St. Thomas eNewsletter

Dear Parishioners,

On Sunday we will be looking into one of the most beautiful works of Netherlandish painting in the fifteenth century, Rogier van der Weyden's "Duran Madonna" or "Red Madonna" that is in the Prado Museum, Spain. Here is a part of a short essay by John Haber that is freely abvailable online and we produce it here for your convenience and as background reading.

with love & prayers,

The Netherlandish Diptych
Let me set aside the art world for a moment, to talk about something more old-fashioned, the art object. An exhibition tells a story of art's coming down off the altar to enter one's home-at times even one's hands. By the show's end, it climbs back on the wall for good, just where I remember it.
Along the way, one gets a concise history of northern Renaissance painting, the art centered in and around present-day Belgium. In each case, however, the painting takes exactly two panels.

An open and shut case
A diptych refers to a painting in two parts. That means hinged panels or, less often and more of a stretch in art-historical terms, front and back. It can push to the limits the unity of a work of art. It can unsettle one's very conception of art as shaped in later times, with their claim to offer a window onto the world. It can make overt the recurring Renaissance theme of painting as an emblem of both this world and eternity. The National Gallery speaks of just that in its title, "Prayers and Portraits: Unfolding the Netherlandish Diptych."

The subtitle has a double meaning as well-the unfolding of an art object and of a narrative in time. It covers nearly two hundred years, as artists adapt their own work and that of others to objects meant for private devotion.

Of course, the art object has never really gone away. Criticism after World War II celebrated it. Formalist criticism insisted on manifesting paint and its support as a two-dimensional object. A rival description, action painting, made abstraction into an extension of the artist's body. With Minimalism, one could walk on art or stumble into it. With installation everywhere these days, one can hardly avoid bumping one's head. Postmodernism points to the art object's real-world entanglements-in the continuity of art and craft, fine art as luxury product, and its museum display.

For all that, one had better not get too close to the art object, at least when the guards are looking. Even when the signs say otherwise, one instinctively backs away. The artist's book, a form meant to hold in one's hands, has its display more often than not under glass. More than ever, art has become an object, only not for you and me. This show celebrates how that fact of life began.

Naturally art took money back then, too. In the Renaissance, individuals and religious orders funded public and private chapels, for altars or fresco cycles. Entire towns created objects of civic pride or competition, like the cathedral dome and sculpted Baptistry doors in Florence. At the same time, individuals could afford icons, for prayer or in remembrance of the departed. Diptychs have a special role here, for one can fold them shut.
The exhibition makes a concept like the Renaissance more difficult to pin down than ever. The National Gallery outlines frequent change, but also the old idea of a continuous northern tradition, one distinct from the Renaissance in Italy. By the end, art looks all set to enter a new age of Dutch and Flemish portraiture, with a new nationalism and new patrons from an emerging middle class. Rembrandt, watch out.

By John Harbour. For complete article: http://www.haberarts.com/diptych.htm