Transcript for:
Heroes, Heroines, and Narrative in Paintings at Yale

hello everyone I'm Pam Franks I'm the deputy director for collections and education here at the gallery and I'm delighted to welcome you all here this afternoon today's lecture is the first in a semester-long series being offered by John Walsh entitled let this be a lesson Heroes heroins and narrative in paintings at Yale this series represents an exciting New Direction for the gallery in our public program the educational offerings of our teaching here at the gallery consistently focus on close observation of specific works of art and prolonged engagement with the collection each fall John Walsh collaborates with the members of the gallery's education department and especially with Jessica sack the gallery's Jan and Frederick mayor senior associate curator of public education to teach graduate students from across campus to lead School groups that visit the gallery this Innovative program is our worldle Gallery teacher program and is setting new standards in the pedagogy of teaching from original works of art thanks to John and Jessica's work along with many other colleagues from across the museum and indeed across campus who contribute to the training when we started to think about whether a multi- lecture series on the collection might be a possibility Our Hope and intention was to extend the close focus on particular artworks and the extended engagement with the collection over time to a broader audience through the galleries gallery's public programmatic offerings there are just a few business items that I'd like you to please note this lecture is being video recorded So if you wouldn't mind please turning off your cell phones at this point or turning them to vibrate I'd also like to mention that John will take questions at the end of the lecture so kindly hold your questions until the end the invitations um for this series and they're available at the back of the room include the list of the full schedule of lectures there's a stack of the and please do take as many as you'd like to distribute um to your friends the invitation also has the very useful information of the website address um www.art gallery. yale.edu and on this website you'll find a link to the lecture series on the homepage the website includes the schedule of lectures of course but it also includes recommended readings for each lecture so that you can explore the ideas further um the video recordings of each of each week's lecture will be posted online within a few days of being delivered so that if you miss one week you can still view the lecture online also finally I'd like to mention um that John and our worldle Gallery teachers will be offering Clos looking in gallery sessions in front of the paintings before and after each lecture beginning next week the first session will be held at 12:30 and the second at 3 p.m. and registration is required and if you look at that invitation with the schedule of lectures you can get the instructions on how to register there's still a few slots left for these sessions and I strongly encourage you to consider attending if you're available so again in planning to develop a more in-depth program about the collection through a lecture series complete with supplemental materials we were really thinking about how to extend some of what happens in meal courses and SCH School classes to a more open forum and thus we've structured this series as something of a public course it was immediately clear to us that no one would be better um to inaugurate this new approach than John Walsh so let me just wrap up by taking one more moment to introduce him a bit more fully John Walsh is the director ameritus of the J Paul Getty museum he graduated from Yale College in 1961 and received his pH D from columia he was a paintings curator at the Metropolitan Museum and at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston he's taught the history of art at Columbia Harvard and more recently at Yale and as I mentioned before at the gallery he leads training sessions for graduate students serving as worldle Gallery teachers this is his seventh year at the gallery serving as an instructor and Mentor for the gallery teachers showing them the art of close- looking by example and elucidating this looking With His abundant knowledge and wealth of experience as a scholar professor and curator John is also a longtime member of our gallery's governing board most recently serving in a special capacity as chair of the board's education committee John has been instrumental in keeping the Museum's teaching Mission Forefront in all of our planning he is a tireless advocate for the museum its Collections and its people we thank him we thank you for your abundant generosity and for this very special opportunity to learn uh over the course of a full semester um as you elaborate John on Heroes heroins and narrative and paintings at Yale Pam thanks for the introduction thanks for the chance to give these lectures at Yale and um thanks for this wonderful audience uh in these lectures I'm going to give you a careful look uh at some of the most powerful and interesting works of art at Yale one at a time um helping them to reveal themselves to you not just by observing them but by also considering their context and their intended function I'm going to pay particular attention in these lectures to subject matter particularly narrative subjects across four centuries When painting in its highest form uh served as a vehicle for stories I want to show you that painting a narrative picture was often like writing an opera where the raw material of a play is converted by poetry and music into something else into something stronger more concise as an expression of the essence of the story and its action so I've chosen pictures that illustrate stories uh it's my argument that if we're going to understand what the paintings were made to do and how they might still teach us something we need to know those stories otherwise it's as though we were at the Opera uh with no libretto enjoying the music but having no idea what's going on or what the words mean or what the music is trying to express the