Existing comment:
European Art -- The Grand Manner: History Painting in Seventeenth-Century Europe:
History painting was a technical term used in the past to describe great and difficult subjects -- from the Bible, mythology, and history itself -- that were considered by critics to draw upon the artist's deeper powers to represent action and emotion convincingly. Implicit in this definition was the claim that such history paintings were of a higher order than landscapes still lifes, and portraiture. These lower genres, it was argued, were of less important because artists only had to reproduce things they saw with their own eyes. History painting, instead, drew upon the higher intellectual faculties of invention and imagination to represent the actions of gods, saints, and heroic mortals.
History painting was most prevalent in the Catholic countries of southern Europe, and Italy attracted ambitious foreigners (such as Nicholas Poussin from France and Peter Paul Rubens from the southern Netherlands) hoping to compete and excel in this genre. However, while at the time few doubted the great artistic effort required to portray these extraordinary subjects, there was little agreement about which style was best suited to them. While the Italian painter Caravaggio and his followers such as Artemisia Gentileschi and the Spanish artist Bartolome Esteban Murillo wanted to cast subjects from the past in a more contemporary guise, Poussin looked to the art of antiquity for inspiration. And Rubens celebrated the freedom of artistic invention with sketchy brushwork and brilliant colorism. Ultimately, there was no consensus about who was most successful at painting in the "Grand Manner." In this gallery, we invite viewers to decide for themselves. |