I have a lot of feelings about Renaissance and Baroque art (and the little sliver of Mannerism in the middle) However, one of the strongest of these feelings is about Artemisia Gentileschi and her version of the biblical story of Judith beheading Holofernes.
The story goes like this (but I’ve never actually read the story I’ve only been told it in the traditional bardic fashion, and this is the version I’ve always been told): The Assyrian army is preparing to take over a town but they’ve stopped for the night, camping just outside the town and resting up for the battle planned for the following day. The townsfolk are nervous and preparing for the worst, and Judith and her lady-in-waiting concoct a plan.
A plan to masquerade as hookers in order to get into the general’s tent and kill him. They dressed up in sexy outfits, walked into the army camp, eyelashes fluttering and hips swinging just so, and soon, the general let them into his tent.
This general, Holofernes (you can see where this is going), gets absolutely wasted, and as he is on the verge of passing out, Judith grabs his sword and beheads him while her lady-in-waiting holds him in place.
Evidently, the screams from the tent probably sounded like the right kind of screams, because Judith and her lady-in-waiting were able to leave the camp with his severed head by smiling coyly at the guards on duty.
The following morning, when the army was ready to attack, the soldiers found the headless body of their general in his tent and, when they approached the villagers, found his head in Judith’s hands. Needless to say, the army accepted defeat and left, demonstrating that there are more tools in a person’s arsenal than traditional weaponry.
Great story. Inspirational as hell. Right?
Caravaggio would disagree. He painted the climactic scene of the beheading, but not the way most people would picture it these days. He showed Holofernes as asleep, Judith as a young maid holding the sword with a sour expression on her face, and her lady-in-waiting as an old crone directing Judith on what to do. It is decidedly not the powerful scene I would have pictured when hearing the story, but it was probably the scene Renaissance and Baroque people pictured.
Except Artemisia painted the same scene. Holofernes is awake and screaming in agony, Judith has one hand holding his hair and the other holding the handle of the sword she’s using to cut off his head, and her lady-in-waiting is on top of Holofernes, trying to hold him down so Judith can do her thing.
Objectively, it’s a much more dynamic scene! If we look at just the figures, we have three characters: Judith, her lady-in-waiting, and Holofernes. In Caravaggio’s, Judith is young, practically a teenager, and wears an expression of disgust and confusion. She holds the sword at an arm’s length, which even an untrained eye would feel is going to make it hard to cut off someone’s head. In Artemisia’s, she’s older, using both her hands, elbows bent, holding Holofernes’ head in place as she viscerally carves with the sword.
Judith’s lady-in-waiting has arguably the most stark differences. In Caravaggio’s, she’s an old crone, barely in frame on the far right side of the scene. She is not involved in the act and is instead directing Judith’s actions. In Artemisias’s, she’s young, strong, and straddling Holofernes, holding him down and in place so Judith can more easily behead him. She plays an active role in the scene.
Even Holofernes is portrayed differently. In Caravaggio’s, Holofernes is almost unconscious, implying that Judith beheading him was more of a crime of opportunity than a premeditated and planned action. It cheapens the act and makes it feel like it was easier than the story leads us to believe. Conversely, Artemisia makes sure Holofernes is awake and still kicking when Judith beheads him. This allows her to involve both Judith AND her lady-in-waiting, and creates a fundamentally more dynamic scene.
Both paintings demonstrate similar painting techniques such as tenebrism, so the main distinctions come down to how the figures in the paintings interact with the story depicted. And Artemisia simply painted a better depiction of the story.
But my reaction upon seeing his art for the first time was exactly that. I was looking at his 1961 painting School of Athens, confused as to how he could be considered a pivotal artist of the post modern age. The scribbles and what looked like colored pencil or crayon pissed me off so much, and it took me a while to pinpoint exactly why I felt so mad.
When my art history professor asked me why I thought it was a terrible work of art, my response was, “It looks like a child drew it.” A fair assessment, and I stand by it to this day, but my professor had a rebuttal.
“Child-like drawings have merit. Drawing like a child is a style many artists adopt, especially modern and post modern artists who lean heavily into the avant-garde.”
