Some Really Old Art

This figure was planned to be one of two panels flanking a larger central panel.  I started the project (and never even got close to finishing it) during a period when I was especially enamored of the painters of 15th and 16th century northern Europe (I still am, but since then I have somewhat broadened my horizons to include others).

While I am a great admirer of the heroic figures painted by Michelangelo and other Italian artists of the Renaissance, I have always also been strongly drawn to the delicate figures of the Northern Renaissance painters.  Maybe it's because in their visualizations of the human body the Northerners didn't seem to niggle over brick-by-brick anatomy so much -- their idea of anatomy in a sense was the polar opposite of the Italian tradition;  it was of the perfection of thought made visible, not an idealization of the flesh from the ground up to meet the spirit.  With this I think my other favorite, William Blake, would have agreed;  he also admired Michelangelo's (or Michael Angelo's, as he would have spelled the name) figures, but he naturally preferred the supra-physical linearity of Gothic figures, and combined them in a personal synthesis of the thick and heroic, and the sinuous and graceful.


Related posts:  Eve #1;  Eve #2