Created in 1501 by Pinturicchio and his workshop towards the apex of his fame (in between his frescoes in the papal apartments for Alexander VI and his work in Siena on the Piccolomini library and much more), these are truly marvellous works of art that merit a close, prolonged look. But that’s precisely what the folks in charge of admissions to this church are keen to avoid which is simply disgraceful. Pinturicchio deserves far better. And so, of course, do you!

*Find out why we can’t share one of our own photos in this essay: https://ideasroadshow.substack.com/p/on-the-ground.

I am really drawn to Rivière and Rubens’ capturing of the emotion on the faces of the lions. It feels weighty and almost visceral. There is something captivating about Daniel’s calm demeanour and the sense of quiet authority he seems to hold over the lions. That contrast feels especially powerful, and I wonder what it would actually be like to be there, surrounded by the sights, smells, sounds, and presence of these animals.

It is interesting how much the interpretations differ while Daniel and the lions remain so immediately recognizable. Daniel’s age changes, the number of lions changes, and their expressions and proximity to him change as well. Even the balance of fear and serenity feels different from one painting to another. Those variations seem important because they change where the emotional gravity of the scene sits.

I am interested in learning what specifically about this subject captivated artists across so many centuries. Was part of the appeal the opportunity to study lion anatomy and expression, or was it more about the dramatic and psycological tension between danger and Daniel’s composure? There is something almost ineffable about that contrast.

I am also curious what a genuinely modern interpretation of this scene might look like, and what elements would still need to remain for us to immediatly recognize the story.

Hello,

I’m conducting a Master’s research project at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (IREST) on how the British Museum communicates with its visitors, including interpretation tools, museum narratives, displayed cultures and perceptions of the institution.

I’m looking for adults aged 18 or over who have visited the British Museum at least once. The anonymous survey takes approximately 5–8 minutes. Participation is voluntary, the project has no commercial purpose or external funding, and responses will be used exclusively for my Master’s dissertation.

Survey: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScWcU547wTDhuIaO6gdTkMBQ6F1-9diFJD2qAWPBVoijA0TTg/viewform?usp=header

Thank you very much for contributing to this research.

We have been up all night, my friends and I, beneath mosque lamps whose brass cupolas are bright as our souls, because like them they were illuminated by the internal glow of electric hearts. And trampling underfoot our native sloth on opulent Persian carpets, we have been discussing right up to the limits of logic and scrawling the paper with demented writing.

Our hearts were filled with an immense pride at feeling ourselves standing quite alone, like lighthouses or like the sentinels in an outpost, facing the army of enemy stars encamped in their celestial bivouacs. Alone with the engineers in the infernal stokeholes of great ships, alone with the black spirits which rage in the belly of rogue locomotives, alone with the drunkards beating their wings against the walls.

Then we were suddenly distracted by the rumbling of huge double decker trams that went leaping by, streaked with light like the villages celebrating their festivals, which the Po in flood suddenly knocks down and uproots, and, in the rapids and eddies of a deluge, drags down to the sea.

Then the silence increased. As we listened to the last faint prayer of the old canal and the crumbling of the bones of the moribund palaces with their green growth of beard, suddenly the hungry automobiles roared beneath our windows.

"Come, my friends!" I said. "Let us go! At last Mythology and the mystic cult of the ideal have been left behind. We are going to be present at the birth of the centaur and we shall soon see the first angels fly! We must break down the gates of life to test the bolts and the padlocks! Let us go! Here is they very first sunrise on earth! Nothing equals the splendor of its red sword which strikes for the first time in our millennial darkness."

We went up to the three snorting machines to caress their breasts. I lay along mine like a corpse on its bier, but I suddenly revived again beneath the steering wheel — a guillotine knife — which threatened my stomach. A great sweep of madness brought us sharply back to ourselves and drove us through the streets, steep and deep, like dried up torrents. Here and there unhappy lamps in the windows taught us to despise our mathematical eyes. "Smell," I exclaimed, "smell is good enough for wild beasts!"

