The Tech Revolution of the 1400’s; Masters Bartolomé, Lluís and Zanetto

Bartolomé de Cárdenas, a.k.a. Bartolomé Bermejo: Virgin of Montserrat, Acqui Terme Cathedral

She’s young and gorgeous, dressed in rich royal robes with brocade and ermine, and even wears a crown.  Her kid, maybe a year old, sits in the buff on her lap.  It could be a royal portrait from a long time ago but it’s not, really.  Not only do both of them have rays coming from their heads, but her chair is a really jagged carpenter’s two-handed saw.  She doesn’t mind, and the merchant kneeling by her side doesn’t think anything is out of line.  Behind and around them is the most amazing landscape, with cliffs and monasteries, and a long grassy vista leading to the shore, on which distant boats are anchored.  It’s sunrise, and the clouds reflect the red and yellow of the sun, still below the horizon.

All of this glamor has a religious subtext. After all, it’s over 500 years old, and most of the European pictures we have from that time—or at least those that we know about now, are religious paintings—many of them showing Christianity’s favorite girl, the Virgin Mary, and the infant Jesus.  Nothing strange here, except that nature seems to have equal billing.  The saw refers to a mountain in Catalonia called Montserrat (sawed up mountain)—a sacred spot with a miracle-working medieval image of the Virgin, and this play on words would have particularly resonated with the merchant.  His name was Francesco della Chiesa (Francis of the Church), and he was an Italian from a town named Acqui Terme, working in his firm’s branch office in Valencia.  He ordered this piece, along with two attached folding wings with other images, for his hometown church.

This was a time when painters and paintings were not the self-driven, gallery-traded artists as they are viewed today.  In the 1480’s, and for centuries before this and a century or two after, at least in Europe, painting was a craft, and generally paintings were made-to-order, whether as religious offerings for churches, or myth and romance-driven interior decoration for houses.  In either case, paintings were viewed as somewhat down-scale; if you were really rich, you would have ordered your picture in enameled metal, precious metal, alabaster or marble for churches, or for residences as well as places of worship, richly-colored tapestries or embroidery, this last often with the addition or pearls, beads or even jewels. In imitation of the more precious things, paintings were brightly colored.  In the case of religious ones, thin, very thin sheets of gold leaf would stand in for the real thing, and the paintings done on wood, in egg tempera and other binding media where necessary, to last awhile.  Most of the domestic ones were done on cloth, and like so much like interior decorator art now, not meant to outlast current décor.

The 15^th century had seen a technical revolution, particularly in the area of Flanders in Northern Europe, in which the traditional binding medium, egg yolk, which acted as the binding medium for painting on wood, was replaced by oil, usually linseed, but occasionally walnut.  Tempera, the egg-yolk medium, produced very durable, quick-drying color (thinking of washing egg off a breakfast plate if you’ve left it for a few days).  The oils permitted slower drying, blending on the painting surface, and much greater depth and richness because of their greater transparency, and often required many coats of glazing to achieve this.  During the first half of the century, Flemish master painters such as Jan van Eyck, Robert Campin and Roger van der Weyden began to push the possibilities of this new medium, and developed techniques that produced the most amazing simulations of all sorts of textures and atmospheric gradations, making the simulation of gold and jewels something that could nearly rival the real thing.

Jan van Eyck, Virgin of Canon George van der Paele, Bruges, Groninge Museum, Bruges

All this was produced by a long and laborious process, which involved the mixing of dried processed   In the case of that anal-retentive superstar, Jan van Eyck, this could involve tiny brushes of just a few hairs in some fine details and certainly also magnifying glasses.

minerals, vegetable and even animal colors, some of them extremely toxic, with the oil medium, after grinding the pigment lumps into a power of varying fineness, and then applying these colors layer by layer.

As Master Eyck produced his miracles, these paintings, many of which were as small as jeweled relics as well as big ones, he became an international superstar, a prestigious painter to the local Duke, Philip the Good of Burgundy, with orders from rich Italians and other magnates and merchants, domestic and foreign.  He became so famous that even after his death, the name “Master Johannes” became synonymous with the best of Flemish production throughout the continent.

