The Artwork Of The Week this week is another one of my absolute favorites, the hellenistic greek bronze know to me as the Defeated Boxer but to most other people as the Terme Boxer or the Boxer at Rest.
Boxer at Rest, Defeated Boxer, or Terme Boxer, 330-50BCE. Hellenistic Greek bronze statue, excavated in 1885 in Rome, Italy (life sized). Currently lives in the Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, Rome, Italy.
The Artwork Of The Week this week is a very recent illustration of a titanoboa eating a sarcosuchus, made by James Gurney for the October 2009 issue of the magazine Ranger Rick.
Titanoboa, 2009. James Gurney. Oil, 14in x19in. Supposedly published in the October 2009 issue of the Ranger Rick magazine (but I can’t find the issue to check because it’s all locked behind paywalls of all kinds). Can be found on James Gurney’s blogspot site, though.
I was unable to find an electronic version of the work that I could cite from, and since I still have to figure out how to properly cite modern works, I cannot include a photo of Titanoboa. However, I originally encountered the work on Tumblr and the post provided a link to Gurney’s blogspot, where he detailed the process of creating the work. Check out his site to see explorations and explanations of art and artists much more comprehensive than I offer here!
The Artwork Of The Week this week is a fresco from the tomb of an Egyptian official named Nebamun.
Fowl Hunting Fresco in the Tomb of Nebamun, c1350BCE. Tomb constructed during 18th dynasty Egypt, rediscovered in 1820 by a British expedition. Fresco now housed in the British Museum in London, England.
The Artwork Of The Week this week is Lee Krasner’s White Squares.
White Squares, 1948. Lee Krasner (1908-1984). Enamel and oil on canvas, 61.1cm x 76.5cm (24in x 30.1in). Currently housed in the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, New York.
(A lot of art made by recent artists has some complicated licensing rules, so I cannot include a photo of the work until I figure out how to navigate said rules. However, you can go to the museum’s website and see the work here, and, perhaps, in the future, the painting will go on display again!)
The Artwork Of The Week this week is the Mayan step pyramid at Chichen Itza, the Temple of Kukulkan.
Temple of Kukulkan, 8th-12th century CE. Within the Mayan site of Chichen Itza. Limestone step pyramid, 24m tall without the temple on top (30m tall with the temple) with a square base of 55.3m x 55.3m (181ft x 181ft). Yucatan Peninsula, Mexico.
The Artwork Of The Week this week is the lesser-known but still rather well-known companion piece to the Birth of Venus by Botticelli: Primavera.
Primavera, late 1470’s to early1470s. Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510). Tempera on panel, 202cm x 314cm (80in x 124in). Currently housed in the Uffizi galleries in Florence, Italy. Companion piece to Birth of Venus.
The Artwork Of The Week this week is one of the most famous paintings from the Italian Renaissance, the Birth of Venus.
Birth of Venus, 1484-1486. Sandro Botticelli (1445-1510). Tempera on canvas, 172.5cm x 278.9cm (67.9in x 109.6in). Currently housed in the Uffizi galleries in Florence, Italy. Companion piece to Primavera.
The Artwork of the Week for this week is one of my own photos because I went on vacation with my family and took many photos. This photo is of some elephant seals!
Elephant Seals Smacking Each Other, 2019. Thatpunnyperson. Digital photo shot with Nikon D3300 DSLR camera.
This photo shows two male elephant seals essentially slapping each other with their own neck, head, and most importantly, large nose. It’s a display of dominance and territoriality, where each seal tries to assert their rule over the seals in the area and fight off challenging males.
There’s not much to explain or expound upon because, when it comes down to it, it’s simply a picture of two seals smacking each other with their noses. What more could you really want out of life?
The Artwork Of The Week this week is the famous Mona Lisa, by Leonard da Vinci.
Mona Lisa or Lisa del Gioconda, 1503. Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). Oil paint on canvas, 2’6” by 1’9”. Currently housed in the Louvre Museum in Paris.
The Mona Lisa is one of the most, if not the most, famous painting from the western world. Her likeness has achieved meme status through her presence in many cartoons and comedies, so the odds of someone not recognizing her is slim. The most famous details of the Mona Lisa are her coy smile and her missing eyebrows. The smile has an interesting explanation, while the eyebrows have a more…well, I guess it’s an interesting explanation as well.
Her smile is noteworthy in the context of Italian Renaissance portraiture. There were only so many reasons to commission a portrait: either you wanted something to symbolize your wealth and power, or you wanted something to celebrate your family. In the Italian Renaissance, most art patrons—that is, people who paid artists to make art—were men, so many portraits from the time period were of influential men and their families. Some men wanted portraits of them and their wives, so several pairs of partner portraits were commissioned by the upper class.
For now, we’re going to ignore the intricacies of Italian renaissance portraiture depicting the men, and focus solely on portraits of singular women. When a portrait of a woman was painted, the lady was usually depicted looking off to the side and in lavishly decorated clothing. We can argue that the nature of the clothing was determined by her status in society, but considering that many paintings were commissioned by the wealthy elite, we can agree on the clothing demonstrating vast wealth and prestige.
The looking-off-to-the-side part, though, is thought to be because a woman staring out at the viewer was needlessly confrontational. Men were always depicted looking directly out at the viewer, and since renaissance Italy was a patriarchal society, this made sense. The men were in charge and needed to command respect and establish themselves as the source of power, and their portraits reflected this idea. Women had to be more demure and deferent, thus the looking away. Nothing says, “I don’t know, you choose,” like lack of eye contact.
