Category Archives: Art

Art

James McNeill Whistler’s Arrangement in Grey and Black, No. 1 (1871)

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With Mother’s Day immi­nent it seemed appo­site to take a look at an image that has been endur­ing­ly asso­ci­at­ed with moth­er­hood, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the US, since the Vic­to­ri­an era: the famous Whistler’s Moth­er. James Abbott McNeill Whistler (1834–1903) was an Amer­i­can painter, based pri­mar­i­ly in Eng­land, and a lead­ing pro­po­nent of “art for art’s sake”, that cre­do which con­sid­ered art to have intrin­sic val­ue quite sep­a­rate from any moral or didac­tic func­tion. He was all about tonal har­mo­ny and saw par­al­lels between paint­ing and music, even enti­tling many of his paint­ings as “arrange­ments”, “har­monies”, and “noc­turnes” — his Whistler’s Moth­er is only col­lo­qui­al­ly so-called and was real­ly called Arrange­ment in Grey and Black.

The sub­ject of the paint­ing is, unsur­pris­ing­ly, Whistler’s moth­er, Anna McNeill Whistler, who was liv­ing with the artist in Lon­don at the time. The sto­ry goes that Anna Whistler was only act­ing as a sub­sti­tute because the orig­i­nal mod­el couldn’t make the sit­ting, and although Whistler had envi­sioned his mod­el stand­ing up, his moth­er was just too uncom­fort­able to pose upright for long peri­ods of time so insist­ed on sit­ting down.

The work was shown at the 104th Exhi­bi­tion of the Roy­al Acad­e­my of Art in Lon­don in 1872, after nar­row­ly avoid­ing rejec­tion by the Acad­e­my (a bone of con­tention for Whistler for many years after). It seems that all these weird ideas Whistler held about “arrange­ments” and so on just didn’t sit well with the stuffed shirts of the Acad­e­my, and they insist­ed on adding an explana­to­ry adjunct, “Por­trait of the Painter’s moth­er”, to Whistler’s title. Whistler even­tu­al­ly sold the paint­ing, which was acquired in 1891 by Paris’s Musée du Lux­em­bourg and  is now housed in the Musée d’Or­say.

In 1934, the US Post Office Depart­ment issued a stamp engraved with the por­trait detail from Whistler’s Mother, bear­ing the slo­gan “In mem­o­ry and in hon­or of the moth­ers of Amer­i­ca”. In that spir­it, this blog is writ­ten in mem­o­ry and hon­our of my own love­ly mum, and to moth­ers every­where!

Whistler’s Moth­er
Art

George Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières (1884)

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One of the great trea­sures in the trove that is London’s Nation­al Gallery is this mas­ter­piece of Neo-Impres­sion­ism, George Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières. It’s actu­al­ly one of a pair of Seu­rat mas­ter­pieces, along­side A Sun­day After­noon on the Island of La Grande Jat­te (held at the Art Insti­tute of Chica­go), with each sis­ter paint­ing depict­ing one side of the Seine riv­er and por­tray­ing the dif­fer­ent lev­els of French soci­ety that fre­quent­ed them in their leisure time: the wealthy soci­ety relax­ing at La Grande Jat­te and the work­ing-class res­i­dents hang­ing out on the left bank at Asnières.

The two paint­ings are lead­ing exam­ples of the tech­nique devel­oped by Seu­rat and known as pointil­lism, involv­ing the use of thou­sands of small, dis­tinct dots of colour and rely­ing on the abil­i­ty of the eye and the mind of the view­er to blend the indi­vid­ual dots into a fuller range of tones. The term was actu­al­ly first used in a pejo­ra­tive sense to mock Seu­rat (a reac­tion com­mon­ly expe­ri­enced by art pio­neers of course) but it stuck, and the tech­nique is rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the hunt by artists in the 1880s for inter­est­ing new meth­ods.

Here, we’re focus­ing on the work­ing-class res­i­dents of the city. They line this pic­turesque spot by the riv­er as they enjoy the sun­shine. There are around five fig­ures in the fore­ground and down the bank we see oth­er peo­ple and boats in the back­ground, plus a cityscape behind that. All of the build­ings are low lev­el and don’t take too much atten­tion from the fig­ures near­est us. There are no trees (unlike at La Grande Jat­te where the bour­geoisie enjoy the shade) and the char­ac­ters are flood­ed with sun­light.

