CHI RHO: THE FRACTALIC LIFE OF THE BOOK OF KELLS

CHI RHO:

THE FRACTALIC LIFE OF THE BOOK OF KELLS

Gaze upon any page in the 9th century illuminated manuscript, the Book of Kells, and you will be mesmerized and amazed. 

One of the most remarkable of pages is the Chi Rho page, the page that has the letters Chi, Rho and Iota depicted in such a sublime and lyrical manner.

The letters form one of the earliest forms of a christogram, a superimposition of the first three letters—Chi, Rho and Iota (ΧΡI) - of the Greek word ΧΡΙΣΤΟΣ (Christos). 

What is even more astonishing about the Chi Rho page, is that the letters are not only abstractions, but are at the same time representational. Their size and position, their serifs and flourishes, create a textual understanding of the story they tell. 

There is also a lovely recursion in the letters. The Chi, Rho and Iota are seen not only as separate letters, but withIn the Chi letter itself, the Rho and the Iota can be seen as well.

This self-generating recursion (repetition) is a fractal.

Here is where things become miraculous. Between the letters and the filling of the page is a boundless infinitude of smaller and smaller designs, eventually so small that the eye can no longer discern their form. In this way, they are fractals, like the infinitely morphing ends of snowflakes and clouds, lightning and crystals, blood vessels and neurons. 

Self-regenerating. Fractalic. 

Life.

THE AUTHENTICITY OF HIS HUMANITY: REMBRANDT’S RELENTLESS QUEST FOR SELF-UNDERSTANDING

The Authenticity of His Humanity:
Rembrandt’s Relentless Quest for Self-Understanding

I am in awe of Rembrandt’s lifelong, courageous self-reflection, documented in his 85 self-portraits (40 paintings, and several dozen prints and drawings).
To discuss Rembrandt is a daunting task, to understand him, well nigh impossible, but we can make an attempt through his searching, brutally honest, no-holds-barred, intimate, elusive, yet at once revelatory self-portraits.
Authenticity writ large.
Authenticity captured in portraiture.
Here is the famous Rembrandt Self-Portrait with Two Circles, which hangs in Kenwood House, London, in which the artist reveals his world-weariness, the Weltschmerz of his life, pictorially conveying his stoic acceptance of financial ruin and domestic challenges.
Rembrandt demonstrates his genius here by channeling the Renaissance master Giotto himself. We recall the famous story where Giotto, asked by the Pope to send a sample of his art, draws a perfect circle, freehand.
Rembrandt draws two.
In identifying with Giotto, one of the greatest artists in history, Rembrandt is magnificently self-aware and confident, solidifying his own place in the Pantheon of the History of Art.

(Rembrandt Self-Portrait with Two Circles
Kenwood House London, c.1668)

THE CRYSTALLINE CLARITY OF AMBIGUITY: THE PARADOX THAT IS VERMEER

THE CRYSTALLINE CLARITY OF AMBIGUITY:
THE PARADOX THAT IS VERMEER

When we gaze upon any of Johannes Vermeer’s thirty-six attested paintings, we are astounded by the crystalline detail he presents, but as we look closer, slowly, thoughtfully, we realize that the  detail is always veiled, hidden, mysterious.
A splendid example of this ambiguity is one of the Vermeer masterpieces  that hangs in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, “Woman holding a Balance.”
It is a luminous work, finely crafted, elegantly polished, and yet painted with that same indescribably ineffable sfumato that characterizes the masterpieces of Leonardo.
The work is filled with references that are oblique, ambiguous.
Is she weighing pearls? That would be a logical inference. But here, the pearls do not sparkle or shine as much as vibrate in their own universe.
The painting behind the woman is an exemplar of another common Vermeerian conceit: the fuzzy wall painting behind the protagonist. We might recognize it as the Final Judgment- we see Christ, angels, the Virgin Mary, and in the lower part, stylized outlines of shadowed humans falling back, stunned and blinded in the moment.
So, maybe instead of weighing pearls, the woman is weighing human souls ? Maybe she is balancing her life experiences on each tray of the scale? If so, What has she come to realize about her life?

WITH AN ARTISTIC VISION: THE OPTICS OF VERMEER’S ALLEGORY OF PAINTING

WITH AN ARTISTIC VISION:

The Physiological and Metaphorical Optics of Vermeer’s Allegory

Large but not monumental in size, Vermeer’s great manifesto, The Allegory of Painting, still dominates not only its crowded room in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna,  but also our minds,  as we reflect upon its  enduring theme and its many remarkable qualities. 

Vermeer brilliantly places himself at the visual and optical center of the painting,  even though he could not have seen himself in this pose as he was painting.

The painter in the Act of Painting. What better allegory of Painting? It is also a theme called Recursion (repetition), a fundamental principle of symmetry and beauty. 

