Hidden Faces in Courbet's Rocks

Courbet, Landscape with Anthropomorphic Rocks

It does not take a genius to recognize that Courbet has turned the rock at left into a human face with water sprouting from the mouth. A rock facing it, just to right of the center, only partly lit, is also a face. The presence of these heads is so obvious that they are acknowledged in the title that the art world has given the painting. Does this not mean, however, that Courbet might have done something similar but less obviously in other landscapes as well? It certainly suggests that his art does not copy nature as was long believed by those who called him a Realist. Indeed, like all great masters before him regardless of their style, Courbet portrays himself by fusing the exterior scene with the inner workings of his mind.

Similar landscapes by  Leonardo, Durer, Corot and Van Gogh can be seen on this website.

Courbet's Snow-covered Source

Courbet, La Grotte de la Source Enneige   (c. 1866)

This painting like many of Courbet's images of caves and the sources of rivers consists of a dark hole with rock swirling around it in the form of an eye. In this case the rock on the right can be seen as the bone at the top of the nose, the rest of the nose theoretically descending under the snow-covered ground. The sweep of the rock in the top left corner also suggests the shape of skin above a right eye facing us. It is, metaphorically, the artist's eye with darkness suggesting insight. Water flowing out of rock was a fertile symbol for Courbet.

See other landscape paintings by Courbet for similar use of the human form as well as examples on this website by Durer, Leonardo, Corot and Van Gogh.

A Landscape "Self-portrait" by Corot (1857)

Left: Corot, La Ronde Gauloise (1857)















A sketch-like landscape print by the nineteenth-century French artist, Camille Corot, includes the ghost-like echo of his own self-portrait in the trees at right. The three-part illustration above shows the trees at right unchanged, the portion of a self-portrait and a diagram showing how the key features of the self-portrait appear in the shading of the trees.

However unlikely this may seem to conventional scholars it is not uncommon. Similar faces and self-portraits appear in landscapes by numerous artists including the earliest landscape that appears to be copied from nature,  a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci. That drawing is shown on this website to include a face like this one.

Left: Detail of right half    Center: Self-portrait    Right: Diagram of self-portrait

Artist and Model in Antonio Campi's St. Sebastian

Antonio Campi's Martyrdom of
St. Sebastian








In this large painting of St. Sebastian by the little-known artist, Antonio Campi (1523-1587), the archer’s expression seems so sympathetic towards his victim and his features so specifically individual that he is as likely to become the focus of our attention as the saint. This should lead us to recognize that the archer is a self-representation of the “artist” in the act of “painting” the saint with his arrows. Indeed his position to the side looking up at the saint’s figure closely approximates  how the artist would have looked up at his canvas while painting it. Yet the saint as “the archer’s painting” is also a self-representation because every painter paints himself. To confirm that aspect of the work’s meaning the artist has placed his inscription on the stone that the saint stands on. “I am the saint”, it implies. The artist has further indicated the saint status as “a work of art” by focussing our attention on the depiction of his nude torso. Spot-lit and essentially monochromatic, it resembles a sculpture and thus a work of art.

The artist/executioner holds his arrow together with a  small branch, a sucker, emerging from the large tree behind him. The sucker has begun to resemble a tree in its own right thus symbolizing the artist/executioner’s fertility as an off-shoot of the great masters that came before. The saint “as a  statue” stands in front of that tree with green drapery, the color of fertility, wrapped around him and with the section covering his groin emerging from where the artist/executioner holds the tree almost as if the drapery is just another “large leaf” of that tree.

The rest of the archer’s equipment, quiver and bow, lie in the lower right-hand corner where artists indicate their authorship. Above them, in the distance, is a white horse facing away from us with a figure trying to restrain it. The horse (cavalloin Italian) may well be a visual pun on cavaletto, the Italian for easel, because large easels traditionally had four legs like a horse. With the horse facing away from us, its form and not just its name more closely resembles how an easel would look in front of the artist. Visual puns like these have been commonly used by great masters across the centuries though they are virtually unknown by art scholars who have never, to my knowledge, recognized a pun on cavaletto.