Seu­rat was just 24 when Bathes at Asnières marked his arrival into the art world. The paint­ings are mon­u­men­tal­ly sized (15 by 6.5 feet) and Seu­rat knew that size would need to be met with tech­ni­cal bril­liance and so he pre­pared very care­ful­ly with thir­teen oil sketch­es and ten draw­ings before embark­ing on the real thing. In the end, he achieved a stun­ning lumi­nos­i­ty and plen­ty of inter­est to hold the view­er’s atten­tion. Sad­ly, Seu­rat died at just 31 and so we will nev­er know what sort of direc­tion his style might have tak­en in the next decades.

Bathers at Asnières
Art

William-Adolphe Bouguereau’s Bacchante (1894)

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The art world is a fun­ny old fish when it comes to “what’s hot and what’s not” and it was ever thus; unless you’re a bolt­ed-on, world-renowned big name like your Rem­brandts and your Van Goghs, you might find your­self in or out of fash­ion. Take William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905). Many peo­ple out­side (and prob­a­bly inside) of France have nev­er heard of him, and yet he was one of France’s pre­em­i­nent aca­d­e­m­ic painters in the lat­ter half of the nine­teenth cen­tu­ry.

Bouguereau exe­cut­ed some 822 known paint­ings dur­ing his career, often por­tray­ing quin­tes­sen­tial­ly clas­si­cal and mytho­log­i­cal sub­jects: Cupid and Psy­che, the Birth of Venus, nymphs and satyrs and so on, as well as a large body of slick reli­gious works, pas­torals, and coy­ly erot­ic nudes. His por­traits were ren­dered with near-pho­to­graph­ic verisimil­i­tude and with a con­sum­mate lev­el of skill and craft. Giv­en that a high per­cent­age of his works are life-size, it is one of the largest bod­ies of work ever pro­duced by any artist. So what went wrong?

Well, Bouguereau rep­re­sent­ed the “old guard”, an uphold­er of tra­di­tion­al val­ues and indeed one who con­trived to exclude avant-garde work from the Salon ( the offi­cial art exhi­bi­tion of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris). Cézanne once expressed regret at being reject­ed by the ‘Salon de Mon­sieur Bouguereau’. In oth­er words, he was a dinosaur and des­tined to be over­shad­owed by the Impres­sion­ists and the mod­ernists of the dawn­ing new cen­tu­ry; his rep­u­ta­tion sank after his death and for many years his work was regard­ed as irre­deemably passé. He has, how­ev­er, recent­ly achieved some­thing of a reha­bil­i­ta­tion, and these days his works fetch huge prices at the auc­tion room. Quite right too, he was bril­liant.

A rep­re­sen­ta­tive work is this 1894 piece, Bac­cha­nte. A bac­cha­nte was a priest­ess or fol­low­er of Bac­chus, the god of wine and intox­i­fi­ca­tion, and, whilst in the Greek myths they are often depict­ed as wild women, run­ning through the for­est, tear­ing ani­mals to pieces, and engag­ing in oth­er acts of fren­zied debauch­ery, Bouguereau here choos­es to por­tray his Bac­cha­nte ‘before the par­ty’!

 

Art

Raphael’s The School Of Athens (1511)

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Back in 2006 I went to Rome, vis­it­ed the tombs of Keats and Shel­ley, sat on the Span­ish Steps, had my cam­era stolen on the sub­way (hol­i­days are often mixed affairs, after all), dis­cov­ered a pen­chant for liquorice liqueur, mar­velled at the Col­i­se­um, got a sore neck look­ing up at St Mark’s Cathe­dral and the glo­ri­ous Sis­tine Chapel…and spent some time in con­tem­pla­tion of the famous fres­co that is the sub­ject of today’s blog. The School of Athens is one of four wall fres­coes in the Stan­za del­la Seg­natu­ra, the apart­ment in the Vat­i­can palace whose walls and ceil­ing were paint­ed by Raphael between 1508 and 1511.

Raphael (Raf­fael­lo Sanzio da Urbino) was com­mis­sioned by Pope Julius II, the same man who also com­mis­sioned Michelan­ge­lo to paint the near­by Sis­tine Chapel (this Pope clear­ly knew his painters), and, like that work, the Stan­za del­la Seg­natu­ra is an embod­i­ment of all that was great about the clas­si­cal spir­it of the Renais­sance. It’s hard to think of a bet­ter sym­bol for the mar­riage of art, phi­los­o­phy, and sci­ence that was the hall­mark of the Ital­ian Renais­sance than The School of Athens.