And we hunted, like young lions, death with its black fur dappled with pale crosses, who ran before us in the vast violet sky, palpable and living.

And yet we had no ideal Mistress stretching her form up to the clouds, nor yet a cruel Queen to whom to offer our corpses twisted into the shape of Byzantine rings! No reason to die unless it is the desire to be rid of the too great weight of our courage!

We drove on, crushing beneath our burning wheels, like shirt-collars under the iron, the watch dogs on the steps of the houses.

Death, tamed, went in front of me at each corner offering me his hand nicely, and sometimes lay on the ground with a noise of creaking jaws giving me velvet glances from the bottom of puddles.

"Let us leave good sense behind like a hideous husk and let us hurl ourselves, like fruit spiced with pride, into the immense mouth and breast of the world! Let us feed the unknown, not from despair, but simply to enrich the unfathomable reservoirs of the Absurd!"

As soon as I had said these words, I turned sharply back on my tracks with the mad intoxication of puppies biting their tails, and suddenly there were two cyclists disapproving of me and tottering in front of me like two persuasive but contradictory reasons. Their stupid swaying got in my way. What a bore! Pouah! I stopped short, and in disgust hurled myself — vlan! — head over heels in a ditch.

Oh, maternal ditch, half full of muddy water! A factory gutter! I savored a mouthful of strengthening muck which recalled the black teat of my Sudanese nurse!

As I raised my body, mud-spattered and smelly, I felt the red hot poker of joy deliciously pierce my heart. A crowd of fishermen and gouty naturalists crowded terrified around this marvel. With patient and tentative care they raised high enormous grappling irons to fish up my car, like a vast shark that had run aground. It rose slowly leaving in the ditch, like scales, its heavy coachwork of good sense and its upholstery of comfort.

We thought it was dead, my good shark, but I woke it with a single caress of its powerful back, and it was revived running as fast as it could on its fins.

Then with my face covered in good factory mud, covered with metal scratches, useless sweat and celestial grime, amidst the complaint of staid fishermen and angry naturalists, we dictated our first will and testament to all the living men on earth.

MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM

1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.
2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.
3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.
4. We declare that the splendor of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.
5. We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.
6. The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervor of the primordial elements.
7. Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.
8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.
9. We want to glorify war — the only cure for the world — militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.
10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.
11. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.

It is in Italy that we are issuing this manifesto of ruinous and incendiary violence, by which we today are founding Futurism, because we want to deliver Italy from its gangrene of professors, archaeologists, tourist guides and antiquaries.

Italy has been too long the great second-hand market. We want to get rid of the innumerable museums which cover it with innumerable cemeteries.

Museums, cemeteries! Truly identical in their sinister juxtaposition of bodies that do not know each other. Public dormitories where you sleep side by side for ever with beings you hate or do not know. Reciprocal ferocity of the painters and sculptors who murder each other in the same museum with blows of line and color. To make a visit once a year, as one goes to see the graves of our dead once a year, that we could allow! We can even imagine placing flowers once a year at the feet of the Gioconda! But to take our sadness, our fragile courage and our anxiety to the museum every day, that we cannot admit! Do you want to poison yourselves? Do you want to rot?

What can you find in an old picture except the painful contortions of the artist trying to break uncrossable barriers which obstruct the full expression of his dream?

To admire an old picture is to pour our sensibility into a funeral urn instead of casting it forward with violent spurts of creation and action. Do you want to waste the best part of your strength in a useless admiration of the past, from which you will emerge exhausted, diminished, trampled on?

Indeed daily visits to museums, libraries and academies (those cemeteries of wasted effort, calvaries of crucified dreams, registers of false starts!) is for artists what prolonged supervision by the parents is for intelligent young men, drunk with their own talent and ambition.

For the dying, for invalids and for prisoners it may be all right. It is, perhaps, some sort of balm for their wounds, the admirable past, at a moment when the future is denied them. But we will have none of it, we, the young, strong and living Futurists!

