If the near extermination of the Armenians is recalled at all, it is because of the derisive remark made by Adolf Hitler, as he planned the Final Solution, "Who now remembers the Armenians?"

 

Arshile Gorky, The Artist and His Mother, (1926-36)

“I shall resurrect Armenia with my brush,” Gorky declared in 1944, almost as a direct rejoinder to Hitler, “for all the world to see.”

A close study of The Artist and his Mother reveals major differences in the way that Gorky composed these portraits in comparison to what painters of religious icons strive to achieve. Yet, I think the two versions of The Artist and his Mother are real - and powerful - icons.

Religious icons evoke the spiritual link between God and humanity. Theotokos Hodegetria may be translated as "Mother of God who shows the way" or "Bearer of God who shows the way." In these icons, the Virgin Mary implores with her eyes and gestures with her hand for the observer to direct his or her attention to Jesus as the "way" to salvation.

Mary's eyes and hands are key elements of icons. A beautiful example appears in the Heaven and Earth, Art of Byzantium from Greek Collections exhibit, which premiered at the National Gallery in Washington and is now at the Getty Museum. The Processional icon of the Virgin Hodegetria, dating to the last years of the twelfth century, was held aloft for the faithful to behold.

 

 

Processional Icon of the Virgin Hodegetria, (late 1100’s) 

The great theologian, Henri Nouwen, evoked the spiritual forces at work in such icons. In his moving book, Behold the Beauty of the Lord, Nouwen wrote:

The Virgin's eyes are not curious, investigating or even understanding, but eyes which reveal to us our true selves. Likewise her hands are not grasping, demanding, or directing, but hands which open a space for us to approach Jesus without fear.

In Gorky's paintings, his mother's eyes are fully-dilated, deep pools of inscrutable energy. She is peering at us or through us with laser-like intensity. The hands of Gorky's mother are unformed or unfinished. Her hands look like they were wrapped in bandages covering wounds from torture or frost bite.

If you look closely at Gorky's mother, the realization slowly dawns that her body - hands and shoulder first - is being erased. Even as the "black holes" of her eyes seize control of us, she is fading from our view. We will remain bound to the presence of her son, however, by the effect of her fixating gaze.

This almost exactly replicates the creative vision of the painters of Byzantine icons, as Nouwen describes in his meditation on the ancient icon known as the Virgin of Vladimir:

Her eyes look inward and outward at once. They look inward to the heart of God and outward to the heart of the world, thus revealing the unfathomable unity between Creator and creation.

Gorky was an artist in the Western tradition, one of the great Abstract painters of the twentieth century. In keeping his mother's eyes directly upon the viewer of The Artist and his Mother, Gorky ignored Western conventions of painting the Virgin Mary that stretched back to Giotto in the fourteenth century.

Theology in Western Europe during the Middle Ages accepted that Jesus was "fully human, fully divine." This was true in the Orthodox provinces of the Byzantine Empire, as well.

For much of that period, Western artists conformed to the Byzantine icon style. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York has works by a thirteenth century painter from Florence whose name remains a mystery. The Master of the Magdalen painted some of his works entirely in the Byzantine style. But a fragment of a painting by this anonymous artist around 1280 reveals a remarkable change. Here, a startling sense of the personality of the Virgin Mary is depicted, very much at odds with the otherworldly demeanor of the Theotokos Hodegetria icons.

 

 

 

Master of the Magdalen, Madonna and Child, ca. 1280

As the fourteenth century dawned, it was this new sense of the humanity of Jesus, the Virgin Mary and Christian saints that emerged as the dominant theme of the increasingly influential Florentine school of art. You can see this in the unforgettable Madonna and Child, painted by Giotto during the decade of the 1320's. Look at the way that the infant Jesus clasps the finger of Mary's hand, which lovingly supports her baby son. This small touch is little short of a revolution in art.

 

 

Giotto, Madonna and Child, probably (1320-1330)

Giotto’s Madonna and Child was in keeping with the Byzantine icon type known as the Panagia Eleousa. The Eleousa style emphasizes the motherly warmth of Mary. But despite superficial resemblances, Giotto's painting is acting on a very different emotional level. Giotto's Virgin Mary is an earthly, rather than a spiritual, being.

This naturalism in turn was promoted to the rest of Western Europe, initially for religious works of art. By the 1500’s, greater attention and resources were being devoted to paintings with secular themes. In portraits of aristocratic women and their children, the stress on the humanity of the Virgin Mary and the infant Jesus in earlier works of devotion can clearly be traced.

Paolo Veronese, Portrait of Countess Livia da Porto and her Daughter Deidamia, (1552)

Portrait of Countess Livia da Porto and her Daughter Deidamia by Veronese exemplifies this evolution in the depiction of women in European art. Veronese was a Venetian artist, where Byzantine conventions had earlier held a commanding position. So the triumph of Florentine-style naturalism is notably significant here.

In Veronese's painting, we can see the transformation of spiritual strength and motherly traits of the Virgin Mary in both Byzantine icons and earlier Madonnas from the Italian city-states. Countess Livia is now the focus of attention. The spritely little daughter draped around her arm testifies to her earthly station as noblewoman and mother. A matching portrait of her husband Count Issepo da Porto and their son Leonida would have also established Countess Livia’s role as wife.

