Giorgione (Venetians) & clouds: * see Endnote<A>

A splendid example of clouds is seen in Sleeping Venus (1510), typical of Giorgione's works, using pure, severe rhythm of line and contour to chasten the sensuous richness of the painting. The sweep of white drapery on which the goddess lies; and the glowing landscape that fills the space behind her frame her divinity. The use of an external landscape to frame a nude is innovative; but in addition she is shrouded in sleep, spirited away from accessibility to any conscious expression.  The piece was left unfinished; the landscape was completed after his death by Titian.  It is the prototype of Titian's own Venus of Urbino & of many others copied it though none attained the fame of this exemplar.  With Giorgione, Titian is considered the founder of the Venetian School.  He joined Giorgione as an assistant; their was a significant element of rivalry. Distinguishing between their work at this period is problematic; a number of attributions have moved from Giorgione to Titian recently with little traffic the other way. One of the earliest known Titian works, Christ Carrying the Cross (Scuola Grande di San Rocco, depicting the Ecce Homo scene) was long regarded as by Giorgione.  In 1507–1508 Giorgione, Titian and Morto da Feltre worked together on the frescos of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. After Giorgione's early death (1510), Titian continued to paint Giorgionesque subjects for some time, though his style developed its own features, including bold and expressive brushwork.  Titian’s best “clouds” are seen in Bacchus and Ariadne (1520-23)

 

Paolo Veronese (Venetians) & clouds: * see Endnote<B>

1528-88, Italian Renaissance painter, in Venice, known for large-format history paintings of religion & mythology, notable are The Wedding at Cana (1563) & The Feast in the House of Levi (1573).  With Titian & Tintoretto, he is 1 of the 3 great trio that dominated Venetian painting of the cinquecento.  A supreme colourist, influenced by Titian he developed a naturalist style of painting.  His most famous works are elaborate narrative cycles, executed in a dramatic and colourful style, full of majestic architectural settings and glittering pageantry. His large paintings of biblical feasts, crowded with figures, painted for the refectories of monasteries in Venice and Verona are especially famous, and he was also the leading Venetian painter of ceilings. His best works were such architectural decorations rather than smaller works such as portraits.  His Deposition of Christ (1547) amply illustrates his best “clouds”

 

Grunewald (tragic clouds): * see endnote<C>

 1470-1528, German Renaissance painter of religious works who ignored Renaissance classicism to continue the style of late medieval Central European art; only a few pieces of his work survive, all religious. His largest and most famous work is the Isenheim Altarpiece (1512-16)

the Netherlanders(tragic clouds): * see EndNote<D>

Early Netherlandish, aka Flemish Primitives, were artists active in the Burgundian & Habsburg Netherlands in the 15th & 16th-century Northern Renaissance, especially in Bruges, Ghent, Mechelen, Louvain, Tournai & Brussels (Belgium).  It begins with Robert Campin & Jan van Eyck in the 1420s & continues to the death of Gerard David in 1523 (some art historian also include Peter Bruegel the Elder as well).  It coincides with the Early & High Italian Renaissance although it is an independent artistic evolution, separate from Renaissance humanism until 1500.  Starting in the 1490s many Netherlandish & other Northern painters travelled to Italy where they incorporated Renaissance ideals & painting styles into Northern painting.  Early Netherlandish painters are often categorised as belonging to both the Northern Renaissance and the Late or International Gothic.  Major Netherlandish painters include Campin, van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Dieric Bouts, Petrus Christus, Hans Memling, Hugo van der Goes and Hieronymus Bosch.

 

El Greco (cloud-symbolism to Spain): *  see Endnote<E>

1541-1614, painter, sculptor & architect of the Spanish Renaissance. "El Greco" was a nickname, a reference to his Greek origin (he normally signed his paintings with his name in Greek); born in the Create, then part of the Republic of Venice & centre of Post-Byzantine art. He trained & became a master within that tradition before traveling age 26 to Venice; in 1570 he moved to Rome, opened a workshop and executed a series of works, enriched his style with elements of Mannerism & the Venetian Renaissance ( notably Tintoretto).  He moved to Toledo, Spain (1577), where he lived and worked until his death; here he received several major commissions & produced his best-known paintings.  His dramatic and expressionistic style was met with puzzlement in the 16th century; he is regarded as a precursor of both Expressionism and Cubism, his works a source of inspiration for poets and writers; an artist so individual that he belongs to no conventional school; best known for tortuously elongated figures & fantastic pigmentation, marrying Byzantine traditions with those of Western painting.