This was a moot point to me. I did not care that it was a style. I insisted that there is a difference between “drawing like a child” and “drawing poorly” but I was convinced that Cy Twombly was just a terrible artist. I felt that giving him the justification of “drawing in the style of a child” was disingenuous to his character and giving him a free pass to make terrible art.
My professor decided to let it lie, and not try to convince me that Cy Twombly had some deep meaning I just wasn’t seeing, and I appreciate that. I had taken many classes from this professor and they had learned long ago that I am not easily convinced. However, they also knew that I would likely go research the artist or the work of art on my own, if only to come to class one day and say, “And another thing—!”
When a friend of mine asked me why I thought Cy Twombly was a terrible artist, I had better words. She gave me a look of distraught confusion, Twombly being one of her favorite artists. I calmly explained myself:
“His drawings are rudimentary at best and lazy at worst. He draws and paints and makes are like a child except he doesn’t have the excuse children do. He’s old enough and familiar enough with art that he knows what is possible in art and he chooses to make drivel. He had access to the whole of human art and experience and he made scribbles. Cy Twombly’s art is an affront to artists and art historians as a whole and all but spits in the face of the progress humanity has made up to this point in time. He takes the whole idea of dadaism and the avant-garde and goes the pompous philoso-bro route saying, “Oh, look at me, I’m making nonsensical marks on a piece of canvas that mean nothing, but I’m going to pretend they mean something profound just to make people feel like idiots.”
My friend, saint that she is, smirked and gave a few tsk tsk tsk’s before opening her laptop and typing something into google. “What you’re focusing on,” she began, “is how Twombly fits into the time period, and how the time period fits into the whole of art history.” She turned her laptop around to show me the screen.
“You need to forget all of human achievement and focus about what’s on the canvas.”
I have never appreciated advice more than I appreciate that last sentence. The work she showed me was Cold Stream, made in 1966. A dark grey background with row after row of light squiggles.
“What does that look like to you?” Her voice dripping with amusement.
“It looks like…a kid’s notebook when they’re bored in class,” I replied.
“Yes,” she said, getting excited. “If you were going to make art and you wanted to make something people could relate to without having to understand the kinds of paint you used or the techniques you used or the life you had led up until you painted the painting…you would make art of your school days, wouldn’t you? You would take the mundane scribbles and squiggles of being bored in class and make them with nice quality paint on nice quality canvas, and you would want to hang it in a nice museum. Purely so that, as viewers wander through the gallery, flexing their brains to understand the works of try-hards like Pollock and Duchamp, a person can come across your work and be reminded of those little breaks from learning they would take in class. The little things they did so their brains didn’t explode from all the learning. Do you see what I’m getting at?”
And I did. Cy Twombly tapped into that raw, emotional understanding of the world that children have, and put it into his art. His Cold Stream was a perfect example of how art doesn’t have to mean something deep and profound, and yet my friend and I were able to give Cold Stream a meaning that was deep and profound.
I had never been so glad to have been wrong. I went back and looked at School of Athens (1961) and saw it in a different light. Instead of haphazard scribbles and messy colors, I now saw a sketched outline of a building and splashes of color to symbolize figures. I saw a relaxed approach to perspective as well as an emotional attempt to capture the feeling of the original renaissance painting, rather than directly copying it. I understood how Cy Twombly was not a modern artist, nor a post-modern artist, nor an avant-garde artist. He was an abstract expressionist, and a damn good one at that.
I went back to my professor and said, “Hey, so, I learned some things, opened my third eye and all that jazz, and I have come to the conclusion that Cy Twombly isn’t all that bad and that you were right.”
So, Cy Twombly wasn’t a terrible artist. He wasn’t even a bad artist. I was just not as well-versed in expressionism as I should have been, and my friend—a person with a passion for Twombly’s art and a patience to rival oil painters—gave me a better explanation than I could have hoped for.
Cy Twombly was about as un-terrible as you could get. I would now even argue he was one of the best artists of the 20th century.
