and it kind of relieves them because they're already in the tomb so it's a really interesting placement of his figures in that perspective in dealing with his context in this subject matter here's another painting by Caravaggio this is his Bacchus there's a really fascinating intermingling during the Baroque period and the late Renaissance of Christian subject matter and imagery and Greek and Roman mythology kind of mixed together there's still this humanism idea going around of looking for inspiration from the Greeks and Romans and we can see it in Caravaggio's painting or Bacchus and so Bacchus was known as the god of wine he was the God of luxury he was the God of opulence and Caravaggio depicts this extremely opulent painting of them one of the things you see in a lot in the Baroque era are these paintings of figures and multiple still lifes and objects and what's so amazing about this is these are the artists kind of showing off a little bit we've talked throughout the semester one of the most amazing things about painting if someone takes a stick with animal hairs at the end of it and dips it in a ground-up flour mixed with oil and they turn it into fabric and skin tone and fruit and wine and so these baroque artists who's in competition with each other they're kind of showing off they're saying look I can paint portraits right I can paint people I can paint skin tone but I can also paint fruit I can paint pears and apples and kumquats give me what you got where I have to show that I can paint a variety of things and a variety of things that are pretty exotic you know you see all these exotic fruits that people don't have some of these Baroque arts this one doesn't have it but so when you get these little flies on there and these little caterpillars and stuff that said look I can paint a fly on a fruit he can paint one wine inside a glass this one here I love the I heard someone once say that Bacchus is probably waking up with maybe a little bit of a hangover and he's got kind of jitters in his hands and so he's kind of swirl this wine a little bit I don't believe it I think Caravaggio did this to show that not only can I can he paint wine in a glass but wine that's rippling in a glass and just amazing amazing detail in this work so here's Lupe's I moved them all over sorry I was trying to zoom in there so there's Caravaggio's Bacchus here's another one by Caravaggio his Saint Matthew and the angel here one of the things that he's highlighting here is his mastery of the foreshortened view as this angel comes in visits he comes in at this angle which is interesting because we talked about this painting by Giotto with these angels that come in they're all excited that Jesus is coming up to heaven and they flip around to to show them sorry Giotto showing different types of perspective and how to paint perspectives we'll look at the mastery that he's done here it's so naturalistic pretty amazing this one here is st. Peter that's being strung up on a cross here and he's got this amazing foreshortened view these amazing muscle structures in these colors where the figures kind of go deep into these shadows that the baroque artist would absolutely loved I also love this figure here because like make the original Michelangelo Michelangelo take Caravaggio he had issues with the church he constantly argued with the church especially after he became well known he was sought after because he was a pretty amazing painting and he didn't want to do a lot of commissions that the church would ask him to do and so sometimes even when he would do a commission he would put little things in to kind of snub at the church a little bit and Michelangelo did the same thing in the Sistine Chapel one thing I forgot to talk about in that video go back and look at the Sistine Chapel and one of the squares is an image of God creating the heavens and creating the earth and when he creates the earth he turns around and bends over and you can see gods but where he just moons the church and that's a way for Michelangelo to kind of snub back at the church well we got the same thing going on here okay this guy holding up Saint Peter he kind of flashes his derriere at us as they lift up st. Peter this is the calling of Saint Matthew this is one of my favorite ones because what a Michelangelo or sorry what Caravaggio does is he's found this amazing way to take these stories from the Christian Bible and combine them with contemporary 16th century or 17th century the figures that he depicted here are clothed in a way that Caravaggio and his friends would address during that time it's the calling of Saint Matthew in the story from the Christian Bible is Jesus fine st. Matthew in the back of a bar or back up a tavern and he went in and called for Saint Matthew that you will be one of my apostles and you will be one of my Saints st. Matthew was like a tax collector but a tax collector back then is kind of like a loan shark and he's hanging around with these seedy people back in the bar and I love it because Jesus goes you here she'll be one of my apostles and he points to the guy next to him because what you're talking about him right you're not talking about me you gotta be talking about in and so this is sort of that choosing of st. Matthew all the people that he uses as his models these are people that Caravaggio would have hung out in the bars Caravaggio loved hanging out in bars and taverns he drank a lot he gambled a lot he would have known loan sharks like this and so he uses his own sort of experience within this painting an interesting little side story Caravaggio was in a tavern once and he got in an argument with a guy over a bet that they had in a tennis match and so they got in a fight over the bed of who won or who owes who or what have you and the fight carried off into the streets and everyone in the tavern said Oh Caravaggio is gonna fight let's go watch fight fight fight and they go out on the streets and Caravaggio is losing this guy is beating up on Caravaggio pretty well and Caravaggio used to carry with them a concealed dagger which was illegal at the time you couldn't have concealed weapons and so he pulls out this dagger as he's getting beat up and he kind of goes ballistic on the guy and just starts stabbing and stabbing and he kills the guy in the middle of the streets in Rome and all of his friends are looking around said whoa what just happened and you got to get out of here right you can't just kill someone and get away with it you got to leave you got a fleet and so he does he flees Rome and he always wanted to get back to Rome that's where his life was that's where the art world was that's where his friends were and so he starts writing