Michelangelo’s David: The Fascinating Story Behind the Renaissance Marble Creation

in Art, History, Video - Arts & Culture | June 28th, 2021

Like many school­child­ren, and, for that mat­ter, Goliath, the Bib­li­cal giant who was felled by a sling­shot, I am a bit of a Philis­tine.

I admit that the first and, for a long time, pri­ma­ry thing that com­pelled me about Michelangelo’s David ( 1501–1504) was the frank­ness with which a cer­tain part of his anato­my was dis­played.

Mugs depict­ing him with a strate­gi­cal­ly placed fig leaf that dis­solves in response to hot liq­uid, Dress Me Up David fridge mag­nets, and an end­less parade of risqué mer­chan­dise sug­gest that his­tor­i­cal­ly, I am not alone.

Kudos to gal­lerist James Payne, cre­ator and host of the video series Great Art Explained, for his nod to the rab­ble in open­ing the above episode not with a view of David’s hand­some head or mirac­u­lous­ly detailed hands, but rather that most famous of male mem­bers.

Hav­ing got­ten it out of the way right at the top, Payne refrains from men­tion­ing it for near­ly 10 min­utes, edu­cat­ing view­ers instead on oth­er aspects of the statue’s anato­my, includ­ing the sculptor’s unusu­al meth­ods and the nar­row, flawed, pre­vi­ous­ly used block of mar­ble from which this mas­ter­piece emerged.

He also delves into the social con­text into which Michelangelo’s sin­gu­lar vision was deliv­ered.

Flo­ren­tines were proud of their high­ly cul­tured milieu, but were not near­ly as com­fort­able with depic­tions of nudi­ty as the ancient Greeks and Romans.

This explains the com­par­a­tive small­ness of David’s tack­le box. Per­haps Goliath might have got­ten away with a gar­gan­tu­an penis, but David, who van­quished him using intel­li­gence and willpow­er rather than brute strength, was assigned a size that would con­vey mod­esty, respectabil­i­ty, and self-con­trol.

The Bible iden­ti­fies David as an an Israelite, but Michelan­ge­lo decid­ed that this par­tic­u­lar Jew should remain uncir­cum­cised, in keep­ing with Gre­co-Roman aes­thet­ics. It was a look Chris­t­ian Flo­rence could get behind, though they also forged 28 cop­per leaves to con­ceal David’s con­tro­ver­sial man­hood.

(This theme returns through­out his­to­ry — the 1860s saw him out­fit­ted with a tem­po­rary fig leaf.)

One won­ders how much small­er things would have appeared from the ground, were David installed atop the Duo­mo, as orig­i­nal­ly planned. Michelan­ge­lo designed his cre­ation with this per­spec­tive in mind, delib­er­ate­ly equip­ping him with larg­er than usu­al hands and head.

One of Payne’s view­ers points out that David’s face, which con­veys both resolve and fear as he con­sid­ers his upcom­ing con­fronta­tion with Goliath, seems utter­ly con­fi­dent when viewed from below.

Giv­en that David is 17’ tall, that’s the van­tage point from which most of his in-per­son admir­ers expe­ri­ence him. 16th-cen­tu­ry Civic lead­ers, cap­ti­vat­ed by David’s per­fec­tion, placed him not atop the Flo­ren­tine Cathe­dral, but rather in Piaz­za del­la Sig­no­ria, the polit­i­cal heart of Flo­rence, where a repli­ca still faces south toward Rome. (The orig­i­nal was relo­cat­ed to the Gal­le­ria dell’Accademia in 1873, to pro­tect it from the ele­ments.)

Payne points out that David has sur­vived many soci­etal shifts through­out his 600+ years of exis­tence. Fig-leafed or not, he is a per­pet­u­al emblem of the under­dog, the deter­mined guy armed with only a sling­shot, and is thus unlike­ly to be top­pled by his­to­ry or human pas­sions.