 

early Flemish artists (linear perspective):

The origins of the Flemish Primitives (Early Netherlandish) lie in the miniature paintings of the late Gothic period, first seen in manuscript illumination, which after 1380 conveyed new levels of realism, perspective and skill in rendering colour, peaking with the Limbourg brothers and the artist known as Hand G who was either Jan van Eyck or his brother Hubert & who illustrated the Turin-Milan Hours (1420).  In the 1420s Campin, van Eyck & van der Weyden established naturalism as the dominant style in northern European painting. They sought to show the world as it actually was, to depict people in a way that made them look more human, with a greater complexity of emotions than had been previously seen. This first generation were interested in the accurate reproduction of objects paying close attention to natural phenomena such as light, shadow and reflection. They moved beyond the flat perspective and outlined figuration of earlier painting in favour of 3D pictorial spaces.  The position of viewers and how they might relate to the scene became important for the first time.  The Reformation brought changes in outlook and artistic expression as secular and landscape imagery overtook biblical scenes.  Pieter Bruegel the Elder is a bridge between the Early Netherlandish artists & their successors. His work retains many 15th-century conventions, but his perspective and subjects are distinctly modern. Sweeping landscapes came to the fore in paintings that were provisionally religious or mythological, and his genre scenes were complex, with hints of religious scepticism & nationalism.

 

Brunelleschi (linear perspective):

In the early 15th century Brunelleschi painted 2 panels: the first being the Florentine Baptistery as viewed frontally from the western portal of the unfinished cathedral, the other is the Palazzo Vecchio seen obliquely from its NW corner.  These panels illustrate geometric optical linear perspective made.  The first Baptistery panel was constructed with a hole drilled through the centric vanishing point. Curiously, Brunelleschi intended that it only be observed by the viewer facing the Baptistery, looking through the hole in the panel, from the unpainted backside.  As a mirror was moved into and out of view, the observer saw the striking similarity between the actual view of the Baptistery, and the reflected view of the painted Baptistery image.  Brunelleschi wanted his new perspective "realism" to be tested not by comparing the painted image to the actual Baptistery but to its reflection in a mirror according to the Euclidean laws of geometric optics.  This showed artists how they might paint their images, not merely as flat 2D shapes, but looking more like 3D structures, just as mirrors reflect them.  Both panels have since been lost.  Around this time linear perspective, as a novel artistic tool, spread not only in Italy but throughout Western Europe. It quickly became, and remains, standard studio practice.

 

Alberti (linear perspective):

In 1435 Alberti began his first major written work, Della pittura, inspired by the pictorial art in Florence; he analyses the nature of painting & explores the elements of perspective, composition and colour.  He regarded mathematics as the common ground of art and the sciences.  This work relied in its scientific content on classical optics in determining perspective as a geometric instrument of artistic & architectural representation.  Albert was well versed in the sciences of his age; his knowledge of optics was based on the long-standing tradition of the Kitab al-manazir (The Optics by the Arab polymath Alhazen-Ibn al-Haytham, died. c. 1041), as mediated by Franciscan optical workshops of the 13th-century Perspectivae traditions, by scholars such as Roger Bacon, John Peckham and Witelo.  Albert stressed that the artist should be especially attentive to beauty.  Beauty was the harmony of all parts in relation to one another, realized in a particular number, proportion & arrangement demanded by harmony.  Such views could be traced back to Pythagoras.  The vernacular Italian version of Della pittura (1435) was for a general audience.  The Latin version, De pictura (1439–41) was more technical, intended for scholars.   It was the first in a trilogy of treatises on the "Major arts" which had a widespread circulation during the Renaissance, the others being De re aedificatoria ("On Architecture", 1454) and De statua ("On Sculpture", 1462).  De pictura described systematically the figurative arts through "geometry".  Alberti divided painting into 3 parts: drawing the bodies’ contours, tracing the lines joining the bodies & consideration of colours & light.  He described all the techniques & painting theories known at the time & included the first description of linear geometric perspective (of 1416).  Alberti credited this discovery to Brunelleschi, & dedicated the 1435 edition to him.  The work influenced artists including Donatello, Ghiberti, Botticelli & Ghirlandaio.  His treatment of perspective was the most influential of his recommendations, implemented by Leonardo da Vinci, and through him to the whole Italian renaissance.