It isn’t surprising that Flanders had an early monopoly on the technique, and few foreign practitioners really got the hang of how to do it well for the next half-century.  Actually, you had to go to Flanders to learn it properly for a long training period, and even if you understood its principles, you might not have the talent to exploit it properly. 

Lluís Dalmau, The Virgin of the Councilors, Barcelona, Museo Nacional d'Art de Catalunya

Dalmau: Saint Baudel

Here are two examples of foreign wannabe oilmasters, both with connections that gave them an advantage: The first is a Spanish painter, who enjoyed the title of City Painter in Valencia, named Lluís Dalmau.  He also enjoyed the favor of his King, Alfonso “the Magnanimous” of Aragon, who sent him to Bruges in Flanders (home of Jan van Eyck) in 1431.  He stayed there, apparently in the   But soon after, Alfonso took on an official court painter, and it wasn’t Dalmau, but rather another local, Jaume Baço Jacomart, whom he would abandon in turn after he conquered Naples.  Nothing at all is known about Dalmau’s work for the King, the city of Valencia or anybody else, until 1443, when, in Barcelona, he took on a municipal commission to paint an altarpiece for the City Hall chapel that featured the Virgin and Child, plus two other saints of relevance to the council, and the five councilors of the year 1443.  The Virgin of the Councilors is a sort of reprise of Jan van Eyck’s Virgin of Canon van der Paele with quotes from the über famous Ghent Altarpiece, that he would have seen a decade earlier, but nowhere as good, even though it is done with oil medium.  Somehow it turns out as a sort of Eyck paint-by-numbers from a ten-year old pattern.  And the only other paintings known to be by Dalmau, without the advantage of Eyck’s prototype, are more traditional, and certainly less exploitive of the possibilities of oil glazes.  This is Saint Baudel, painted in a very traditionally Catalan way, encased in gold-leaf brocade; handsome, but flat, except maybe in his face.

Eyck studio for a number of years, coming back to Valencia to decorate a pavilion for his king six years later.

 

Zanetto Bugatto, Galeazzo Sforza, Milan, Castello Sforzesco

Weyden, Anthony, "Great Bastard of Burgundy"

The second is an Italian named Zanetto Bugatto, court painter to the ducal Sforza family of Milan.  He was sent to Roger van der Weyden’s studio by Bianca Maria Visconti, wife of Francesco Sforza between 1460 and 1463, and later became the official portraitist of their son and successor, Galeazzo Maria Sforza.  As a court painter and designer, he was responsible for many tasks, of which painting portraits was just a part, including medallions with the Duke’s “official” image.  Only a few painted fragments are linked with him with any security, one being a portrait of Galeazzo Maria, and the fragment of an altarpiece with his plump wife Bona and a patron saint.  I haven’t seen a

pigment/medium analysis of either one, and both have been tampered with a lot over the centuries,

Zanetto: Bona and her Patron Saint, Milan, Museum of Applied Arts

but both pictures show whatever painting technique he had was modified very much according to the demands of Milanese conventions and tastes, though he seems to have been a better painter than Dalmau.. The Flemish development of the ¾ portrait was rejected by his patron for the more traditional Italian profile view, also echoed in the portrait medallions of stone and gold for which he provided designs.

Both of these cases show that local traditions and tastes both win over the precious and detailed Flemish oil glaze products: foreign buyers may have collected imported works from the likes of Eyck and van der Weyden, but they preferred more familiar adaptation by their home-grown painters; in any case, neither Dalmau nor Bugatto approached those northern paragons in what they could do with their newly acquired skills.

