Part seven in a series on D&Dable art
 |
| Jacques Callot, from "Les Gobbi", 16something |
Everybody wore lace and a fancy sword, it was a strange time on a strange continent…
Once anatomy and perspective got going in the Renaissance, Europeans spent the next 400 years treating their newfound ability to make shit look really real like a kid treats a toy on Christmas--or how people are treating photoshop right now.
Once anatomy and perspective got going in the Renaissance, Europeans spent the next 400 years treating their newfound ability to make shit look really real like a kid treats a toy on Christmas--or how people are treating photoshop right now.
Oh hey, we can show someone's head getting chopped off:...
 |
| Artemesia Gentilleschi-Judith Slaying Holofernes, 16something |
Or I can paint my hot wife's disturbing eyes...
 |
| Nicholas Hilliard, from the English Renaissance, 1578. You can usually tell English painters because they're way behind the style curve and way into blue and white. Bonus: Do you see the distant John Blancheness lurking here? |
 |
| Pietro Longhi, Rhinoceros, 1751 |
 |
| Caspar David Friedrich, Sea of Ice 1824 |
So, basically, if somebody in Europe saw it or even just imagined it between 1500 and 1900 there's a painting of it. The range of subjects is unprecedented, even if the range of techniques isn't.
When we look at most modern fantasy illustration and concept design--this is where their bag of tricks came from. Even video games and movies still rely heavily on what this era of painting showed about the variety of different effects you can get just by the changing the light sources or palette.
The main ones, in the order they appear, are…
Mannerism: the one where everybody is skinny
 |
| (I have yet to find an example of a good work of Mannerist art.) |
Baroque: the one where everything was dramatic
 |
| Bernini's Ecstasy of St Teresa, 1647-52 Which is phenomenal. |
 | |
 |
 |
| This little guy is a Falconet from the Louvre, a clearly chilled out French descendant of Bernini's impaling italian angel. 1757. The hair is worse, but the expression is subtler. |
 |
Neo-Classicism: the one where everything is serious
 |
| Houdon, 1778. He's all THE ONLY BABY I CARE ABOUT IS THE NEW REPUBLIC! |
Romanticism: the one where everything is emotional and natural
 |
| John Martin, 1851-3 The Great Day of His Wrath. Freak out. |
Realism: the one with a lot of grey.
%2BArrangement%2Bin%2BGrey%2BPortrait%2Bof%2BMaster%2BStephen%2BManuel.jpg) |
| Whistler, Portrait of Master Stephen Manuel 1885 |
Minor 19th century movements of special interest to RPG folks include the Orientalists, who painted scenes from the far and middle east...
 |
| Jean-Leon Gerome. Heads of the Rebel Beys. 18something. |
...and the pre-Raphaelites…
 |
| John William Waterhouse, The Magic Circle |
...who spent a great deal of the 19th century painting things from an idealized Middle Ages. They're spiritual ancestors of Tolkien and a lot of the high-fantasy artists and high-fantasy ideas still around today.
If we imagine every bad artist as a kind of failed experiment in an ongoing attempt to manipulate the bloodlines to create a good artist, people like Waterhouse, Burne-Jones and Gerome (whose paintings--from what I've seen--completely fall apart up close) were necessary to produce like Jeffrey Catherine Jones and Frank Frazetta.
 |
| Edward Burne-Jones--The Doom Fulfilled, 18something |
As usual, the typical art historian's Bugbear of Relevance rolls right over what's most interesting about the best work from this era which is: it's just really fucking good.
For example, everything below gets called baroque, despite theatricality, drama and action not really being the point…
 |
| The extremely insignificant Willem Kalf just painting somebody's dinner and knocking it out of the fucking park. Click and enlarge and look at that lobster. |
 |
| This is Bernini's portrait of Scipione Borghese |
 |
| Finelli's portrait of the same Cardinal Borghese, less baroque, but arguably even better than Bernini's. I love the missing button. |
 |
| This is Vermeer. Now normally I'd be chewing Vermeer out for that halo of grey over her head, but I've seen this painting in person and it's actually maybe the best painting. Period. Ever. So click and enlarge. See if you can find a single stray scrubby brush stroke anywhere in there. |
 |
| Rembrandt Human Thief, Level 7, 1634 |
 |
| Velasquez, Portrait of Juan De Pareja, 1650. Juan was a former slave and painter in his own right who worked in Velasquez's studio. You can tell in the actual portrait that Velasquez did the face and the lace but some of the lazier stuff at the bottom may have been done by an assistant. Or just Velasquez being lazy. Anyway--the top half in particular is still amazing. |
 |
| Velasquez himself, 1645 |
Basically: There were a lot of people painting and sculpting, a few were good and most of their names are familiar.
What art history pretty much completely fails to mention are the prints and the printmakers. The three (otherwise wonderful) big fat survey books I've been relying on to refresh my memory about who did what when for the spine of this series pretty much skip printmaking entirely.
 |
| Meister E.S., from the Fantastic Alphabet |
 |
| Some other letters |
Prints are small and not usually in color and, unlike oil paintings, you can't keep them out in museums for long or they'll fall apart. They represent a parallel but not visually equivalent tradition to what's going on in the rest of Europe in Piratey Times yet even in today's art schools the printmaking department is like pretty much where anyone giving a fuck about you goes to die.
Part of the problem is also down to the original art history villain--Vasari. Printmaking was, in the beginning, predominantly a northern art (Durer, Schongauer) and so Vasari was like fuck that whole medium let's talk about Giotto some more, amirite?
 |
| from the Triumph of Maximillian, by one of several German Renaissance printmakers, 15something |
In the split you can hear echoes of the crowd-pleasing but gormless bulbous soft-focus warm Italian Renaissance painter/ vs sharp-eyed but uncharismatic joyless angular Northern Renaissance printmaker split today when people discuss digital painting vs black-and-white post-Sutherland RPG art (and lurking beneath that, is an echo of arguments about painting--free, open, colorful, vague--vs illustration--dutiful, precise, detailed. With anything truly great conforming, of course, to neither stereotype.)
 |
| Jacques Callot, 16something, bringing a suave and pre-Seussian line |
 |
| Hendrik Goltzius, 1588. Notice the weird roundness-- either peoples' muscles used to be shaped different or that's the influence of the Italian Renaissance's eccentric conception of anatomy |
 |
| Piranesi's prison drawings were just made up and dungeony as fuck... |
 |
| …but they drew on his experience drawing ancient ruins like this here, Remains of the Tomb of the Metelli--both 17something |
The nice thing about the huge archive of old master prints from a gamer point of view is they really do contain a record of every freakshow kind of picture imaginable. What with all these museums digitizing their archives, it's a fucking endless rabbit hole:
 |
| Wenceslaus Hollar, 16something |
 |
| Sebastien Le Clerc |
 |
| Henry Holiday From the Hunting of the Snark |
.jpg) |
| Wenceslaus Hollar, 1652 |
.jpg) |
| Wenceslaus Hollar, 1646 Edit: Holy fuck I forgot Gustave Dore: .jpg) |