Parthenon of Athens, 1829. William Miller. Engraving. [Public domain] Wikimedia
The Artwork Of The Week this week is the Ancient Greek temple of the Parthenon.
The Parthenon, 447-432BCE. Architects: Iktinos and Callicrates, Sculptor: Phidias. Marble. 45’ tall x 228’ long x 101’ wide (13.72m x 69.5m x 30.9m). Sits on the Athenian Acropolis in Greece.
I have a complicated history with the Parthenon, beginning with not liking it for almost a decade because it was famous and popular. Then, I realized halfway through my undergraduate education that this thinking was a terrible reason to not like a piece of art, so I did some research and read up on exactly why the Parthenon is such a historically revered piece of art. Now, it has a special place in my heart and I ended up writing my undergraduate senior thesis on the statue that lived within. But that’s a discussion for another post.
The Parthenon is an ancient Greek temple from the Classical period of Greek art and architecture. It was built between 447BCE and 432 BCE by architects Iktinos and Callicrates (and teams upon teams of artisans), and is the perfect example of a temple of two orders. If you want to know what “orders” are, go read my other post on columns and bask in what is probably my favorite topic in art history. The Parthenon has one peristyle in the Doric order along the outer edge of the stylobate, and two colonnades bookending the cella with a continuous frieze around the cella itself in the Ionic order.
Uploaded by Ken Russell Salvador [CC BY 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0)] Wikimedia
The outer peristyle consists of Doric columns and is topped with 92 metopes across the four sides depicting four different stories form greek mythology: the gigantomachy in the east, the amazonomachy in the west, the centauromachy in the south, and the sack of Troy in the north. The pediments depict either the cycle of day and night the birth of Athena, or the legendary founding of Athens in the east, and the contest for godly patronage of Athens in the west.
East Pediment, likely Athena’s birth. No machine-readable author provided. “Crissov” assumed (based on copyright claims). [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)] WikimediaWest Pediment, likely contest for patronage. No machine-readable author provided. “Crissov” assumed (based on copyright claims). [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/)] Wikimedia
The inner peristyle is topped with a 98m (322’) frieze depicting the Panathenaic procession from the northwest of the Acropolis and up to the temple complex on the top of the Acropolis. The procession was part of a festival held every four years where offerings and a new robe were carried up to the temple and offered to Athena, the godly patron of Athens. The Ionic columns and frieze border the cella where the famed chryselephantine sculpture of Athena lived, and the robe offered during the Panathenaic procession was either placed on the statue or hung next to it.
Section of interior frieze. Louvre Museum [Public domain] Wikimedia
Though the temple looks pristine and white in modern times, it was once pained in bright colors, making it quite the spectacle. However, many people find it hard to envision some of the worlds most famous greek and roman artworks as colorfully painted. They feel as though the colors would detract from the dignity of the works and be distracting and tacky. In response to these thoughts, I ask what is the difference between colorful paintings on classical temples and colorful stained glass windows in christian churches? Both are there to make the building nicer to look at, and both buildings perform the same function.
Phidias Showing the Frieze of the Parthenon to his Friends, 1868. Alma-Tadema. Oil on canvas. [Public domain] Wikimedia
Regardless, the Parthenon stands as one of the most recognizable structures in the world and is complex enough that a simple Artwork Of The Week entry is not enough. Look forward to one or more full length articles about it in the future!
Let’s talk columns. I love columns, which sounds weird, but I do. Columns are, in my opinion, one of the most beautiful ways to hold something up. You see it used in figurative language as well: “the pale column of her neck” is a perfect example of how columns are both aesthetically pleasing and damn efficient at what they do. How noble a cause but to carry aloft a skull containing that which all of human evolution has worked to achieve.
Flowery language aside, columns have been a cornerstone of architecture for thousands of years. The ancient Egyptians stacked drums of bound papyrus reeds on top of each other to hold up their roofs. They eventually turned to using stone instead and filled massive halls with inscribed columns such as in the temples of Karnak.
The ancient Greeks used columns in everything from mundane government buildings to palaces to temples, and used anything from local stone to specific types of marble only found in a few places.
