MICHELANGELO was 17 when a fellow student (‘a bestial and arrogant man’) punched him on the nose and broke it. It was a permanent disfigurement that this celebrant of male beauty felt keenly. Anger burned throughout his life. One papal patron, Leo X, dithered over commissioning the great artist: ‘But he is terribile; one cannot deal with him.’ Yet it was his terribilità, his ability to instil awe, terror or a sense of the sublime, that led contemporaries to call Read More
MICHELANGELO MERISI DA CARAVAGGIO (1571–1610) was a violent yob but a painter of genius. He did not invent chiaroscuro, dramatic contrasts of light, but he took it to expressive heights, darkening the shadows, transfixing a subject in a blinding beam. The dramatic tenebrism he perfected changed art. It pervades the Baroque and 19th century realism – and film noir. But the Baroque took Caravaggio’s theatricality without the psychological insight. He worked without preparatory sketches. His models were beggars, whores, riff-raff. Read More
HENRI ROUSSEAU (1844-1910) was born in Laval, Mayenne, into the family of a tinsmith (who went broke and had his house seized). After high school, where Henri excelled at drawing, he studied law but was caught cheating his employer, a solicitor, out of some petty cash and stamps and sent to jail for a month (1864). When released he joined the army. In 1871 he got a job as a customs official in Paris. Thus his nickname of ‘Le Douanier’. Read More
HOLLYWOOD, according to Orson Welles, was ‘the biggest electric train any boy ever had.’ It was a Mecca for the gifted, and ungifted. Herman Mankiewicz, co-author with Welles of Citizen Kane (1941), telegrammed screenwriter Ben Hecht – ‘Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots. Don’t let this get around.’ The cinema’s ‘Golden Age’ is 1927 (when sound started withAl Jolson’s The Jazz Singer) to 1960. 1960 marked key moments in screen history. The studios Read More
HENRI MATISSE (1869-1954) ‘In Matisse we see the decorative, in Picasso the destructive.’ It’s a traditional view, but a distortion. They were both figurative, both abstract. Both celebrated colour and line. They changed our sense of beauty; and they changed art forever. Matisse began the revolution, around 1904, with the ‘brutal’ colour of his ‘Fauve’ period (‘wild beast’). ‘Colours became sticks of dynamite,’ said André Derain, his fellow Fauve; but Matisse was less bombastic. He was finding out ‘how to Read More
‘Paris is the World, the rest of the Earth is nothing but its suburbs.’ So said the playwright Marivaux in 1734. Paris was then at its zenith, the largest city in Europe and unmatched for luxury and style. During the 11C, Paris had grown rich from the silver trade; and it lay on a strategic route for pilgrims and merchants. In medieval times relics drew hordes of pious tourists with disposable cash. King Louis IX (later Saint Louis) built Sainte-Chapelle Read More
‘Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.’ Shakespeare (Henry IV, Part 2) Edward II and Edward V were murdered in prison. So probably were Richard II and Henry VI. Richard III was killed in battle. Charles I was executed. But kingship brings perks: power, wealth, adulation. The throne gives you the right to whack foreigners, which Henry V, after a misspent youth, found he was good at. Henry II’s empire stretched from the Pyrenees to Scotland. You don’t rule Read More
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun (1755-1842) nearly lost her head during the French Revolution. She had chummied up to Ancien Régime society and Queen Marie Antoinette, painting over 30 portraits of the Queen and her family, and becoming her court painter. But Élisabeth escaped the guillotine, fleeing in 1789, and prospered abroad until finally returning to Paris in 1802. Her exile in the capitals of Europe was a progress of distinction; an international celebrity, she was feted for her art and Read More
Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746–1828) was a great artist – the most important Spanish painter between Velázquez and Picasso – and a great survivor. Like Jacques-Louis David in France, he was a court painter who portrayed champions of the old order and champions of the Enlightenment; the repressive and the liberal. He painted his patron, the Spanish king Charles IV, a feckless booby devoted to hunting and fiddling with clocks; and Charles’s son Ferdinand VII, a despotic incompetent Read More
EDGAR DEGAS (1834-1917) L’Absinthe (1875/6) may be about a powerful spirit made from wormwood (the ‘Green Fairy’) but it is art, not sociology. Phylloxera had devastated French vineyards, which made wine expensive. The cheapest way to oblivion was Absinthe. The picture is the essence of Degas: lowlifes, distraction, jagged planes, subtle palette. Sadness. And precise drawing (‘I am a colourist with line’). Space is suggested, not constructed; the zig-zags define it. ‘I thirst for order,’ he said. The lady’s splayed Read More