Watch more episodes of James Payne’s Great Art Explained on his YouTube chan­nel. As a bonus below, we’ve includ­ed anoth­er infor­mati­ive video from Smarthis­to­ry fea­tur­ing the always illu­mi­nat­ing Dr. Steven Zuck­er and Dr. Beth Har­ris.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

What Makes Leonardo’s Mona Lisa a Great Paint­ing?: An Expla­na­tion in 15 Min­utes

New Video Shows What May Be Michelangelo’s Lost & Now Found Bronze Sculp­tures

3D Print 18,000 Famous Sculp­tures, Stat­ues & Art­works: Rodin’s Thinker, Michelangelo’s David & More

Michelangelo’s Hand­writ­ten 16th-Cen­tu­ry Gro­cery List

Ayun Hal­l­i­day is an author, illus­tra­tor, the­ater mak­er and Chief Pri­ma­tol­o­gist of the East Vil­lage Inky zine.  Fol­low her @AyunHalliday.

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The Long-Lost Pieces of Rembrandt’s Night Watch Get Reconstructed with Artificial Intelligence

in Art, History, Technology | June 25th, 2021

Most of us know Rem­brandt’s mas­ter­piece by the name The Night Watch, but it has a longer orig­i­nal title: Mili­tia Com­pa­ny of Dis­trict II under the Com­mand of Cap­tain Frans Ban­ninck Cocq. By the same token, the ver­sion of the paint­ing we’ve all seen — what­ev­er we hap­pen to call it — is small­er than the one Rem­brandt orig­i­nal­ly paint­ed in 1642. “In 1715, the mon­u­men­tal can­vas was cut down on all four sides to fit onto a wall between two doors in Amsterdam’s Town Hall,” writes The New York Times’ Nina Sie­gal. “The snipped pieces were lost. Since the 19th cen­tu­ry, the trimmed paint­ing has been housed in the Rijksmu­se­um, where it is dis­played as the museum’s cen­ter­piece, at the focal point of its Gallery of Hon­or.”

In recent years, the Rijksmu­se­um has hon­ored The Night Watch fur­ther with a thor­ough­go­ing restora­tion called Oper­a­tion Night Watch. This ambi­tious under­tak­ing has so far pro­duced attrac­tions like the largest and most detailed pho­to­graph of the paint­ing ever tak­en, zoom-in-able to the indi­vid­ual brush­stroke.

That phase required high imag­ing tech­nol­o­gy, to be sure, but it may appear down­right con­ven­tion­al com­pared to the just-unveiled recre­ation of the work’s three-cen­turies-miss­ing pieces, which will hang on all four sides of the orig­i­nal at the Rijksmu­se­um for the next three months. This mak­ing-whole would­n’t have been pos­si­ble with­out a small copy made in the 17th cen­tu­ry — or the lat­est arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence tech­nol­o­gy of the 21st.

Image cour­tesy of the Rijksmu­se­um

“Rather than hir­ing a painter to recon­struct the miss­ing pieces, the museum’s senior sci­en­tist, Robert Erd­mann, trained a com­put­er to recre­ate them pix­el by pix­el in Rembrandt’s style,” writes Sie­gal. Erd­mann used “a rel­a­tive­ly new tech­nol­o­gy known as con­vo­lu­tion­al neur­al net­works, a class of arti­fi­cial-intel­li­gence algo­rithms designed to help com­put­ers make sense of images.” The process, explained in more detail by Shan­ti Escalante-De Mat­tei at ART­News, involved dig­i­tal­ly “split­ting up the paint­ing into thou­sands of tiles and plac­ing match­ing tiles from both the orig­i­nal and the copy side-by-side,” train­ing mul­ti­ple neur­al net­works to com­plete the paint­ing in a style as close as pos­si­ble to Rem­brandt’s rather than the copy­ist’s. The result, with a few new faces as well as a star­tling­ly dif­fer­ent com­po­si­tion­al feel than the Night Watch we’ve all seen, would no doubt please Cap­tain Ban­ninck Cocq and his mili­ti­a­men: this, after all, is the por­trait they paid for.

