Icon and Emblem
As the major patron of the arts throughout the European Renaissance, the Roman Catholic Church played a central role in the development of artistic tastes. Many early European paintings from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries depicted scenes from the Bible and were intended to decorate altars or chapels, or were made for private devotional use. Scenes of the birth of Christ, of episodes from the life of the Virgin Mary, and of incidents from the lives of the saints provided popular subject matter - subjects which an illiterate public could "read" and understand.
The tradition of iconic painting - devotional images of religious subjects - has an ancient lineage and derives ultimately from Greco-Roman portraiture and art of the early Christian church. During the Renaissance, this tradition came to encompass a kind of "disguised symbolism," where any painted, drawn, or carved detail might carry a symbolic message. Icons could thus be thought of as standardized signs conveying standardized meaning. By contrast, emblematic painting held more generalized messages and was usually intended to convey moral lessons to the viewer.
Iconic art is still popularly produced for the Eastern and Orthodox Christian churches.
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Jean Francois MilletFrance, born Flanders, 1642-1679 . Landscape with Mountains and a plume of smoke . circa 1660 . oil on copper panel
. 1968.25
In seventeenth-century France, a moral struggle was thought to exist between logic and emotion. This struggle was often depicted in landscapes where figures from classical mythology inhabit an idyllic, timeless setting.
Contemporary viewers understood landscapes such as Millet's to refer to heroic moral virtues. This type of carefully wrought landscape would then suggest the rational posture the viewer must adopt in the face of chaotic human passions.
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Peter Paul RubensFlanders, 1577-1640 . The Road to Calvary . circa 1632 . oil and emulsion paint on wood
. 1966.16
The traditional subject of Christ carrying the cross to the hill of Calvary here combines the emotional pathos of the exhausted Christ with the heroic dynamism of a triumphal procession.
The gray and brown tones of this ornately theatrical work would ordinarily suggest that it was a grisaille preparatory study. In such a study, Rubens quickly brushed in his first ideas in brown tones with white highlights. His studio assistants then transferred these sketches to the full-scale decorative programs.
The Berkeley grisaille, however, shows a level of detail usually found only in Rubens's completed altarpieces. It seems that Rubens, working alone, executed the grisaille for the use of an engraver, who then copied the composition onto a metal plate for printing. The Road to Calvary thus lets us see the artist's hand at work on an intimate scale, full of painterly vitality in expression and movement.
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Artist unknownFlanders, late 15th century . Ecce Homo (Behold the Man) . undated . wool tapestry
. 1957.1
Gift of the Hearst Foundation
This remarkable tapestry retraces all the episodes of the Passion-the sufferings of Christ between the night of the Last Supper and his death.
The title of the work comes from the Latin version of the Gospel of St. John (XIX, 5): "Then came Jesus forth, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple robe; Pilate saith unto them: Behold the man." Christ's presentation to the people forms the central episode of the tapestry.
The tapestry itself has an important lineage. It was commissioned as part of a cycle for the chapel and organ room at Knole, the extraordinary house built in 1457 by the then-Archbishop of Canterbury in Kent, England. As archbishop, Thomas Cranmer surrendered the house and its contents to the British crown in 1537. Elizabeth I then made a gift of it to Thomas Sackville, in whose family the tapestry remained until it was purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan in 1911. Morgan sold the tapestry to William Randolph Hearst in 1923, whose family ultimately donated it to the Berkeley campus.