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Carel Fabritius, The Goldfinch, 1654 "We have art in order to not die for the truth."  Donna Tartt quotes Nietzche in the opening of one of her chapters in The Goldfinch , an epic journey of life novel.  It's taken me all year, but finally, I've finished reading The Goldfinch ( need a long plane trip to do that ).   The entire drama is centered around a missing painting, or, shall we say, a stolen painting in the hands of the narrator. It's interesting that Donna Tartt chose a painting to be the symbol of her protagonist. I always enjoy reading books that center around a painting.  Usually these books imagine the fictions that influenced the creation of the paintings, books by Sarah Dunant ( In the Company of the Courtesan ) and Tracy Chevalier ( Girl with a Pearl Earring ). But this novel is not about how or why the painting was made.  It is about the journey of the painting and it's presumed caretaker, what it does for him through his growing years and into ...

Diego Velázquez, Joseph's Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob, 1630 oil on canvas, Monastery of San, Lorenzo, El Escorial,  Spain, 87 3/4 x 98 3/8 in.  wikipedia image Cheating card players and fortune tellers by Caravaggio and Georges de la Tour are among the best-known paintings of deception .   Two extraordinary Velázquez paintings completed in 1630, The Forge of Vulcan and Joseph's Bloody Coat Brought to Jacob , above, are also allegories of deception from the Baroque period of art.  Although a Biblical painting and a mythological painting would not seem connected, the canvasses match in height, format and the number of figures, six each.  The painting of Jacob and sons has been cut at either end, while the other image has added canvas to the left.  Both paintings have large window openings onto landscapes on their left sides.  There are only male figures, many of them scantily dressed to show the artist's extraordinary ability at depicting muscles of...

Diego Velázquez, Las Hilanderas ( The Spinners ), oil on canvas, H: 220 cm (86.6 in) x W: 289 cm (113.8 in) The Prado, Madrid ( Not for beginning art students; I was not able to understand or interpret this painting at all until teaching a class in Mythology. )  The study of myths in all cultures, like the study of art, may seem obscure but it can illuminate some truths about humanity.  Around the world, the beauty of weaving has some association with magic. So we look to Diego Velázquez's Las Hilanderas ( also called The Spinners, The Tapestry Weavers or The Fable of Arachne) which focuses on the weaving contest between Pallas Minerva and Arachne described in Ovid's Metamorphoses .  The foreground scene is about a competition which includes spinning and carding, preparations that come before the weaving of tapestries. The final outcome of the story is implied, not shown. Velázquez used a complex composition of diagonals to weave a tale,  a fable that lovers of ...

Saint Francis in Ecstasy, from the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, CT, is in the Kimbell Art Museum's exhibition, Caravaggio and His Followers until January 8 One painting in the Kimbell Art Museum's Caravaggio exhibition (today is the last day) reveals an unexpected side of Caravaggio's nature. St. Francis in Ecstasy , from the Wadsworth Athenaeum in Hartford, CT, is poetic. Parallel lines of light on water to the left lead to a very sweet angel holding St. Francis.  The saint  has swooned after receiving the stigmata , the wounds of Jesus. In dead center, St. Francis's foreshortened hand vaguely reveals this hole representing the nail that went into Christ's hand. Intentionally I have refrained from writing about the type of paintings for which Caravaggio is most famous. The Boy Bitten by a Lizard and The Sacrifice of Isaac (in the Kimbell exhibition ) cause discomfort and hit us in the gut. As Isaac is about to be killed by his father Abraham, he looks out of ...

