Mona Lisa

From the WSJ story.

the Mona Lisa is, technically speaking, a very great work of art. But is that really obvious? Well, it would be if we could still see the thing. Unfortunately, like the dollar bill and the American flag, it has assumed a pall of such impenetrable familiarity that we no longer see it at all.

But if ever you succeed in seeing the painting as people saw it in centuries past, you will discover something astounding: The Mona Lisa looks entirely different from what we have been led to believe. To many observers, this is the one supreme masterpiece, the unarguable bedrock of our visual culture, the painterly equivalent of the Parthenon, Chartres and the Taj Mahal. In fact, it is anything but that. It is a mysterious, shifting, elusive thing, and it was that very ambiguity that so confounded and compelled the attention of all who saw it in the past.


From the web.














Like most of the portraits of this period, and like most of Leonardo’s portraits, the Mona Lisa is a half-length of a seated woman (it is just possible to make out the arm of the chair in which she sits.) The face is an odd compromise between the general and the particular. Representing Leonardo’s preoccupation with anatomy, the face expresses unparalleled naturalism, yet it remains largely an androgynous type, one that recurs in Leonardo’s “Virgin of the Rock” and in his depiction of St. John.

After the eye has accounted for such generalizing impulses, suddenly it is drawn to the incongruous perspectival and anatomical perfection of the hands and midriff, which are angled away from the picture plane. Those hands embody the scientific naturalism that began among the Lombard Herbalists of the late 14th century and would be revived, a century after Leonardo, in Caravaggio and his followers.

From the Louvre.

A Victorian Novel in Stone

The British Houses of Parliament stand beside the Thames, a symbol of London itself. Their silhouette, culminating in the great clock tower that houses Big Ben, is famous all over the world. Yet this is a building that came about by accident and whose precise authorship was for many years clouded by controversy. Its proper name is the Palace of Westminster, for it replaced the medieval palace, begun by Edward the Confessor, where from the 13th century onward Parliament habitually met. Over the years the old building was expanded, altered, filled in and divided until it had sprawled into a higgledy-piggledy mess, with several shops and a pub jammed up against the walls.

Slideshow

The Tale of the Temeraire

Picture from a story in today's Wall Street Journal. HWPL owns a book Joseph Mallord William Turner, text by John Walker, which has the painting in a color plate.












In the late summer of 1838, H.M.S. Temeraire, a once-glorious remnant of the Battle of Trafalgar of 1805, was towed up the Thames to the wharf at Rotherhithe, to be broken up and sold for her fittings and oaken timbers. J.M.W. Turner's painting of the doomed ship's final passage, in which he summoned her illustrious past by rechristening her the "Fighting Temeraire," never left his possession and became part of his bequest to the nation after his death in 1851 at age 76. Enshrined in the National Gallery in London since 1856 and embodying a nostalgic nation's memory of an age when it ruled the waves, Turner's canvas remains among his best-known and best-loved works. Even today, as scholars debate the meaning of its ambiguous but deeply stirring imagery, "Fighting Temeraire" elicits a charged emotional response.

Picture gleaned from the Web.











Contrary to legend, we know that Turner did not witness the Temeraire's last journey up the Thames, and countless critics in his day and ours have enumerated the ways in which the painter plays fast and loose with the facts here. News accounts tell us, for example, that the ship had been dismasted before setting out for Rotherhithe. From a contemporary print we learn that Turner moved the smoking funnel far to the fore of his tug; and a chart of the Thames makes plain that the westward course of the voyage has the sun setting, incongruously here, in the east.