fossilfly
03-16-2009, 10:24 AM
Below is an article on the "Art and Love in Renaissance Italy" exhibit featuring some Majolica in Fort Worth.
Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth shows how Renaissance romance was moneyed affair
12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, March 15, 2009
By SCOTT CANTRELL / The Dallas Morning News
scantrell@dallasnews.com FORT WORTH – If it's any consolation, people in Renaissance Italy seem to have been as conflicted as we are about love and sex. At least that's the conclusion to draw from "Art and Love in Renaissance Italy," a major exhibition opening today at the Kimbell Art Museum.Portraits of young couples and paintings of mythological weddings, often laden with coded images, celebrate new marriages. Elaborately painted trays and pottery commemorate new births.
But there's also a haunting Lorenzo Lotto painting of a middle-aged couple who've obviously lived through some storms. And, behind a wall decorously covered in a green damask, you can titter at some of the soft, and not so soft, porn that had its own rich Renaissance tradition. (Signs will warn of adult content.)
Fort Worth is the exhibition's stop after a run at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was organized by the Metropolitan's Andrea Bayer and Nancy Edwards, the Kimbell's curator of European art and head of academic services.
There's some spectacular art and craft here, but also stuff closer to folk art. Sadly, the Prado's famous Titian of the organist leering at the nude Venus was loaned only for the Met showing. Fort Worth gets a related Titian with a lutenist instead of an organist.
"There has been a lot of work in the last couple of decades by social historians on Renaissance practices of love and marriage," Edwards says. "The art objects help fill in that study ...
"Art historians are re-contextualizing the period, trying to understand the art in the way people of the period would have understood it."
In addition to exhaustive commentaries on individual works in the exhibition, the accompanying catalog, edited by Bayer, has fascinating introductory chapters setting the sociocultural stage.
What's love got to do with it?
Not until 1563, in the waning days of the Council of Trent, was marriage institutionalized as a church ceremony. Before that, weddings usually took place in homes, often without benefit of clergy. A handshake and a couple of witnesses were all that were required.
But the richer the families involved, the more elaborate the surrounding ceremonies were. There were grandiose processions from the home of the bride to that of the groom, and sumptuous dinners. The celebrants wore bejeweled dresses and capes, breeches and waistcoats, in lustrous brocades sometimes threaded with gold – not white, mind you.
The dowry was a monetary gift to the husband from the bride's father. But it also typically included domestic items – linens and such – presented in wooden chests more or less elaborately decorated.
"It was the very fluidity of the marriage vows," Bayer writes in her introductory essay, "that made the traditional rituals and their public manifestations so important for weddings sanctioned by society. ... Indeed, public wedding ceremonies and the material objects generated for them provided the physical demonstration of the marriage's legitimacy."
Unspoken in all this, the Renaissance was very much a man's world. For all the images of beautiful women, in paintings and on the tin-glazed pottery called maiolica, the bella donna remained property.
Especially among the nobility, marriages were arranged, typically when girls were only 15 or 16. Girls were, in effect, currency bartered for political alliances and financial security. Paintings inside those marriage chests were sometimes surprisingly sexy, as if encouraging awkward new couples to engender children.
One wonders if the Renaissance celebration of love and marriage, in poetry as well as art, wasn't sometimes a ruse, a veneer of respectability pasted over a lot of cynical business deals. To our eyes, the paintings of young newlyweds, often on separate and facing panels, look impossibly stiff, even dour. Contemporary writers and illustrators noted the booming business in prostitutes and their upmarket sisters, courtesans; men often complained of faithless wives.
Whether out of love, lust or tactical necessity, offspring were produced. But those sometimes richly decorated childbirth trays still celebrated mainly baby boys, not girls.
Romancing the past
The childbirth trays, typically about 2 feet in diameter, are among the more fascinating objects in the Kimbell show. Apparently used to serve food to the new mother in bed, they are decorated with scenes from the Bible and Greco-Roman mythology as well as contemporary domestic scenes.
A particularly detailed tray, thought to be from the Ferrara workshop of Francesco del Cossa, portrays the biblical meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. The cloth-of-gold dresses are vividly texturized with fine punchwork.
Maiolica childbirth bowls and platters, sometimes designed to nest, also were used for serving food to the lying-in mother. The examples in the Kimbell show are brightly colored with childbirth and child-care scenes as well as mythological lovers.
A rebirth of interest in classical art, learning and mythology was a defining feature of the Renaissance. Highlights among the paintings include Tintoretto's dramatically charged Venus and Mars Surprised by Vulcan (Mars peers out from hiding under a bed) and two groupings, by various artists, of the Jason-and-Medea myth, which had a happier ending in some Renaissance versions.
And, yes, there's some juicy – and funny – stuff in the PG-13 section. But explore that on your own.Plan your life
"Art and Love in Renaissance Italy" continues through June 14 at the Kimbell Art Museum, 3333 Camp Bowie Blvd., Fort Worth. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays and Saturdays, noon to 8 p.m. Fridays, and noon to 5 p.m. Sundays. $14; discounts for children, students and seniors. Half-price on Tuesdays and from
5 to 8 p.m. Fridays. 817-332-8451. www.kimbellart.org.
Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth shows how Renaissance romance was moneyed affair
12:00 AM CDT on Sunday, March 15, 2009
By SCOTT CANTRELL / The Dallas Morning News
scantrell@dallasnews.com FORT WORTH – If it's any consolation, people in Renaissance Italy seem to have been as conflicted as we are about love and sex. At least that's the conclusion to draw from "Art and Love in Renaissance Italy," a major exhibition opening today at the Kimbell Art Museum.Portraits of young couples and paintings of mythological weddings, often laden with coded images, celebrate new marriages. Elaborately painted trays and pottery commemorate new births.
But there's also a haunting Lorenzo Lotto painting of a middle-aged couple who've obviously lived through some storms. And, behind a wall decorously covered in a green damask, you can titter at some of the soft, and not so soft, porn that had its own rich Renaissance tradition. (Signs will warn of adult content.)
Fort Worth is the exhibition's stop after a run at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was organized by the Metropolitan's Andrea Bayer and Nancy Edwards, the Kimbell's curator of European art and head of academic services.
There's some spectacular art and craft here, but also stuff closer to folk art. Sadly, the Prado's famous Titian of the organist leering at the nude Venus was loaned only for the Met showing. Fort Worth gets a related Titian with a lutenist instead of an organist.
"There has been a lot of work in the last couple of decades by social historians on Renaissance practices of love and marriage," Edwards says. "The art objects help fill in that study ...
"Art historians are re-contextualizing the period, trying to understand the art in the way people of the period would have understood it."
In addition to exhaustive commentaries on individual works in the exhibition, the accompanying catalog, edited by Bayer, has fascinating introductory chapters setting the sociocultural stage.
What's love got to do with it?
Not until 1563, in the waning days of the Council of Trent, was marriage institutionalized as a church ceremony. Before that, weddings usually took place in homes, often without benefit of clergy. A handshake and a couple of witnesses were all that were required.
But the richer the families involved, the more elaborate the surrounding ceremonies were. There were grandiose processions from the home of the bride to that of the groom, and sumptuous dinners. The celebrants wore bejeweled dresses and capes, breeches and waistcoats, in lustrous brocades sometimes threaded with gold – not white, mind you.
The dowry was a monetary gift to the husband from the bride's father. But it also typically included domestic items – linens and such – presented in wooden chests more or less elaborately decorated.
"It was the very fluidity of the marriage vows," Bayer writes in her introductory essay, "that made the traditional rituals and their public manifestations so important for weddings sanctioned by society. ... Indeed, public wedding ceremonies and the material objects generated for them provided the physical demonstration of the marriage's legitimacy."
Unspoken in all this, the Renaissance was very much a man's world. For all the images of beautiful women, in paintings and on the tin-glazed pottery called maiolica, the bella donna remained property.
Especially among the nobility, marriages were arranged, typically when girls were only 15 or 16. Girls were, in effect, currency bartered for political alliances and financial security. Paintings inside those marriage chests were sometimes surprisingly sexy, as if encouraging awkward new couples to engender children.
One wonders if the Renaissance celebration of love and marriage, in poetry as well as art, wasn't sometimes a ruse, a veneer of respectability pasted over a lot of cynical business deals. To our eyes, the paintings of young newlyweds, often on separate and facing panels, look impossibly stiff, even dour. Contemporary writers and illustrators noted the booming business in prostitutes and their upmarket sisters, courtesans; men often complained of faithless wives.
Whether out of love, lust or tactical necessity, offspring were produced. But those sometimes richly decorated childbirth trays still celebrated mainly baby boys, not girls.
Romancing the past
The childbirth trays, typically about 2 feet in diameter, are among the more fascinating objects in the Kimbell show. Apparently used to serve food to the new mother in bed, they are decorated with scenes from the Bible and Greco-Roman mythology as well as contemporary domestic scenes.
A particularly detailed tray, thought to be from the Ferrara workshop of Francesco del Cossa, portrays the biblical meeting of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba. The cloth-of-gold dresses are vividly texturized with fine punchwork.
Maiolica childbirth bowls and platters, sometimes designed to nest, also were used for serving food to the lying-in mother. The examples in the Kimbell show are brightly colored with childbirth and child-care scenes as well as mythological lovers.
A rebirth of interest in classical art, learning and mythology was a defining feature of the Renaissance. Highlights among the paintings include Tintoretto's dramatically charged Venus and Mars Surprised by Vulcan (Mars peers out from hiding under a bed) and two groupings, by various artists, of the Jason-and-Medea myth, which had a happier ending in some Renaissance versions.
And, yes, there's some juicy – and funny – stuff in the PG-13 section. But explore that on your own.Plan your life
"Art and Love in Renaissance Italy" continues through June 14 at the Kimbell Art Museum, 3333 Camp Bowie Blvd., Fort Worth. Hours: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays and Saturdays, noon to 8 p.m. Fridays, and noon to 5 p.m. Sundays. $14; discounts for children, students and seniors. Half-price on Tuesdays and from
5 to 8 p.m. Fridays. 817-332-8451. www.kimbellart.org.