pictures we're going to study in this series um are part of a long tradition so-called history painting a species of narrative painting it was prefigured in Antiquity it was defined during the Renaissance and after that was regarded as the most elevated category of art for 400 years and more it was officially recognized as the most important work a painter could do it was had the highest purpose to show people what was sacred and what their duties were to each other to society and to God it was the most demanding branch of art the most prestigious and the best paid and it was only in the middle of the 19th century that that kind of History painting started to lose its place in the hierarchy in less than one person's lifetime the it was um largely overshadowed by subjects that had always ranked much lower uh that is scenes of daily life landscape Still Life by and large moral and ethical Pur purposes for art gave way to the pleasures of observing and recognizing by World War I abstract art had made representative painting itself Irrelevant this happened in the name of artistic progress in the last two lectures we'll look at how this radical change came about the ideas behind abstract art still affect the way many people see older art that was true of my teachers and their teachers and for a while true of me and probably most of yours I mean the idea that what really counts in a work of art is its design its shapes its colors its relationships and the idea that those formal elements can communicate with us Spectators directly no matter whether they depict anything or or recognizable or not let alone a story so why not just dispense with subjects altogether with this suited abstract art it also affected the way people saw older art they looked primarily for its abstract strengths and they found them but these ideas put blinders on several generations of people who came to assume consciously or unconsciously that subject matter was actually irrelevant to judging older art or taking pleasure in it I'll have more to say about how we lost our taste for narrative in art and didn't develop a familiarity with the subjects that artists expected us to recognize history painting didn't die uh it survived in Altered form and was revived for particular purposes in our own time most often when issues of social justice are involved I confess in this series I'm leaving a lot out because the art of visual narrative is a lot older and more wide spread in the cultures of the world than you're going to see in these lectures for one thing the Deep background I I won't have anything much to say about the earliest historical pictures made more than 4,000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia like this box on the left inlaid with scenes scenes of War and Peace or this stil on the right with carving in relief that celebrates a military Victory but while they're on the screen let me just say a bit more both of these were made in the era of the famous Epic of Gilgamesh the first epic literature that comes down to us in writing about the great Gilgamesh the king of Uruk modern Iraq one-third human and two-thirds God of superhuman strength these pictures remind us that we are a storytelling species stories of great events like these victories had been memorized and recited and passed down from one generation to the next not unchanged but morphing and merging and being elaborated all the time long before they were compiled into written epics let alone pictured and what functions did story serve They Carried Vital Information that the people of one generation knew they needed to pass on to the next how the world arose how people perished in a great flood what the gods expected of humans how Heroes and wise men and seers behaved how the tribes won victories and suffered calamities the stories in the earliest literature embodied the rules and tabos of society they were the primary material for the education of children and they were a way for entire peoples to preserve a body of common experience and wisdom well back to what I'm not covering uh in these lectures for a moment uh that includes uh painted py made in ancient Egypt like this one made for the Scribe H nefer showing the events that he hoped were going to happen after he died he's being led into the Hall of judgment um his heart is being weighed and he uh then gets presented to uh the god Osiris I will also um not be dealing uh much if at all with miniature painting uh not only in Persia here but in the med medieval West even though they're often really ingenious at the way they picture comp complex narratives and I'm going to neglect Chinese and Japanese narrative pictures uh like these Scrolls uh despite their tremendous force and delicacy instead of trying to present a global survey of narration and pictures I'll be focused on One Long tradition in Europe and America the DNA of that tradition is in ancient ient Greece and Roman painting we have only small fragments uh of Greek wall painting but we have thousands of painted vases like this one some of them with terrifically Vivid episodes um from the narratives uh like this one of King Phineas the blind prophet in the story of the Argonauts uh here who's tormented by harpies who fly and to steal his food every day many Roman wall paintings survive like um this one these in the Villa De Villa of the Mysteries in Pompei almost 1500 years before the Renaissance where there are large figures performing ritual actions in convincing poses and painted to appear weighty and Grave the Romans also had a more fluent and expressive way of painting on walls that's best preserved uh in the rediscovered New Testament scenes by an unknown artist of the 9th century ad uh in this carolingian church near vesa the strange and famous fact of course is that the Revival of History painting in the Renaissance in Italy took place without the artists having any knowledge of the kind of pictures I've just showed you from Antiquity all of them had disappeared were buried or plastered up Greek and wall painting Greek and Roman wall painting had to be summoned up from the ancient literature strangely enough and the man who did this uh was this man the intellectual