You can watch videos on this Rijksmu­se­um page show­ing how the clas­sic paint­ing was restored.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Makes The Night Watch Rembrandt’s Mas­ter­piece

The Restora­tion of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch Begins: Watch the Painstak­ing Process On-Site and Online

The Largest & Most Detailed Pho­to­graph of Rembrandt’s The Night Watch Is Now Online: Zoom In & See Every Brush Stroke

All the Rem­brandts: The Rijksmu­se­um Puts All 400 Rem­brandts It Owns on Dis­play for the First Time

Watch an Art Con­ser­va­tor Bring Clas­sic Paint­ings Back to Life in Intrigu­ing­ly Nar­rat­ed Videos

AI & X‑Rays Recov­er Lost Art­works Under­neath Paint­ings by Picas­so & Modigliani

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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The Artistic & Mystical World of Tarot: See Decks by Salvador Dalí, Aleister Crowley, H.R. Giger & More

in Art, Games, History | June 24th, 2021

The tarot goes back to Italy of the late Mid­dle Ages. Every day here in the 21st cen­tu­ry, I see unde­ni­able signs of its cul­tur­al and tem­po­ral tran­scen­dence: specif­i­cal­ly, the tarot shops doing busi­ness here and there along the streets of Seoul, where I live. The tarot began as a deck for play, but these aren’t deal­ers in card-gam­ing sup­plies; rather, their pro­pri­etors use tarot decks to pro­vide cus­tomers sug­ges­tions about their des­tiny and advice on what to do in the future. Over the past five or six cen­turies, the pur­pose of the tarot many have changed, but its orig­i­nal artis­tic sen­si­bil­i­ty — dra­mat­ic, sym­bol-laden, and high­ly sub­ject to coun­ter­in­tu­itive inter­pre­ta­tion — has remained intact.

You can get an idea of that orig­i­nal artis­tic sen­si­bil­i­ty by tak­ing a look at the the Sola-Bus­ca, the old­est known com­plete deck of tarot cards. Dat­ing from the 1490s, it holds obvi­ous his­tor­i­cal inter­est, but it’s hard­ly the only tarot deck we’ve fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture.

Artists of sub­se­quent eras, up to and includ­ing our own, have cre­at­ed spe­cial decks in accor­dance with their dis­tinc­tive visions. The unstop­pable sur­re­al­ist Sal­vador Dalí designed his own, a project embarked upon at the behest of James Bond film pro­duc­er Albert Broc­coli. Lat­er, the mas­ter of bio­mech­anism H.R. Giger received a tarot com­mis­sion as well; though his deck uses pre­vi­ous­ly unpub­lished rather than cus­tom-made art, it all looks sur­pris­ing­ly, some­times chill­ing­ly fit­ting.

The world’s most pop­u­lar tarot deck was designed not by a famous artist, but by an illus­tra­tor named Pamela Cole­man-Smith. Many more have used and appre­ci­at­ed her work than even, say, the Thoth deck, designed by no less renowned an occultist than Aleis­ter Crow­ley, “the wickedest man in the world.” If you won’t take his word for it, per­haps the founder of ana­lyt­i­cal psy­chol­o­gy can sell you on the mer­its of tarot: for Carl Jung, the deck held out the pos­si­bil­i­ty of the “intu­itive method” he sought for “under­stand­ing the flow of life, pos­si­bly even pre­dict­ing future events, at all events lend­ing itself to the read­ing of the con­di­tions of the present moment.” (See his deck here.) Even if you’re not in search of such a method, few oth­er arti­facts weave togeth­er so many threads of art, phi­los­o­phy, his­to­ry, and sym­bol­ism. Of course, no few mod­ern enthu­si­asts find in it the same appeal as did those ear­ly tarot play­ers of the 15th cen­tu­ry: it’s fun.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Meet the For­got­ten Female Artist Behind the World’s Most Pop­u­lar Tarot Deck (1909)

