Dictionary of Art and Artists












Paintings


that Changed the World



(by Klaus Reichold & Bernhard Graf)



From Lascaux to Warhol






Supreme art is a traditional statement of certain heroic and religious truth,
passed on from age to age, modified by individual genius,
but never abandoned.

William Butler Yeats


 

The Pagan Dragon
 

An evil beast

 

George mounted his steed, made the sign of the cross and charged the dragon that was advancing towards him; he brandished his lance mightily, commended himself to God and struck the dragon with such force that it fell to the ground.

Jacobus de Voragine, Legends aurea (Golden Legend), 1265-66

 

Still with Paul Richter as the dragon-slaver Siegfried in Fritz Lang's Nibelungen, 1924

 

According to legend, in the second century ВС there lived a dragon in a lake near the city of Silene in the land of Libya. It often crawled from its wet home "to beneath the city walls" — or so it was claimed in the Legenda aurea — translated into English by William Caxton in 1485 as the Golden Legend— the most frequently read book in the Middle Ages with the exception of the Bible. There, the beast was said to have poisoned with its breath all those who came near it. To appease the dragon, a lamb and one human victim were sacrificed every day. A lot was drawn to determine "which man or which woman should be offered to the dragon". One day the lot fell to the king's daughter, Sabra, who bravely accepted her fate for the benefit of the city. However, just as she was ready to make her way to the lake, her altruistic intentions were dampened when "Saint George came riding up as if by chance" and asked her why she was so sad. Suddenly, the dragon appeared. George valiantly pierced it with his lance — though he did not kill it. As legend has it, George proceeded to wrap the princess's girdle round the wounded beast's neck and to lead the dragon triumphantly like a tame dog into the city, where he slew it with a single blow of his sword. George was subsequently celebrated as a hero and the dragon was never to be seen again.

In antiquity the scaly, fire-spitting beast was thought to possess demonic, primordial powers. It was said that the gods had to fight and kill the monster before the world could emerge from the animal's dead body. In Christianity the legendary winged creature came to symbolise sin and paganism. Described in Revelation as a symbol of the devil and elsewhere in the Bible as a demon of temptation, the dragon still flits like a ghost through the pages of the Old and New Testaments. Likened to a diabolical serpent by the biblical scholar Origen in the third century AD, the legendary green monster was not met with sympathy in Europe or in the Near East, but was repeatedly depicted as being "trample [d] under feet" (Revelation). Yet there were others besides St George who were renowned dragon-slayers: St Michael, St Margaret, the prophet Daniel of the Old Testament as well as Siegfried, the legendary hero of the Nibelungenlied, who bathed in the blood of the vigilant dragon, presumably to render himself immune from injury.

Indeed, no one seemed to show mercy on the tormented animal — except Paolo Uccello, a Florentine painter who staged the present scene like a romantic fairy-tale with an ironic undertone. Kept on a short lead by the princess, the fearsome beast is made a pitiful, almost amusing spectacle; with its curled tail and contorted stance, it looks more like a caricature than a monster. Here, the unfortunate animal appears to be having a tooth extracted, which, according to other sources, never occurred.

Despite the widespread feelings of fear and disgust towards the dragon in Europe and the Near East, in the Far East it was held to be a beneficent creature that brought good luck.
 

Paolo Uccello
St. George and the Dragon
c. 1456
Oil on canvas, 57 x 73 cm
National Gallery, London





 

A Lesson in Perspectives
 

The sepulchre of Christ

 

This man [Joseph of Arimathaea] went unto Pilate, and begged the body of Jesus. And he took it down, and wrapped it in linen, and laid it in a sepulchre that was hewn in stone, wherein never man before was laid.... And the women also, which came with him from Galilee, followed after, and beheld the sepulchre, and how his body was laid.