to the church asking for a papal pardon please forgive my sin please forgive this murder and let me back into Rome if you do I'll do all the paintings you wanted me to do I'll basically work for you here's a painting that he sends to the Church of Rome and it's a painting of David and Goliath that we've seen a lot of this is after David has cut off the head of Goliath well the head is a self-portrait of Caravaggio he said look I've been Goliath I've been a bully but I'm willing to pay for my sins if you let me back and so the church agrees they eventually send him a letter and say yeah you can come back with your arse right you're working for the church you're going to do all the commissions we want you to do and so he is in Malta at the time which is an island town in Italy and he puts all of his stuff on this ship he's waiting for them to board the ship he's hanging out there at the stockyards at the ship there and he's in a tavern and he gets in another fight they get arrested they've been put in the stockade and he watches his ship with all this stuff go back to Rome he then gets dysentery and he dies and the shores of Malta so he never makes it back so a pretty fascinating story on this artist and I think it added to his story and made him such a famous artists along with his amazing technical skill so this is Peter Paul Rubens and one of the things I don't like about your book is they show you only the center panel of this triptych pane and the triptych is important because first of all you would never see one panel without the other two we talked about a triptych it's almost like a dart board where you would open up as this altar and I think the side panels inform the story a little bit more I'm sure you all know that Jesus was not the only person ever to be crucified that people were crucified by the Romans every day and Jesus was crucified with two other people and here are the two other people that are coming to be crucified that day and then on this panel it has all the mourners that have come to witness the event and so Rubens unlike Caravaggio like I said he didn't work from live models and so his figures are much more dramatic there's so much movement within this piece and the figures are really struggling to pull up Jesus and I love this idea and we talked about it with Michelangelo's God and man or God an atom or the creation of man where the Angels hold up God and the angels are struggling to hold up God well we have the same thing with these figures that are pulling up the cross that Jesus is on Jesus was known as a relatively frail man in the Christian Bible but all of these guys are struggling with all their might and it really highlights the enormity of the event for the Christian people this is Rubens Bacchus which again much more dramatic much more elaborate than the calm Bacchus of Caravaggio this is the party this is an opulent times ten his Bacchus has obviously had a lot of food and wine throughout the years and he rests and hangs out with his cherub friends who this I love this cherub here because bum Baca says Cup has runneth over and this cherub is getting a little steel of some of his wine this cherub here has had enough and he's just over here urinating on the ground goddesses hang out with him and other figures this is Neptune here who hangs out with them I love his footstool which is a lion chewing on these grapes that he just rolls his leg on this lion as a footstool here and so one of the things about Bacchus is quite often he's depicted with this androgynous look sort of this male/female sort of combined figure and Rubens definitely does that here the reason being is Bacchus was the son of God zeus the god of all gods and his mother was actually immortal her name was Emily and what happened was Zeus was known to have affairs with many mortals throughout his life but a God cannot show their likeness to a mortal without bad things happening to the mortal like exploding like turning to dust all kinds of death happens and so he would disguise himself when he would come down and woo these mortals and so quite often there's weird stories of these animalistic who come down as oxes and these weird animals but anyway his wife found out he was having an affair with semele and his wife told him said look you can go see that woman but you're gonna go see her one last time and you're gonna go see her as your true self knowing that she would Paris and so Zeus goes and he shows her who he really is and as she's dying he realizes that she was pregnant with his child so he takes out the child from her womb and he puts it in himself to carry out the child to the full labor and one version he puts him in his thigh and the other version he puts him in his testicles hey this is Greek mythology man it's not I'm not making this stuff up and so Bacchus was born from both a male and a female and so quite often he's depicted quite honest like this one here here's another painter from the Baroque era her name is Artemisia Gentileschi and what's so exciting is we finally get a prominent female painter now throughout history a lot of female artists either weren't recognized in their time or they weren't recognized throughout history and today in my lifetime we didn't really talk about many artists like Artemisia Gentileschi when I was studying art but that has gotten better and that has changed unfortunately during this time of the Baroque era especially in the Renaissance there wouldn't have been many opportunities unfortunately for female artists and so there's not really that many for us to recognize Artemisia Gentileschi her father was an artist and she was extremely talented from a very young age one of the problems that she always had is during this time to become an artist you needed to be an apprentice well she couldn't find a master studio that would take her on as an apprentice the master would have thought it would be an embarrassment to their studio to take on a female apprentice she didn't want to just work for her father because she wanted to pave her own path and make her own way well one thing her father does do is hook her up with an artist an artist named Tasi that agrees to take Artemisia on as an apprentice because she was an extremely talented painter unfortunately Tasi takes advantage of the situation there's a horrible movie out called Artemisia it's an old old movie but don't watch it because it talks about this torrid love affair between Artemisia and Tasi which couldn't be further from the truth Tasi actually raped her and during this time the rapists if they proposed marriage to the victim all charges would have been dropped just proposing all charges would have been dropped so what Artemisia did