See other similar examples of the same subject by Mantegna, Durer, Michelangelo ,Hans Baldung Grien, Carlo Crivelli, Perugino and, more recently, by Egon Schiele 

Cubism and Early Film

There's an interesting exhibition at PaceWildenstein in midtown New York this month. It's based on the idea that Cubism developed out of Picasso's and Braque's interest in moving pictures. The general amazement at seeing pictures move for the first time affected everyone at the turn of the twentieth century and was certain to affect the thinking of these two visual artists. Of this there can be little doubt. However, though both Picasso and Braque frequently attended showings, their reactions to what they saw were rarely recorded.

Arne Glimcher, PaceWildenstein's Director, and Bernice Rose, the exhibition's curator, think they have seen formal similarities in certain Cubist works to the shapes of the early projectors and cameras. Some of their examples are quite convincing. I have never had any doubt that the sound-hole protruding from Picasso's cardboard sculpture of a guitar is a reference to an eye and vision. Rose's suggestion, therefore, that it is modeled after the protruding lens of a projector makes sense. Other comparisons, though, are less convincing. In Portrait of a Woman of 1910 Rose thinks the woman's rectangular breasts with protruding nipples are again based on a projector (see the exhibition catalogue, p. 86). What else could Picasso have done, though? If a breast is represented as a cube, as seems natural in a Cubist painting, its protruding nipple is bound to resemble the lens sticking out from a projector regardless of what Picasso was thinking.

The biggest problem about the show's thesis is that it does not strike the right balance. Artists get ideas from many places and, while the articles in the catalogue do credit the tradition of art history as an important counter influence, they place far too much emphasis on the influence of film. Yes, Picasso wanted to challenge and change our visual perception but it was equally important for him, as it is for any great artist, to maintain the tradition. He was trying to extend the tradition, not end it. It is thus crucial to determine what it is about art history that Picasso thought was important. When that is clear, the stylistic novelty of Cubism will look less revolutionary. I can say this with confidence because while Picasso and Braque invented Cubism they were not the first artists to challenge perspective, fracture faces or make the gentle curves of nature straight. These features, long associated with Cubism, were not new. They first appeared in painting 500 years earlier, as I will demonstrate in an upcoming essay. Picasso, therefore, was responding to tradition, not rejecting it.

Nevertheless, despite these criticisms, I do think Rose and Glimcher are on to something. They exaggerate the importance of film to the development of Cubism but it was a factor and it seems quite remarkable that no-one has looked in depth at this subject before now. Go see it. It's well worth a visit.

New Admission Price at the Metropolitan Museum

Much ink has been spilled in local papers about the Metropolitan Museum's new "Recommended" admission price of $20 (up from $15.) Although voluntary, most people, particularly low-income visitors and tourists, are embarrassed or pressured into paying it. The policy is thoroughly unethical and always reported inaccurately by city's news media.

It is generally thought, and always reported, that the flexible policy is a promotional ploy of the Museum's own choosing to maximize both income and visitor numbers. It is not. Decades ago the Museum signed an agreement with New York City. In return for using public land and the building itself, which is also owned by the public, the Museum (which only owns the art on the walls) agreed not to charge an entry fee. Later in need of money to expand, they made the contribution voluntary, first using the word "Suggested", now "Recommended".

To be in strict compliance with their contractual obligations to the City, the Museum should allow people in for free. In practice, they force those unwilling to pay the recommended amount to pay something, even a penny. Yet demanding that penny is still against the terms of the Lease. Occasionally, I check compliance as I did, by coincidence, last week before the "price" increase. I wanted to pay nothing but was not allowed in until I had paid something. After I explained the situation to them, the supervisors fell back on the "We do what we are told" justification of low-level employees. I paid my penny and entered.

Art Journals Timid about Art Scholarship

For five months I have placed news of Dante's presence in Michelangelo's Last Judgment in The Art Newspaper. In May and June (2006) the news appeared as advertising in double-page spreads. You might think that such news was significant enough to the art world, let alone the Catholic Church, to have justified some mention in their editorial. Not a bit of it. I have heard nothing from anyone on the editorial side of The Art Newspaper, or any newspaper for that matter. Why?

I really don't know for sure. I can only conclude, though, that they consider such discoveries the province of academics and the matter a subject for peer review. As though the eminent art scholars could see these discoveries. They can only approve of them by admitting that they themselves have been blind and that their books on Michelangelo are misleading. Some hope of that!

Yet any layman or practising artist reading the essay and examining the images can tell immediately that the analysis is broadly correct. Most importantly, Dante's profile is there. If it was just a mirage or fantasy, then one would be able to see any number of faces there, including David Beckham's. The fact that it only looks like Dante, Michelangelo's lifelong muse, makes its presence self-evident.