The Gospel of Luke (23:52-53,55)

 

Looking towards the open heavens: Andrea Mantegna — one of the great masters of perspective techniques, ceiling fresco, Palazzo Ducale, Mantua, 1475
 

According to scripture, Jesus Christ probably died soon after three o'clock in the afternoon, and one might think, as far as the authorities were concerned, "the case was closed". However, for the family of a person executed in Roman times disgrace did not end with death. Roman law provided a harsh accompaniment to crucifixion: the loss of the right to honour the dead. It was only through an act of pardon that the body of an executed person was returned for proper burial. In this respect the narrative contained in the Gospel of Luke is highly plausible. The Jerusalem councilman, Joseph of Arimathaea, who revealed himself to be a follower of Jesus at the Crucifixion, had to bow to convention and beg Pilate, the Roman governor of Palestine, for the body of Christ. Pilate granted this request only after a Roman officer, who had been present at the Crucifixion, verified that the man from Nazareth was indeed dead. What then happened to the body of Jesus is described in the Gospel of John (19: 39—41): "And there came also Nicodemus, which at first came to Jesus by night, and brought a mixture of myrrh and aloes, about an hundred pound weight. Then took they the body of Jesus, and wound it in linen clothes with the spices, as the manner of the Jews is to bury. Now in the place where he was crucified there was a garden; and in the garden a new sepulchre, wherein was never man yet laid." But here was this garden? The gardens of Jerusalem were north of the second city wall, and their presence was indicated by a nearby garden gate. Here were also the quarries, and during Jesus' lifetime, chamber graves were hewn from the rock of these steep slopes. In one of these chamber graves, not far from Golgotha, the "Place of Skulls", Joseph and those with him buried Jesus.

This sepulchre is the setting for Andrea Mantegna's The Entombment. The Italian Renaissance painter, who worked for fifty years at the Gonzaga Court in Mantua, had trained his eye for anatomical detail through the study of ancient sculpture. He achieved great plasticity of form in his figures through the use of a perspective technique known as foreshortening, and it is probably not a coincidence that Mantegna depicted the body of Christ lying in a tomb. In 1453, a few years before the picture was painted, Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman Empire, fell to the Turks. When the Ottomans took the city, Christendom lost a precious relic, the "anointing stone" on which, according to tradition, Joseph of Arimathaea had placed the body of Christ. The work by Mantegna could be interpreted as a critical response to the Turks defilement of Christian holy places, since popes of that period called for crusades against the Turks to free Constantinople and the Christian relics from the hands of unbelievers.

 

Andrea Mantegna
(1431—1506)
The Entombment
c. 1490
Pinacoteca di Brera, Milan






 

Venus: The Evening Star
 

The Goddess of Love and her mysterious origins

 

You might swear that the goddess [Venus] came out of the waves. Her right hand covering her breasts, she wants to enthral us. And wherever she plants her divine foot, flowers spring up to greet the skies.

Angelo Poliziano, The Realm of Venus, с 1475

 

_{Where Aphrodite stepped onto land: Petra tou Romiou, a beautiful bay in the south-west of Cyprus}
 

Praxiteles, Medici Venus, Roman Copy, Uffizi, Florence
 

The origins of the gods have always been a mystery and the origin of Venus is a particularly difficult case. Malicious tongues say that she came from the countryside. Probably a successor to an ancient mother goddess, she was venerated in what is now Italy as the patroness of gardens and vegetable farming — especially on Veneralia, the feast day of Venus, April I. In defence of her reputation, one should add that she lost her earthiness early on. Beginning in the fourth century ВС she was equated in Rome with Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of love, who was the patroness of coquettish young women, of laughter and fun, and of sweet desire and clemency.

Aphrodite's origins are also rather uncertain, and the various legends about her birth contradict one another. These stories agree about one thing, that Aphrodite emerged from the sea. According to the early Greek poet Hesiod, who established the family tree of the Olympian gods, Aphrodite was born of the foam which billowed up around the genitals of her castrated father Uranus, which were cast into the sea by his son Saturn (Cronus), who was responsible for this violent act. Another legend tells us that Aphrodite was born in a bivalve shell. The Italian Humanist poet Angelo Poliziano (Pollitian), who was an advisor at the Medici court in Florence, elaborated on these ancient tales in his writings:

"And born within [the white
foam],
in rare and joyous acts
a maiden with a heavenly race
by playful zephyrs
is pushed to the shore.
She travels on a sea-shell;
and it seems
that the heavens rejoice."