father of History painting and the first person to describe it the 15th century Florentine Leon Batista Alberti this is his self-portrait in bronze uh looking every inch a forceful Roman of antiquity his Treatise of 1435 deura on painting rested on classical Authority the painters and the writers of more than a thousand years earlier it was a how-to book for artist s it explained perspective and other tools of the trade and it was also a rule book explaining the correct way to do things Alberti wrote that what he called Historia Historia are pictures based on texts Greek and Roman and Christian texts they don't necessarily depict actual historical events I'm showing you an episode from Christ's Life by maacho of about 10 years earlier a large fresco that Alberti knew very well and admired the purpose of History painting was to edify the public to instruct them and ultimately make them better people these pictures says Alberti have numerous figures he recommends nine or 10 of different ages and attitudes which he says the P should study in advance by making drawings the figures aren't subject are subject rather to the rules of decorum that means that they're not common or everyday but instead they're elevated in costume and posture they're idealized in their proportions too and in their facial features the Alberti also says that the spectator should feel that he's entered into the space of a picture and the experience of the action that's being represented he says that the painter needs to give the picture a suitable subject or have one supplied by his educated friends he needs to give the painting variety DEC Orum that is appropriateness of appearance and expression and dignity so in creating this new very explicit rationale for painting Alberti turned to the ultimate Authority for people of his times the writer of writers of classical Antiquity he made a parallel with rhetoric the science of persuading people with words he said a painter should make a plan for the picture and he should aim to Rouse the viewers emotions with figures who outwardly demonstrate their ings as clearly as possible just as a good speech does he says that painters should deliver Beauty abundance and variety not only of humans but also landscape Animals still Al and so on the painting should be what he says charming and attractive enough to hold the eye of the learned and the unlearned with a sense of pleasure and emotion he mentions long lost paintings by the famous artists of Greece and Rome like aelis and timanthes pictures that were described by plen the Elder and encouraged painters to try their hands at reconstructing these lost pictures and they soon did The Three Graces by Raphael on the left is only the best known of many examples alberty also names a mosaic by a modern painter uh jotto uh that was in St Peter's Basilica uh and then later destroyed We Know It uh from this drawing by a follower showing the calling uh St Peter with the apostles uh in a ship in the background one of the founding events of of the Christian Church Alberti applied Historia to relief sculpture as well as to wall painting the RO Romans had mastered that art of relief sculpture for epic narratives the most Spectacular One you know is on the column of trun um in the Forum in Rome it has a band of relief sculpture wound around it with scenes from the wars that the emperor Tran had been fighting in DEA modern Romania we see preparations for battle we see sieges battles itself speeches over and over and there are many appearances by the emperor Tran about 60 in all uh Lively skillful uh but not sculpture that's intended for really close inspection which is hard to do anyway um by the way um this idea of a band or scroll format was adopted about a thousand years later to depict the Norman conquest of England in 1066 in the so-called biotapestry an embroider embroidery that's 230 ft long that tells the story of course from the Winner's side which is a pretty consistent feature of a historical narrative the scenes though include um the death of the English king uh Edward the Confessor the Fateful uh oath of his uh successor to William the successor to William that is the oath William uh the shipping across the channel and even the appearance of Haley's Comet which is a very bad sign for the English we're apt to think of tapestry and embroidery as a lesser art form but until the 19th century tapestry was the most prestigious form of picture in fact the most expensive medium of all uh for uh narrative art when for example Lou the 13th of France here had to present an impressive gift to Cardinal Franchesco barbarini it wasn't a painting by Rubin uh painting painting by Rubin exists but it wasn't the painting it was a seven seven different 25 foot wide tapestries woven from rubin's design with Gold and Silver Thread which cost much much more than paintings of the same size the idea was magnificence not just the story some of that actually is still that magnificence is still preserved in the stair Hall of the Philadelphia Museum where you can see these tapestries now the great sculptor Lorenzo giberti used the term hisor for the reliefs on the baptistry doors of the Cathedral of Florence uh I'm afraid I'm going to have very little to say about sculpture including relief sculpture which is after all a pictorial art uh and which was regarded as at least equal to painting uh and more challenging for the artist and like tapestry uh much more expensive to get back to painting um more than a century before Alberti Divine defined istoria and maacho realized his ideas a Great Masterpiece of monumental narrative painting had been made here in Padua in the chapel built for enrio sceni a banker uh and a money lender uh here he is giving a chapel to the Virgin Mary and on the wall are life-sized Fresco of episodes from The Life of Christ and these are a tremendous leap for narrative painting j showed how you could give a flat surface the illusion of space and paint humans who look like they have actual volume and weight and even suggests that they have living breathing vitality and individual personalities look for example at how Joseph and Mary uh hand over their oops come back back