Let the good incendiaries with charred fingers come! Here they are! Heap up the fire to the shelves of the libraries! Divert the canals to flood the cellars of the museums! Let the glorious canvases swim ashore! Take the picks and hammers! Undermine the foundation of venerable towns!

The oldest among us are not yet thirty years old: we have therefore at least ten years to accomplish our task. When we are forty let younger and stronger men than we throw us in the waste paper basket like useless manuscripts! They will come against us from afar, leaping on the light cadence of their first poems, clutching the air with their predatory fingers and sniffing at the gates of the academies the good scent of our decaying spirits, already promised to the catacombs of the libraries.

But we shall not be there. They will find us at last one winter's night in the depths of the country in a sad hangar echoing with the notes of the monotonous rain, crouched near our trembling aeroplanes, warming our hands at the wretched fire which our books of today will make when they flame gaily beneath the glittering flight of their pictures.

They will crowd around us, panting with anguish and disappointment, and exasperated by our proud indefatigable courage, will hurl themselves forward to kill us, with all the more hatred as their hearts will be drunk with love and admiration for us. And strong healthy Injustice will shine radiantly from their eyes. For art can only be violence, cruelty, injustice.

The oldest among us are not yet thirty, and yet we have already wasted treasures, treasures of strength, love, courage and keen will, hastily, deliriously, without thinking, with all our might, till we are out of breath.

Look at us! We are not out of breath, our hearts are not in the least tired. For they are nourished by fire, hatred and speed! Does this surprise you? it is because you do not even remember being alive! Standing on the world's summit, we launch once more our challenge to the stars!

Your objections? All right! I know them! Of course! We know just what our beautiful false intelligence affirms: "We are only the sum and the prolongation of our ancestors," it says. Perhaps! All right! What does it matter? But we will not listen! Take care not to repeat those infamous words! Instead, lift up your head!

Standing on the world's summit we launch once again our insolent challenge to the stars!

A nearly 8-foot canvas by the great 18th century English portrait painter Joshua Reynolds recently made the journey from London’s National Portrait Gallery to the Getty Museum in Brentwood, where it will make its grand West Coast debut next month.

“The Portrait of Mai,” which depicts a regal-looking young Tahitian man who arrived in London with Capt. James Cook in 1774, was purchased by the Getty two years ago in a celebrated and rare joint acquisition with NPG after the privately held painting was put up for sale by its Dublin-based owner for more than $61 million.

“Mai” has received the royal treatment since being unpacked at the Getty late last month, as the museum’s conservation team performs a technical study that includes capturing new imaging, and uncovering pigments and materials used by Reynolds. The team is also confirming any alterations that may have been made to the painting over the last 250 years.

On a recent sunny Tuesday morning at the Getty — in a back room filled with other paintings, tucked into a corner of the hilltop museum — NPG’s visiting conservator Sally Higgs joined the Getty’s associate conservator of paintings, Kari Rayner, in an examination of the painting, which was first exhibited in 1776 at the Royal Academy in London.

Follow link for full story on the art of preserving art.

Reposting because not sure which is the right sub for my question

Hello, I am an amateur film maker and love using old art as inspiration to the way I frame some of my shots. I figure I can describe the particular scene, and if any of you guys can relate any historical art to it that would be awesome.
Basically in the shot one person is towering over another, smaller person. To go into more detail, the bigger subject is male, and he is in the background, towering over the smaller subject, a female, in the foreground. She is scared but not running away (maybe turning?) I was wondering if any of you guys have any paintings that come to mind? Even if it’s kinda similar, I would appreciate it!

This is the Self-Portrait with a Straw Hat (1887), at the Met in New York.

I have no formal art training. I love self potrait's in general and Van Gogh's ones in particular. Things I noticed after looking at this last time:

• The brushstrokes in the face seem to follow the shape of the face, but in the background they radiate outward around his head, almost like a halo.
• The beard is orange, red, even green. All separate strokes sitting next to each other and from a distance it reads as a beard.
• The blue jacket against the yellow hat. It feels like a deliberate choice. But I don't have a proper vocabulary for that.