The zephyrs, blowing a strong wind, steer her "ship" towards the Mediterranean island of Cyprus, where she is greeted by nymphs, who are "surprised by joy at the sight of her" and dress her in a cloak decorated with flowers — for even the goddess of love cannot remain nude forever. The Italian Renaissance painter Allesandro Filipepi, later
known as Sandro Botticelli, may well have taken Poliziano's poem as the literary model for his painting The Birth of Venus. Probably commissioned by the Medici family, the painting depicts the goddess as the personification of Love. She is to lead the Florentines, who at the time were growing increasingly enthusiastic about Greek philosophy, back to its loftiest ideals: goodness, truth and beauty.

Today the planet Venus, sometimes called the Evening Star, is not the only reminder of how important the goddess once was. The fifth day of the week also bears her name: "Friday", and the German "Freitag", derive from the name of the Teuton goddess Freya, who was equated with Venus. Friday in Italian, venerdi, and in French, vendredi; respectively have retained much of the original sound of "Venus", and both mean "Venus Day".

 

Sandro Botticelli
(1445—1510)
The Birth of Venus
c. 1485
Tempera on canvas
Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence






 

Myths and Medicine
 

How to catch a unicorn

 

It has a single horn in the middle of its forehead. But how can it be caught? One places an elegantly clad virgin in its path. And then, the beast leaps into the virgin's lap and follows her.

Physiologus, The Unicom, third century AD

 

"Only that which has never existed anywhere
can remain eternally young."
Drawing by Jean Cocteau, 1953, for the premiere of the ballet "The Lady and the Unicorn"
 

The fifth century ВС Greek historian and personal physician to Persian Kings, Cresias is said to have discovered all the wonders of his time. And so, he was the first to tell of the amazing beast called the unicorn: it could be found in Asia and was a white, donkey-like horse with a red head, blue eyes and a large horn. According to Cresias, the horn, if scraped down and ground to a powder, was an antidote to poison and relieved muscle cramps. Although malicious gossip had it that Ctesias was a drinker and a pathological liar, his tale of the unicorn lived on. Physiologus, an anonymous writer who invested all sorts of animals with Christian symbolism, took up the tale, associating the unicorn with Christ. Conceived by a virgin, the Son of God had become a "horn of healing" as an antidote to all the world's ills. In the Middle Ages, when poison had become a popular instrument to settle political disputes, many rulers were anxious to protect themselves from assassination through the horn of the unicorn. By the sixteenth century it was considered more than an antidote to poison and an aphrodisiac; it was also "serviceable and wholesome as a remedy for epilepsy, pestilential fever, rabies and parasitic worms".

But how is one to catch a unicorn? Physiologus himself had remarked that the marvellous beast, which loved solitude and shunned humans, was "possessed of high courage". He stated further: "The hunter cannot approach it because it is so powerful." The famous legend which told of placing a virgin in the path of a unicorn was still known. And although artists had been dealing with the subject matter for centuries, few success stories had been recorded. All that was known was that a unicorn could not be deceived by an "unvirtuous" virgin. If the unicorn were tricked in such a way, instead of placing its head in her lap it would ram its horn into her side.

Capturing a unicorn was not a simple undertaking. Considering this, the number of cornua unicornuum (unicorn horns) in the treasuries and curiosity cabinets of Renaissance princes is astonishing. Upon closer inspection, these "horns", which can be up to three metres long, transpire to be the tusks of male narwhals. It is for this reason that the narwhal is also known as the "unicorn whale".

 

Anonymous
The Lady and the Unicorn
Late 15th or early 16th century
A mon seul desir, sixth scene from a six-part tapestry woven in Brussels Wool
Musee National de L'Hotel de Cluny, Paris







 

Thus God Created Man in His Image
 

The first artist self-portrait

 

For just as the ancients gave their idol Apollo the most beautiful of human forms, so do we desire to use the proportions for Christ the Lord, who is the most beautiful thing in the world.