 

Piero della Francesca (linear perspective):

He was trained in mathematics & had a deep interest in the theoretical study of perspective.  He wrote 3 treatises: Abacus Treatise, Short Book on the Five Regular Solids and On Perspective in painting (1474).  These include arithmetic, algebra, geometry & innovative work in both solid geometry & perspective.  He was also intensely interested in Classical mathematics.  In the late 1450s, he copied & illustrated the following works of Archimedes: On the Sphere and Cylinder, Measurement of a Circle, On Conoids and Spheroids, On Spirals, On the Equilibrium of Planes, The Quadrature of the Parabola, and The Sand Reckoner. 

 

Prime-Symbol:

This is classic Spengler.  Each civilization is centred on a fundamental archetype, its prime symbol, which it will actualize socially, artistically, politically, economically & scientifically.  The Apollonian prime symbol was the Body, the Egyptian was the Path, the Magian was the Magic Cave or cavern, the Faustian is Infinity.  Each prime symbol defines a range of possibilities of a given culture, civilization & influences they way it operates in the world.  For instance the Apollonian culture was focused on the point present of the nearby, the Faustian devote their energies to the ceiling less chase of infinity.  The idea is derived from Goethe, who refers to an archetype, (the originary phenomenon’ or Urphänomen).  This capable of morphing into a range of different particulars (see his The Metamorphosis of Plants, 1790) while remaining true to itself.  Goethe’s morphology posits that the defining quality of a thing or composite of things, their participation in particular forms, is guided by the archetype (the prime symbol), the fundamental & original theme.  His morphology is defines entities that exist on the intuition & expansion of harmonic sympathies between them, thereby avoiding a reductionist approach.  It is very much a biological approach.

(from Technic and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality, by Federico Campagna)

 

Imperial Age (ground-schemes of Eastern origin):

The Gardens of Lucullus were the setting for an ancient villa on the Pincian Hill on the edge of Rome; laid out by Lucius Licinius Lucullus (60 BC).  Luxury garden such as these originated in Persia; Pompey mockingly nicknamed Lucullus "the Roman Xerxes".  Lucullus had first-hand experience of the Persian gardening style, in the satraps' gardens of Anatolia ("Asia" to the Romans) and in Mesopotamia & Persia itself.  Plutarch noted that Lucullus was the first Roman to command an army over Taurus, past the Tigris, who took and burnt Sinope & Nisibis, across the Red sea and Arabia.  And like most of his fellow Romans, Plutarch, thought these occupations of Lucullus' retirement unbecoming to a Roman, and mere play.  The garden was filled with works of art, Greek sculpture, originals & copies of “old masters” (the statue of the 'Scythian knife was found in this garden).  Around 55 AD, mosaics excavated in the gardens provided the earliest known use of tesserae made with the technique of gold sandwich glass, an essential component of Byzantine mosaics.

 

L. B. Alberti (first garden-theorist):

1404-72, Italian humanist, famous as an architect but also was an author, poet, artist, priest, linguist, philosopher & cryptographer, a Renaissance Man.  He wrote the first Renaissance text to include garden design (On the Art of Building, 1443-52) where he drew upon the architectural principles of Vitruvius, quoted Pliny the Elder & the Younger to describe what a garden should look like, how it should be used.  He argued that a villa should both be looked at & a place to look from; that the house should be placed above the garden, where it could be seen and the owner could look down into the garden.  The garden should include porches giving shade, planters on marble columns, vases & amusing statues (but not obscene); rare plants & evenly alighted trees

 

Ludovisi villas (park): see endnote<F>

a suburban villa in Rome, built 17th century on the area once occupied by the Gardens of Sallust near the Porta Salaria (the great patrician pleasure grounds of Roman times).  On an assemblage of vineyards Cardinal Ludovico Ludovisi built in the 1620s the main villa to designs by Domenichino; it was to house his collection of Roman antiquities.

