The New Murrey and Blue blog

Sparkypus, funny what you said about costume, I work part time with Barnes & Noble, (the discount is delicious), so I keep a steady stream of items on my wish list and yesterday I was cruising through our database of what is still available on Jan van Eyck, van der Weyden, Memling, Christus, van der Goes, etc, usually called Early Netherlandish painting and oh pooh, it’s a wasteland out there!

I have a few monographs from school but I wanted to add to my material after your post. Our “interlibrary loan” system, which is where I would normally turn for out of print or very pricey items, is of course, nonfunctional during Covid and apparently will remain so ad infinitum… IF you haven’t looked into (online is one source unless you have a good available library system) some of these artists for costume give it a try, the Burgundian court was THE most spectacular, cultured, lavish, and stunning example of the arts across the spectrum, no parallels anywhere in Europe or England (though I think R2 had the aesthetic and intellect to come close!).

One sculptor you probably have not heard of but MUST look for is CLAES SLUTER … I’m a painter and I can’t build a 4″ Lego house if my life depended upon it so sculptors exert an exotic fascination on me, and this one perhaps more than any other! We know ZIP about his training, his background, and can explain even less how he can even have created the extraordinary figures that surround, in mourning, the Tomb of Philip the Bold and first Duke of Burgundy (it is at Dijon) who died in 1404 – curiously it is a single monument as his wife decided to be buried alongside her parents. The figures Sluter crafted are choirboys, monks, members of the household, but it is their drapery that is just a revelation – GO LOOK!

When Frank Gehry, the Canadian architect, explained WHAT influenced his amazing Guggie art museum at Bilbao he cited the large and small figures found in Giovanni Bellini’s lovely Madonna and Child painting AND… the drapery folds in the Mourning Tomb figures at Dijon by Sluter! These date to about 1403-6, literally a century before Michelangelo’s David! I had three grad classes in Sculpture and no one ever had an explanation as to how someone like a Sluter could ‘happen’ – his expressive realism, (and just look at his costuming at the Well of Moses as well), is a seismic break with everything in the Northern mode at the time and long after him! Allegedly Michelangelo knew of his work, that I find hard to believe as Sluter never left his province (we think) and Michelangelo, as we know, openly loathed Northern artists, and there was no Pinterest, no Net, no Instagram, no nothing! If you wanted to know what another artist was doing you had to walk, take a donkey, a ship, and schlep your way there to their studio, and see it for yourself!

Sparkypus, Sluter is 3 decades before the painters you used in the post – look at these mourning figures – they are all shown in deep emotion, each one in their own world of openly crying, or contemplation, or some profound expression, they are simply breath taking – there is NOTHING like these sculptures in Northern art, for their realism, accuracy (in art, living things, animals and people, for example, when shown in accurate perspective, is called “foreshortening” – it is not yet popular in Northern painting in this period, it won’t be for another century really) and the sculpture of the day remained “gothic” in that figures were more of less attached to the columns of a church or cathedral, not freely or visually understood as uniquely and completely human. Sluter is just a shocker.

ok, I’m out, had my Sluter rant on, but he IS worth looking for!

another thing you might do, for comparison, is look at the costuming detail of say the Northern painters 1400-1500 and then again 1600 during the Dutch or Northern Baroque age (roughly 1590’s through 1715!) – and compare with what the Italians do in art 1400-1490’s (primarily it was egg tempera and fresco) then also see the Italian Baroque period (same dates as North but now almost exclusively in oil for portraiture, which is where one sees costuming in greater detail).

What I noticed, (my major was/remains Italian/French 1470’s-1550’s) is that something definitely happened in painting – while oil paint was introduced to the Italians (thanks to Leonardo) it’s effect did not have the same correlation in the detailing of costuming as it had in the visual description of hair, facial expression and emotional content of portraiture, which hardly ever, maybe NEVER factors into portraiture before in Northern painting where Oil had been supreme for decades. While a Raphael of Titian might – on occasion – pay lip service to aspects of some costume worn by a favored sitter, as a rule that is not the focus of the portrait the way it is in Northern painting – why??? what changed? I have a few theories but you have made a more enthusiastic and thorough study of costume than I have and I would love to hear it!

(Titian has several famous portraits – Emperor Charles V, one equestrian, horse steals the show in that one, and the one with his hound, sleeves on that coat are impressive! My favorite is the Man with the Blue Sleeve, hahhaaa)

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