Albrecht Durer, Treatise on Human Proportions, 1528

 

Dimensions and figures: geometric diagrams showing proportions for heads and faces by Villard de Honnecourt
 

In the Middle Ages a painter was "just" an artisan. He enjoyed the same status as stonemasons and woodcarvers, not to mention bakers, tanners, basket weavers and cobblers. Painters were used to "disappearing" behind what they painted. They usually did not even sign their work and most were soon forgotten. Then a man appeared who was possessed of supreme self-confidence: Albrecht Durer. Born in the free imperial city of Nuremberg in Germany, he was equally superb as a painter, a draughtsman and a woodcarver, a universal genius of the Renaissance on a par with Leonardo da Vinci. An inventive and bold thinker, Durer was open to the Humanist currents of his day. Well aware that he was original, talented and free, he refused to be merely an anonymous instrument of divine inspiration. He saw himself as an artist who pursued his own artistic aims, and had the courage to show his own face and personality in his work. It is true that a number of artists had already painted portraits of themselves as penitents or by-standers. Albrecht Durer had no use for compromises. He took the self-portrait one step further and portrayed himself as he really was, thus creating the genre of artist self-portraits. Five earlier Durer self-portraits are known but the present one in which the artist is wearing a fur coat is the most momentous. Durer had never before portrayed himself in such an uncompromisingly frontal pose. The manner of self-representation he chose for this work had, until then, been reserved for depictions of Christ or royalty. Making himself look like Christ in this work was a deliberate statement of intention and supports Durer s firm belief that artists' creativity derived directly from God's creative powers. In 1512 he wrote: "The high art of painting was greatly appreciated for many centuries by mighty kings. They made outstanding artists rich and bestowed many honours upon them since they knew that great masters are on a level with God. A good painter is full of figures and forms and if it were possible for him to live for ever, he would always bring forth something new."

Self-Portrait in a Fur Coat, built on a pyramidical arrangement of planes, remained in Durers possession during his lifetime. Posterity views it as his monument to his idea of what an artist really is. In translation, the Latin inscription reads: "Thus I, Albrecht Durer of Nuremberg, painted myself in my own colours at the age of twenty-eight."

 

Albrecht Durer
(1471-1528)
Self-Portrait in a Fur-Collared Robe
1500
Alte Pinakothek, Munich







 

Heaven and Hell
 

Crime and corruption in a turbulent world

 

In the midst of the fire stand diabolical hangmen with knives, scythes, drills, axes, picks, shovels and other instruments with which they torment the souls of gluttons, beheading them, running them through with spits, drawing and quartering them and then throwing them into the fire. There they melt like fat in the pan.

After The Vision of Tundale, 1484

 

Paradise, worldly pleasures and Satan's realm:
An overall view of Bosch's three-piece masterwork The Garden of Earthly Delights
 

The spectacle depicted here is a devastating one: devils and demons, spectres and other monstrous figures attack the poor sinners to rack, torture and torment them in indescribably grotesque ways. The instruments of torture that feature so prominently in this hellish scenario, such as the bell and gigantic musical instruments, are wholly unconventional. Pathetic sinners are woven alive into the strings of an enormous harp, shut into a drum or shackled to a huge lute to endure the beat of a diabolical symphony, a world-class apocalyptic martyrdom. Despite the surreal world of madness and perversion that unfolds like a nightmare in this painting, it is undeniably a masterpiece of consummate elegance and perfection.

