Posts Tagged Leonardo da Vinci
Readers’ cultural review of 2011: What, no Katy B?
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 15, 2011
Last week our critics picked their highlights of 2011. Did they get it right? Readers respond with their own highs (and lows)
MattB75
One Man, Two Guvnors was the most fun I've had in a theatre for years – easily the best play of 2011, and James Corden best performer. The National theatre largely misfired for me: A Woman Killed with Kindness, Cherry Orchard, 13, The Kitchen, Frankenstein and Greenland were all largely disappointing.
The RSC's Homecoming was the best revival. Rupert Goold's Merchant of Venice was great fun, even if the inconsistency in Portia's characterisation (from ditzy blond Glee fan to brilliant prosecutor, hm) took the edge off it.
Tom Brooke was my favourite actor of the year – in The Kitchen, and I Am the Wind.
oogin
Frank Gehry and Zaha Hadid are still two of my least-admired starchitects. However, credit where it's due. I had the pleasure of wandering Toronto's AGO (Art Gallery of Ontario), redesigned by Gehry [a few years ago], and apart from his usual frivolous facade, the interior had been quite brilliantly done. So restrained and sophisticated: words I never never thought I'd use for the old showboater.
daveportivo
Katy B owned pop in 2011, or temporarily leased the lower sections of the charts from Adele at least. Seven singles off one album and a successful B-side, bridging the gap between cool, intriguing dance and charming, relatable 2000s-style British pop-star writing. Loved it.
Kleistphile
The programme of the year has been Mark Cousins' superb history of the cinema, The Story of Film: An Odyssey, on More4. Incredibly wide-ranging, informative and inspiring, with extremely intelligent analysis of how film developed and how the great directors innovated.
drdownunder
Artist Christian Marclay's awesome 24-hour film-montage The Clock, shown as part of the British Art Show in Plymouth. Mesmeric, fascinating, witty editing and marvellous film-buffery content.
SlimJim888
The Inbetweeners Movie. The snobs may scoff but this film says more about Britain and its youth than 20 Ken Loach films ever could.
OldFriar
Two of the greatest musical evenings were the appearances of the Budapest Festival Orchestra and Ivan Fischer in Mahler's First symphony, and the zany late-night Prom with audience requests including Bartók, Kodály and Stravinsky. A month before that, the magic combination of Andris Nelsons and the CBSO in Richard Strauss and Prokofiev's Alexander Nevsky.
At the Royal Opera, the three most memorable performances were Madama Butterfly with Kristine Opolais in the title role and her husband Andris Nelsons in the pit; Werther with Sophie Koch and Rolando Villazón doing his best (still short of what Jonas Kaufmann can do); and the recent revival of Faust, with Vittorio Grigolo, René Pape, Angela Gheorghiu and Dmitri Hvorostovsky.
digit
The release by the BFI on DVD and Blu-Ray of Barney Platts-Mills's 1971 film Private Road, starring Bruce Robinson (who later wrote Withnail and I). I first saw this in about 1987 on TV and I've been wanting to see it again ever since. Even better than I thought.
Mark42
Gruff Rhys's Hotel Shampoo was my favourite album of the year; Cashier No 9 was not given the recognition it deserved. Enjoyed Kate Bush, Tinie Tempah, Noel Gallagher and Will Young's offerings, but very disappointed with Coldplay. Adele: lovely voice but too many songs sound the same on her album.
Still, it wasn't all bad: the end of Westlife and hopefully the beginning of the end for X Factor.
dbeecee
Right Here Right Now; Format international photography festival in Derby. Thousands of photographers took part from all over the world, including Joel Meyerowitz and Bruce Gilden. An exciting and eclectic mix showing the best in street photography.
davidabsalom
Best resurrection: Rab C Nesbitt. Comedy of the year for me. Now that the Tories are back in, he seems to have found his mojo again.
zibibbo
Leonardo da Vinci at the National Gallery. I think the major problem with this absurdly hyped show is that, apart from the two versions of the Virgin of the Rocks and the unfinished St Jerome, the other six "Leonardo" paintings on display are either too unattractively gauche, stiff and mannered to be considered good or significant. Or they're too implausibly naturalistic to be an autograph work (La Belle Ferronière is too lifelike to be by Leonardo). Or just too plain weird and damaged to take seriously (step forward, the newly discovered Salvator Mundi).