to me back um how um how they the parents um hand over their baby uh to the high priest in the temple the story is from the gospel of St Luke Mary is doing her sacred Duty under the Jewish law completing her ritual purification 40 days after child's birth the old man Sim here shown as the high priest had been promised that he wouldn't die before seeing his savior here he's just said his famous prayer now let thy servant depart in peace for mine eyes have seen thy salvation and he's telling Mary that a sword will pierce her soul the child looks at the hairy stranger just as any baby would and tries to get away reaching for his mother just as she she tees impulsively for him we're not just seeing the emotional bond of babies and mothers we're not just seeing the Old Law and the new jotto is actually showing the terrible conflict that exists for this mother and child between human love and divine Duty that Fresco is 12 feet high now here's jotto again um the same subject uh on on the right on a tiny panel um about the size of an iPad uh concentrated on Christ's attempt to escape this this time this time he gives Simeon the back of his hand uh and not incidentally spreads his arms in a kind of in innocent spontaneous uh reminder of the crucifixion in the future a lot of the expressive vocabulary that jotto invents here for Cent and for centuries to come um is here already in in in in joto in the 14th century there there are figures here of persuasive gravity variety there's a tone of high seriousness there are legible poses and expressions and there's a high purpose to illustrate the Crux of an important story without a caption we understand what's going on and we understand it at a human level empathetically with our emotions we may have forgotten the passage in the gospel but the images how people look looked and felt and behaved those things may well be Unforgettable in our minds that's the great potential of narrative painting images that are indelible and we will see it reached over and over again uh in these series these pictures in these series another Florentine uh Antonio Del poolo 140 years after jotto pushes the expressive possibilities farther uh studying the nude body in more and more difficult attitudes he invents a new kind of Hercules uh not an overdeveloped bodybuilder but instead a kind of shrewd character with a tough ropey body that's as tightly strung as his bow and it's a story of A New Kind draw from the drawn from the life of Hercules ones one that the artists uh contemporaries knew from Roman literature bodies get more convincing and expressive and so do the settings and narratives this scene uh of Hercules is set just above the Arno Valley so that you can actually see the Dome uh of the Cathedral of Florence in the distance that the painter brings the story home to the audience and makes it relevant to them the Flemish painter Ro Roger ven was an exact contemporary of Alberti and maacho in Florence he paints St Luke the patron saint of artists at work at a portrait of Virgin and child St Luke's Studio window looks out on a landscape of a River City in contemporary Flanders uh he places the legend of St Luke in the world of the painter and his Patron into the very particular here and now soon um artists of narrative scenes are inventing ways to suggest a more complex inner life for the actors in Venice in the early 16th century a new generation of painters was producing states of mind that hadn't been seen before in the entire history of art ambiguous shifting dreamy unknowable and they reinforce The elusive moods of the characters by painting settings that are not sharply defined like Roger Fen but softened by a subtle light and atmosphere for instance doso dosi this is this eccentric brilliant painter of Ferrara presents a young man in armor with a Halo he stares out at us with a troubled expression brow contracted mouth open if you take a second look you see a head uh here up against his chest it's sort of like the way a spaniel might put his head there but it's it's a dragon's head and you notice that he's holding a pole here that's been broken off at the top this adds up you realize who this has to be it has to be St George but it's in a completely different aspect than what you expect which is really the night on Horseback uh in broad daylight spearing The Dragon while the maiden watches and prays for her hero this is Rafael's little picture in the National Gallery alsoo imagines George after the battle alone at Twilight looking at us as though he were troubled and wanted reassurances about what he had done here's another isolated participant uh this is a girl in exotic costume with a drum mouth open evid singing an educated spectator spectator around 1600 could probably tell you who this is and probably tell you who's not in the picture but is part of the story and um again a conventional version clears this up uh she is the daughter of jeepa the ambitious Israelite General in the Book of Judges Who challenged the enemy to battle only after he swore to God that if he won he'd sacrifice the first person he saw coming out at the door of his house he returns Victorious of course and out the door rejoicing comes his only daughter what Peter DTA paints here is what movie people call a tight shot we we see what the Victorious General saw his beloved daughter happy oblivious that's it his horror his remorse for what his ambition would cost these things we have to imagine this is very sophisticated storytelling well all this leads me to make some general points about narrative painting us using some of the pictures at Yale that we're going to be talking about at greater length in this series uh it's kind of Overture uh medley of tunes that you'll uh here here later later at greater length the first point uh is that telling a story with a single picture is doing it the hard way is definitely hard compared to pros and poetry and drama on stage you need some techniques to do it but the single picture has great advantages which I'll be pointing out there is the problem of time uh a story unfolds in time and may have many episodes in a novel those episodes are described one after the other as you turn pages