Events from the year 1504 in art.
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Raphael, Marriage of the Virgin, 1504
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The many meanings of Michelangelo's Statue of David - James Earle
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Michelangelo's David and the Florentine Republic
Transcription
DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: We're in the Brera in Milan, and we're looking at an important early Raphael. DR. BETH HARRIS: Raphael's in his early 20s when he paints this, and the subject is The Marriage of the Virgin. And it's taken from a book called The Golden Legend. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: Now, this is a medieval book that basically tries to fill in all the missing stories in the Bible. I mean, if you think about this deeply religious Christian culture, they look to the Bible to understand the sacred story. But there are so many omissions. There are so many things that are missing that people created the glue to tie the stories together. DR. BETH HARRIS: And that's what's collected in the book we know today as The Golden Legend. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: So this story is about the marriage of the Virgin Mary to Saint Joseph. And the story says that there were a number of people that wanted to marry Mary. DR. BETH HARRIS: She had many suitors. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: And each of these suitors had a rod, and that she would be married to the one whose rod flowered. DR. BETH HARRIS: Miraculously flowered. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: Needless to say. DR. BETH HARRIS: And so they went to the temple, and the man whose rod flowered was Joseph. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: And we can see that in this painting. Joseph, who's got that wonderful yellow drape over his shoulder and around his waist, is putting a ring tenderly on the Virgin Mary's finger. And he holds in his left hand a rod that indeed has leaves at its end. DR. BETH HARRIS: And there are other suitors behind him you can see have rods without flowers on the end. And one suitor in the front is annoyed, has decided to break the rod on his knee. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: This wonderful human narrative quality here, this is not just the sacred event. But it really is enacting it before us as a kind of performance. DR. BETH HARRIS: And so right in the center, we have a priest marrying Mary and Joseph. And the painting is so symmetrical in so many ways with that temple behind. And we have this rationally constructed perspective space. And that priest is in the middle between Mary and Joseph, but he tips his head a little bit, so he's just off center. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: In fact, there's a little bit of the chaos of the crowd that people are moving this way and that, that people are focusing here and there. DR. BETH HARRIS: This painting is often compared to an early Renaissance painting by Raphael's teacher, Perugino, The Giving of the Keys to St. Peter. And you can begin to see here in this early work by Raphael indications of what we understand now as the High Renaissance style, as opposed to a kind of stiffness of the 15th century, of the early Renaissance. Raphael gives us figures who seem to move very easily and elegantly. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: So make no mistake. This is a painting that is still clearly indebted to Perugino. But I think you're absolutely right. Raphael is beginning to step out of his master's shadow. He signed the painting, and if you look very closely at the front of the temple, you can see it says Raphael Urbinus, Raphael from Urbino. And there is a beautiful sense of elegance, especially in the Virgin Mary. She is painted so tenderly. DR. BETH HARRIS: And she stands in a lovely contrapposto, tilts her head down. There's that typical Raphael sweetness. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: So whereas the early Renaissance so often was trying to reveal the truths of what we see of the world that we live in, here there's an attempt to perfect, to create a kind of balanced, harmonious representation of an ideal, Heavenly place. DR. BETH HARRIS: Ideal beauty, perfection, harmony are qualities we associate with the High Renaissance. And we see that in the background of this painting. If we follow the linear perspective system and we track the orthogonals created by those paving stones behind the frieze of figures in the front, we see a centrally planned temple in the background, a form that was considered ideal by the architects and the artists of the High Renaissance. We can think of Bramante, for example, and his Tempietto. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: It's a spectacular building. And I love the way that the linear perspective leads our eye back there past the frieze of figures in the foreground. And then our eyes are allowed to move around that arcade that's occupied by those smaller figures. But then my eye goes back to the doorway and then through the building to the doorway on its far side and to the sky that's revealed beyond even that. And there is that diminishment of the scale of the one doorway and then the farther doorway giving us a real sense of the completeness of this space. DR. BETH HARRIS: There's a real love of creating an illusion of space and the way that the sizes of the figure shift as we move further back into space. We have this real harmony here that I think is very typical of the High Renaissance between the architecture and the figures where one ennoble another, where one is as ideal and perfect as the other. It's this High Renaissance moment, although the very beginnings. DR. STEVEN ZUCKER: And of course, we're looking with hindsight as to what will happen. [MUSIC PLAYING]
Events
- January 25 – A committee of artists and citizens of Florence, including Leonardo da Vinci, Sandro Botticelli, Cosimo Rosselli and Piero di Cosimo, meets to decide on the placement of Michelangelo's marble statue of David.[1]
- September 8 – Michelangelo's David is unveiled in Florence.
- The Signoria of Florence commissions both Michelangelo[2] and Leonardo da Vinci to paint the walls of the Grand Council Chamber in the Palazzo della Signoria.
Works
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Cranach, The Rest on the Flight to Egypt
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Sculpture
- Michelangelo
- David
- Madonna of Bruges
- Pitti Tondo (marble bas-relief)
- Taddei Tondo
Graphic art
- Jacopo de' Barbari – Still life with Partridge and Gauntlets
- Fra Bartolomeo – The Vision of St. Bernard with Sts. Benedict and John the Evangelist (approximate date)
- Hieronymus Bosch – The Garden of Earthly Delights (triptych; approximate date)
- Cima da Conegliano (approximate date)
- Christ among the doctors
- Madonna and Child (Uffizi and San Francisco versions)
- Saints Peter Martyr, Nicholas of Bari, Benedict and an Angel Musician
- Lucas Cranach the Elder – The Rest on the Flight to Egypt
- Albrecht Dürer
- Giorgione (approximate date)
- Leonardo da Vinci – The Battle of Anghiari
- Pietro Perugino – Marriage of the Virgin
- Raphael
- The Seven Works of Mercy (Master of Alkmaar)
Publications
- Pomponius Gauricus – De sculptura
Births
- April 30 – Francesco Primaticcio, Bolognese painter, architect and sculptor (died 1570)[4]
- October 29 – Shin Saimdang, Korean genre works painter and calligraphist (died 1551)
- date unknown – Sesson Shukei, Japanese Zen monk and painter from the Muromachi period (died 1589)
- probable – Marco d'Agrate, Italian sculptor (died 1574)
Deaths
- April 15 – Filippino Lippi, Tuscan painter (born 1457)[5]
- date unknown
- Pedro Berruguete, Spanish painter (born 1450)
- Gian Giacomo Dolcebuono, Italian architect and sculptor (born 1445)
- Matteo Lappoli, Italian painter (born 1450)
- Master I. A. M. of Zwolle, anonymous Dutch goldsmith and engraver (born 1440)
References
- ^ Denise L. Bissonnette; Maurizia Binda; Michelangelo Buonarroti (1992). The Genius of the Sculptor in Michelangelo's Work. Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. p. 210. ISBN 978-1-891921-59-9.
- ^ Gabriella Di Cagno (2008). Michelangelo. The Oliver Press, Inc. p. 23. ISBN 978-1-934545-01-0.
- ^ Dana Facaros; Michael Pauls (2001). Northeast Italy. Cadogan Guides. p. 60. ISBN 978-1-86011-808-1.
- ^ Encyclopedia of World Biography: Orozco-Radisson. Gale Research. 1998. p. 453. ISBN 978-0-7876-2552-8.
- ^ Rona Goffen (1 January 2002). Renaissance Rivals: Michelangelo, Leonardo, Raphael, Titian. Yale University Press. p. 433. ISBN 978-0-300-10589-6.