Pop Goes the Artist!

Friday morning I visited the National Gallery of Art on a self-guided field trip for two different classes. For my Renaissance class, I had to visit the “Prayers and Portraits” exhibit, which contains more than 30 Netherlandish diptychs from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It’s an especially interesting exhibit because many of the diptychs on display have been seperated over the centuries and only now are the proper halves, through the wonders of modern technology, being temporarily united.

Unfortunately, photography was not allowed in the exhibit, so you’ll have to rely on the NGA’s website for images (there’s actually a downloadable pdf of the exhibition brochure), but almost every piece in the exhibit was stunning. One particularly striking diptych, for example, featured an unusual contrast between the crucified Christ in the arms of God the Father (a common medieval motif) and an image of Christ as a baby on Mary’s lap in a contemporary (for the period) domestic setting. I’ll actually be writing a paper on that one, which I picked because it was unusually packed with theological and symbolic meaning.

There was also a pair of paintings by Jan van Eyck, The Angel Gabriel with The Virgin Annunciate, that made me do a double take because of the unique approach van Eyck took: both Gabriel and Mary were painted as though they were marble statues, with nearly photo-realistic precision. Even their wooden frames were painted to resemble marble. (The photo to which I linked, from Olga’s Gallery, gives an idea of the techinical mastery of this work, but does not remotely do it justice.)

Most of the other diptychs were composed of a portrait of Mary with the Christ child on one said and a portrait of the person who commissioned the work on the other, since diptychs were primarily designed for private, household prayer. The most striking of these portraits, in my mind, was the portrait of Diego de Guevara, which depicts an incredibly delicate sensitivity as well as the subject’s genuine grief at the suffering of Christ. Phenomenal.

All in all, it was a great exhibit, both because of the rare opportunity it presented to see many of these works as they were meant to be displayed, and because it featured both strong portraiture and deeply symbolic and beautiful religious art.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 11th, 2006 at 8:03 pm and is filed under Museums. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.