One of the very few who pulled it off was the guy responsible for painting the wonderful Virgin of Montserrat (or at least her metaphor), made around 1480.  He was a master painter named Bartolomé de Cárdenas, originally, it seems, from Córdoba in southern Spain, but by 1468 practicing his trade in Valencia.  He must have spent some time in a Flemish studio (my own inclination was with Roger van der Weyden), but there was no aristocratic sponsor in his case.  In part deux of this tale, I’ll describe Bartolomé’s singular painting skills and eccentric career and lifestyle.  Just to give you a clue, after painting the wonderful main painting of the Virgin of Montserrat, he walked from the rest of the commission, and the side paintings, which he may have sketched out, had to be finished by someone else.

Bartolomé de Cardenas and Rodrigo the Osona, the entire Virgin of Montserrat Triptych

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For Zanetto Bugatto, there's an article by Luke Syson, entitled "Zanetto Bugatto, Court Portraitist of Sforza Milan" in the Burlington Magazine, May 1996, pp. 300-308.  If you have Jstore access, you can access it at:http://www.jstor.org/stable/886901?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Material on Lluís Dalmau is harder to find in English: A brief comment on the Virgin of the Councilors is available from the website of the Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya: http://www.museunacional.cat/en/9-lluis-dalmau-virgin-consellers-1443-1445

and also: http://www.museunacional.cat/en/colleccio/virgin-consellers/lluis-dalmau/015938-000

For Master Bartolomé de Cárdenas, a.k.a. Bartolomé Bermejo, wait for part deux.

Izzy? wiz? Oz?

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz was the first entire book I read on my own.  I was  seven at the time, and had gotten sick with rheumatic fever (fortunately a mild case); I had to stay inside all summer, preferably resting, and was getting bored.  I had read plenty of comic books on my own, but hadn’t tried real books outside my school readers. 

L. Frank Baum: Wizard of Wizards

As soon as I started it, I got hooked, totally involved with Dorothy, Toto and their adventures.  I was so bowled over, that I almost cried when Dorothy had to say goodbye to her Oz companions at the end, even though she was going home.  I was so sorry that the book was over!  Though none of the subsequent Oz books had the same appeal—even The Land of Oz, where the hero Tip transgendered into Ozma—my addiction to reading began then, and has never let up.

I didn’t see the Judy Garland movie until several years later—those were the days when you only got to see movies when they were rereleased to theaters.  I loved that too, freaked out at age nine by The Cyclone, not to mention Miss Gooch/the surviving Wicked Witch, but the movie, wonderful as it was, couldn’t quite come up to the novel, and the tremendous world of imagination that it

evoked. I think it was that solutions to weird situations were always matter of fact, and acceptance of the fact that all those Ozians spoke English. The Oz of my imagination was a world apart from the Denslow illustrations in the book, too; for even childish me could see that they were quaint and old fashioned by the time I got there, though I thought that the Wizard/Humbug was spot on.

Over the years, of course, once it was released to television, everyone, me included, has seen the movie countless times.  The last time I caught it was last weekend, and maybe this is the first time since I saw it in a theater that I really watched it.  Watching it inspired me to go reread the book.  This time it was in an IPad, a Kindle edition with no pictures at all.

Denslow's Wonderful Wizard 4 friends + Toto

I loved them both, though maybe for different reasons.  L. Frank Baum’s book, even in its 70 pages, is a lot more detailed and complicated, with its color-coded landscape, and all of those other details the movie left out, including the China people, scary beasts, two good witches, one a little elderly lady in white, the other a gorgeous redhead.  And the one surviving bad witch didn’t look like green Margaret Hamilton at all.  But the book’s characters are all no-nonsense people or creatures, and as you read along, every solution to each problem is entirely straightforward: all of this makes good logical sense to a kid, and I think, even at seven, I realized that intelligence, feeling emotion and courage were things that the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman and the Lion had all along; they just hadn’t named them.

As many analysts and scholars have recognized, the film took on a somewhat different slant, which is where it succeeded in itself where earlier filmed versions—including the silents produced by Baum himself hadn’t.  Film is a different medium altogether, with telling the story within a reasonable running length and its potential of visual magic demanding a different approach.  I think that MGM did it brilliantly.  Songs were good—and had already been in earlier stage adaptations.  Also, though the vaudevillian turns of the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and particularly Bert Lahr’s hilarious Lion should seem dated, they hold up well, probably because the land of Oz is such a fantasy anyway.