The fres­coes depict the themes of phi­los­o­phy, the­ol­o­gy, lit­er­a­ture and jus­tice, and per­son­i­fi­ca­tions of the same four themes dec­o­rate the ceil­ing. The School of Athens, rep­re­sent­ing phi­los­o­phy, is notable for its accu­rate per­spec­ti­val pro­jec­tion, which Raphael learned from Leonar­do da Vin­ci (whose like­ness Raphael used for the cen­tral fig­ure of this paint­ing, Pla­to). The two cen­tral fig­ures are Pla­to and Aris­to­tle, each hold­ing a copy of one of their books (Plato’s Timaeus and Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics), and around them is an assort­ment of fig­ures from the worlds of phi­los­o­phy and the nat­ur­al sci­ences, includ­ing Socrates, Pythago­ras, Euclid and Ptole­my. If you’re ever in Rome, be sure to vis­it the Stan­za del­la Seg­natu­ra, but do look after your cam­era!

Art

Caravaggio’s The Calling of St Matthew (1600)

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For the arche­type of the dan­ger­ous­ly pas­sion­ate artist, go no fur­ther than Car­avag­gio. Car­avag­gio (full name Michelan­ge­lo Merisi da Car­avag­gio, 1571–1610) lived a tumul­tuous life in Rome in the late 16th cen­tu­ry, paint­ing mas­ter­pieces in between being locked away for var­i­ous offences usu­al­ly involv­ing brawl­ing and assault. Many records exist of his being sued for one infrac­tion or anoth­er: he was sued by a wait­er for throw­ing arti­chokes in his face; he was sued by his land­la­dy for not pay­ing his rent and then for van­dal­ism when he threw rocks through her win­dow. Usu­al­ly, Car­avag­gio was bailed out by wealthy patrons but when, in a duel in 1606, he actu­al­ly killed a local gang­ster, he was forced to go on the run and he spent the final four years of his life mov­ing between Naples, Mal­ta, and Sici­ly. Thus, Car­avag­gio, like none oth­er, com­pels us to sep­a­rate the artist from his art.

But what an art: Car­avag­gio employed close phys­i­cal obser­va­tion with a dra­mat­ic use of chiaroscuro (the use of strong con­trasts between light and dark) that came to be known as tene­brism. He used the tech­nique to trans­fix sub­jects in bright shafts of light between dark shad­ows, and since he often chose cru­cial moments and scenes from the Bible and lit­er­a­ture, his works were often vivid­ly expressed dra­ma. He worked rapid­ly, with live mod­els, pre­fer­ring to for­go draw­ings and instead work direct­ly onto the can­vas: if he had been a snook­er play­er he would have been Hur­ri­cane Hig­gins.

A case in point is The Call­ing of St Matthew, held in the Con­tarel­li Chapel, Rome, and depict­ing the sto­ry from the Gospel of Matthew: “Jesus saw a man named Matthew at his seat in the cus­tom house, and said to him, ‘Fol­low me’, and Matthew rose and fol­lowed Him.” Car­avag­gio depicts Matthew the tax col­lec­tor sit­ting at a table with four oth­er men. Jesus Christ and Saint Peter have entered the room, and Jesus is point­ing at Matthew. A beam of light illu­mi­nates the faces of the men at the table as they stare at the new arrivals. When you look at the pic­ture, you could be for­giv­en for won­der­ing which sit­ter is Matthew: is the beard­ed man point­ing to the slumped fig­ure (“Who, him?”) or at him­self (“Who, me?”). For­tu­nate­ly, two oth­er paint­ings sit along­side this one in the chapel (The Mar­tyr­dom of St Matthew and The Inspi­ra­tion of St Matthew) and they fea­ture the same beard­ed man unequiv­o­cal­ly play­ing Matthew.

Car­avag­gio, The Call­ing of Saint Matthew
Art

Edgar Degas’s The Dance Class (1874)

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The writer Edmond de Goncourt wrote in his jour­nal in 1873: “Yes­ter­day I spent the after­noon in the stu­dio of a painter named Degas. Out of all the sub­jects in mod­ern life he has cho­sen wash­er­women and bal­let dancers”. That same year Edgar Degas (1834–1917) would join forces with Mon­et, Renoir, and Cézanne, to exhib­it paint­ings under the ban­ner of Impres­sion­ism and would go on to achieve fame as one of the world’s great artists and ren­der­ers of move­ment. Half of his prodi­gious out­put (of 1200 or so works) depict­ed dancers and the world they inhab­it­ed, and he claimed the bal­let for mod­ern art as Cézanne claimed the land­scape and Mon­et the haystacks and lilies.

