Nevertheless, I tried. I started with the Diego Velázquez painting Kitchen Scene with Christ in the House of Martha and Mary. It is also known simply as Christ in the House of Martha and Mary. It is believed to have been painted in 1618 during the Baroque period, shortly after Velázquez left the workshop of his master, Francesco Pacheco. It is both a genre painting and a bodegón. A genre painting is a scene of everyday life, mostly of the lower class. A bodegón is the Spanish word for a still life of food and kitchen items.
The genre painting portion is the two women in the foreground. The young woman is helping prepare a meal. Her flushed face and frown indicate that she is unhappy with the work that she is doing. The older woman gestures towards her as if to offer advice. The bodegón, of course, is the meal that is laid out on the table - garlic, fish, eggs, and a pepper.Possibly the most curious part of this painting is the religious scene that is occuring in the top right. Velázquez was notorious for putting a "painting within a painting." (Las Meninas, anyone?) For a while, art historians couldn't decide if the religious scene was a painting on the wall, a mirror reflecting the scene from the room where the young woman is preparing the meal, or if it was occurring in the room adjacent to the working woman. The latter theory is now the most widely accepted one although the hole in the wall is a bit mysterious.
Anyway, the religious scene shows a man who is clearly Jesus talking with two women, whom art historians believe are Martha and Mary from the story depicted in Luke chapter 10. In the story, Martha gets mad at her sister Mary for sitting and listening to Jesus instead of helping her around the house. She asks Jesus to tell her sister to help her and Jesus says something along the lines of, "Mary has chosen what is best, and it cannot be taken away from her." Based on that story, it is believed that the young woman preparing the meal is a modern-day Martha (well, modern day meaning 17th century Spain.)
The painting I chose to compare and contrast Kitchen Scene with is The Shepherds, painted by Jean-Antoine Watteau around 1716 (again, no one knows the exact date).
Watteau was born nearly 25 years after the death of Velázquez. He is part of the Rococo movement, which started in France. The Rococo was a direct reaction to the extravagance and drama of the Baroque, which many people believed to be too much. It was also a reaction to the rule of Louix XIV who had recently banned the popular commedia della'arte, or Italian Comedy, which was performed in local French theaters to the delight of many. The French turned their attention away from the throne to idyllic scenes of love, pleasure, and leisure. There are no moral messages in Rococo paintings, but there is a lot of sensual symbolism.The scene takes place in an unknown, secluded area (a popular theme in Rococo art...for more on this, see Fragonard's series of paintings called "The Progress of Love."). A boy in the back left of the painting pushes a girl on a swing. (Swings/the act of swinging were full of sexual innuendo during this period of painting.) At the bottom left, a young boy watches the dancing couple. Next to him, a man gropes a woman. Beside her, two people are either looking at the musician or the dancers.
Quick side note, it was a habit of the upper elite French aristocrats to go out in the country and dress up as shepherds or peasants, which is what this painting depicts. None of the people are poor, they basically just acted like it for fun. Even Queen Marie Antoinette had a countryhouse built for her where she liked to pretend she was a farmer.
Somehow I stretched out my research paper to be 8 or 9 pages long. I think I did a decent job on it and am very glad it's over with, but now I have 2 more research papers and a Spanish essay for my other classes... the fun never ends!
* P.S. the hyperlinks are not spam, they are legit websites.
No comments:
Post a Comment