Thank you, Adrian Searle, for having the integrity to give your honest opinion about this insanely promoted but hugely disappointing show.
andglove
The High Country, an album by Portland band Richmond Fontaine, demands your attention from first song to last. It's one of the only albums that will give you the same sense of satisfaction that finishing a novel does.
LDTBFJ
Bridesmaids was a great and genuinely funny film. Comedies (and female comedians) are too frequently dismissed, especially by the Oscars board.
Snarlygog
British Art Show 7: In the Days of the Comet in Plymouth. It was good to see [Christian Marclay's] The Clock and Sarah Lucas's work up close and personal. At least there is an emphasis on craft skills in video art: good focus, framing and timing are back in fashion.
alphabetbands
Nicola Roberts, the good one from Girls Aloud. In her album Cinderella's Eyes she lays out her inner demons and anguish on a platter of sumptuous dance pop hooks and beats. The album is so simple that my two-year-old can sing along, and layered enough that we slightly elder statesmen can appreciate it as well.
juliendonkeyboy
In no particular order: Sufjan Stevens live at Southbank: ambitious, experimental, joyous, exciting, sad. Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle: the sixth episode, Democracy, was quite simply awesome. Senna is my film pick: made in 2010, but didn't get released on these shores until 2011. Wonderfully moving.
habsfan0303
Propeller's Comedy of Errors was riotous. I mean, how often does a naked grown man run past you with a sparkler wedged into his buttocks?
glynluke
Archipelago is the worst film I have ever seen in 50-odd years of cinema-going. How Peter Bradshaw and Philip French can find a single redeeming quality in this dreadful two-hour river of bathetic, emotionless, drama-free drivel baffles me.
Shatillion
I loved Attack the Block. I got mugged the week before it was released and actually found watching it quite cathartic. I was rooting for the little shits by the end. That's good screenwriting.
JimTheFish
A really disappointing year for British TV, which has been on a downward slide. Doctor Who was probably still the best thing domestically. The Crimson Petal and the White and The Hour were underwhelming misfires; The Shadow Line was about the only really promising new kid on the block.
The basic problem is that there's just not enough TV drama being produced. We need more one-offs, more Plays for Today to allow TV to find new voices and take more chances. Everything seems to be market-researched and focus-grouped into mediocrity.
LocalBird
We went to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park this summer and were blown away by the incredible Jaume Plensa exhibition; the alabaster heads took my breath away. Beautiful, mesmerising and enchanting.
Carefree
Memorable plays: Flare Path, Frankenstein (Jonny Lee Miller as the Creature was brilliant), and Much Ado at the Globe (Eve Best and Charles Edwards were good enough to almost match my memories of Janet McTeer and Mark Rylance as Beatrice and Benedick).
Damper squibs were Chicken Soup with Barley (far too long). Conor Macpherson's The Veil at the National started brilliantly but didn't deliver the beautiful, haunting, elegiac power of The Weir – a great shame.
Alarming
There were aspects of Grayson Perry's Tomb of the Unknown Craftsman that drove me round the bend. But he wrote well about his theme and chose some absolutely lovely objects from the British Museum's collection.
uptomost
85A collective from Glasgow's brilliant mechanical opera Idimov and the Dancing Girl at the Secret Garden Party. Spooky, funny, ingenious.
AdminGuru
The Tree of Life: a vast expansive film with multiple interpretations, and little in the way of film convention for the casual viewer to latch on to. Viewers fall into two camps I think: those who want simply to be entertained and led, and those who want to explore and participate. Tree of Life is about participation.
Wrighthanes
I just couldn't get The Tree of Life. I tried. I wanted to like it. Admittedly I was on a Singapore Airlines flight, which is not the ideal way to appreciate its cinematic beauty.
DeunanKnute
The Tree of Life is quite possibly the most overrated movie of all time. The sheer brilliance of every single actor isn't in dispute, nor is the superb cinematography. The movie itself is the problem, because it's a real clunker. It's also one of the few films I've seen at the cinema where people were either (vociferously) walking out in disgust or staying behind just to boo.
