kunsttexte.de - Journal für Kunst- und Bildgeschichte

Editorial

Angela Dressen — 2023-12-18

The Florentine exhibition Donatello, the Renaissance (2022)

Francesco Caglioti — 2023-12-18

Le revers de la médaille

Neville Rowley — 2023-12-18

The making of Donatello: Sculpting the Renaissance

Peta Motture — 2023-12-18

Ein Medici in Berlin

Kay Usenbinz — 2023-12-18

Gegenstand dieses Beitrages ist ein Porträt im Berliner Bode-Museum von der Hand Giorgio Vasaris, das einzige Gemälde Vasaris in den Sammlungen der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz. Es zeigt nicht Bernardetto, als welcher der Porträtierte in Literatur und im Museum ausgewiesen wird, sondern den Kardinal Giovanni de’ Medici (1543 – 1562) aus einer Nebenlinie des Hauses. Zugleich vermag es Vasari als versierten Künstler auszuweisen.

Aesthetic Form and Social Plurality in Rubens’ Death of Decius Mus

Maximilian Geiger — 2023-12-18

Analysing the structure of the dead combatant’s physicality in “The Death of Decius Mus” from Rubens’ image series on the Roman consul, the corpus turns out to be a place where antiquity as a guideline for how to depict a human body is reflected. Broaching the issue of Genoa’s political constitution, the corpus is related to Rubens’ theory of the imitation of statues, the intellectual discourses about the city’s socio-political formations and their history. Scrutinizing the relationship between Decius Mus’ tenuous figural position in the painting and the soldier’s body as a rudiment of the pictorial space, this paper reveals the relevance of pictorial elements in Rubens’ history painting, which point to several structures of perception and narrative decentralization. Herewith, the artist formed a comprehension of Genoa’s republican constitution, which undermined its authoritarian historical outline and focused on welfare in consideration of its elements. The decisive form of the image structure activated perceptual resistance and made it possible to see real circumstances. This article is an introduction to results of my PhD thesis, “Rubens und die Immanenz des Bildes. Sehen und Erzählen im Norden“, in which I follow on from my master thesis. With specific regard to Rubens’ “Battle of the Amazons” (1617), perceptual respectively mental structures of the beholder and their reflection in and activation through layers of the pictorial space and levels of representation in early modern history painting are disclosed, and their relevance for depicted narrations and actions is shown. This leads to a theory of the early modern image, in which the image-concepts of Leon Battista Alberti and the Catholic Reform are modified.

Offenbares Geheimnis

Wolfram Morath — 2023-12-18

Die Freilegung des im 18. Jahrhundert übermalten Gemäldes im Hintergrund der Dresdener ‚Briefleserin‘ hat nicht allein die Ikonographie von Vermeers Bild wieder hergestellt. Ihr Resultat betrifft die visuelle Erscheinungsdichte der bildlichen Organisation insgesamt und bringt eine ikonische Komplexität ans Licht, welche unvermutete Einblicke eröffnet in Vermeers Reflexion von Bildlichkeit und Sehen, die weiterzudenken sind. Die Kennzeichnung des intrikaten Verhältnisses von Vermeers Teilhabe am und Differenz zum holländischen ‚Bildsystem‘ ist ebenso Gegenstand der Untersuchung wie sein ironisches Spiel mit den Gattungsmustern von Genre und Stilleben und Vermeers verdeckte, noch kaum verstandene Bezugnahme auf die konfessionsgeschichtliche Verankerung der Malerei seiner Zeit.

Raffael und Rubens im Wettstreit?

Isabell Franconi — 2023-12-18

Comparisons serve individuals to situate themselves in society, but they are as well a complex intellectual and learnable heuristic for gaining knowledge. With regard to works of art, the visual comparison can be traced back to antiquity, initially as the staging of an artistic competition in the sense of the agón or paragone (inherent to which is the Italian verb „paragonare“, meaning „to compare“). A particularly impressive example for comparative viewing can be found in the sanctuary of the church of San Biagio in Finale Ligure. There we fnd copies after Raphael’s Transfguration and Rubens’ Assumption of the Virgin Mary from the hand of the now forgotten painter Pier Lorenzo Spoleti (1682–1729), whose own pictorial inventions were – according to his biographer Carlo Giuseppe Ratti – „not very elegant“ in terms of composition. He was, however, all the more outstanding as a copyist. The detailed analysis of the paintings and the preserved written sources reveals that Spoleti recognised and took advantage of the opportunity ofered by the visà-vis position of the paintings for a comparative juxtaposition. Therefore, he deliberately modifed his copies, which, according to the hypothesis of this article, allowed the initially not very obvious similarities between the two originals to be revealed, and this enabled Spoleti to arrange or stage a paragone between Raphael and Rubens, between the High Renaissance and the Baroque.