To make it more coherent within a running time less than two hours, modifications and omissions in the original book were made.  To begin with, there was a backstory presented in the Kansas part, with most of the important Oz people personified in farmhands, a snake-oil salesman and a very grouchy neighbor.  Many of the subsidiary Oz incidents were omitted, including whole populations of Quadlings and Winkies, not to mention the China people and assorted nasty beasts, while the winged monkeys were reduced to rather sinister figures, rather than the genies that Baum imagined.

The 1939 classic movie

Then there was the brilliant idea to film the Kansas sequences in monochromatic sepia, and the Oz portion in Technicolor (which is why Dorothy’s silver shoes in the original morph into brilliant ruby slippers in the movie). Technicolor always looked surreal in its over-ripe colors anyway, and the film took advantage of this by making the entire Land of Oz over the top in its artificially brilliantly colored, oversized flowers, fruits and landscape features.  After all, who can forget the wonderfully art-deco Emerald city, soaring in the distance with a Busby-Berkeley sound track chorus?  And Glinda the Good—not just a conflation of the two good witches of the novel, but any five-year-old’s Fairy Princess, in bouffant pink and that high crown, fluttering and ditzy as played by Billie Burke? 

Then there was Margaret Hamilton’s green-faced Wicked Witch and her green Winkie soldiers, and midget Munchkins.  The main protagonists were just as wonderful, and so much has been written about Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Bert Lahr and Jack Haley, not to mention the multiple Frank Morgan characters, I’m not going there.

The whole picture has a zany coherence—amazing with four directors—finalized by Glinda’s explaining that Dorothy could have gone home at any time, but needed to learn things before she had the wisdom to understand the charm in the Ruby Slippers—the moral, which doesn’t seem offensive.

Numerous scholars have produced a large body of critical analysis of both the book and movie over the years, dissecting every possibility from the color theory of Baum, political messages within the text, to Freudian analyses of each of the characters and their relationships to each other.  In Baum’s time and even beyond, Oz became a franchise, with many sequels, not only by the creator (he wrote 14) but by an officially sanctioned successor, Ruth Plumly Thomson (19) and other authors after that.  None recaptured the magic, at least for me—not even the ultimate Oz sequal—Wicked.

Wicked: The Musical

The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West by Gregory Aldrich and its sequels.

The Wizard of Oz has also been produced numerous times since the 1939 film, mostly for television.  Can anyone remember any of them?  I refer the reader to IMDB.com for a massive list.  Much more memorable are two musicals, The Wiz, really the only really inventive later retelling of the original story, and Wicked, based on the Aldrich novels.  In both cases, the Baum novel (the crazy wicked witch and Dorothy’s silver shoes in the Wiz)) and the 1939 movie (the green Ephebia of Wicked), serve as departure points for new riffs appropriate for their times.

The Wiz: The Movie

Oz itself and its characters are so embedded in American culture now that references to them are continually reused in many different ways, often far far away from their  origins—though not completely so..  Here are just three examples: Oz the Television series (2002-2006), where a prison is named OZ, and a special unit of it is called the Emerald City.  The 1974 pop song Tin Man, to whom the Wizard gave nothing to that he didn’t already have, which was sung by the group America. And there’s the cartoon the Wizard of Id, and it’s still going on, even if the only association is the two letter place.  So many really funny cartoons with Oz characters have come out, maybe most notably those by Dan Piraro in his Bizarro comic strip, that they fill a folder in my file cabinet.  This form uses the characters to make really funny commentaries on so many far more nonsensical things in our culture.