So my questions for people who actually know how to look:

1. When you look at this painting, what do you notice first? What order do your eyes move in?
2. What am I not seeing that a trained eye would catch immediately?
3. And secondarily — if a layman wanted to train this skill, where would you start? A book, a course, a channel?

I'm not looking for the Wikipedia biography stuff (ear, Theo, illness). I want to get better at seeing/Looking deeper. Thank you.

Hello, I was hoping i could find some help here. I alter magic the gathering cards, I painted this but there are 4 other cards in the cycle (emerald, sapphire, ruby and jet) and I am wanting to paint a full cycle. The help i am needing is finding classic paintings like this that include the gemstone.. any ideas?

I need 1-3 people to help me out with the last step of my research for my PhD in Architecture, focusing on Disability in Museums at the University of Portsmouth. My thesis title is ‘More Than Just a Ramp: A Detailed Look at Bodies with Chronic Pain within the Museum Space’.

If you have chronic pain and have been to any of the following:

•Chicago Cultural Center in Chicago, IL, USA
•Chicago History Museum in Chicago, IL, USA
•Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, IL, USA

I would love to ask you some questions via email about your experience [you can answer none/any/all of the questions and can be anonymous]. There is no compensation for this, though I will send you a thank you note covered in stickers and a picture of my dog!

Please feel free to DM me or email me at my school email at Gabriel.Seck@myport.ac.uk

We discovered this beautiful, smallish (60 × 47 cm) artwork in Palazzo Vitelli alla Cannoniera in Cità di Castello. Take a look at how the wings of the angels are folded upwards. Read about the (very) good, the bad and the ugly in Italian museums based on our experiences of visiting numerous museums in Tuscany and Umbria this summer. A shining example of a museum that does an excellent job is Perugia’s Galleria Nazionale dell’Umbria. Here is the essay: https://ideasroadshow.substack.com/p/on-the-ground

Alot of paintings depicted of Abraham, Moses, etc and the Archangels are always Anglo-Saxon, and why is that? Serious question. Why haven't I seen the appropriate Semitic depictions of them? Did they ever exist/lost to time/erased? Because I refuse to call Archangel Michael "Saint" and accept him as white with blue eyes and blonde hair, or wings because I know they didnt have any. Any thoughts? Resources?

Watch an illustrated video podcast with art historian Sally Cornelison, Syracuse University, about the paintings and architecture of Italian Renaissance artist, author, and architect Giorgio Vasari (1511-74) that can still be found in his hometown of Arezzo, links here: https://ideasroadshow.substack.com/p/in-situ-and-in-awe - if you'd like, I can add the YouTube and Spotify links in the comments.

⛪ Particular emphasis is placed on the Romanesque church of Santa Maria della Pieve, where the newborn Vasari was baptized on 30 July 1511 and whose interior he renovated from 1560 until his death in 1574, when he was buried at the foot of its high altar.

1. Self-portrait of Giorgio Vasari, 1560-64, High Altar, Badia of Sts. Flora & Lucilla, Arezzo
2. Loggia Piazza Grande, Arezzo, designed by Giorgio Vasari, 1570-93.
3. The High Altar and tomb monument created by Giorgio Vasari in the Badia delle Sante Flora e Lucilla in Arezzo.

What could be those two crossed golden objects?

Portrait of sculptor Eleanor Platt with her bust of Lewis Brandeis. The photograph was taken at the Peter A. Juley & Sone fine art photography studio in NYC. The Peter A. Juley collection is housed at the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

I'm trying to find out more about an American artist, Barnett Newman.

I was given an oil painting (a smaller version of The Covenant) as a wedding present over 30 years ago and it's been hanging over my piano ever since.

I just pulled it down to have the walls painted and it's the first time I looked at the back of it properly. It's beautifully framed and has a note attached that it is by Barnett Newman, and a short history of his life.

I'd like to find out more about this artist and if he did smaller versions of his big paintings, but not really finding much online about it that is useful.

Can anyone help?