My Kid Could Paint That

Matthias Grünewald, The Visit of St Anthony to St Paul and Temptation of St Anthony, 1515

One of the most interesting features of the Northern Renaissance was its push towards permutation, not only of different artistic styles but also of different attitudes. Religious paintings became increasingly secular in aim and focus, while more secular works took on a transcendental/religious quality. Of the works that exemplify this shift, Grünewald's The Visit of St. Anthony and Temptation of St. Anthony shows just how gorgeous this permutation can be.

The painting itself is religious almost to a fault. The two scenes depicted show St. Anthony in various phases of his life, showcasing not only his permanence, but also his challenges as he attempted to bring his fiery rhetoric to non-believers. This sentiment, of austerity and boldness, is contrasted brilliantly by the languid and overgrown.

Enter James Blake.

James Blake's 2012 album Overgrown is largely an album of unrequited romances and failed ambitions. Nowhere on the album is that stated more boldly than the title track where Blake states, "I don't want to be a star/but a stone on the shore/a lone doorframe in a wall when everything's overgrown." Blake's production matches his sentiment, blending modern electronic beat programming and bass with a saturated piano line and elegiac pop strings. This idea of permanence, and having a message that lasts beyond your lifetime and into infinity, is at the root of St. Anthony's portrayal here.

Grünewald's presentation here is quite telling--not only are the colors somewhat darkened and disconnected, but the characters also exhibit a disconnection from their location in time. St. Paul, who lived way before St. Anthony, casually has a conversation with Anthony as if his anachronistic placement is nothing more than a slight misstep. The temptation has a similarly timeless quality, its monsters taken straight from a Bosch or Dali painting. All of this alludes to a divorce from notions of time and impermanence that Blake captures perfectly in "Overgrown."

Albrecht Dürer, The Great Piece of Turf, 1503

Leave it to Albrecht Dürer to make grass look divine.

Really, in almost any other context or with any other painter, a painting of turf would be exactly what you'd expect it to be--lifeless, plain, or insubstantial. But left to Dürer (read: Jesus), being a self-styled king among artists, it gains a depth, weight and an unexpected experimental edge that no one would've expected otherwise. But to anyone not looking deeply enough, it's turf. Gorgeous turf, but turf nonetheless. But let's just get one thing clear before going on:

Not looking is a grave mistake.

The most immediately interesting thing that Dürer presents comes in the form of the plants themselves. Full of life and variety, the collection lacks the uniformity of "regular" grass. While there are patches of similarity, they're punctuated by smaller sprouts that pop up and vie for the sunlight. Dürer captures this push for life perfectly, even without including external imagery like a sun or a sky. In addition to that, each plant is rendered in painstaking detail, to the point where even modern photographic technology struggles to match it. It's amazing even now to think of the hours, the days, that Dürer spent gazing at the ground, hoping to God (read: himself) that he could render it correctly.

But aside from this, there can't be anything else interesting about this painting, right?

Wrong.

Aside from the variety Dürer brings to this turf, there's also a wonderfully subtle degree of depth lent to the painting that helps it feel real, in a way that many nature paintings (or Renaissance paintings in general) lack. The leaves of the plant (please excuse my dearth of horticulture knowledge) sit elegiacally at the front of the painting, contrasting with the urgency that the sprouts provide.

Albrecht Dürer, The Great Piece of Turf (detail), 1503

There's almost a spiritual component to it in that the hierarchies that prevail throughout nature feel so perfectly rendered and accepted. Even the dirt, created using jarringly experimental watercolors, feels in place. Despite featuring an amazing amount of variation and detail, the painting never feels cluttered or forced, everything is in its right place. But aside from that, there's a certain tranquility to zooming into any part of the painting and finding a new layer or new bit of detail.

Ultimately, this painting demonstrates a lot of things. First and foremost would be, to most, Dürer's outstanding ability as a painter (mind you, this is post Jesus-self-portrait), but it also showcases a lot of the ways that the Northern Renaissance represented a mindshift.

In the North, there was a greater shift towards tangible, secular ideas, a recognition of science and economics and brutality. But this shift wasn't absolute, and there are bits of spiritual and religious tradition that slip into a lot of otherwise secular paintings. But this painting demonstrates the merging of the two traditions, that there could be something divine, something transcendent, about an absolutely scientific painting of grass.

All of that in a painting of grass, and you'd be crazy not to look deeper.