Sal­vador Dalí’s Tarot Cards Get Re-Issued: The Occult Meets Sur­re­al­ism in a Clas­sic Tarot Card Deck

The Thoth Tarot Deck Designed by Famed Occultist Aleis­ter Crow­ley

H.R. Giger’s Tarot Cards: The Swiss Artist, Famous for His Design Work on Alien, Takes a Jour­ney into the Occult

Behold the Sola-Bus­ca Tarot Deck, the Ear­li­est Com­plete Set of Tarot Cards (1490)

Divine Decks: A Visu­al His­to­ry of Tarot: The First Com­pre­hen­sive Sur­vey of Tarot Gets Pub­lished by Taschen

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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1540 Monet Paintings in a Two Hour Video

in Art | June 24th, 2021

I am dis­tressed, almost dis­cour­aged, and fatigued to the point of feel­ing slight­ly ill. What I am doing is no good, and in spite of your con­fi­dence I am very much afraid that my efforts will all lead to noth­ing. 

To know any­thing about the school of paint­ing called Impres­sion­ism, one must know Claude Mon­et, who gave the move­ment its name with his paint­ing Impres­sion, Sun­rise and pro­vid­ed its method — an almost con­fronta­tion­al rela­tion­ship with land­scape in plein-air. “I have gone back to some things that can’t pos­si­bly be done: water, with weeds wav­ing at the bot­tom,” Mon­et wrote in a let­ter to his friend Gus­tave Gef­froy in 1890. “It is a won­der­ful sight, but it dri­ves one crazy try­ing to paint it. But that is the kind of thing I am always tack­ling.”

That “kind of thing,” the com­pul­sion to paint nature in motion, required work­ing quick­ly, repeat­ing the same exper­i­ments over and over, despair­ing of get­ting it right, pro­duc­ing in the attempt his glo­ri­ous series of haystacks and water lilies. Mon­et began paint­ing land­scapes upon meet­ing artist Eugene Boudin, who taught him to paint in open air, and he nev­er stopped, refin­ing his brush­stroke for almost sev­en­ty years: from his first can­vas, 1858’s View from the banks of the Lezade, to his last, The Rose Bush, fin­ished in 1926, the final year of his life.

What­ev­er else Impres­sion­ism might mean, when it comes to Mon­et, it entails a prodi­gious amount of draw­ing, sketch­ing, and paint­ing. Over 2,500 such works have been attrib­uted to him. That num­ber is prob­a­bly much high­er “as it is known that Mon­et destroyed a num­ber of his own works and oth­ers have sure­ly been lost over time,” notes the Mon­et Gallery. Around 2,000 of those works are paint­ings, now spread around the world, with the largest col­lec­tion locat­ed at the Mar­mot­tan Mon­et Muse­um in Paris, where Impres­sion, Sun­rise (above) is held.

While it may be near­ly impos­si­ble to see all of Monet’s known works in one life­time (just as it seems impos­si­ble that he could have made so many mas­ter­pieces in one life), you can see 1540 of them in the video at the top — in a pre­sen­ta­tion that may or may not suit your art view­ing sen­si­bil­i­ties. If zoom­ing slow­ly into hun­dreds of Mon­et paint­ings for a few sec­onds leaves you feel­ing a lit­tle over­whelmed, you can also head to the Mon­et Gallery online to see over 1900 of the artist’s attempts at “fol­low­ing Nature,” as he put it, “with­out being able to grasp her.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Rare 1915 Film Shows Claude Mon­et at Work in His Famous Gar­den at Giverny