perhaps with interludes of commentary by the author and there's often the author's Voice or somebody else's to guide you a play or a film also presents the episodes successively but we see them in sequence in real time painters of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance could deal with a long narrative by presenting individual episodes in many separate scenes uh the Life of Christ for example uh here in this big alterpiece by guanto there are a dozen episodes uh each occupying uh a separate panel small panel on either side of this large coronation of the Virgin the story unfolds in each row left to right top to bottom and therefore are more events on top they're all framed in a structure that's something like the cross-section of a church with the episodes fitted together as support for the central Nave like Zone that shows the object of devotion Christ crowning his mother in heaven all these choices would have been worked out with the artist and a framemaker uh by a man who was paying the bill uh whose name was probably Nicholas we can guess that because there's a picture of St Nicholas up top um and probably with a help of a priest in charge of the church uh in the town of Padua dedicated uh to St Martin uh who which is also he's also up there at the top so longer narratives can be spun out in a series of discret episodes like this or it can be compressed into a single image uh that's what we have in this Dutch uh painting here uh in the gallery uh up front uh in the garden here is the Virgin and child but also St Anne prominently Mary's mother with um and the picture is really about Mary's lineage so we get family flashbacks o over at the Left Outside The Garden is Mary's elderly father Joakim Anna had been Barron for 20 years and in the distance Joakim is pleading for a child with God who appears in the form of an Angel when Anna then becomes pregnant uh she and Joakim meet at the Golden Gate of Jerusalem and rejoice which is what's happening here at the top so the events of a year happen in a single frame another familiar subject Le leads itself uh to a sequence uh in a single image uh this is the stry alterpiece by genti De fabriano uh the action as you can see I hope snakes around the top starting with the Magi standing on a mountain and seeing the star they take horse they travel to Jerusalem the top and um there we don't see this part they ask Herod about the birth of a king to the Jews which worries Herod since he's the king so he asks them to go out and report back at the upper right they come out again and they follow the star and at the bottom they've arrived on a a page uh you can see is uh taking off the Spurs of one of the Kings as the others Crouch and then kneel down to be blessed the biblical story is stretched into a ribbon that moves through a vast landscape that makes it clear that the whole world is involved in this event the most dramatic contrast I can imagine is an's view of the same virgin of the same version of the same subject which again is a tight closeup all the pageantry is gone there's no tour of the Holy Land no sequence of events here the focus is the theological crutch of the story The Crux of the story that the wise and powerful men who represent the old order of the world come to render homage to the New Order Christ in this compressed format our attention goes to the faces of the Kings to the terrific solemnity of their expressions as though they already knew the fate of the baby as his mother does there's nothing in the New Testament accounts that suggests this possibility the artist invented it like jotto he imagines the intense human emotions felt by everybody here in a couple of weeks we'll look at this picture of the conversion of Saul by the Italian painer Galo it also shows why a single image can be so effective at putting a story across he's chosen the key moment in the long story of Saul's life the turning point when he's knocked down and struck blind chosen by God without having done a thing to deserve it he's been Saul the persecutor before this now he'll be Paul the preacher it's a strong and beautiful painting but to get its full force you have to know the biblical accounts of Saul's life before he got on the road to Damascus the life before what he was doing what happened afterward the painter assumed you would know all that he assumed that his picture of this one incident would summon up the rest of the story in your mind that's going to be true of almost every painting that we look at whether the subject comes from the classical mythology or from the old or new testament or from recorded history my first point was that telling a story with a single image is the hard way the painter first needs to choose the episode well and we Spectators have to be equipped to see it second Point narrative painting has a lot in common with drama on stage and even more with Opera the skill involved are similar you have a story you choose an incident or an episode from it call it a scene you cast it with suitable actors you block out their movements on stage and you coach them with expressions and gestures there's a whole Repertory of body language that's common to both theater and painting and is for several centuries well known not surprisingly since actors and directors often use the same Illustrated textbooks in expressive expressing the the Passions many of you heard Robin Simon's marvelous lectures on that subject at the AL Center for British art earlier this year you need to have a setting of course and scenery uh and props you need lighting to heighten the action and to put the emphasis where you want it painters Do Without Words and Music but they have all those other expressive devices and they make a stationary thing they create something that doesn't change stands still and invites close slow looking and immersion in the image the painter also often picks a scene because it's the heart of the matter or the turning point of the story like like this the the oath that leads to the creation of the Roman Republic or the moment of decision just as in theater the scene is often chosen because it displays the character of the heroin or hero or the villain here uh