Why is this important? The woman in the Mona Lisa is staring directly out at the viewer. Her eyes are not downcast, they’re soft and making eye contact. Her coy smile suggests that she knows how unusual this behavior is, and that she will not look away. It’s a test of social interaction. Will the viewer call her on this breach of social order or will they uncomfortably stare back, inevitably being the first to look away?
Of course, the viewer would have to be the first one to look away because she is a painting, forever frozen in time, with gentle but unblinking eyes. Eyes under seemingly nonexistent eyebrows.
The eyebrows are there. I promise, they exist. They are very faint, partly because of the nature of oil paint and partly because the painting is dirty. Oil paint dries very slowly, and Leonardo was known for continuously adding details to painting as they dried, so while the eyebrows may have been stark and present in the very first paint layer, the successive layers have muddled the view enough that they seem invisible. Oil paint also gives painting an almost luminescent look in the right light, so catch the Mona Lisa at the wrong angle and all definition disappears. The Louvre also does not clean their art, so the layers of dirt from the years the painting has existed are still covering all the details. And since Leonardo did not wait between coats to let the paint dry, the paint ended up holding onto dirt stronger than it should have. Thanks, Leonardo.
Paintings by Leonardo’s students who copied the Mona Lisa show definitive eyebrows, so art historians are confident that the original’s eyebrows do exist. X-rays and tests of the painting show the “cartoon” underneath the paint having eyebrows, so they even existed in Leonardo’s preliminary sketches. But, unless science figures out how to clean dirt out of oil paint layers and the Louvre decides to clean the painting, we may never see the Mona Lisa’s actual eyebrows.
But, like the old M&M commercial with Santa, “They do exist!”
There is a lot to say about the Mona Lisa, so much that people write senior theses and doctoral dissertations on it, but this is a crash course on the quirky history behind her smile and her eyebrows. If you want to see a beautiful and quintessential example of an Italian Renaissance portrait of a woman, go look up Ginevra de Benci, also by Leonardo da Vinci.
The Artwork Of The Week this week is a Chinese print of Avalokiteshvara.
Avalokiteshvara, 10th century CE. Cave 17, Mogao Caves, Dunhuang, Gansu province, China. Color woodblock print, 40cm x 17cm (15.75in x 6.7in). Currently in the British Museum in London.
I’ve found that people tend to focus the most on “western art”, which is a truly lame euphemism for art from Europe and North America. Art has been made by every civilization, every group of people, and arguably every person since humans first came into existence. Of course, this opens up the discussion of “what can be considered art,” but we’ll tackle that on another post.
For now, we have to fill in some of the gaps in knowledge left by what I view as a failing of “western society” and learn what some terms mean. Avalokiteshvara is figure, and is a kind of bodhisattva who embodies the collective love and compassion of all Buddhas, and can be almost directly translated from Sanskrit as “lord who gazes down upon” in a benevolent way. The early Chinese adaptation of the name, Guanzizai, ended up altering the meaning slightly to “lord who gazes down upon sound” where “sound” means “the cries of those in need,” so the compassionate angle stayed the same as the language for the concept evolved. The modern Chinese name for him is Guanyin where the meaning of “the cries of those in need” was truly solidified. A bodhisattva is someone who is on their way to becoming a buddha, but has chosen not to actually become a buddha in favor of helping humanity instead.
Philology side, Avalokiteshvara was considered one of Buddhism’s bodhisattvas who had a genuine interest in helping people get to paradise, and portraying him gained popularity as Buddhism swept through Asia in the 10th century. There are many artistic interpretations of Avalokiteshvara just as there are many artistic interpretations of buddhas and bodhisattvas in general. Some are in metal, some in stone, some on silk scrolls, some on wood panels.
The example for this weeks AOTW is a print of Avalokiteshvara made through wood-block printing during the 10th century CE. It was unearthed from Cave 17 of the Mogao Caves just outside of Dunhuang city, which is part of the larger Jiuquan city in the Gansu Province (what we would consider a city within a county within a state, here in the US). Dunhuang is in the northwestern deserts of China and was an instrumental location along the Silk Road, so the heavy traffic the city experienced led to the creation of several cave complexes, the most famous of which are the Mogao Caves. These caves ended up being filled with buddhist art and manuscripts, making them one of the most important historical and religious sites in China, and I would argue one of the most important historical and religious sites in the world.
But. Back to the print. This print and the prints found with in in Cave 17 are some of the oldest woodblock prints in the world. This print in particular portrays Avalokiteshvara seated over a prayer and the text aligned vertically on the right of the figure is a cartouche identifying him. This layout with an image above a block of text went on to become a popular page layout style for Chinese books from the 10th century all the way to the 16th century.
There are several interesting things about this specific print: the woodblock print aspect and the presence of the cartouche. The use of woodblock printing demonstrates the advancement of technology reaching the point where art and writing becomes cheap to produce and distribute. This is why the Mogao Caves and the other cave systems in the Dunhuang area are called the “Thousand Buddha Caves.” The sheer volume of art and writing found within the caves establishes China as the creator of printing.
Furthermore, the cartouche draws interesting parallels to ancient Egyptian art, where cartouches label figures as well. Many people studying art history view cartouches as a uniquely Egyptian feature in art, but the presence of cartouches and cartouche-like features in 10th-century Chinese Buddhist art challenges how people view “stereotypical” aspects of art movements. How much of what people are taught is characteristic of a given civilization is actually unique to that civilization?
This Artwork Of The Week is endlessly interesting!
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