Claude Mon­et at Work in His Famous Gar­den at Giverny: Rare Film from 1915

How to Paint Water Lilies Like Mon­et in 14 Min­utes

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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David Bowie on Why It’s Crazy to Make Art–and We Do It Anyway (1998)

in Art, Music, Television | June 22nd, 2021

Art is use­less, Oscar Wilde declared. Yet faced with, say, a paint­ing by Kandin­sky, film by Mal­ick, or great work by David Bowie, we may feel it “impos­si­ble to escape the impres­sion,” as Sig­mund Freud wrote, “that peo­ple com­mon­ly use false stan­dards of mea­sure­ment — that they seek pow­er, suc­cess and wealth for them­selves and admire them in oth­ers, and that they under­es­ti­mate what is of true val­ue in life.” How­ev­er ambigu­ous­ly, art can move us beyond the self­ish bound­aries of the ego to con­nect with intan­gi­bles beyond ideas of use and use­less­ness.

That expe­ri­ence of con­nect­ed­ness, what Freud called the “ocean­ic,” stim­u­lat­ed by a work of art can mir­ror the sub­lime feel­ings awak­ened by nature. “A work of art is use­less as a flower is use­less,” Wilde clar­i­fied in a let­ter to a per­plexed read­er. “A flower blooms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by look­ing at it. That is all that is to be said about our rela­tions to flow­ers.” It’s an imper­fect anal­o­gy. The flower serves quite anoth­er pur­pose for the bee, and for the plant.  “All of this is I fear very obscure,” Wilde admits.

The point being, from the point of view of bare sur­vival, art makes no sense. “It’s a loony kind of thing to want to do,” says Bowie him­self, in the inter­view clip above from a 1998 appear­ance on The Char­lie Rose Show. “I think the san­er and ratio­nal approach to life is to sur­vive stead­fast­ly and cre­ate a pro­tec­tive home and cre­ate a warm lov­ing envi­ron­ment for one’s fam­i­ly and get food for them. That’s about it. Any­thing else is extra. All cul­ture is extra…. It’s unnec­es­sary and it’s a sign of the irra­tional part of man. We should just be con­tent with pick­ing nuts.”

Why are we not con­tent with pick­ing nuts? Per­haps most of us are. Per­haps “being an artist,” Bowie won­ders “is a sign of a cer­tain kind of dys­func­tion, of social dys­func­tion­al­ism any­way. It’s an extra­or­di­nary thing to do, to express your­self in such… in such rar­i­fied terms.” It’s a Wildean obser­va­tion, but one Bowie does not make to stig­ma­tize indi­vid­u­als. As Rose remarks, he has “always resist­ed the idea that this cre­ativ­i­ty that you have comes from any form of dys­func­tion or… mad­ness.” Per­haps instead it is the mar­ket that is dys­func­tion­al, Bowie sug­gests in a 1996 inter­view, just above, with Rose and Julian Schn­abel.

Art may serve no prac­ti­cal pur­pose in an ordi­nary sense, but it is not only the prove­nance of sin­gu­lar genius­es. “Once it falls into the hands of the pro­le­tari­at,” says Bowie, “that the abil­i­ty to make art is inher­ent in all of us, that demol­ish­es the idea of art and com­merce, and that’s no good for busi­ness.” Wilde also saw art and com­merce in fun­da­men­tal ten­sion. “Of course man may sell the flower, and so make it use­ful to him,” he wrote. “But this has noth­ing to do with the flower. It is not part of its essence. It is acci­den­tal. It is a mis­use,” an arti­fi­cial ele­va­tion and enclo­sure, says Bowie, of expres­sions that belong to every­one.

Relat­ed Con­tent: 

Bowie’s Book­shelf: A New Essay Col­lec­tion on The 100 Books That Changed David Bowie’s Life

When David Bowie Launched His Own Inter­net Ser­vice Provider: The Rise and Fall of BowieNet (1998)

David Bowie Songs Reimag­ined as Pulp Fic­tion Book Cov­ers: Space Odd­i­ty, Heroes, Life on Mars & More