the Widow agripina displays her virtue as a faithful spouse by bringing home her murdered husband's ashes her virtue as a prolific mother with her children and she displays her virtue as a brave citizen coming back to Italy to seek Justice from a corrupt Emperor Benjamin West used a used a dramatic devices that he shared with directors of contemporary theater they use a they include a vocabulary of poses big gestures that signal grief piety horror despair all things that the audience can read easily from the back seats stagers stage designers also create Illusions like this one of deep space in the background and they use light that rakes across the stage from an unseen source and picks out those figures that they need to have visible for expressive purposes painters help to make new kinds of theatrical experiences possible too not only drama on stage but particularly silent movies when they began to tackle historical stories and got serious about set building the first film epic was from the novel quovadis set in Nero's Rome and what better model could you possibly find for the decor of the Coliseum and for the Gladiators and this and a dozen other Roman movies of the same type than the paintings of Gerome like the one here at Yale speaking of Decor we will be exploring this picture and others by the most astonishing creator of theatrical settings for historical events and painting John Martin almost a century later when DW Griffith was planning his three and a half hour epic intolerance in 1916 and needed to reproduce Babylon at the time of King belshazzar near the the corner of Hollywood and sunset boulevards uh he had to go no farther than Martin's wonderful painting or the print reproducing it and take whatever he needed which was actually quite a lot in the last couple of lectures I'll have more to say about how movies and TV and other media displaced painting as a vehicle for storytelling but some contemporary artists have combined particular intensity of History paintings and the narrative technique of film combine them with startling results these Stills are from a 12-minute video piece by the artist Bill Viola uh who has used old Master paintings as the starting point for silent scenes in slow motion of mysterious new narratives my third Point uh is that Spectators tell the story history painting gives us work to do we need to look carefully at what the painter included and how it's treated making sense of a narrative picture is akin to reading and for us that can mean reading a foreign language furthermore as I've said before that we need to know the story all this work is Complicated by the truth that all of us looking at the same picture of a narrative subject see it differently each of it each of us reads its content differently because we differ my version of this picture by Marco Pino that we'll be talking about my ver my version of it is not going to be yours the same is truth of true of fiction plays dance Opera it's true whether we know the story or not I can tell you a lot about what the gospel of St John says about the raising of Lazarus and I will but none of you will process my words or the text or the picture in the same way as others we each receive information through multiple filters of life experience age education gender many more these differences are going to turn up in the conversations that we have in front of the pictures themselves starting next week I said that the spectator tells the story to help us Spectators do that the artist puts us in our imaginations into the picture uh he Paints the subject for example seen from a particular vantage point which becomes our vantage point and which conditions our experience here we see Saul and his horse from close up as though they had been almost passing us on the road just as the horse ju just the just the Horse and Rider nobody else when it's staged this way the event is personal almost private when Peter brl Paints the same subject we see it entirely differently bral sets it in a great steep Alpine landscape where there's an army toiling up toiling up the slope everybody just getting on with the job we're far away and off to one side which means we don't even see what's going on right away and neither do a lot of other people Saul's accident hardly interrupts the March and there are just a few rays of light uh to suggest that what we're witnessing is a Divine act the point of putting this scene in a huge crowd is partly that it's not a private event the message is that the choice of this man who was the scourge of Christians to become the greatest Christian Missionary affects everybody though nobody knows that yet the effect of the setting is also to suggest that its importance the importance of the event is as Broad and sweeping as the landscape itself artists can put us in the picture by including our alter egos this is a device that Leon Batista Alberti recommended to painters saying it's a good idea to include somebody in the picture looking out at The Spectator where is he looking out at The Spectator establishing a connection there's a man uh here who does that and his costume and his face look very much to be of peno's own time the 16th century not Christ's time he's there as a witness to an important event and he invites us to be one too and to learn from it in history paintings the painter will sometimes show how a spectator can be a good witness and suggest how he or she should feel this is an engraving of a painting by Van djk for which the original is lost the French 18th century writer Dennis dero reported an argument he had with learned friends about this painting which shows the Roman general belisarius here who was treated unjustly by the emperor Justinian so the legend goes he was blinded abandoned to beg for alms and then recognized uh by one of his former soldiers who lamented his cruel fate oo's friends judged that it was a fault of the painter that he gave that Soldier so much prominence dero said no that's not a fault that's actually the point he said that's it's just that which made the painting moral and that the soldier was playing my role the soldier is completely absorbed in what he's seeing what he's doing is absorbing