Converted to PNG and optimised by w:User:stw. [Public domain] Wikimedia
The ancient Romans did the same, and carried on the tradition of using columns as an aesthetic choice as well as a structural element as seen on the outside of the Colosseum.
Columns also come with their own lingo, too. A specific type of column is called an order. A line of columns is a colonnade. Four lines of columns forming a rectangle are called a peristyle. The platform on which many temples are built is called a stylobate and the peristyle sits right on the edge of the stylobate. The bottom of the column is the base and the top is the capital. The grooves in the column are called flutes. The often highly decorated part of the roof right above the column is called the entablature. Probably the coolest column-related term is entasis which describes the way columns swell in the middle to give the impression of a tall and straight column from afar. Columns without this swelling look like they get narrower in the middle because the eye makes them look larger at the top and bottom where they meet the building. Cool, right?
Columns have been such an integral part of specifically European architecture that the ancient civilizations who birthed them came up with specific types of columns to fit their different needs. In the massive hypostyle hall of the temples of Karnak, the columns are present just as much to hold up the ceiling as they are to tell a story, so they are tall, they are wide, and they are absolutely covered in hieroglyphics.
In classical Greek and Roman architecture, columns are thin and fluted, used to hold the ceiling up and break up a buildings facade, making it simply feel better to look at. No one wants to look at a flat box, and these ancient civilizations embraced that.
Unknown, scan by sidonius 16:34, 7 November 2006 (UTC) [Public domain] Wikimedia
In specifically Greek and Roman architecture, columns can be identified as one of three canonical orders. There are two what I call “suborders” of columns, but they were a later addition and used exclusively by the Romans. However, there is fourth kind of column is still being debated by historians because the only remaining examples are actually reconstructions.
Let’s tackle this fourth one first. It’s called the Minoan column because it was first discovered in the palace of Knossos on Crete (and yes, Minoan stuff is named after the mythical King Minos with the minotaur). These columns are red and tapered so that their widest point is actually at the top, said to have been constructed of the trunks of cypress trees inverted to prevent the trees from taking root in the building itself.
However, by the time anyone started to really buckle down and catalogue all the different types of columns, Sir Arthur Evans, the guy who rediscovered Knossos in 1900, had created these reconstructions based on what he found, supposedly replacing and “repairing” the ruins. No original Minoan columns exist, and some scholars are convinced they never existed at all, and were simply fabricated by Evans either because he thought it would look cool or simply lacked any evidence contrary to what he thought the columns actually looked like.
That was your crash-course into the controversy surrounding specifically the columns of the palace at Knossos. There was much drama surrounding Knossos since Heinrich Schliemann was also discovering Tiryns and Mycenae around the same time. Minoan columns definitely exist now, so labelling any “red-painted tapered columns” as Minoan columns is okay in my book, at least as long as the columns are on the island of Crete.
The three Greek and two Roman column orders are definitely real, though. Don’t worry.
The three types of Greek orders are Doric, Ionic, and Corinthian, and the two types of Roman orders are Tuscan and Composite. To give a simple timeline, Doric is the oldest type of column, found in Aegean and early Greek architecture, while Ionic came later during the Classic periods. Corinthian columns are the next most recent and were mostly for ornamental purposes as opposed to being structural components. Tuscan and Composite columns are Roman-era subsets of Doric and Corinthian orders, respectively and share most of the characteristics of their predecessors
In terms of appearance, though, to the untrained eye, they look identical, and for the most part, they are. They start at the bottom as a pillar, they extend up as a pillar, and they meet the ceiling as a pillar. Standard column behavior, right?
This is where things get interesting, though. Doric columns do not have a base. while Ionic and Corinthian columns do. This means that the very bottom of a Doric column sits directly on the floor. Ionic columns and Corinthian columns have at least one, maybe two disks of bases in larger diameters to give a little visual variation.
What’s more interesting is that Doric columns have very little capital at the very top of the column where it meets the ceiling. Ionic columns have volutes, or little scrolled knobs at the top, and Corinthian columns have massive organic ornamentation in the form of acanthus leaves. Doric columns are by far the most understated type of column.