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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AI & X‑Rays Recover Lost Artworks Underneath Paintings by Picasso & Modigliani

in Art, Technology | June 22nd, 2021

You see above a paint­ing by Amedeo Modigliani, a por­trait of the artist’s lover Beat­rice Hast­ings, unseen by the pub­lic until its redis­cov­ery just this year. Or at any rate, some see that: in anoth­er sense, the image is a new or almost-new artis­tic cre­ation, based on X‑rays of Modiglian­i’s Por­trait of a Girl. Under­neath the paint that makes up that cel­e­brat­ed work lie traces enough to estab­lish the pres­ence of a dif­fer­ent, ear­li­er one beneath. But only now, after the employ­ment of neur­al net­works fed with enough of the artist’s acknowl­edged work to rec­og­nize and repli­cate his sig­na­ture style, do we have a sense of what it could have looked like.

“Antho­ny Bourached and George Cann, both PhD can­di­dates, are head­ing the ‘Neo­Mas­ters’ project through a com­pa­ny called Oxia Palus,” writes The Guardian’s Dalya Alberge. “They have ambi­tious plans to redis­cov­er fur­ther hid­den paint­ings on can­vas­es that were reused by artists, who were per­haps too impov­er­ished to buy sup­plies or dis­sat­is­fied with ini­tial com­po­si­tions.”

Modigliani was cer­tain­ly impe­cu­nious enough to have done so more than once, and his rela­tion­ship with Hast­ings — a long affair that was volatile even by the stan­dards of the ear­ly 20th-cen­tu­ry Parisian bohemia they inhab­it­ed — did pro­vide mate­r­i­al for oth­er por­traits.

Spe­cial­ists, respec­tive­ly, in neu­ro­science and the sur­face of Mars (their com­pa­ny’s name refers to a region of that plan­et), Bourached and Cann have proven enter­pris­ing in this art-ori­ent­ed endeav­or. “A 3D-print­ed phys­i­cal ren­der­ing of their cre­ation, com­plete with com­put­er-sim­u­lat­ed ‘brush­strokes’ and tex­ture, will soon go on dis­play at London’s Leben­son Gallery as part of the duo’s ‘Neo­Mas­ters’ project,” writes Nora McGreevy at Smithsonian.com. Ear­li­er this year, McGreevy also cov­ered Oxia Palus’ dig­i­tal­ly assist­ed recov­ery of a Barcelona land­scape pos­si­bly paint­ed by the Span­ish poet, play­wright, and artist San­ti­a­go Rusiñol — before it was paint­ed over by Pablo Picas­so.

This dis­cov­ery actu­al­ly goes back to 1992, when con­ser­va­tors first deter­mined the exis­tence of anoth­er image beneath Picas­so’s lit­tle-known La Mis­éreuse accroupie, or The Crouch­ing Beg­gar. “Researchers sus­pect that Picas­so used the moun­tains in Rusiñol’s land­scape to shape the con­tours of his female subject’s back,” writes McGreevy. “A 2018 X‑ray of that less­er-known work by the Art Gallery of Toron­to pro­vid­ed Oxia Palus what they need­ed to start work on their A.I.-assisted recre­ation. Not only did Bourached and Cann 3D print 100 phys­i­cal copies of the final prod­uct, they linked each one to a unique non-fun­gi­ble token (NFT), the new kind of dig­i­tal arti­fact that has become some­thing of a craze in the art world — sure­ly an unimag­in­able after­life for these images Modigliani and Picas­so must have assumed they’d oblit­er­at­ed for good.

via Hyper­al­ler­gic

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Orig­i­nal Por­trait of the Mona Lisa Found Beneath the Paint Lay­ers of da Vinci’s Mas­ter­piece

Sci­en­tists Cre­ate a New Rem­brandt Paint­ing, Using a 3D Print­er & Data Analy­sis of Rembrandt’s Body of Work

Short Film Takes You Inside the Recov­ery of Andy Warhol’s Lost Com­put­er Art

A 10 Bil­lion Pix­el Scan of Vermeer’s Mas­ter­piece Girl with a Pearl Ear­ring: Explore It Online