The woman in the painting is a Muse - is she Clio, the Muse of History, or perhaps Fama, or maybe the goddess Pictura? We think back to Cesare Ripa and his early 1600s treatise, the essential Iconologia where he represents Pictura as a Muse of Art (see other posts I have written on this theme). 

Note the many metaphorical and artistic allusions:

There is a painting within a painting (think Las Meninas by Velazquez, painted around the same time). There is the “fuzzy painting on the back wall”- an iconic Vermeerian conceit - is it a historical map?

Vermeer scholar Walter Liedtke describes this painting “as a virtuoso display of the artist's power of invention and execution, staged in an imaginary version of his studio ..."

According to Albert Blankert "No other painting so flawlessly integrates naturalistic technique, brightly illuminated space, and a complexly integrated composition."

(Johannes Vermeer, The Allegory of Painting, also called The Art of Painting, or The Painter in his Studio

Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna c. 1668)

ANNUIT COEPTIS !

HAPPY NEW YEAR !
HAPPY NEW BEGINNINGS!
ANNUIT COEPTIS !

The back of the dollar bill has several famous Virgilian phrases that the founding fathers thought appropriate to memorialize.
The new country, America, with its vast, rich wilderness and its democratic philosophy, was metaphorically a “Novus Ordo  Seclorum” (“ A New Order of the Ages”), the phrase deriving from Virgil’s fourth Eclogue.
Then there is that fine phrase above the pyramid,  another quote from Virgil, “Annuit Coeptis” which translates as “ (God or Providence) has favored New Beginnings.”  The phrase comes from Virgil’s farmer’s manual, the Georgics:
“Da facilem cursum, atque audacibus annue cœptis“
“Give me an easy course and favor my daring new undertakings.”
Annuit Coeptis: Thirteen letters, thirteen colonies.

The obverse of the dollar bill has the most famous phrase  of them all  “E Pluribus Unum” (“Out of Many, One”).
Again, Thirteen letters, thirteen colonies.

And here we see Janus, the Roman god of the past and the future, of doors and portals, of births and deaths, of war and peace, of new beginnings.
He was a Roman God- there was no Greek antecedent.
The Etruscans before the Romans had their own  Janus-like deity, the “bifrons” (two-headed) Culsans.
Janus, Janua, Doors: May they all open for you in 2019!
May you have New Beginnings!
Annuit Coeptis !

Janus Bifrons sculpture (Giano Bifronte, 2nd cent BCE, from Vulci, Viterbo,  Italia).

REMBRANDT AND THE VESALIAN TRADITION

REMBRANDT AND THE VESALIAN TRADITION
The Anatomy Lesson of Dr Nicolaes Tulp (1632)

One of Rembrandt’s first great masterpieces, this famous painting shows how the young (26 year-old ) Rembrandt already began placing his Art within enduring historic and scientific traditions.
Here we are brought into the anatomy theater, where Dr Nicolaes Tulp is explaining the musculature of the arm to a group of physicians, some of whom paid a commission to be painted in the work.
Of great importance from the standpoint of the thread that links Rembrandt to the Vesalian tradition is the medical text that is open near Dr Tulp. It is the foundational 1543 treatise,  _De Humani Corporis Fabrica_. written by the brilliant Dutch anatomist Andreas Vesalius (Andries van Wesel).
Dr Tulp’s teacher was Professor Pieter Pauw, whose teachers at the University of Padua  were Hieronymus Fabricius and none other than Vesalius himself.

The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp
Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (c.1632)
Mauritshuis. The Hague

REMBRANDT’S VISION

REMBRANDT’S VISION

Did Rembrandt have cataracts? Though there is no proof, he lived into his sixties, so it is indeed possible and would explain the progressive defocus and brunescence of his color palette in his later works.
Rembrandt’s depiction of the Story of Tobit is also of interest to physicians and visual scientists because it shows how fascinated was Rembrandt regarding advances in optical science that were taking place, especially in Amsterdam, with his colleagues Christiaan Huygens and Antonie Philips van Leeuwenhoek.
According to the story in the Book of Tobit, Tobias sleeps outdoors one night and is blinded by bird droppings.
In Rembrandt’s painting, seen here, Tobias applies “fish’s gall,” given to him by the Archangel Raphael, to cure the blindness in his father Tobias’ eye (probably a cataract) as Raphael looks on.

The Book of Tobit is a part of the Apocrypha. It was not accepted by Bishop Irenaeus in the second century CE nor Jerome in 405 CE as part of the canonical Bible. It was termed a “deuterocanonical” text.