In the 1870s Edgar Degas had become fas­ci­nat­ed with bal­let dancers, pay­ing fre­quent vis­its to the mag­nif­i­cent Palais Gar­nier, home of the Paris Opéra and its Bal­let. He haunt­ed the wings and stalked the class­es where the Opèra’s bal­let mas­ter, Jules Per­rot, trained groups of young girls. He would be con­stant­ly sketch­ing his obser­va­tions and accu­mu­lat­ing ideas for paint­ings to ren­der lat­er in his stu­dio. Degas’s pic­tures of bal­leri­nas per­form­ing onstage con­vey exquis­ite­ly the bal­ance, grace and radi­ance of the dancers, whilst at oth­er times, Degas stripped away the poet­ry and illu­sion to show the hard work behind the scenes: the hang­ing around, the stretch­ing at the bar, the rub­bing of sore mus­cles, the tying of shoes.

It is at this point that I should sig­nal the need to sep­a­rate art from real­i­ty, for the real­i­ty of the bal­let was that it had a sor­did under­bel­ly. The dancers were usu­al­ly young, poor, vul­ner­a­ble and ripe for exploita­tion by abon­nés, the name for wealthy male sub­scrip­tion hold­ers who often lurked in the foy­ers, and there was more than a hint of pros­ti­tu­tion (often with their moth­ers in col­lu­sion, des­per­ate I sup­pose to push their daugh­ters up the lad­der). The glam­our was only on the sur­face.

To defend Degas from the obvi­ous fleet­ing thought, how­ev­er (although his char­ac­ter may be called into ques­tion for var­i­ous oth­er rea­sons such as mis­an­thropy and anti-semi­tism), it is under­stood that his rela­tion­ship to the dancers was pater­nal and pro­fes­sion­al rather than preda­to­ry.

Of the sev­er­al hun­dred Degas paint­ings to choose from, here’s one that fea­tures the old Per­rot school­ing his bal­leri­nas in The Dance Class (1874), with the dancers in var­i­ous stages of prepa­ra­tion. The girl on the left appears to be look­ing at her mobile phone!

The Dance Class
The Dance Class
Art

Grant Wood’s American Gothic (1930)

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Grant Wood (1891–1942) was an Amer­i­can painter best known for his paint­ings depict­ing the rur­al Amer­i­can Mid­west, par­tic­u­lar­ly Amer­i­can Goth­ic (1930), which has become an icon­ic exam­ple of 20th cen­tu­ry Amer­i­can art. Wood was born in rur­al Iowa and received his art train­ing at the Art Insti­tute of Chica­go before mak­ing sev­er­al trips to Europe to study Impres­sion­ism and post-Impres­sion­ism. He always returned to Iowa, how­ev­er, and had a stu­dio at the house he shared with his moth­er in Cedar Rapids. He was a major pro­po­nent of the art move­ment known as Amer­i­can Region­al­ism which arose in the 1930s as a response to the Great Depres­sion, and incor­po­rat­ed paint­ings, murals, lith­o­graphs, and illus­tra­tions depict­ing real­is­tic scenes of rur­al and small-town Amer­i­ca.

It was while dri­ving around the town of Eldon, Iowa, look­ing for inspi­ra­tion, that Wood spot­ted the Dib­ble House, a quaint small white frame house and con­sid­ered it just right for his pur­pos­es. So why “Amer­i­can Goth­ic”? Well, the house is built in the so-called Car­pen­ter Goth­ic style, an archi­tec­tur­al style bor­row­ing ideas from Goth­ic archi­tec­ture but ren­der­ing it in wood. Here’s the Dib­ble House below, with its arched Goth­ic style win­dow clear­ly shown.

The Dib­ble House

Wood want­ed to add fig­ures of peo­ple he fan­cied should live in that house: a farmer and his daugh­ter. He chose for his mod­els his sis­ter Nan Wood Gra­ham and their den­tist Dr Byron McK­ee­by. The woman is dressed in a colo­nial print apron while the man is adorned in over­alls cov­ered by a suit jack­et and car­ries a pitch­fork. It’s an odd blend, and some took it ini­tial­ly as a mock­ery of “the kind of peo­ple” who might live in such a house, but this was far from the intent of the artist who wished to sim­ply cre­ate an authen­tic depic­tion of real peo­ple in his home state.