Martha and Mary Magdalene, c. 1598, shows the saint at the moment of her conversion. It is from the Detroit Institute of Arts, but is currently on view in Caravaggio and His Followers, at the Kimbell Museum of Art In Caravaggio's remarkable version of the Mary Magdalen story, he painted the moment of her transition from sinner to saint. As much as Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code popularized the idea that the Church demonized Mary Magdalen, more commonly she was idealized in art as a saint who turned her life around. The painter Michelangelo Merisi, who is nicknamed Caravaggio, was demonized in his lifetime for his shockingly realistic paintings and his own "sinful" life. (He was charged with murder and often on the run.) The inclusion of Martha with Mary Magdalen and other objects requires the viewer to interpret the symbolism. Martha is seated with her back to the viewer, with only one shoulder and her hands hit by Caravaggio's dramatic lighting. On the ...

Valentin de Boulogne, Soldiers Playing Cards and Dice, c. 1618/20 A magnificent exhibition of Caravaggio and His Followers at the Kimbell Museum in Fort Wort h features the Washington National Gallery of Art's Soldiers Playing Cards and Dice by Valentin de Boulogne. The painting tells a story of deception. Caravaggi o had also painted Card Sharks with fewer figures. Boulogne, a Frenchman working in Rome, may have known of his composition. Boulogne's painting is a tight, close-up composition with masterfully chosen areas of ligh t. Two simultaneous episodes are taking place: dice throwing on the right and cheating card players on the left. The card sharks are the first to demand our attention, as they look startlingly real. Behind the central fig u re, who is in the process of cheating, a nother drama is happening. A man on the r ight l ooks down and covers his dice, perhaps hiding something while his adversary with the red hat seems about to erupt in anger. Although ...

Frans Hals, Young Man and Woman at Inn, 1623 Metropolitan Museum of Art Willem de Kooning, Merritt Parkway, 1959, from the Detroit Institute of Art, Bequest of Hawkins Ferry, is in a n exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (called MoMA), New York At first glance, Frans Hals and Willem de Kooning have nothing in common, other than being artists who originally came from the Netherlands. More than three hundred years separate their art and two very different New York Museums, the Met and MoMA, have exhibitions of their work. Hals was vividly realistic and de Kooning was a founder of Abstract Expressionism, but their common grounds are looseness of brushwork, luscious paint and bold energies going in all directions. In short, it is their painterly techniques. Women, II, in MoMA, part of the Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Collection, is one of many paintings of women that de Kooning did in the 50s Analyzing the radiating diagonals of Hals' compositions and paint quality, we might won...

In the hills of central Sicily the Cathedral of Caltagirone--its dome covered with ceramic tiles--is just one the many wonders in this city of colorful tile (Baroque and A rt Nouveau buildings, too). Ceramics everywhere.......I resisted the temptation to buy more pottery (my house has enough and there's no more room), except one small putto, because I can look at these beautiful photos and remember how it felt to be there. The green pinecone i s a prominent symbol in this region. It reminds me of the pineapples in Williamsburg. A stroll through the local park reveal planters, light fixtures, fences in a variety of colors. The common colors for the tiles are blue, green, yellow and orange, in an endless variety of creative patterns. Figural designs and shapes are thoroughly Italian, especially with the masks, but some geometric designs in the tiles hint of an Arabic background. Nearby is a ceramics museum. Scalloped arches are an Islamic feature. The town'...

The Cathedral of Sircusa (Syracuse), Sicily is built within the colonnades of Greek temple to Athena from the early 5th century BC. Byzantine Christians converted the ruins of it into their Cathedral in the 7th century. The fluted columns are engaged in the outer side wall, along with triglyphs, metopes, etc. (the parts of the Doric Order in Greek architecture). The arched windows and crenelated top date from the Middle Ages. (It even had been a mosque at one time.) However, around the corner, the facade is thoroughly Baroque, built in 1700s! Old and new don't clash, though -- because they aren't seen simultaneously. Behind the door of this Cathedral's Baroque facade, the simplicity of an actual Doric temple colonnades are hidden. The medieval barrel vault comfortably meets the ancient Greek colonnade to form a side aisle. The temple's floor plan easily adapts to the 7th century Basilican plan church. The darkest components of this plan belong to the origina...