 

Albani villas (parks): * see endnote<G>

villa in Rome built at the Via Salaria for Cardinal Alessandro Albani, nephew of Pope Clement XI. Projected in 1745, the building of the villa began 1751 (the architect Carlo Marchionni); I was completed in 1763.  Its purpose was to house Cardinal Albani's evolving, collections of antiquities & ancient Roman sculpture.  These soon filled the casino that faced the Villa down a series of formal parterres. Marchionni also built the 2 temples in the park, an Ionic temple of Diana & a sham ruin.

 

Fontainebleau post Francis I (long narrow lake): * see endndote<H>

one of the largest French royal châteaux, 34 miles SE of Paris; its medieval castle & subsequent palace served as a residence for the French monarchs from Louis VII to Napoleon III.  On the east side of the chateau, on the site of the garden of Francis I, Henry IV (1 570–1610) created a large formal garden, or parterre .  Along the axis of this parterre, he built a grand canal 1200 meters long, similar to one at the nearby chateau of Fleury-en-Biere.  Between 1660-64 this was rebuilt on a grander scale, filled with geometric designs, the path bordered with boxwood hedges and filled with colourful flowerbeds. They also added a basin, called Les Cascades, decorated with fountains, at the head of the canal.   Shade trees were planted along the length of the canal, as well as a wide path, lined with elm trees, parallel to the canal.

 

point de vue (Rococo park):

French for point of view; the French formal garden is a garden style based on symmetry & the principle of imposing order on nature.  It was governed by a set of principles.  A geometric plan using the most recent discoveries of perspective and optics was used.  A terrace was built overlooking the garden, allowing the visitor to see all at once the entire garden.  The residence serves as the central point of the garden, and its central ornament.  A central axis, or perspective, is built, perpendicular to the facade of the house, on the side opposite the front entrance. The axis extends either all the way to the horizon (Versailles) or to piece of statuary or architecture (Vaux-le-Vicomte).   The architects applied the rules of geometry and perspective to flower beds & trees; they also worked to improve perspective, to create the illusion of greater distance.  This was often done by having alleys become narrower, having rows of trees that converged, or were trimmed so that they became gradually shorter as they went farther away from the centre of the garden or from the house.  Both of these effects created the illusion that the perspective was longer and that the garden was larger than it actually was.  Another trick used by French was the Ha-ha, to conceal fences which crossed long perspectives.  A deep and wide trench with vertical wall of stone on one side was dug wherever a fence crossed a view, or a fence was placed in bottom of the trench, so that it was invisible to the viewer.  The epitome of the French garden is the Gardens of Versailles, designed in the 17th century by the landscape architect André Le Nôtre for Louis XIV and widely copied by other European courts.

 

Chinese garden-art:

a landscape garden style which evolved over 3,000 years, includes both the vast gardens of the Chinese emperors & members of the imperial family, built for pleasure and to impress, and the more intimate gardens created by scholars, poets, former government officials, soldiers and merchants, made for reflection & escape from the outside world. They create an idealized miniature landscape, to express the harmony that should exist between man and nature.  A typical Chinese garden is enclosed by walls & includes one or more ponds, rock works, trees and flowers, and an assortment of halls and pavilions within the garden, connected by winding paths and zig-zag galleries. By moving from structure to structure, visitors can view a series of carefully composed scenes, unrolling like a scroll of landscape paintings.

 

Couperin (silver-bright distance-pictures of pastoral music):

1668 -1733, Francis, aka Couperin le Grand ("Couperin the Great") to differentiate him from the rest of the musically talented Couperin family; a French Baroque composer, organist and harpsichordist who was deeply influenced by the Italian composer Corelli; he introduced Corelli's trio sonata form to France.  Couperin's grand trio sonata was subtitled Le Parnasse, ou L'apothéose de Corelli ("Parnassus, or the Apotheosis of Corelli"). In it he blended the Italian and French styles of music in a set of pieces which he called "Styles Reunited".  Many of his keyboard pieces have evocative, picturesque titles (such as "The little windmills" and "The mysterious barricades") and express a mood through key choices, adventurous harmonies and (resolved) discords. They have been likened to miniature tone poems.