the moral of the story he's learning learning has always been a a primary purpose of most history painting I'm making the the point that we Spectators tell the story I'm going to give a few more instances of pictures that imply a sequence of episodes only one of which we see the rest we can deduce in Jerome's U oops in in Jerome's Arena scene all that happens is that the Gladiators salute the emperor before they start to fight but there's evidence all over the place about what's just happened there's blood in the sand a pair of dead or dying men is there in the foreground there's another one farther back and farther back still um a bunch of bodies is being dragged out of there ahead of them two actors playing the roles of the Gods of the underworld are leading them towards the portal through which they're going to be dragged and disappear so artist shows by these Clues what's happened just before and we Spectators know like the Romans in the coliseums know what's going to happen again very shortly as soon as the player introductions are over with in other 19th century paintings there's an even more explicit invitation for us to do the storytelling it's a new kind of narrative painting like the novels that appeared in serial form every week that Victorian exhibition Victoria exhibition go lovers go loved here's a favorite here at the Ale Gallery the painting by mle of a woman of marriageable age standing at a desk with a letter and an empty vase she's holding a portrait of a man behind her and she's deep in thought the title the artist gave it was yes or no with a question mark at the Royal Academy exhibition of 1871 the critics thought it was marvelous and they hoped for a sequel answering the question um mle held out for three years and after a lot of discussion the picture of the picture in the Press uh he exhibited a sequel called no I have to show you a color engraving of that one because the original is lost and it was more controversy and finally two years later mle exhibited this painting um uh yes with an exclamation point showing the guy showing up showing up with a traveling uh cloak and carrying a beat up suitcase case he's been away more difficult to follow and certainly more serious is this Enigma by Gustaf Corb one of the major paintings at Yale but one I couldn't really justify as a narrative painting for these lectures still a story is implied there has been a kind of action and we can see it in the snow the rider leans back in the saddle as his horse lowers his head towards the tracks of the horse himself and also the tracks of a small animal with spots of blood we don't know is this a Trapper is it a poacher possibly he doesn't have any gun or traps and not even an expression that we can read in the shadow just body language to express exhaustion at the end of a Pursuit the horse and r are in the same is evidently in some situation that involves tracking a wounded animal but despite the clues we don't know what the story was or is and whether it might express some condition of KB's own Spirit we have to think about it that's the invitation to us a fourth point about narrative pictures is that they need to be compared with others that's how we understand better what the artist added to the tradition of representing the same subject or altered or just borrowed from them art history thrives on comparisons and art historians love these exercises like a climber loves Rock Benjamin West gave the scene of agrin's Landing a tremendous severity the central group has white robes um here to distinguish it and moves solemnly across from the ships towards the temples and the City a picture on the right here by Gavin Hamilton of the same rare subject painted a little bit earlier gave West the same the basic layout that he used but it's the changes that West introduces that are important he eliminated the pointless climb up the steps uh on the right his colors are more somber the tone is more grave the figures are more numerous and smaller and the architectural setting here is much grander all of this pulls our attention to the heart of the matter which is agrippina's defenseless confrontation with official Rome these aren't just differences of form in other words they're differences of meaning we saw that in the case of the St Paul pictures bral's Long View versus galo's closeup here here's another uh striking case um there's an amazing large painting uh in the gallery which you've probably seen by the Dutch painter Abraham Bloom art of the flood in Genesis we know that the waters must be rising but we don't see that uh in fact we don't see much else except the doomed Sinners most of them struggling to Higher Ground all struggling gracefully others perform a kind of ballet of dismay and despair showing off their amazing physiques the emphasis here is not on the 40-day storm or on the flood waters or the Ark of Noah but on the individuals of the offending race of humans who are shortly to be wiped out and across the street in the British Art Center is a huge painting of the same event by John Martin whose belshazzar's Feast you saw a few minutes ago the contrast could hardly be greater if it pictured a different subject his Deluge is a terrifying vision of nature nature gone mad the Earth cracking open and belching fire great w Wes about to sweep everybody away we look at all this from high ground but it's not going to be high enough to save us from what's already happening to the crowds of tiny people trying to climb to safety our visceral reaction uh comes from nature turned murderous here in the Martin whereas with blumar our reaction is to the fear that we read in the individual bodies and and painting there are many different ways to tell a story in other words the same story at my fifth point and last is about narrative painting especially history painting it always has a message for its intended audience and often has a motive the question is for us what were those messages and what if anything is left for us to think about now that might apply to our lives let's look at a few scenes of War to sharpen the point John Trumble knew exactly what he was saying in his Rec Recreation of the Battle of Bunker Hill and