Wood’s mod­els: his sis­ter and den­tist

Amer­i­can Goth­ic became one of the most famil­iar images of Amer­i­can art and has been wide­ly par­o­died in Amer­i­can pop­u­lar cul­ture. Exu­ber­ant it ain’t, but it some­how cap­tures a stead­fast spir­it befit­ting of the con­text in which it was paint­ed.


Grant Wood
Art

Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas (1656)

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The Span­ish Gold­en Age of flour­ish­ing arts and lit­er­a­ture in Spain coin­cid­ed with the Span­ish Empire’s polit­i­cal and mil­i­tary dom­i­nance in the 16th and 17th cen­turies, rough­ly dur­ing the reigns of the Hab­s­burg mon­archs Charles V, and the Philips II, III and IV of Spain. In lit­er­a­ture, Cer­vantes was writ­ing Don Quixote de la Man­cha (1605) and Lope de Vega was knock­ing out about 500 plays and 3000 son­nets between the 1580s and 1630s. In art, El Gre­co, Fran­cis­co de Zur­barán and Bar­tolomé Muril­lo flour­ished, as well as the lead­ing artist of them all, Diego Velázquez, who worked under the patron­age of King Philip IV between the 1620s and 1650s.

Velázquez’s ear­li­est works are bode­gones, kitchen or pantry scenes with promi­nent still-lifes and domes­tic activ­i­ty such as his Woman Fry­ing Eggs (1618) which I remem­ber being tak­en with many years ago dur­ing a vis­it to the Nation­al Gallery of Scot­land in Edin­burgh. How­ev­er, it was when he took to por­trai­ture that he gained the atten­tion of King Philip and was invit­ed to become court painter. Diego was able to thrive under Philip’s wing for the rest of his life. He pro­vid­ed por­traits for the court (he paint­ed Philip him­self over thir­ty times) and for lumi­nar­ies of the time such as Pope Inno­cent X, but was also giv­en the free­dom to paint less promi­nent per­son­al­i­ties such as Juan de Pare­ja, a for­mer slave and fel­low painter in his work­shop.

His mag­num opus, how­ev­er, was Las Meni­nas (The Ladies-in-wait­ing or Maids of Hon­our). Paint­ed in 1656 and now resid­ing in the Museo del Pra­do in Madrid, Las Meni­nas depicts the 5 year old Infan­ta Mar­garet There­sa sur­round­ed by her entourage of maids of hon­our, chap­er­one, body­guard, two dwarfs and a dog. Just behind them, Velázquez por­trays him­self work­ing at a large can­vas and look­ing out­wards towards the view­er. In the back­ground there is a mir­ror that reflects the upper bod­ies of the king and queen them­selves. Giv­en the expec­ta­tion that a court paint­ing would be a for­mal affair, Las Meni­nas’ com­plex and enig­mat­ic com­po­si­tion sur­pris­es us and cre­ates an uncer­tain rela­tion­ship between us and the fig­ures depict­ed. Because of its unusu­al nature, Las Meni­nas has been one of the most wide­ly analysed works in West­ern paint­ing, and it’s one of “the greats” that I hope to vis­it one day.

Diego Velázquez, detail from Las Meni­nas
Art

Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel Frescoes (c.1305)

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Before Raphael was Michelan­ge­lo, and before Michelan­ge­lo was Leonar­do, and before Leonar­do was Bot­ti­cel­li, and before Bot­ti­cel­li was Giot­to. Giot­to di Bon­done (c. 1267 – 1337) was a painter and archi­tect from Flo­rence dur­ing the Late Mid­dle Ages, work­ing before the great flour­ish­ing in the arts known as the Renais­sance. The 16th cen­tu­ry art his­to­ri­an, Gior­gio Vasari (inci­den­tal­ly, the first man to use the term Renais­sance in print), in his Lives of the Painters, cred­its Giot­to with break­ing tan­gi­bly away from the preva­lent Byzan­tine style and ini­ti­at­ing “the great art of paint­ing as we know it today, intro­duc­ing the tech­nique of draw­ing accu­rate­ly from life”.

His two great mas­ter­works were the design of the cam­panile at Flo­rence Cathe­dral, and the dec­o­ra­tion of the Scroveg­ni Chapel in Pad­ua. A third may well be the famous fres­coes in the Upper Basil­i­ca of Saint Fran­cis in Assisi, though this is dis­put­ed: sad­ly, giv­en the peri­od, many fea­tures of his life are hard to sub­stan­ti­ate.