 

  

An interesting feature of this impressive portrait is the marten pelt draped over the arm of Countess Livia. The fur of the marten was believed to confer protection on pregnant women. Countess Livia was indeed expecting another child in 1552.

 

Marten’s Head, (ca. 1550-1559

The head of the marten was encased in a golden, jeweled mask, making it into a Renaissance-era rabbit’s foot. By a delightful stroke of collecting luck, the Walters Museum was able to acquire an almost exact duplicate of this curious treasure.

Countess Livia da Porto was no doubt a very devout Christian woman. Likewise, Christianity and folk wisdom maintained a long partnership over the centuries. Yet, the presence of the jeweled martin's head and the lack of any overt Christian symbols in this painting highlight the diminished role of religion in art by the closing decades of the Renaissance.

The status of women in world society has undergone many transformations since Veronese painted Countess Livia. The countess lived in an age of high mortality of infants and mothers, an age of religious wars and rumors of wars. The jeweled marten’s head is a symbol of a time we would not want to see repeated.

Is that also true of icons of Mary in Byzantium and Madonnas from Italy? The “cult” of the Virgin during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance represents an extreme idealization of womanhood at the expense of actual equality for women in Christendom. Thus, icons to a certain extent were products of repressive, patriarchal societies.

Never-the-less, Arshile Gorky’s The Artist and His Mother shows that the Theotokos Hodegetria is still a profoundly moving symbol of female courage and devotion.

The icons of the Virgin Mary and the evolving depictions of the mother of Jesus throughout the Middle Ages and early Renaissance represents a major advance for women in Western society. In pointing the way to Christ as savior, the Theotokos Hodegetria showed that the care of the human soul was a not a matter to be left – exclusively – in the hands of the “Fathers of the Church.” 

***

Text: Copyright of Ed Voves, all rights reserved

Images Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. (for the image the Processional icon of the Virgin Hodegetria, which appeared in the Heaven and Earth, Art of Byzantium from Greek Collections exhibit), the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore MD.

Use of the image The Artist and His Mother by Arshile Gorky was granted by the Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, exclusively for this essay and may not be reused.

Introductory Image: Unknown artist, Portable Icon with the Virgin Eleousa, early 14th century, probably made in Constantinople, miniature mosaic set in wax on wood panel, with gold, multicolored stones, and gilded copper, dimensions: Overall: 4 7/16 x 3 3/8 x 1/2 in. (11.2 x 8.6 x 1.3 cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, Gift of John C. Weber, in honor of Philippe de Montebello, 2008, Accession Number: 2008.352

Unknown artist, Triptych Icon of the Virgin and Child with Saints, tenth century, ivory, Overall H: 4 3/4 x W: 9 3/16 x D: 3/8 in. (12 x 23.4 x 0.9 cm); Proper left panel: H: 4 5/16 x W: 2 3/16 x D: 3/16 in. (10.9 x 5.6 x 0.5 cm); Middle panel: H: 4 3/4 x W: 4 9/16 x D: 3/8 in. (12 x 11.6 x 0.9 cm); Proper right panel: H: 4 5/16 x W: 2 1/4 x D: 3/16 in. (11 x 5.7 x 0.5 cm), The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore MD 71.158

Arshile Gorky, American (born Armenia), 1904 – 1948, The Artist and His Mother, c.1926-36, oil on canvas, 60 x 50 inches Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Gift of Julien Levy for Maro and Natasha Gorky in memory of their father
© 2009 Estate of Arshile Gorky / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Unknown artist, Processional icon of the Virgin Hodegetria (front) and the Man of Sorrows (back), last quarter of 12th century, tempera and silver on wood, overall size: 115 × 77.5 × 3.5 cm (45 1/4 × 30 1/2 × 1 3/8 in.) Byzantine Museum, Kastoria, Greece.

Master of the Magdalen, Italian, active 1265-1295, Madonna and Child, ca. 1280, tempera on wood, Dimensions: Irregular, 29 1/2 x 18 1/4 in. (74.9 x 46.4 cm) Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY, Gift of Irma N. Straus, 1964, Accession Number: 64.189.1

Giotto, Italian, probably 1266 - 1337, Madonna and Child, probably 1320/1330

tempera on panel overall: 85.5 x 62 cm (33 11/16 x 24 7/16 in.) framed: 128.3 x 72.1 x 5.1 cm (50 1/2 x 28 3/8 x 2 in.) National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C Samuel H. Kress Collection 1939.1.256

Paolo Veronese, 1528-1588, Portrait of Countess Livia da Porto and her Daughter Deidamia, 1552, oil on canvas, painted surface H including addition across bottom: 82 1/16 x W: 47 5/8 in. (208.4 x 121 cm), The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD 37.541

Unknown artist, Venetian, Marten’s Head, ca. 1550-1559, gold with enamel, rubies, garnets, and pearls, H: 3 5/16 in. (8.4 cm), The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, MD 57.1982