From the union, Minos, the most ancient of European civilizations, will be born on the island of Crete. Her brother, Cadmus, the inventor of writing, searched for her and founded the city of Thebes. This is the birth of civilization.
Well, it is a myth.
Ovid’s tale paints the bull’s nature as calm, stating “his forehead was not lowered for attack nor was there fury in his open eyes.” The bull’s expression was one of “love and peace.”
There is an argument by some that this painting eroticizes rape, that Europa’s facial expression is sexually explicit and bears “a look of ecstasy.”
The title of the work was originally Europa . The word rape was not added until fifty years after Titian’s death. Rape, or ratto, had a different meaning at the time of the painting, though; it meant abduction, to seize or take away by force.
However, in the myth, Europa did not fight the bull to stay with her father. While fearful, she did not resist. She was just another of Jupiter’s sexual conquests, the number of which is beyond counting. Leda, Danae, Callesto, Aphrodite, and Demeter were all the recipients of Jupiter’s lust.
The painting itself — how to appraise it in light of some of these arguments?
I’m relieved that it’s not clear at all that Europa is enjoying this ride! She’s holding on to Jupiter’s horn, or she’d slide down to the serpents below. She is gloriously plump, as ideal women were in those days. The cupid is chunky — no dieting here.
The bull’s eye is, I must agree, engrossing — if a bull’s eye can be said to have a personality then here’s one for you. Perhaps you might think that it’s only a muley-eyed bull, but the bull does seem to have an eye looking forward, an eye that conveys the message, “This is going to be fun!”
What do I feel seeing this? Hard to put into words. The bull is improbably gorgeous. Europa’s legs, breast, and throat are part of a lush symphony. A writhing crimson scarf ties into the soft pink sky reflecting the cherubs. It has the look of a painting that might have been created by Tchaikovsky. It is a bit hard to see the detail of the pink sky and fish below.
The Gardner was robbed early on the morning of March 18, 1990, by two men pretending to be policemen. They tied up the only two attendants, art students, and stole six pictures in about eighty-one minutes. One glorious Vermeer — The Concert , and he had only perhaps thirty-six in his total output — and a Rembrandt. They missed this painting in the next room.
JP
A Seated Scribe (1479–81)
Gentile Bellini (1429–1507)
Gentile Bellini,
A Seated Scribe, 1479–81
Pen in brown ink with watercolour and gold on paper, 18.2 x 14 x 2.6 cm
Purchase, 1907 (P15e8)
Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston
Photo credit: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum / Bridgeman Images
Sometimes you stumble upon a little painting that enthrals, just enthrals — often a fluke, a curious reaction, but nevertheless a real passion erupts.
Such is this, a pen and ink drawing (18 cm x 14 cm), created in a type of heavy watercolour (known as gouache).
A Seated Scribe is attributed to Gentile Bellini, though some authorities suggest that Costanzo da Ferrara from Naples is the artist. I think this is nonsense. I’ve looked at Costanzo’s stuff and Bellini’s. Gentile Bellini is so romantic that it must be his, just must be. Trust me on this.
Gentile Bellini was from a family of Venetian painters. His father, Jacopo, was famous for his use of oil paint. His brother, Giovanni, did the portrait of Doge Loredan (National Gallery, London), one of the greatest portraits of all time, and the Frick’s Saint Francis in the Desert .
Not many of Bellini’s works remain since many were large canvases that were hung in buildings that later burned. However, we know that in 1479 he was considered the most prestigious painter in Venice.
Such was his fame that when warfare between Venice and the Ottoman Empire stopped in 1479 and Venice negotiated a peace treaty with Sultan Mehmed II of Constantinople, Bellini was sent as an emissary of Venice to Constantinople for eighteen months to help cultivate good cultural relations.
Bellini was successful in Constantinople, partially because of his ability to draw patterns and lines, so important to the Eastern mind. So it was that Bellini found himself commissioned to paint Mehmed, who wanted to have his portrait done, an odd ambition for a Muslim Turk in 1480. There would be few such works, however, since the cultural thawing didn’t last beyond Mehmed. His successor considered representations of the human figure to be un-Islamic.
As well as his portrait of Mehmed, Bellini also created this work. Here is a young member of the Ottoman Court. He wears a navy caftan woven with gold, bright silks on his arms and neck (a striking mauve or light eggplant collar), and in the meringue folds of his turban, a ribbed red taj — the head gear worn during Mehmed’s reign. There is a touch of peach fuzz on his upper lip.
I love the gentleness of this, the delicacy of line, the ornate carpet of a caftan, the meringue of the turban, the crinkles of the magenta sleeves, the faraway look of the sitter, the exotic flimmer of it all. It lifts a parchment image from a golden manuscript and creates a whispered image. Look at the scrolls of material at his back seat — it is a blueprint for Frank Gehry’s architecture!
The sleeves remind me of Rembrandt’s caramel sleeves in his Jewish Bride in the Rijksmuseum, but this was created long before that painting. Think of this: 1480 is the time. Look at the caftan, gold patches, the white-grey designs, a ghostly image. This is 190 years before Vermeer and his patterns of thicker and more patchy rugs. It’s amazing — 190 years!
For those interested, there is a good novel, The Bellini Card by Jason Goodwin, about a Constantinople eunuch and detective being sent to Venice in 1840 to recover the vanished portrait of Mehmed.
JP
Museum of Fine Arts
4. Moonlit Landscape (1819)
Washington Allston (1779–1843)
Washington Allston, Moonlit Landscape , 1819
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
Photo credit: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston / Bridgeman Images
Years ago, I bought a very inexpensive but evocative, black-and-white, roughly hewn oil on board painting, called After Allston . Years later, I was in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and there it was, “the” Allston itself, tucked off in a little side gallery with other American Romantics. The full moonlight shimmering on the water under the little bridge — romantic indeed!
Washington Allston saw poetry and painting as a means of self-expression. After studies at Harvard and in New England, he sojourned abroad, meeting Samuel Taylor Coleridge, of “Kubla Khan” (“For he on honeydew hath fed, and drunk the milk of Paradise”) fame. The results of which must be the lyricism in Allston’s work. On his return to the United States, Allston focused on landscape, as seen here in Moonlit Landscape .
Moonlit Landscape depicts a journey made possible by the ambient light, although at what stage, we don’t know. Who are these travellers? Are they randomly meeting? The ambiguity, often found in Allston’s work, is tantalizing. From classical landscape, Allston frequently used the same motifs: discernable figures in the foreground, water as a focal point,