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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What Makes Leonardo’s Mona Lisa a Great Painting?: An Explanation in 15 Minutes

in Art, History | June 17th, 2021

The Mona Lisa may be on dis­play at the Lou­vre, but best of luck appre­ci­at­ing it there. The first obsta­cle, quite lit­er­al­ly, is the crowd that’s always massed around it (or, in the time before social-dis­tanc­ing poli­cies, was always massed around it). Even if you maneu­ver your way to the front of the cam­era-phoned throng, the paint­ing itself hangs with­in a thick glass case — can’t have a repeat of the 1911 theft — and has dimen­sions in any event much small­er than peo­ple tend to imag­ine. After all, we come to know Leonar­do da Vin­ci’s most famous paint­ing through cul­tur­al ref­er­ence and par­o­dy, but also through large-scale repro­duc­tion, the bet­ter to under­stand the painstak­ing and inno­v­a­tive artis­tic labor that makes the Mona Lisa worth flock­ing to in the first place.

Still, there are those who come away from the Mona Lisa — assum­ing they can man­age to get back out through the mass of human­i­ty — won­der­ing what all the fuss is about. It was for them, pre­sum­ably, that cura­tor James Payne chose that paint­ing as the first sub­ject of his Youtube series Great Art Explained.

As he would in his sub­se­quent episodes (such as his three-part series, pre­vi­ous­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, about Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights), Payne casts off the accu­mu­lat­ed his­tor­i­cal spec­u­la­tion and oth­er var­i­ous forms of cul­tur­al bag­gage to find the work’s artis­tic core. In the case of the Mona Lisa, not just “the great­est psy­cho­log­i­cal por­trait ever paint­ed” but “the end prod­uct of the great­est inquis­i­tive mind in his­to­ry,” that still leaves much to dis­cuss.

In under fif­teen min­utes, Payne explains a host of the tech­niques Leonar­do employed in paint­ing the Mona Lisa that no artist of his time and place had used before — and indeed, that in some cas­es no oth­er artists mas­tered until long there­after. These include work­ing on top of an under-lay­er of white paint that appears to be “light­ing Mona Lisa from with­in,” strip­ping his sub­ject of “all the usu­al high-sta­tus sym­bols” usu­al­ly seen in aris­to­crat­ic por­trai­ture, depict­ing her at three-quar­ters length rather than in full frame, mak­ing the back­ground fade into the dis­tance while also sug­gest­ing motion, and com­bin­ing the tech­niques of low-con­trast sfu­ma­to and high-con­trast chiaroscuro. And only a painter with Leonar­do’s anatom­i­cal knowl­edge could have exe­cut­ed that famous­ly sub­tle smile, which appears and van­ish­es again depend­ing on which part of the Mona Lisa we look at — no mat­ter whether we’re doing it at the Lou­vre or on Youtube.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

How the Mona Lisa Went From Being Bare­ly Known, to Sud­den­ly the Most Famous Paint­ing in the World (1911)

Did Leonar­do da Vin­ci Paint a First Mona Lisa Before The Mona Lisa?

Orig­i­nal Por­trait of the Mona Lisa Found Beneath the Paint Lay­ers of da Vinci’s Mas­ter­piece

When Pablo Picas­so and Guil­laume Apol­li­naire Were Accused of Steal­ing the Mona Lisa (1911)

Mark Twain Skew­ers Great Works of Art: The Mona Lisa (“a Smoked Had­dock!”), The Last Sup­per (“a Mourn­ful Wreck”) & More

Great Art Explained: Watch 15 Minute Intro­duc­tions to Great Works by Warhol, Rothko, Kahlo, Picas­so & More

