A review by nickfourtimes
A Little History of Art by Charlotte Mullins

informative medium-paced

3.0

1) "It is 1305 in Padua, Italy, and Giotto is showing his assistant where to spread today's fresh plaster on the chapel wall. He is going to paint on it while it is still damp using a technique called buon fresco, so his colours sink into the plaster to form a luminous wall painting. It is quite a challenge, knowing just how much plaster to apply. He has to paint the whole lot in one day or it will dry out and his colours will no longer be locked in but will sit on top. He knows what he is doing though - he has been painting frescoes in Enrico Scrovegni's private chapel for over two years now. The chapel will soon be complete, the walls covered in frescoes and the ceiling twinkling with gold stars against a dark blue heavenly sky."

2) "It is midnight on 14 May 1504 as a giant naked man begins to move through Florence's silent streets. The man is David, Michelangelo's most ambitious sculpture to date. It has taken him two years to carve and has taken the cathedral board almost as long to agree on where to locate it. Michelangelo signed a contract to make a colossal sculpture for the top of the cathedral's façade but ultimately the board decided to give it a more public home. It is now to be placed outside the Palazzo della Signoria, home to Florence's government."

3) "Claude's collectors were not Poussin's intellectuals but the aristocracy of Europe. In Claude's paintings, trees again frame the landscape and draw us in to the view. In Pastoral Landscape from 1647 the trees flank the river, which lures us further into the scene as we follow its path to the hazy mountains in the distance. People are present only to give scale and pinpoints of colour. In many of his scenes the sun is rising, casting a golden glow over every leaf and blade of grass. The rich morning light hovers over, under and in front of everything it touches.

Landscape is not natural; it doesn't simply exist. Landscape is not the land itself but a carefully selected view that is sketched or painted to tell a particular story of man's relationship to the earth. For Poussin and Claude it is dotted with fictitious Roman temples and harks back to the dawn of classicism. For Dutch artists, by contrast, landscape reflected aspects of contemporary life. Windmills and churches rise from flat swathes of land; boats and ships set sail under heavy skies. The rise in Dutch landscape painting was fuelled by the interests of the middle-class collectors who bought them. They didn't live in private palaces or cathedral cloisters but out there, in the real world, where their ships bobbed at anchor and their windmills turned in the fields. They had fought hard for their land, battling rival nations and even the sea itself, by pumping low-lying lakes dry to create more land for farming."

4) "Shortly after this exhibition [Jacob Epstein] dismantled Rock Drill and amputated the figure at the waist. He removed one arm before casting it in bronze and later exhibited the mutilated torso without the drill. The First World War, which had started in 1914, stripped him of his enthusiasm for futuristic machinery. He wrote that the Rock Drill figure now represented the armed, sinister figure of today and tomorrow. No humanity, only the terrible Frankenstein's monster we have made ourselves into? The battle droids in Star Wars bear an uncanny resemblance to Epstein's original figure - inhuman robots each wielding an automatic weapon."