Never before or since has a painter succeeded in creating a more symbolically perverse orgy of torture than Hieronymus Bosch. There could be no crasser contrast to the works of the Italian Renaissance than this. The right panel of his triptych The Garden of Earthly Delights, considered to be the Netherlandish painters masterpiece, reveals nothing of human beauty. It intricately embroiders the hellish sufferings to which man in his imperfection is condemned. Bosch's imagination is inventive on an unprecedented and unparalleled scale. With ghoulish wit, he delights in staging this inferno teeming with monstrous atrocities. As overwhelmingly bizarre as all this may seem, Bosch's imagination was, in fact, rooted in the reality of his times. People groaned under the weight of increasing taxation. Crime and corruption were rampant. Bishops, cardinals and Popes kept mistresses, fathered children and even showed them to the public at Mass. Of monks it was said then that they spent the day indulging in "flatulent discourse, dice games and gluttony". It was commonplace that their "corruption stank to high heaven". Bosch's contemporaries may indeed have recalled the words of the prophet Isaiah (5: 11—12, 14): "Woe unto them that rise up early in the morning, that they may follow strong drink; that continue until night, till wine inflame them! And the harp, and the viol, the tabret, and pipe, and wine, are in their feasts: but they regard not the work of the Lord, neither consider the operation of his hands.... Therefore hell hath enlarged herself and opened her mouth without measure: and their glory, and their multitude, and their pomp, and he that rejoiceth, shall descend into it." However, the man who unleashed such unmitigated atrocities onto the canvas did not fear Divine Judgement, at least not in the eyes of the Spanish satirist Quevedo у Villegas (d. 1645), who had the painter engage in a fictive dialogue in which he claimed not to believe in the devil or in hell.

 

Hieronymus Bosch
(1450-1516)
The Musicians Hell
Triptych of Garden of Earthly Delights (right wing)
c. 1500
Oil on panel, 220 x 97 cm
Museo del Prado, Madrid






 

The Demonic Enchantment of a Smile
 

The secret of the Mona Lisa

 

The lady smiles with regal serenity. Her instinct for conquest, for cruelty, the whole legacy of her sex, the will to seduce, to enmesh in deceptive wiles, the apparent goodness concealing malicious intentions - all this appears and disappears behind a veil of serenity to be lost in the poetry of her smile. Smiling, she is good and evil, cruel and merciful, gentle and cat-like.

Angelo Conti, On the Mona Lisa, 1909

 

The most influential genius of his rime: Leonardo da Vinci, Self-Portrait, с 1516
 

Is she cold-hearted? Soulless? Seductive? "Hundreds of poets and men of letters have written on this woman. And none of them has solved the enigma of her smile, none has read her thoughts", to quote an essay written by Angelo Conti. Attempts at interpretation are legion, yet none is satisfying. Some see "the embodiment of all the love experienced in the history of civilisation", others "the narcissistic traits of Leonardo himself ". Even the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud, felt compelled to comment on the Mona Lisa: "If one thinks of Leonardo's pictures, the recollection of the beguiling and enigmatic smile that he has magically conjured on to the lips of his female figures comes to mind. An unchanging smile on long, curving lips: it has become the distinctive feature of his work and is usually called 'Leonardesque'. The exotic, beautiful face of the Mona Lisa is most captivating to the spectator and confounds his wits." Even Freud was forced to admit defeat: "Let us leave the enigma of the Mona Lisa's countenance unresolved."

We do know something about the artist's model. She was known as Mona, or Monna, which means "Madam", Lisa del Giocondo.

Born in 1479, she married the respectable cloth merchant Francesco del Giocondo and lived in Florence. There she was noticed, at the age of twenty-four, by Leonardo da Vinci, who was twice her age. An extraordinarily gifted painter, sculptor, draughtsman, architect, natural scientist and engineer, he was arguably the greatest genius of his age. Giorgio Vasari, who founded the discipline of art history, understated the unparalleled powers of this polymath and universal genius when he referred to him as "most admirable and divinely gifted". He is said to have worked on the Mono Lisa for three years, using the most sophisticated techniques to distract his model so that he might capture that enigmatic smile.

 

Leonardo da Vinci
(1452—1519)
Mona Lisa (La Gioconda)
c. 1503-5
Musee du Louvre, Paris





see also: Monalisamania


 

Leonardo da Vinci
Mona Lisa (detail)






 

"And the Lord God Called unto Adam,

and Said unto Him,

Where Art Thou?"
 

Michelangelo recreates man

 

And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.... And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.