GorillaPie
The [designs for the] new US Embassy in London. I realise these buildings have to be more fortresses than offices, but really. I'm disappointed that such an important new commission isn't going to be more iconic. Especially since I live opposite the site.
Gundmundsdottir
Possibly the biggest disappointment was the final track on Bon Iver's second album: it never fails to surprise me with just how cheesy and plain bad it is.
CurlyScot
Some of my favourite moments have been in otherwise unremarkable shows. I was slowly won over by Susan Hiller at Tate Modern, and Nancy Spero's works Azur and Hours of the Night II [at the Serpentine] were so incredible I forgot all the meh stuff that surrounded them. The only exhibition I have been unreservedly knocked over by was Mike Nelson's Coral Reef at Tate Britain – an old piece so I'm not sure it counts. Not a superlative year; let's hope 2012 is better and isn't overwhelmed by a spurious Cultural Olympiad.
Leo Steinberg obituary
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on April 13, 2011
Art historian and critic known for his elegant investigations of Renaissance paintings
Leo Steinberg, who has died aged 90, was one of the most brilliant and original art historians of his generation. He wrote as persuasively about the great Renaissance masters as he did about Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg. His best-known work was The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion (1983).
I was lucky enough to meet Leo in 1955, and over the decades we continued to see each other – in New York, where he lived for most of his adult life, or on his visits to London. He was impatient of small talk or gossip; conversation was always about particular works of art, which he would discuss intensely. What he said was charged with a sense that art was of overwhelming importance: "anything anyone can do, painting does better".
That passionate involvement with a specific work, and the intelligence which fed it, made him not only an engrossing interlocutor but also a dazzling lecturer (at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York, tickets for his lectures sold out on the day they went on sale). He was invited to deliver the prestigious Mellon lectures at the National Gallery in Washington DC (1982) and the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard University (1995-96).
He was a devoted teacher, concerned about his students, whose careers he followed. From 1961 to 1975, he was professor of art history at Hunter College, in New York, and then moved to the University of Pennsylvania, where he was Benjamin Franklin professor until his retirement in 1991.
Though firmly identified with the New York art scene, Leo was born in Moscow, where his father, Isaac, a distinguished lawyer, was briefly Lenin's minister of justice. Isaac's radical views (he wanted to shut down all prisons) soon led to his dismissal and emigration to Berlin after threats of assassination.
Leo's childhood in Berlin left him with a barely noticeable German inflection to the otherwise impeccable English formed in his adolescence, since the arrival of the Nazis forced another displacement – to London. There, he finished his schooling and studied sculpture at the Slade. He moved to New York with his family soon after the end of the second world war.
In New York, he worked as a freelance writer and translator, studied philosophy and taught life drawing at Parsons school of art. He embarked on a doctoral thesis at the Institute of Fine Arts at New York University. His study of the diminutive and intricate Roman baroque church of San Carlo alle Quattro Fontane, designed by Francesco Borromini, set out the formal devices employed by the architect to engage the passerby's unsuspecting attention.
While working on his thesis, Leo published criticism in arts magazines and became the most articulate spokesman of the rising New York School of painters. His early advocacy of Rauschenberg and Johns was committed but jargon-free, and he was one of the few critic-historians whose essays were eagerly read by artists for their clarity and elegance. His criticism was collected in a book of essays, Other Criteria: Confrontations with 20th-Century Art, in 1972.
But for all this involvement, he was not really acquisitive and lived rather frugally. In 2002, he donated his collection of 3,200 prints (mostly from the 16th and 17th centuries, but also works by Picasso and Matisse) to the museum of art at the University of Texas in Austin. In 1986 he was awarded a MacArthur fellowship (known as the "genius" grant).
He continued to be prolific, writing with equal enthusiasm about Pontormo and Picasso. The examination of a work was never approached on merely formal terms – although he was a painstaking analyst, always meticulous in his attention to detail, to the way brushwork was used to fragment or to mould space; he would even investigate the implications of words pasted on the printed scraps of collages (treated as abstract patterns by most art historians) in his search for clues to the artist's intention.