Vasari tells some sto­ries about Giot­to that sound decid­ed­ly fan­ci­ful. Accord­ing to him, Giot­to was a shep­herd boy, dis­cov­ered by the great Flo­ren­tine painter Cimabue draw­ing pic­tures of his sheep on a rock. They were so life­like that Cimabue approached Giot­to and asked if he could take him on as an appren­tice. Anoth­er sto­ry recounts how Giot­to drew a life­like fly onto one of his master’s paint­ings and laughed when Cimabue tried sev­er­al times to brush the fly off. Yet anoth­er tells how the Pope request­ed to see an exam­ple of his artis­tic skill and Giot­to sim­ply sent him a per­fect cir­cle he had drawn in free­hand.

Fan­ci­ful sto­ries aside, there’s no doubt­ing the achieve­ment of the Scroveg­ni Chapel fres­coes. The sub­ject mat­ter is not unusu­al for church dec­o­ra­tion in medieval Italy, being cen­tred on the lives of the Vir­gin Mary and Christ, but the style for the day was sen­sa­tion­al: solid­ly three-dimen­sion­al, with faces and ges­tures based on close obser­va­tion, and the char­ac­ters clothed in gar­ments that hang nat­u­ral­ly and have form and weight. The expan­sive use of ultra­ma­rine blue pig­ment is remark­ably effec­tive: when you look at the chapel as a whole, it seems awash with blue (albeit fad­ed with time, sad­ly).

I’ll fin­ish with anoth­er sto­ry that’s prob­a­bly apoc­ryphal (but who knows?). The great poet Dante vis­it­ed Giot­to while he was paint­ing the Scroveg­ni Chapel and, see­ing the artist’s chil­dren flit­ting around, asked (rude­ly) how a man who paint­ed such beau­ti­ful pic­tures could have such plain chil­dren. Giot­to, who, accord­ing to Vasari was always a wit, replied, “I make my pic­tures by day, and my babies by night”.

Giotto 1
Giotto 2
Giotto 3
Giotto 4
Art

Francisco Queirolo’s Escape From Deception (1754)

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In the his­toric cen­tre of Naples lies the San­severo Chapel, a for­mer church con­vert­ed into a fam­i­ly bur­ial chapel by the noble di San­gro fam­i­ly in 1613. In the 1750s, Rai­mon­do di San­gro, the Prince of San­severo, com­mit­ted the last years of his life to dec­o­rat­ing the chapel with great works of art. He had already had a rich life of enquiry and exper­i­men­ta­tion in the sci­ences and was well-known for his inven­tions as well as a deep involve­ment with alche­my and Freema­son­ry. How­ev­er, since Rai­mon­do had had run-ins with the Inqui­si­tion and had elect­ed to destroy his sci­en­tif­ic archive before his death, it is his artis­tic lega­cy that remains.

In par­tic­u­lar, he com­mis­sioned three sculp­tors to pro­duce a mar­ble sculp­ture each, name­ly Anto­nio Corradini’s Veiled Truth, Guiseppe Sanmartino’s Veiled Christ, and Francesco Queirolo’s Escape from Decep­tion. By good judge­ment or good luck – or, some said, by the mys­te­ri­ous pow­ers of the occult – Raimondo’s choice result­ed in all three sculp­tures turn­ing out to be amaz­ing mas­ter­pieces of exquis­ite skill.

Let’s look at just one of them. The Release from Decep­tion by Genoese sculp­tor Francesco Queiro­lo shows a man’s emer­gence from a fisherman’s net, guid­ed by an angel hov­er­ing above a globe as he untan­gles the man from the net. Every piece of this incred­i­ble sculp­ture is carved out of mar­ble, includ­ing the care­ful­ly craft­ed knots in the net draped around the fig­ure of the fish­er­man. The scene depict­ed is both bib­li­cal and alle­gor­i­cal, the net sym­bol­is­ing sin, world­li­ness or wrong-think­ing, and the angel help­ing the man to see the error of his ways.

The idea of one man, with his mal­lets and chis­els and rasps and rif­flers, strug­gling with one block of mar­ble to “free the form trapped inside the block”, as Michae­lan­ge­lo used to describe it, is a com­pelling one. I myself have only fleet­ing­ly passed through Naples, but if I ever return, I shall be seek­ing out the San­severo Chapel; I’d like to see this “in the flesh”, so to speak!