 

Piraro's Bizarro

In the end, though, I think it’s the stylized world of Oz created first in 1900, with its straight forward tale-telling and also the film in 1939, that still resonate, replete with vaudeville turns and art deco details, more than a three quarters of a century later, because it’s a parable and a fairy tale in the grand tradition, but a quintessentially American one, however much L Frank Baum thought he was creating a break from the old traditional ones.  It’s part of all of us.

            

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Two Interesting Articles For Scholarly OZ Fans:

Charles Evan Swartz, Before the Rainbow: L. Frank Baum's the Wonderful Wizard on Sage and Screen to 1939, Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002

Carol Billman, "I've Seen the Movie: Oz Revisited.' Literature/Film quarterly, 1981, pp. 241-50.

Thanks to Christy Higgins and Dan Piraro for letting me use Dan's fabulous cartoons!

O the Future! How Can We Tell?

Every year about this time, it’s the custom of news analysts to look back at events for the year, and come up with predictions, based on their analyses, of what will happen in the year to come.  This used to be the job of newspaper writers and TV commentators, but now anyone can do it---and we do, on Facebook and Twitter or blogs like this one.  Maybe the world as we know it will end next year, burned to a crisp by climate change, or the human population decimated by a new plague or Isis or some other group.  Maybe we’ll just go along, and some of us might even be royally bored—or not.

 

            Humans try everything to be able to predict the future, whether visiting astrologers, reading the entrails of some unfortunate sacrificial beast, or consulting all sorts of databases, polls and statistics.  In any event, it’s a crapshoot.

            We can’t even see a worldview, whatever our world might be, because we are right in the middle of things, and are bound by the limitations of our own intelligence and five senses.  Let me give you an example of wrong possibilities, conclusions come to by perfectly sound observations: those of a German philosopher, physician and cartographer named Hironymus Münzer, who made a very long journey around Western Europe in 1494-1495, and wrote about it.

Münzer

            For a biography of Münzer, there is a nice web summary at Project Gutenberg.  I did a translation of the Spanish part of the journey into English, and in 2010-2011 in a project called “Münzerama,” Myself and two of my former graduate students followed about 2/3 of Münzer’s Spanish/Portuguese route, chronicling what still remained from the sites he described. 

Maximilian

            Our trip was easy: a car, hotels, good roads, restaurants.  Münzer’s journey was a real slog: mostly on horseback, along narrow often rocky trails for the most part, staying sometimes in castles, sometimes in primitive inns or even private dwellings.  In a time of fortified cities and a sometimes chaotic countryside, the only way to make the trip was to have good connections to facilitate things.  Münzer and his companions evidently did: it’s most possible that he had tacit sponsorship of the Hapsburg Emperor Maximilian, then looking both for connections to overseas trade being explored both in Spain and Portugal, and for matches for his two children, Philip and Margaret. Münzer’s cartographic skills, published within Hermann Schedel’s Nuremberg Chronicle in 1493 certainly gave him credibility.

João II

            Münzer met with João II, King of Portugal in Évora, and had an audience with The Catholic Kings, Fernando and Isabel at a monastery near present-day Madrid.  He apparently discussed cartography and trade with the former, who sent him on to Lisbon with introductions so that he could personally report on Portuguese maritime trade.  Visiting the Catholic Kings gave him time to observe young prince Juan, heir to the united Spanish Kingdom, and his sister Juana.  Both of these children would marry the two Hapsburg offspring in due course.

Fernando and Isabel,  Juan and Juana +
The Virgin and Dominican Saints

            But there was so much more.  1494-5 was a watershed time to be on the Iberian Peninsula, for two years earlier, the Catholic kings had conquered the last Muslim possession in Spain, the Kingdom of Granada, thus ending 700 years of Christian/Muslim conflict. This, together with their marriage, joining Castile and Aragon, effectively reduced rival kingdoms on the peninsula from five to three, and Navarre would be absorbed in 1512. Also in 1492, Fernando and Isabel expelled their kingdoms’ Jews, and the royally sponsored Inquisition was busily rooting out false converts (Münzer saw a few of these unlucky ones in prison in Zaragoza).  He also witnessed the dispersal of the indigenous population (the Guanches) of the recently conquered Canary Islands, and saw many of them being auctioned off into slavery in the city of Valencia.