For most columns, and especially Ancient Greek columns, the type of column used is paired with ornamentation along the outside edge of the roof. Where modern houses have eaves and gutters, ancient Greek temples had what are called entablatures and the entablature was the space just above the column capital and just below the roof.
James and John Knapton, et al. Chambers, Ephraim, ed. [Public domain] Wikimedia
A temple’s entablature can tell you whether the temple is Doric or Ionic. Doric temples have triglyphs, which are little blocks of stone inscribed with three vertical lines, and metopes, which are little squares of stone carved into a scene like a picture. If you look at a temple and see squares spaced out by little blocks with three vertical lines, you’re looking at a Doric temple.
Ionic temples have a continuous frieze in their entablature. A frieze is a carved scene, usually depicting some pivotal event relevant to the subject it’s attached to. If you look at a temple and see one long scene wrapping around the temple above the columns, you’re looking at an ionic temple.
The Corinthian order essentially built upon the decorative nature of the Ionic order by pairing the classic Ionic continuous frieze with the acanthus leaves on the capitals. The end result makes buildings of the Corinthian order massively decorated and almost delicate to look at.
Tuscan columns look like super plain Doric columns, spectacularly containing even less decoration than the original. I know–that doesn’t seem possible, and yet somehow, the Tuscan order manages to be the single most plain looking architectural feature in the human history.
The Composite suborder is what happens when you try to combine the Ionic and Corinthian orders. It has both the volutes or scrolls of an Ionic capital and the leaves of a Corinthian capital, and a massively decorated frieze.
To review, the main differences between ancient columns are:
Doric has no base and very little capital.
Ionic has a base and scrolls as capitals.
Corinthian has a base and highly decorated capitals with acanthus leaves.
Doric has triglyphs and metopes, while Ionic and Corinthian have a frieze.
Tuscan is like a super boring Doric.
Composite is a mixed order.
Minoan is on thin ice but I’ll allow it.
“But how will knowing this info help me sound cool?”
Uh, wouldn’t you be wowed if you showed someone an ancient temple and they said “oh, yeah, that’s a doric temple which means it’s either really late Aegean or early to mid Greek, and I know this because the columns have no base/ the columns have no capital/ triglyphs and metopes are present”?
No? Try this tidbit of info on for size, then. The famous Athenian temple, the Parthenon, is both Doric and Ionic. How is this possible? It has two peristyles. That’s right. One inside the other. The outer peristyle is Doric, as evidenced by the lack of bases and capitals, and the presence of metopes and triglyphs. The inner peristyle is Ionic as evidenced by the minimal but present bases and scrolled capitals, and the long continuous frieze wrapping around the interior portion of the temple.
Now, when someone walks up to you on the street, thrusts a photo of an ancient Greek temple into your hands, and demands you identify what kind of temple it is and give a ballpark timeframe for when it was built, you are equipped with the knowledge to answer “please stop bothering me and go away, I’m trying to walk to work and I will call the cops”
Every Monday night, I will pick a work of art and write post about it, exploring everything that comes to mind when I look at the work. If the artist is known, there will be a little about them. If it lives in a specific place, I’ll talk a little about it. I will always give a semi-formal description of it including the name, when it was made, the artist if there is one and when the artist lived, the materials of which it is made, the size or dimensions, and where it currently lives if it still exists. I know, that last part is sad to think about, but some art ends up either getting destroyed or falling apart over time.
They’ll look a little something like this :
Judith Slaying Holofernes, 1610. Artemisia Gentileschi (1593-1653). Oil paint on canvas. 158.8 cm by 125.5 cm (78.33 in by 64.13 in). Currently in the Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte in Naples, Italy.
Or, if the work is missing some info, like this:
Boxer at Rest, circa 330-50 BCE. Bronze. Currently at Palazzo Massimo alle Terme in Rome, Italy.
I will pick the Artwork Of The Week at random but feel free to send me recommendations. Yours may just make it into a full-length post!