Donatello, David, 1440?

Donatello's David, renowned as the first free-standing bronze sculpture of the Renaissance, was quite controversial at time of release. While heralded as a great modern (at the time) work by some patrons, others considered it risque, especially in its nude and effeminate depiction of David. But one thing about the statue that has drawn considerable attention is David's hat. Being the only real article of clothing on the statue, it was bound to be imbued with speculative myths and hackneyed meaning.

But the actual hat itself is also quite enigmatic. The design of the hat is anachronistic of the time, it being more of an Italian mercenary's hat than anything that could have come out of the Biblical Era. And while the rest of the sculpture screams masculinity ...not, the hat at least conjures up the image of the violent Goliath and his supposed indomitable nature. But then there're the flowers.

While the hat itself seems out of place, what's weirder still is the presence of laurels and other flora. Taking an anachronistic hat and putting laurels (which are native to the Mediterranean region) on as accents seems like a bold move. But, this may make the sculpture better, at least historically. Unlike the Davids of other artists (read: Michelangelo), this David may indeed be more adherent to the Bible, depicting David as a somewhat weaker-looking person. In the narrative, David's weakness is extolled as a virtue, making its symbolic depiction here seem intentional.

Brunelleschi, Pazzi Chapel, 1460?

Brunelleschi, as an artist, ostensibly lost perspective. A perpetual number two to Ghiberti, his relief and painting work was also often overlooked in favor of other people's work. But, in the world of architecture, he was almost unrivaled in his brilliance. From the beautifully austere exteriors of his buildings (see: Pazzi Chapel), to their placement and humanist features, the architectural work of Brunelleschi trumps any of his other work, putting him in a building league all his own.

Michael Baxandall, a noted art historian, notes that Brunelleschi was a "rediscoverer" of perspective as an artistic positioning tool. His use of perspective in all of his different mediums showed him to be a special breed of academian, one that could take his pitfalls as a painter and fix them in his sculpture or his architecture. The somewhat rudimentary implementation of perspective in his paintings became wonderfully symmetrical architecture. The weird and uncouth dimensions on some of his figures would beget the sleek lines and perfect proportions of buildings like the Pazzi Chapel. Moreso than his greatest rival Ghiberti, Brunelleschi was a true renaissance man.

Raphael, School of Athens, 1511

What an exquisite back. I'm sure, at some point in time, someone looking to get their artistic weight up said something to that effect while looking at Ptolemy in Raphael's School of Athens. In fact, someone not looking deeply would likely mistake Ptolemy as an extra, one of only a handful of purposeless people in a sea of Super Important People.

Despite this cameo-as-afterthought, Ptolemy is actually just as important as Plato or Diogenes with regards to his contributions to the academic community. Known for his theories on mathematics and astronomy, he was one of the first to publish a book theorizing the distance between the Earth and the other planets. This tome, called the Almagest, was the main point of reference for astronomers and amateur stargazers alike for the next few hundred years. He also published a book called The Geography, which compiled the best and most comprehensive maps of the regions into one (somewhat) concise book.

Lorenzo Ghiberti, Jacob and Esau, 1425-52

This relief, titled Jacob and Esau, is another relief from Ghiberti's magnum opus, the East Doors or Gates of Paradise. Crafted sometime between 1425 and 1452, the relief looks to tell the story of the twin brothers as they fight over their respective birthrights. While other parts of the story (e.g. the selling of Esau's birthright for stew) are depicted in the periphery, the ultimate end to the the biblical story, their reconciliation, is depicted in the front of the relief.

Lorenzo Ghiberti, Gates of Paradise, 1425-52

There's something to be said for obsession. While never good in a vacuum, certain forms of obsession can help to create monumental things. This sentiment is evidence in Ghiberti's magnus opuses, a pair of gold and bronze doors dubbed by Michelangelo the "Gates of Paradise." Worked on excessively by Ghiberti through two commissions over 25 years, the doors show a meticulousness and attention to detail that is distinctly Ghiberti. While hardly resembling a gate (Michelangelo always did have a problem with distinctions), the so-called Gates of Paradise do indeed live up to a heavenly ideal, with their beautiful gold plates, all realizing scenes from the Bible. Ghiberti expertly crafted almost every part of this masterwork, lending an awesome amount of detail to each panel. Each face is emotive and relevant, even his own.

Yayoi Kusama, Aftermath of Obliteration of Eternity, 2009