to whom and why he was saying to posterity that the United States had won in its independence from England by the concerted action of people of all classes binding themselves together being brave enough to fight against Great odds and sacrifice their lives if they had to and there's another message about decency and restraint in Warfare something that Trumble believed in even to the point of inventing an incident of Battlefield gallantry we'll see that these ideas these are ideas about war that we um 250 years later might be thinking about 40 years later the the Dutch born French painter Ari Sheffer had a different view of warfare he painted the scene of The Retreat of Napoleon's Army from Russia in the winter of 1812 making it clear that this was not a moral Victory but instead a horrific defeat it was the result of many blunders Napoleon had already left and returned to Paris leaving his best general in charge of getting the remains of the army out of Russia out of every 200 men who went into Russia one came out sheffer's picture is without hope and it's without Heroes it's about sacrifice for nothing it's an answer to the many images of Napoleon's victories and it's a general statement about the futility and barbarity of War a kind of never again aimed at an audience of liberals and undecideds in Paris uh people who could remember the ideals of revolutionary France before Napoleon hijacked it and turned it into an overweening Empire and a base for military adventurism you get some hints from my my rhetoric about what I think a modern audience could learn from such pictures this pair um by the Victorian painter Augustus Leopold egg hangs across the street it's set two centuries earlier sitting in the center of of a Sumptuous room full of gorgeous women and obsequious looking men is a radiant young man in white he is the second Duke of Buckingham the favorite of Charles II and he rose to be the most powerful man at court in his Peak at his Peak the richest man in England except for the king and a famously dissolute character right over its head out the window you can see Buckingham's star the moon proverbially fickle the companion painting on the right shows the once glorious Buckingham dead at the age of 29 alone in what Alexander pope called the worst ins worst room his white silk jacket thrown off the order of the Garter there at his knee this is all Vivid and plausible but egg made it all up not only the party scene but also the death of Buckingham he was actually back at his Grand Country estate in Yorkshire when he died where he went hunting and caught a chill then died in the cottage of one of his tenant Farmers but squalor works a lot better if you're showing rise and fall and Lord knows this was a period for moralizing in public the more graphic the punishment for sin the better sometimes the target audience for painters was very very small and it helps to know exactly who that audience was this is Van djk again painting the commonest of religious subjects the Madonna and child uh here with a donor figure in adoration he is the ab Scala a former ambassador of The Dukes of savoo a Wy operator who'd been put out of his job by the new Duke Scalia knew the duchess however Christine Maria of France and he had vanj paid him praying to the virgin whose face is that of The Duchess Scalia wanted to be reinstated and he'd evidently had the painting made to be presented to her speaking of Flemish painters commissioned by Italian political figures to show them in a good light in order to regain political Advantage at a foreign Court here's the most famous case of all really a kind of Epic of flattery Ruben's cycle of Maria deichi in the 19 in 1620s Maria deichi who was the queen mother of France who was a Florentine uh and a the Widow of King Henry IV got Rubin to paint her story in 21 very large pictures the story itself was fraught since she was Regent for her young son Louis the 13th and wanted power for herself well others did too notably the Cardinal rishu and she had years of deadly struggle with these people after attempting a coup or two and being banished Maria succeeded in getting back in favor and in a position to have her side of the story told rubben used the allegorical language of his time to make it a heroic story uh this for example is oopsie come back here this is Maria and Henry her the King King Henry who died but made her Widow Maria and Henry meeting for the first time like Jupiter and Juno in the sky Maria's role uh in the Battle of in The Siege really of yudish in in Germany was actually nil uh but she did visit once and Ruben paints her as the Victor giving her the trappings of equestrian portraits of men and she becomes the Conquering Hero of beauty her reconciliation with her son King Louis the 13th was a political expedient and none too stable but rubben paints it as a Divine event where the Devils of Envy here the Rival courtiers are cast down the story hung on the walls of Maria's great palace at luxemborg in the Luxembourg Palace for visiting ambassadors and courtiers and the King himself to look at this was a fully political iCal rewriting of History it was propaganda with a capital P painting like history itself has often been a tool of politics now finally I think we need to look at paintings of historical events as a species of fiction and just like historical fiction it needs to have themes like the rise of democracy the fall of tyranny Crime and Punishment and so on themes determine the choice of what episodes get shown and water eliminated it's a mix of actual invented actual and invented of fact of Spin and invention not truth in a literal sense but what that wise philosopher and observer Steven kbear called Truth truthiness to be coherent both historical novels and history paintings need to be structured to get their points across to be credible and to be Vivid to capture attention and hold it and to be remembered next week we will examine this picture uh showing one of The Many Adventures of Hercules its historical fiction about the most durable hero of all and one of the last episodes of his legendary life the most fateful episode of all so um try to be here if you can thank you okay