Leo was impatient with any criticism which merely analysed the object presented to the spectator, since what really interested him was why the artist had wanted to do it in the first place. This is the key to The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion. The book is concerned with what Leo termed "ostentatio genitalium", the display of the genitals which often figured in devotional paintings or engravings of the Renaissance and which had been "tactfully overlooked for half a millennium". He argued that the prominence of Christ's genitals was a presentation of incarnational theology explicit in the sermons and pious literature of the time, in which the blood shed at the circumcision is considered the first offering of the redemptive sacrifice.
It was the embodying of an idea which historians, oscillating between prudishness and pornography, found embarrassing or far-fetched. The book was received with bemused deference at the time; however, it has recently been reprinted with an account of the controversy and has transformed our understanding of Renaissance art, while his reading was confirmed in an appendix to the book by the Jesuit theologian John O'Malley.
Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were the artists who preoccupied him in his later years; Michelangelo's sculpture of the naked Christ in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome, to which the church added a loincloth, was one of the key works discussed in The Sexuality.
His book Michelangelo's Last Paintings, on the frescoes of the Conversion of St Paul and the Crucifixion of St Peter in the Cappella Paolina, in the Vatican, appeared in 1975. In 2001, he published Leonardo's Incessant Last Supper, a subtle re-examination of the most famous of Renaissance frescoes, in which he pointed to the combining of the forewarning of betrayal and the institution of the Eucharist which followed it.
When I visited him last year – we both knew we might not meet again – he dismissed the matter of his health in the first few minutes, but for an hour and a half we talked of Michelangelo's Doni Tondo, a circular painting of the holy family, in the Uffizi, Florence. We discussed the affectionate embrace of the figures, and the naked youths who people its background. He was writing an extended essay on the painting and thought that he would leave it unfinished, a fragment.
Leo married Dorothy Seiberling in 1962; the marriage ended in divorce. For more than 40 years, he was much helped by a devoted assistant, Sheila Schwartz. He is survived by his nephews and nieces.
• Zalman Lev ("Leo") Steinberg, art historian, born 9 July 1920; died 13 March 2011
• This article was amended on 13 April 2011. The original stated that Leo Steinberg had also been married to Phoebe Lloyd, and that he was helped by Sheila Schwartz 'in his later years'. These points have been corrected.
Golden ratio shows maths and art come from the same place in our minds
Posted by The Sheet in Architecture News on December 28, 2009
The beauty of the golden ratio, surely, lies in the discovery of harmony in imbalance – that is, it's not a symmetrical division, it's not 1+1, but a bit more interesting and lively. In architecture, the piers and windows of Durham Cathedral seem to apply it as assiduously as in the Parthenon in Athens. But why such mystique?
The ancient Greek thinker Pythagoras was moved to find that a string only produces perfect musical notes when divided by exact mathematical fractions. He saw this as a revelation of divine beauty. This attitude to number (that it is the key to the secret harmony of the universe) survived in the middle ages in Muslim and Christian architecture.
In the Renaissance, Leonardo da Vinci took it to new extremes, analysing the perfect proportions of a horse and a human and finding number at the heart of nature. In 1504 he was designing fortifications for an Italian town. While researching this for a forthcoming book, I puzzled over diagrams of pyramids that keep interrupting plans for towers – until I understood that Leonardo believed so passionately in the power of proportion that he thought it could make a castle invulnerable. He illustrated his friend Fra Luca Pacioli's book The Divine Proportion, which praises the golden ratio, and so helped to create one of the most persistent cults in maths and art.
Whether or not the golden ratio really has any special significance in human psychology, it has been given that status by artists like Leonardo. Another is surely the great 15th-century painter Piero della Francesca, whose geometrically pleasing art is rooted in mathematics. The persistent pursuit of this proportion right down to Le Corbusier proves that mathematics and art come from the same beautiful place in our minds.
So how do you find this special proportion? Divide a straight line in two so that the ratio of the whole length to the larger part is the same as the ratio of the larger part to the smaller part. The result (roughly 1.62 to 1) is the golden ratio.
Jonathan Jones's book about Leonardo da Vinci will be published by Simon and Schuster in April 2010.