Besides, their potential concern about not being specialists themselves would be a strange excuse. They provide commentary on the Iraq war without being experts, why would they be shy about art?

Should Museum Curators Interpret Art?

The Brooklyn Museum has rearranged its curatorial departments. Gone are those of Egyptian and African art and European painting to be replaced by just two departments: one for the permanent collection, another for special exhibitions. This has not been universally welcomed. The national Curators' Association argues that by doing away with the traditional structure , the Museum has undermined the role of the curator-scholar. This is dangerous, they claim, because "knowledgeable curators are needed to preserve and interpret" the collections. The museum counters that, with a small curatorial staff, the system had to be streamlined.

The Curators' Association is upset over the potential change in a curator's secondary role, that of interpretative scholar, rather than of any impact on their primary role as guardians of the collection. Reports suggest that curators fear that "their traditional power to conceive, propose and organize exhibitions" will be diminished. They fear it, no doubt, because contrary to their claim that "they are uniquely qualified to make recommendations regarding...[their collection's] interpretation", they are not uniquely qualified at all, as any glance at the art literature of the past twenty years will confirm. There is no consensus on what art is, what art means or what art does. Each in their own field is just one voice among many, all recommending minor changes in our understanding. There has been no great work of art scholarship in half a century.

Curators, through the rising dominance of exhibition catalogues in the field of scholarship, have gained a level of prestige and exposure that their intellectual contributions have failed to justify. If their role as "uniquely qualified scholar..to interpret" their collection was a valid claim, they would have no fear of losing it. That they do reveals the weakness of their case.

Of course, I am not recommending that large museums follow the Brooklyn's example. Specialist care is needed for special collections. It is just that interpretative ideas proposed by curators are rarely interesting, important - or valid.

The Justification for this Exhibition is a Dog

A recently opened exhibition on dogs in art (Bruce Museum, Greenwich, CT) has attracted a lot of attention. Art lovers like dogs (don't you think?) and the newspapers have taken the opportunity to run an appealing illustration. This type of exhibition, though, based on genre rather than artist, seems to lack content. Is there, for instance, any intellectual depth to canine portraiture worthy of a great artist? Why, for instance, does the picture above by George Stubbs have more merit than other pictures in the exhibition by minor artists such as Sir Edwin Landseer? These questions, as many like them in other genres, should be crucial to the status of art scholarship as an academic discipline. Equivalent questions in literature and music have long been answered to the general satisfaction of the discipline. Yet Robert Rosenblum, the eminent art scholar at New York University, who has written a book on dogs in art and contributed an essay to the catalogue, fails to answer either question. Indeed his principal reason for writing on the subject is that he likes dogs, an intellectually suspect reason to begin with, and presumably he has nothing better to do with his time.

Of course, all of us familiar with art know that the above painting meets a high aesthetic standard and is far from frivolous. We know it instinctively yet we cannot explain why. Unfortunately, no-one inside academia can either because conventional wisdom in the field holds that the differences between great and lesser art are subjective and relative when, as I will demonstrate when I find a publisher, the real differences are objective and universal. Indeed it is an inability to find the difference that allows the Bruce Museum to place a Landseer next to a Stubbs in the first place. The only justification: both portray dogs. Wow! Bow Wow!

James Beck and the Metropolitan's $45 million Duccio

James Beck of Columbia University has a history of questioning conventional wisdom on major projects and purchases. Not long ago he questioned the authenticity of the Madonna of the Pink that London's National Gallery had recently purchased believing it to be by Raphael. Now, the New York Times reports, he is questioning the attribution to Duccio of the Madonna and Child (illustrated above) that the Metropolitan Museum just bought for $45 million. He thinks that it was probably painted in the late 19th century!


Whether or not Beck is correct, it is healthy to have somebody asking awkward questions and having their views aired in a major paper. Too much art scholarship, particularly in a remote field like this one, is dominated by a handful of "eminent" specialists whom nobody dares question. Good for Beck if he keeps them on their toes! In this case, though, there is an additional issue above and beyond the merits of this one painting.

Should the Metropolitan Museum be spending such a vast sum on a field, early Renaissance painting, in which authorship is notoriously difficult to determine. Attributions within it continually change, making $45 million on any object seem like a risky wager.