Nakedly Nude V, Where to look?: Bronzino, Tintoretto & a Nude-in-process

Yesterday we looked at a few characteristics of Mannerist painting ... the two I'd like to concentrate on merge in these next paintings: elongated or exaggerated bodies, and drama-filled small spaces. Let's begin with Agnolo Bronzino's "Allegory of Venus and Cupid" from 1545:

 

Generally, when the central figure in a painting is a nude, it is difficult for the viewer to look at anything -- or anyone -- else in the picture plane.  Here, that's a bit more difficult; the painter has offered us a fine puzzle. Venus's body is smooth, a bit long in the torso, and, if she had been posed alone, on, say, a divan or a rug, she would appear calm and elegant.  But we immediately notice the figure embracing her, who is captured in a rather uncomfortable, if not impossible, pose, and this body, too, is quite distorted, longer of trunk than would be normal. The figure to the right, and the head and shoulders above Venus, display quite a bit of emotion, more than off-setting the placid content on the faces of the two figures on the left.  Venus was Cupid's mother, so the viewer can hope that Cupid is the little guy on the right.  And everybody else -- or the disembodied others? The background seems to me a swirling collage of faces, masks, doves, twisted blue drapery (later to come of age in the "Demoiselles d'Avignon"?), then a screaming man with muscular arms, someone at the upper left ordering a coffee ... If it is Cupid embracing Venus, then that would explain the Last-Judgment imagery of the picture.  What do you think is happening here?  The uncertainty seems deliberate.

The next painting is Susannah and the Elders, by Tintoretto, from 1555-6:

We can see the elders, at each side of the hedge. They, too, seem quite uncomfortable, but they will soon be able to see ... well, pretty much everything they would hope to here.  This Susannah is substantial ... where Bronzino's Venus was nude, Susannah is naked (see my other numbered nudely/naked, nakedly/nude posts). She is not perfect; she is not anticipating a portrait to come of this quiet, reflective toilette. She is alone, she thinks, and not yet aware of her onlookers.  But she is all we see.  And her calm demeanor pulls us in -- because this moment is so fleeting.  But still we look at her.  Even more, I think, than we look at Bronzino's Venus.

Why is that? We look at the "Allegory of Venus and Cupid" because we cannot be sure what is happening; so, we look all over the canvas, and then all over the canvas, and then catch a detail or two, and then look all over again.  But when we move to Tintoretto's "Susannah," we get the male gaze. And so our tendency is to gaze, as well.  Our focus is certain here.

Thinking about the ways we process the nude and the naked body, I have been working on a new odalisque,  this one with a subdued background, a background that, I hope, might still draw attention. But it can be difficult.  Theodore Roethke wrote, in "I Knew a Woman":

I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
.... What's freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways.)


So, yes, it can be difficult to pull attention away from that naked "bright container,"  whether it is male or female.  Here is a detail of the bones, so far, in my newest painting:

 

Resting, now, until we do battle again, tomorrow. 

The Queen's Skirt Explodes, Part III, and Wendy Steiner and the Model

On May 5th and again on May 21, I talked about the ways that silks and satins and furs and jewels outshine the faces of Queens (and other elevated subjects, from Holbein to John Singer Sargent)... I had argued that one reason that we remember both a dress and an upholstered chair, but not always the expression of the supposed subject, from an Ingres painting, might be that the painter is displaying his talent: a well-painted pearl? ... another line on the resume.  It could also be that the subjects themselves, from a higher class, unused to sitting so long, were not terribly forthcoming, and the painter became lost in all the decorative touches (every gorgeous thing the sitter owned, very likely) which actually spoke to him.

The Queen, in her sittings in the atelier, bored, would probably be noticing the painter's model (there was always a favorite); the Queen would, in her stiff pose, with her elaborate dress, be trying (consciously or not) to outshine the model, to keep the painter's attention on her royal personage alone.  But the painter would be looking about, testing the light, seeing the familiar face, waiting, in the corner, and the model beckoned. I have always pictured this as a likely scenario, thinking that the model would be the dose of "real" life, something closer to the painter's own experience, that he would rather be attending to.

But I have been reading Wendy Steiner's book,  The Real Real Thing: The Model in the Mirror of Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), and she discusses a short story by Henry James, "The Real Thing." A couple, the Monarchs (hmmm... Queen and King?) press the artist-narrator to engage them as models, as his wife, for example, is so lovely, and Steiner says "This is just the trouble ... for Mrs. Monarch is already an artistic cliche, and the artist seems unable to make any art based on her that is not equally unoriginal" (page 38).  And yet, when the artist considers his model, he sees that she is "'so little in herself'" and yet she encourages his leap to "'alchemy in art'" (38).  So I think I need to refine what I have been thinking, thanks to Steiner's interpetation of the story.

It isn't exactly that the model represents the "real," or is somehow more real;  it is that she, in what Steiner calls her "plasticity," can allow an artist to control the way she is represented, in a way that he cannot control the Queen's image.... He can create anything from his model. The Queen remains, stubbornly, herself. So, this is my new task for my next painting/drawing: a new Queen's skirt.

The Queen's Skirt Explodes, part II, this time with Bronzino's help

In a post on May 5th, I had written about the way that some portraits seems to privilege the satins and silks and ermines and jewels of their owners over... their faces, and I had given you a photograph of a painting from my series exploring the peculiarities of that subject...

And I have found a new painter who seduces with his brushed fabrics. Agnolo Bronzino, an extraordinarily talented Renaissance painter, lesser known than some of his contemporaries, has had two exhibitions devoted to him in the past year, one at the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence last winter and the other at the Metropoitan Museum of Art in new York last winter and spring. The catalogues are out, and there is a review by the very perceptive Ingrid Rowland in The New York Review of Books from May 26 (pages 8-10).  It is a wonderful, thorough review; read it... it is really fine. She outlines the way he worked, his basing of some works on Michaelangelo's (and she reproduces a drawing as proof of this sculptural echo), and Cosimo de' Medici's choice of Bronzino as his court painter.  She mentions that Cosimo de' Medici thought in terms of politics, geography, education, and economics.  He did not, for example, import textiles; Cosimo "set up his own Florentine silk works" (p.10).  And, she says,  Bronzino "knew how to use art as a form of publicity"; as he painted Cosimo's consort, Eleonora de Toledo,  he painted those very textiles perfectly (p. 10). Look:

What stays with you? The dress. The child's face is easy to love, in part, I think, because his clothing is so softly done. Eleonora's face has no chance up against those patterns, the shoulder laces, the enormous stylized flower on her chest.  In Bronzino's defense, Rowland writes that perhaps Eleonora "seems less haughty than melancholy; she was probably already beginning to suffer from the consumption that eventually killed her" (p. 10).  Her face is very far removed from the foreground, it seems to me; perhaps because she was ill.  But we can imagine another version of this portrait, one where her face, pale and subtlety-done as it is, comes forward, where she is seen as a person who will soon not be here, and knows it, one where the dress fades into the distance because the person is what matters. Bronzino was more than skilled enough to create this other portrait, where the face is the thing ... and yet he chose the dress.  I have sometimes thought that when artists paint these ruffles and laces so perfectly that they are adding to their resume, saying, "if I can paint these, I can paint anything."  This seems more than a few lines on a resume... this may be the most civilized, and early form of ... dare I say it? ... advertisement, for the silks of Florence. They are lovely ...