“May you live in inter­est­ing times,” goes the apoc­ryphal but nev­er­the­less much-invoked “Chi­nese curse.” Egon Schiele, born in the Aus­tria-Hun­gary of 1890, cer­tain­ly did live in inter­est­ing times, and his work, as fea­tured in the new Great Art Explained video above, can look like the cre­ations of a cursed man. That’s espe­cial­ly true of those of his many self-por­traits that, as host James Payne puts it, ren­der his own body “more ema­ci­at­ed than it actu­al­ly was, rad­i­cal­ly dis­tort­ed and twist­ed, some­times face­less or limb­less, some­times in abject ter­ror.” Here Schiele worked at “an inter­sec­tion of suf­fer­ing and sex, as if he is dis­gust­ed by his own body.”

Such a pre­oc­cu­pa­tion, as Payne sug­gests, may not seem com­plete­ly unrea­son­able in a man who wit­nessed his own father’s death from syphilis — caught from a pros­ti­tute, on the night of his wed­ding to Schiele’s moth­er — when he was still in ado­les­cence.

But what tends to occu­py most dis­cus­sions of Schiele’s art is less his famil­ial or psy­cho­log­i­cal back­ground than his line: the “thin line between beau­ty and suf­fer­ing” that clear­ly obsessed him, yes, but also the line cre­at­ed by the hand with which he drew and paint­ed. His art remains imme­di­ate­ly rec­og­niz­able today because “his line has a par­tic­u­lar rhythm: angu­lar, tense, and eco­nom­i­cal­ly placed. It’s not just a means of describ­ing form; it’s a voice.”

In this voice, Schiele com­posed not like­ness­es but “psy­cho­log­i­cal por­traits, a search for the self or the ego, a pre­oc­cu­pa­tion of the time.” The fig­ure of Sig­mund Freud loomed large over fin-de-siè­cle Vien­na, of course, and into the twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry, the city and its civ­i­liza­tion were “caught between the old impe­r­i­al order and mod­ern demo­c­ra­t­ic move­ments.” A “lab­o­ra­to­ry for psy­cho­analy­sis, rad­i­cal art, music, and taboo-break­ing lit­er­a­ture,” Vien­na had also giv­en rise to the career of Schiele’s men­tor Gus­tav Klimt. By the time Schiele hit his stride, he could express in his work “not just per­son­al dis­com­fort, but the sick­ness and fragili­ty of an entire soci­ety” — before he fell vic­tim to the Span­ish flu pan­dem­ic of 1918 at just 28 years old, along with his wife and unborn child. In a sense, he was unlucky to live when and where he did. But as his art also reminds us, we don’t mere­ly inhab­it our time and place; we’re cre­at­ed by them.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

New Dig­i­tal Archive Will Fea­ture the Com­plete Works of Egon Schiele: Start with 419 Paint­ings, Draw­ings & Sculp­tures

How Art Gets Stolen: What Hap­pened to Egon Schiele’s Paint­ing Boats Mir­rored in the Water After Its Theft by the Nazis

The Life & Art of Gus­tav Klimt: A Short Art His­to­ry Les­son on the Aus­tri­an Sym­bol­ist Painter and His Work

Gus­tav Klimt’s Icon­ic Paint­ing The Kiss: An Intro­duc­tion to Aus­tri­an Painter’s Gold­en, Erot­ic Mas­ter­piece (1908)

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 and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.

No artist became a Renais­sance mas­ter through a sin­gle piece of work, though now, half a mil­len­ni­um lat­er, that may be how most of us iden­ti­fy them. Leonar­do? Painter of the Mona Lisa. Michelan­ge­lo? Painter of the Sis­tine Chapel ceil­ing (or, per­haps, the sculp­tor of the most famous David, depend­ing on your medi­um of choice). Raphael? Painter of The School of Athens, as recent­ly fea­tured here on Open Cul­ture. Raphael paint­ed that mas­ter­work in Vat­i­can City’s Apos­tolic Palace between the years 1509 and 1511, when he was in his mid-twen­ties. Under­stand­ing how he could have attained that lev­el of skill by that age requires exam­in­ing his oth­er work, as Evan Puschak, bet­ter known as the Nerd­writer, does in the new video above.

Specif­i­cal­ly, Puschak exam­ines Raphael’s Madon­nas, a sub­ject to which he returned over and over again through­out the course of his short but pro­duc­tive career. In what seems to have been his first ren­di­tion of Mary and her holy son, Puschak says, “you can see that Raphael has a bet­ter sense of three-dimen­sion­al bod­ies and how to make them feel like they’re part of the space that they’re in” than his father, who’d been a well-regard­ed painter him­self, or even than Piero del­la Francesca, from whom his father learned.

“Yet the paint­ing also suf­fers from “an awk­ward­ness in the arrange­ment of the fig­ures,” as well as a lack of “emo­tion, rela­tion­ships, or any sense of nar­ra­tive” — much like “a thou­sand oth­er Madon­nas that came before.”

Yet Raphael was a quick study, a trait reflect­ed in the devel­op­ment of the many Madon­nas he paint­ed there­after. From Leonar­do he learned tech­niques like sfu­ma­to, the cre­ation of soft tran­si­tions between col­ors; from Michelan­ge­lo, “how to use the human body as an expres­sive tool.” But what most clear­ly emerges is the con­cept con­tem­po­rary the­o­rist Leon Bat­tista Alber­ti called his­to­ria: a nar­ra­tive that plays out even with­in the con­fines of a sta­t­ic image. In Raphael’s cir­cu­lar, abun­dant­ly detailed Alba Madon­na of 1511, Puschak sees the infant Jesus “not so much tak­ing as grab­bing his future and pulling it clos­er” as Mary looks on with emo­tions sub­tly lay­ered into her face. How, exact­ly, Raphael honed his instinct for dra­ma is a ques­tion for art his­to­ri­ans. But would it be too much of a reach to guess that he also learned a thing or two from his time as a stage-set design­er?

Relat­ed con­tent:

Pla­to, Aris­to­tle & Oth­er Greek Philoso­phers in Raphael’s Renais­sance Mas­ter­piece, The School of Athens

Artist Turns Famous Paint­ings, from Raphael to Mon­et to Licht­en­stein, Into Inno­v­a­tive Sound­scapes

Why Leonar­do da Vinci’s Great­est Paint­ing is Not the Mona Lisa

The Evo­lu­tion of The Great Wave off Kana­gawa: See Four Ver­sions That Hoku­sai Paint­ed Over Near­ly 40 Years

14 Self-Por­traits by Pablo Picas­so Show the Evo­lu­tion of His Style: See Self-Por­traits Mov­ing from Ages 15 to 90

The Evo­lu­tion of Kandinsky’s Paint­ing: A Jour­ney from Real­ism to Vibrant Abstrac­tion Over 46 Years

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