Genesis (1:26-27,2:7); heading: Genesis (3:9)

 

Michelangelo
The ideal of Classical beauty: Nudes figures from the ceiling fresco in the Sistine Chapel
 

Michelangelo was born in Florence in 1475. As a boy of thirteen he was apprenticed to the workshop of the painter Domenico Ghirlandaio (1449—1494). There his talent was discovered and furthered by Lorenzo de' Medici, a great lover and patron of the arts. As a young man Michelangelo was allowed to live in the Medici palace as a guest, where he could study the ancient statues in the garden and was instructed by the ruler, Lorenzo, himself. However, by the time he reached the age of eighteen, that was not enough for Michelangelo Buonarroti. How was a sculptor to represent a human body in motion without knowing how the muscles functioned under the skin? He wished to study anatomy, but he needed corpses to do so. He knew he would not be admitted into a charnel house, as it went against his contemporaries' sense of propriety and moral principles. The popular American novelist Irving Stone — whose book about Michelangelo, The Agony and the Ecstasy (1961), was a bestseller — allowed chance to drop a key into his hero's hands: the key to the hospital of Santo Spirito. Eagerly, yet terrified of being caught, he set to work at night. By the flickering light of a candle, he carefully dissected corpses to study the way muscles were formed and how they worked, how the spinal column was arranged and where the organs were located. Without empirical observation and active study, no matter how he may have gone about it, Michelangelo would never have become the model that he has been for subsequent generations of artists. Nor would he have been revered in his own lifetime as a sculptor, a painter, a writer of profoundly moving sonnets and a thinker in the Platonic mould. To him the idea, the conception of a work of art — and this was especially true of sculpture — was latent in the material, waiting to be recognised by the artist and wrested from it in the creative process.

Michelangelo's Creation of Adam is surely one of the most sublime portrayals of man ever achieved. On 10 May 1508 Michelangelo began to work on this fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in the Vatican. Initially he had misgivings about accepting the commission because he viewed himself primarily as a sculptor. He suffered agonies while painting the Sistine ceiling, as his contemporary, Giorgio Vasari, sympathetically relates: "From keeping his head bent back for months on end to paint the vaulted ceiling, he ruined his eyes so that he was no longer able to read even a letter and could not look at any object without holding it up above his head." But that was not all. Michelangelo, then thirty-five years old, had to placate his sixty-seven-year-old patron, Pope Julius II, who "was of an impatient, choleric temperament and could not wait until the work was finished". By 31 October 1512, Julius II was finally able to marvel at the completed fresco, with its over 300 figures.

 

Michelangelo
(1475-1564)
Creation of Adam
1510
Fresco, 280 x 570 cm
Cappella Sistina, Vatican
 

Michelangelo
Creation of Adam
1510
Fresco, 280 x 570 cm
Cappella Sistina, Vatican






 

Queen of Angels and Men
 

The Sistine Madonna and Dostoyevsky

 

Angels bend to you in solemn ceremony and Saints pray where your foot steps: glorious Queen of Heaven! To you the lyre of the spheres resounds, which God has strung. Your spirit gazes, divine to see, through the veil of your unfading, blooming figure; you bear a child of sublime omnipotence, victor over death and liberator of the world.

August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Sonnet to the Sistine Madonna, с 1840

 

Raphael, The Sistine Madonna (detail), Gemaldegalerie, Dresden
 

Visiting Dresden, the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821—1881) could hardly tear himself away from The Sistine Madonna. He kept returning to the Gemaldegalerie where it hung to spend hours in front of it. Vasari, the Founding Father of art history, said of the artist: "How generous and benevolent Heaven may on occasion show itself to be by showering one man with the infinite riches of its treasures, all the grace and rare gifts otherwise distributed over a long period of time among many individuals, can be clearly seen in the beauty and grace of Raphael." Dostoyevsky may have had similar feelings about the painting and the artist. On his last day in Dresden, he pulled up a chair in front of the painting so that he might be closer to the Madonna's face: "What beauty, innocence and sadness in that heavenly countenance, what humility and suffering in those eyes. Among the ancient Greeks the powers of the divine were expressed in the marvellous Venus de Milo; the Italians, however, brought forth the true Mother of God — the Sistine Madonna." The author of Crime and Punishment (1866) went so far as to claim that, compared to this masterpiece, other representations of the Virgin resemble bakers' wives or other pedestrian, petty-bourgeois women.