            He saw further signs of the Catholicization of Spain in many places, with the recent conversion of most remaining mosques into churches, and the vigorous establishment of many Franciscan and Dominican monasteries..  He actually attended a functioning Mosque in Granada, which was soon to be closed as well.  Even more impressive was a visit to the Alhambra, former palace of the Nasrid Kings, which still retained much of its fabled richness.

Banana

            Other exotic experiences awaited: a crocodile skin and giant tortoise shell  relics at the Monastery of Guadalupe,  other exotic animals in private zoos, a stay with a Muslim family and a chance to witness a Muslim wedding ceremony at Arcos de Jalón, a visit to a glass factory and another to Lisbon’s Great Synagogue (Portugal had not yet expelled its Jews), and his very first banana (that he mistakenly called a prickly pear).  Münzer makes no mention of Columbus’s first voyage (the second voyage was then in progress), but when Columbus had returned from his initial journey in 1493, he was convinced that had reached the easternmost outposts of Asia.

            The overall impression carried back by the Northern visitor was that the realm governed by the Catholic Kings, uniting to Spanish Kingdoms of Aragon and Castile with Granada, along with a prosperous Portugal had ushered in a golden age of Iberian peace and stability, with grand economic possibilities.  This was radically different than the situation a quarter of a century earlier, when Bohemian knight, Václav Šašek z Birkova, and Gabriel Tetzel of Nuremberg visited the peninsula; at that time things were far more unpredictable and dangerous, for Granada was still separate, and civil wars were raging in both Castile and Aragon.

So in 1494-5, stability was the breaking out all over.  King João of Portugal, having lost his son and heir Afonso in a hunting accident, had confidence that his natural son Jorge could take on the succession.  Fernando and Isabel were consolidating their unified realms, not only by their relentless policies of religious, if not ethnic cleansing, but in their further integration into the European mainstream via marriage alliances with the family of the Holy Roman Emperor.  The furthering of international trade with Africa and Asia via maritime exploration put both Iberian countries on the road to opening vast new markets.  The report to Emperor Maximilian must have been rosy indeed.  Everything seemed organized and set.

But the Great Oracle was mum about what happened next.  Before the 16^th century began many of these bets were off!  The Spanish-Hapsburg marriages did happen in 1496 and 1497, but Prince Juan died soon after, and the Spanish throne would pass to the Hapsburgs, through the marriage of Juana (the crazy) and Philip (the handsome) and their son Carlos, the future King of Spain and Holy Roman emperor all at once..  João would soon die too, and his natural son Jorge would never rule, instead the throne passed to his cousin Manoel, who married in succession two of Fernando and Isabel’s other daughters.  As a condition of this alliance, the Jews of Portugal were expelled too.  Columbus, of course, soon figured out that he had claimed a new continent, rather than an old port for Spain, and Portugal would get a part of it too, as well as sizeable markets in Africa and Asia.  But in the end, it was the Hapsburgs who really triumphed.  By the time that Fernando and Isabel’s grandson Charles took the combined Spanish/Hapsburg throne, he would rule over a good piece of the known world, both old and new.  Go figure!

So for 2016, I’m just going with the flow, whether I like it or not. 

Sources:

A good summary of Münzer's career can be found at: http://self.gutenberg.org/articles/hieronymus_münzer

I've translated Münzer's Spanish and Portuguese portion of the trip (from a Spanish translation, not the original Latin) Look for it soon at: http://art.utsa.edu/faculty/judith_sobre#additional

Our Münzer project of 2010-2011 can be found at http://munzerama.blogspot.com.

James Firth has produced a book on Münzer and his discussions between himself and João II on African explorations in Portugal entitled Doctor Hieronymus Münzer's Itinerary (1494-1495) and the Discovery of Guinea; it was self-published in 2014 and is available at Amazon.com.