Renaissance & Baroque Art Assignment #3

Renaissance Artwork

Filippino Lippi's Madonna and Child

One beautiful piece of artwork that I saw at The Metropolitan Museum of Art was Filippino Lippi's "Madonna and Child." Filippino Lippi is from Italy and he painted this beautiful artwork around 1485 for a wealthy banker named Filippo Strozzi. This painting is also held up with a stunning golden thick and well-designed frame. This painting shows the Madonna and Child seated inside a closed area, with a view of the landscape with a river through a window. Lippi definitely put a lot of work into this painting as it can be seen with the details of the still life and landscape view. What attracted my attention so much was the vibrant colors that he used. Complementary colors are definitely shown here with the bright blue and yellow and then red with green. This ultramarine blue was used in this painting in particular because Strozzi valued material display and insisted that his paintings had that specific color. Other parts of the painting was requested by Stozzi such as the landscape. Stozzi lived in an area with a fortified gate and two bridges over the river and this was indicated in the painting. Also Stozzi owned an African slave and in the background, it can be seen that an African slave is spearing for fish. This is a very complex painting with many symbols. For example, the Christ Child rustling with the book. It is one of the most famous and popular symbol in Florence. Another symbol is the pomegranate which symbolizes the Church. I can depict Madonna and Child as a unity type of artwork, because it shows the lifelike style that Stozzi lives in. Everything from the color to the background creates unity.

Baroque Artwork

Peter Paul Rubens's "Wolf and Fox Hunt"

Another beautiful piece of artwork that I saw at The Metropolitan Museum of Art was Peter Paul's "Wolf and Fox Hunt." Peter Paul Ruben is from Siegen, Germany and he painted this artwork on 1616. This large artwork is 245.4 cm by 376.2 cm and it is held up high with a gold thick frame. The story behind this artwork is that Rubens wanted to create a market for a new art form. He replaced models for or copies of tapestries for that very expensive medium. This canvas was more symmetrical in design but had to be trimmed at the top and left side because according to a client in 1616, paintings as large as Ruben's simply couldn't fit in a house. It is said that Ruben had assistants to help him paint this large and detailed painting but he claims that he had worked on the wolves himself. I found this painting to be so amazing because first off, the size of it was just so much to take in seeing it in person and secondly, I love that every corner of this canvas was used showing great details in the animals with their furs and also with the patterns shown on the white stallion to the right. I noticed that Ruben's choice of colors were analogous. Analogous are colors that are close with each other. There area lot of dark colors such as brown, red and then tints and shades were present. Looking closely at the gentleman on the white stallion to the right, it could be seen that this gentleman was outlined very well. In this painting there is a lot of overlapping as well, as it could be seen throughout this wolf and fox hunt depiction. What makes this a baroque piece of artwork is that there's this theatricality type of feeling with the dramatic lighting and curve-linear movement within the animals and the horse riders. The painting depicted unique scenes that were not common in the Europeans every day life, for example, exotic animals were not accessible to common people in Europe but because Ruben had close contact with noble people, he was able to gain access to these exotic animals,  unlike other artists.