Tobias Healing his Father Tobit’s Blindness
Rembrandt van Rijn c.1636
Staatsgalerie  Stuttgart

CRANACH'S HAT TRICKS

Young Lady with a Hat
Lucas Cranach, the Elder

Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472 - 1553) and his sons, Hans and Lucas the Younger, ran the most prolific and successful studio in sixteenth century Europe.
Cranach and Co. produced, on commission, hundreds of refined and detailed paintings of, well, of anybody and everybody. They created portraits of royalty (the Electors of Saxony and other assorted aristocracy) and Protestant reformers, especially the elder Cranach’s close friend Martin Luther, dozens of paintings with nude or seminude mythological figures, monumental paintings of Adam and Eve and other biblical figures, as well as other important religious installations.

One of the genres in which Lucas Cranach specialized was portraying women in hats, amazing hats, outsized hats, crazy, vertiginous hats, gravity-defying hats, hats that make you go "wow!"

Ingenues and dowagers, young and old, decked out and depicted in outrageous millinery. Cranach painted scores of these portraits, the most wondrous of which, in my view, is the one we see here. The pompoms alone are worth the view. This remarkable topper looks like a solar system precariously balanced on the woman's head. 

These remarkable women in these remarkable hats were portrayed within a concept called Weibermacht - literally, Women Power. Weibermacht was a Renaissance and medieval German literary and artistic Topos, inverting the male-dominated sexual hierarchy by describing and depicting women in positions of power. 

Remarkable women. Remarkable hats. Remarkable Lucas Cranach and Hat Tricks !

OF VERMEER’S TINIEST JEWELS AND THE DEFINITION OF EXQUISITE

Girl with a Red Hat
Johannes Vermeer, c. 1666
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

One of the most exquisite Vermeers is also one of the smallest: the mesmerizing painting, The Girl with a Red Hat at the National Gallery in Washington DC. Notwithstanding that the attribution to Vermeer is still being debated by art historians, virtually all of us would say, purely on observational grounds, pattern-recognition from a lifetime of thinking and looking and reflecting on Vermeer’s sublime oeuvre, and the je ne sais quoi of the colors and the sfumato finish, that this is indeed a Vermeer. The painting is of a type called a Tronie. Most likely the sitter was not a famous or aristocratic person, but someone who simply represented a certain facial expression or emotion: sadness, joy, or in this case, perhaps surprise. Rembrandt painted dozens of Tronies and then used them as character types in his major paintings.
The Girl with a Red Hat was created around 1666, and is one of only two Vermeers that he painted on wood panel (instead of linen or canvas).
The vermillion base of the red and the ultramarine (an alchemically magical blue from the pulverization of lapis lazuli) are astonishingly beautiful. Pigment analysis reveales a palette consisting of natural ultramarine, lead white, yellow ochre, umber, green earth, vermilion, and madder lake.
I see many pearls in this sublime painting- one on each earlobe and several on her necklace, of course. Then, as I look closer, mirabile dictu, I see yet more pearls, as if they had just appeared: one as the reflection off her nose, one on the tip of her tongue, and three more reflecting off her lips..... it is as if her lips are Nacre, and the pearls, metaphorically, three reflections, three tiny pearls of exquisite beauty.....

Exquisite. And in my view, by Vermeer, as this jewel of a painting could not have been crafted by anyone else...
Girl with a Red Hat
Johannes Vermeer c. 1666 National Gallery of Art, Washington DC

VERMEER’S CHIAROSCURO MASTERPIECE OF MYSTERY: LADY AND MAIDSERVANT WITH A LETTER

Lady and her Maidservant with a Letter
Johannes Vermeer, c. 1667
Frick Collection

It was Leonardo da Vinci, among the first boldly to use chiaroscuro technique, who brought pictorial art to a new level of intensity and narrative. Chiaroscuro reached its zenith in the 1600s with Caravaggio (Michelangelo Merisi) and his followers, the Caravaggisti, in their astonishingly powerful paintings. We must remember that Rembrandt, Vermeer and Hals also used this technique to powerful effect.
The great Frick painting, Lady and Maidservant with a Letter, is one of my favorite paintings in all of art history. I pay homage to it whenever I am at the Frick, which is frequently (there are two other smaller Vermeer’s in this spectacular collection. The Met has four Vermeers, making NYC a Vermeer city shrine to the Master). What is the Mistress thinking about as the Maid hands her the sealed letter? What do they each know of the source of the letter or its contents?
Why are the Lady’s lips almost trembling? The woman’s ermine lined fur, the strong use of the color yellow, the pearls, the light from the left, the ambiguity of meaning, are all iconic Vermeerian techniques. The chiaroscuro highlights the protagonists and creates even more drama and a three dimensionality to this masterpiece of Light and DarkVermeer’s ineffable genius lay in the way he could transfigure such quotidian and domestic scenes into visual narratives of an almost sacred monumentality.

Lady with a Maidservant Holding a Letter

Johannes Vermeer c.1667

Frick Collection NYC