A major Italian artist by 1500, Raphael was commissioned at the age of thirty-nine to work on the design of the new St Peter's in Rome. The young architect had already painted The Sistine Madonna for the high altar of San Sisto in Piacenza, where the relics of Pope Sixtus 11 (martyred in 258) had been kept since the ninth century. The Sistine Madonna hung in the church until 1755, when it came into the possession of the Prince Elector, Frederick Augustus II of Saxony. Before Dostoyevsky, German writers, such as August Wilhelm von Schlegel, Heinrich von Kleist and Franz Grillparzer, had been enthralled by the painting. The Sistine Madonna continues to enjoy wide acclaim to this day. In recent times, advertising and commerce have discovered the irresistible appeal of the two bored, mischievous angels on the lower edge of the picture plane. They appear on cups and napkins, letter paper and lampshades. Putti like these are a type of angel, which made their first appearance during the Renaissance. Deriving from the Italian word for "child" or "infant boy", the putto, with his chubby, sensual cheerfulness, is in the tradition of Eros or Cupid, the god of love. In ancient writings and representations, Eros was portrayed as a half-naked boy with wings, while his figure ranged from slim to plump. The child-like appearance of Italian putti is an expression of their innocence. In connection with the Virgin, they represent the immaculate purity of the Queen of angels and men.

 

Raphael
(1483-1520)
The Sistine Madonna
1513-14
Oil on canvas, 265 x 196 cm
Gemaldegalerie, Dresden





 

Money Makes the World Go Round
 

Trade and coins in early modern times

 

When the little "moutons d'or" were devalued to twelve "sous parisis", there was no bread, no wine nor anything else. The money changers refused to pay a decent rate of exchange. And people hoarded their money although it was worth nothing. Many simply tossed their coins right over the money changers' shops into the river.

From the diary of an anonymous Parisian, 1427

 

Money raining down on the people: At the coronation or King Joseph II, coins are thrown to the crowds, 1690
 

The term "trade" was first used in the modern sense in ancient Egypt. From the fourth millennium ВС, the land of the Pharaohs maintained trade links with other civilisations. These commercial ties consisted primarily of the bartering of goods, such as raw materials, hides, tools, even the brightcoloured feathers of exotic birds, valuable shells and, of course, precious stones. The Persians were the ones to invent the mintage of coins. The bartering of goods gradually yielded to payment in currency, although the heyday of the coin did not arise until the Middle Ages, when importing goods became of primary importance. Suddenly Venetian, Genoese and Pisan ships were sailing across the Mediterranean to meet caravans bringing silk overland from China or spices from India. On returning to their home ports, the Italian manners sold their valuable cargoes to merchants. In the Holy Roman Empire, for instance, powerful mercantile enterprises sprang up everywhere. The Hanseatic League controlled trade to and from the North Sea and the Baltic coasts.

Once the era of overseas discovery and exploration was well underway, trade became a global matter. At that time, paper money (a Chinese invention) was used in Europe merely as a receipt for monies tendered, and the material value of coins still corresponded to their nominal value. Yet money looked different depending on where one went. Only money changers were able to determine the value of a coin by looking at it through a magnifying glass and by placing it on the scales to find out its exact gold or silver content. For this reason money changers were an indispensable part of life in the great trade centres and market towns. Even the man in the street required their services. Without the money changers a soldier who wanted a tankard of beer in the town where he was garrisoned would have had to drink water if he had carried only the currency of his native city. Flemish painter Quentin Massys observed a money changer at work in Antwerp. At that time the city was the main port of the Low Countries, and bustled with economic activity. Money changers enjoyed high status. Nevertheless, they were always suspected of being stingy, avaricious and of charging exorbitant interest. Perhaps the wife of the money changer depicted is contemplating a prayer book in the pious hope that she and her husband will not be led into temptation by the lure of riches....

 

Quentin Massys
(1465/66—1530)
The Moneylender and his Wife
1514
Musee du Louvre, Paris