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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Download Great Works of Art from 40+ Museums Worldwide: Explore Artvee, the New Art Search Engine

in Art, Technology | June 16th, 2021

Dil­bert cre­ator Scott Adams once wrote of his ear­ly expe­ri­ences intro­duc­ing the World Wide Web to oth­ers. “In 1993, there were only a hand­ful of Web sites you could access, such as the Smith­so­ni­an’s exhib­it of gems. Those pages were slow to load and crashed as often as they worked.” But those who wit­nessed this tech­nol­o­gy in action would invari­ably “get out of their chairs their eyes like saucers, and they would approach the key­board. They had to touch it them­selves. There was some­thing about the inter­net that was like cat­nip.” In the inter­ven­ing decades, the tech­nol­o­gy pow­er­ing the inter­net has only improved, and we’ve all felt how great­ly that cat­nip-like effect has inten­si­fied. And the Smith­son­ian, as we’ve fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture, is still there — now with much more online than gems.

Today, the Smith­so­ni­an’s impres­sive online col­lec­tions are acces­si­ble through Artvee, a new search engine for down­load­able high-res­o­lu­tion, pub­lic domain art­works. So are the col­lec­tions of more than 40 oth­er inter­na­tion­al insti­tu­tions, from the New York Pub­lic Library and the Art Insti­tute of Chica­go to the Rijksmu­se­um and Paris Musées, many of which had lit­tle or no online pres­ence back in the ear­ly 1990s.

In recent years, they’ve got­ten quite seri­ous indeed about dig­i­tiz­ing their hold­ings and mak­ing those dig­i­ti­za­tions freely avail­able to the world, upload­ing them by the thou­sand, even by the mil­lion. With so many art­works and arti­facts already up, and sure­ly much more to come, the ques­tion becomes how best to nav­i­gate not just one of these col­lec­tions, but all of them.

Artvee con­sti­tutes one answer to this ques­tion. Using its search engine, writes Denise Tem­pone at Domesti­ka, “you can fil­ter cat­e­gories such as abstract art, land­scape, mythol­o­gy, draw­ings, illus­tra­tions, botany, fash­ion, fig­u­ra­tive art, reli­gion, ani­mal, desserts, his­to­ry, Japan­ese art, and still life. The site also gives you the option to search by artist. You will find works by Rem­brandt van Rijn, Claude Mon­et, Raphael, and San­dro Bot­ti­cel­li in this amaz­ing gallery.” Oth­er col­lec­tions, cre­at­ed by Artvee itself as well as by its users, include “illus­tra­tions from fairy tales; cov­ers of pop­u­lar Amer­i­can songs; and some even more pecu­liar ones, such as adverts sell­ing bicy­cles that are over a hun­dred years old.”

The vari­ety of artists brows­able on Artvee also includes Alphonse Mucha, Edvard Munch, and Hilma af Kint; oth­er col­lec­tions offer the won­ders of polit­i­cal illus­tra­tions, book pro­mo posters, and NASA’s visions of the future. All of the items with­in, it bears repeat­ing, are in the pub­lic domain or dis­trib­uted under a Cre­ative Com­mons license, mean­ing you can use them not just as sources of inspi­ra­tion but as ingre­di­ents in your own work as well, a pos­si­bil­i­ty few us could have imag­ined at the dawn of the Web. Back then, you’ll recall, we all used a vari­ety of dif­fer­ent tools and por­tals to nav­i­gate the inter­net, accord­ing to per­son­al pref­er­ence. The emerg­ing field of art search engines, which includes not just Artvee but oth­er options like Museo, may remind us of those days — and how far the inter­net has come since.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

A Search Engine for Find­ing Free, Pub­lic Domain Images from World-Class Muse­ums

Vis­it 2+ Mil­lion Free Works of Art from 20 World-Class Muse­ums Free Online

The Smith­son­ian Puts 2.8 Mil­lion High-Res Images Online and Into the Pub­lic Domain

14 Paris Muse­ums Put 300,000 Works of Art Online: Down­load Clas­sics by Mon­et, Cézanne & More

Cre­ative Com­mons Offi­cial­ly Launch­es a Search Engine That Index­es 300+ Mil­lion Pub­lic Domain Images

Flim: a New AI-Pow­ered Movie-Screen­shot Search Engine

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities, the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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