Famous Works of Art - And How They Got That Way

331 Pages·2015·14.496 MB·English

by  John B. Nici

Famous Works of Art—
And How They Got
That Way
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Famous Works of Art—
And How They Got
That Way
John B. Nici
ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD
Lanham • Boulder • New York • London
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Published by Rowman & Littlefield
A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc.
4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706
www.rowman.com
Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB
Copyright © 2015 by John B. Nici
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic
or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written
permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nici, John B.
Famous works of art—and how they got that way / John Nici.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4422-4954-7 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4422-4955-4 (ebook)
1. Masterpiece, Artistic—Public opinion. 2. Art and society. I. Title.
N72.5.N53 2015
701'.03—dc23
2015008192
™
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American
National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library
Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.
Printed in the United States of America
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To Carol Lewine and Bill Clark,
extraordinary scholars, masterful teachers
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Contents
Foreword by Dennis Geronimus ix
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction xix
1 The Great Sphinx: Beyond Human Understanding 1
2 The Tomb of Tutankhamun: Politics, Ethnic Pride, Hornets,
a Dead Canary, and a Curse 15
3 The Parthenon Sculptures: Lord Elgin and How Greece Lost Its Marbles 33
4 Apollo Belvedere: The Rise and Fall of the Apollo Belvedere 49
5 Nike of Samothrace: The Victory of the Staircase 61
6 The Birth of Venus by Botticelli: Nothing Is Forever, Not Even Neglect 73
7 Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci: You Never Know What a Smile Can Do 85
8 Sistine Madonna by Raphael: The Most Perfect Picture in the World 101
9 The Burial of Count Orgaz by El Greco: A Touch of Madness Goes
a Long Way 119
10 Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer by Rembrandt: Fame Available
for a Price 131
11 Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Leutze: Or Perhaps,
Washington Crossing the Rhine 141
12 Luncheon on the Grass by Édouard Manet: Success through Scandal 151
13 The Thinker by Auguste Rodin: Fame Has Its Consequences 161
14 The Starry Night by Vincent van Gogh: Lost in a Starry Night 173
15 The Scream by Edvard Munch: Scream, Indeed 185
16 American Gothic by Grant Wood: All-American Gothic 195
vii
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viii Contents
17 Migrant Mother by Dorothea Lange: The Power of the Press 205
18 Guernica by Pablo Picasso: Travels with Guernica 215
19 Campbell’s Soup by Andy Warhol: Mmm Mmm Good 229
20 The Vietnam Veterans Memorial by Maya Lin: The Triumph of Abstraction 241
Notes 253
Index 275
About the Author 281
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Foreword
WHAT PRICE FAME?
“I
t’s a masterpiece,” “A signature work,” “A classic!” With ever greater frequency,
“masterpieces” seem to come down to us fully validated as such, but who determines
their rarified status? And, more important, how is it determined? What, in fact, does
the designation of a work of art as a masterpiece actually mean? In contemporary us-
age, the definition trends toward a work of exceptional quality, or the most virtuosic
example, a magnum opus, by a particular artist—a great artist, to be more exact.1 By
implication, a masterpiece—be it visual, literary, dramatic, musical—awes its audience
with its sheer genius, originality, and expressive power. In its modern conception, the
designation in effect becomes largely aesthetic, presupposing a lofty cultural achieve-
ment. Yet it was hardly always thus.
The original meaning of “masterpiece” in a visual context was derived from
medieval artistic practice and, more specifically, the obligatory requirements of
guild membership. Having finished his or her training, a young or immigrant artist
could only gain entry into the artists’ guild by finishing and submitting a test piece,
a demonstration work that attested to its maker’s mastery of his or her chosen craft.
In a rather unusual demand of rigor, one especially protectionist guild of painters
and sculptors in late fifteenth-century Cracow is documented as having required
as many as three exemplars, posing different representational challenges and thus
testifying to the artist’s ability to conquer a wide range of technical problems. Upon
the work’s acceptance, the applicant’s status as a journeyman or apprentice ended
and that of full-fledged master began. The proof was thus in the skill: the most
critical requirement separating a successful craft-masterpiece from a failing effort.
On occasion, this very same precondition of supreme quality and skill was exploited
by the guilds not only to elevate the socioeconomic status of a practitioner from
artisan to artist or to protect the consumer from flawed, inferior products but to
use it as an exclusionary tactic, foreclosing unwanted competition from foreigners
within the local artistic community by means of arbitrary or prohibitively strict as-
sessment. Local councils and individual patrons at times felt the stifling effects in
their own right, protesting that guild protectionism ran the risk of compromising
trade and even artistic innovation. By the mid-sixteenth century in Florence and
the mid-seventeenth century in Paris, guild control was sharply on the wane; in its
ix
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