26th April 2009: Documentaries on Art 3 - Renaissance Masters

Documentaries on Art 3

Renaissance Masters

26th April 2009: 5.45pm
Ashwin Hospital Auditorium

Konangal presents the third episode of ‘Documentaries on Art” this Sunday, 26th April 2009. This series is planned with screenings of art documentaries on every fourth Sunday , introducing great masters from the renaissance period to the advent of Cubism with simple , easy to understand documentary presentations by art scholars Tim Marlow, Simon Schama and Waldemar Januszczak . Powerful and rich presentations of these BBC documentaries on great masters and their art of our times are definite eye openers to the wonderful world of art.

This week we present four 26 minutes BBC documentaries on renaissance masters of early 15th and 16th centuries , Rubens, Raphael, Titian and Leonardo da Vinci. This will be followed by a 50 minutes BBC documentary “Private Life of a Masterpiece’ on Da Vinci’s masterpiece “The Last Supper”.

The section of documentaries highlighting renaissance masters ends this Sunday. Next month we are going to have a full screening devoted to the great Dutch master, Rembrandt. It will be followed by documentaries on great masters Vermeer and Goya in June.

Tim Marlow

Tim Marlow is a writer, broadcaster, art historian and Director of Exhibitions at White Cube in London. In 1993 he founded Tate: The Art Magazine. From 1991 to 1998 he presented Radio 4's arts programme Kaleidoscope, for which he won a Sony Award, and is currently a presenter of the World Service arts programme The Ticket.

As well as numerous arts programmes for Five, he presented a documentary on JMW Turner for BBC ONE . Other television work included presenting the now notorious Is Painting Dead? Tim Marlow is the author of various books including monographs of the French sculptor Auguste Rodin and the Austrian expressionist Egon Schiele as well as a survey of great artists published by Faber. He has written extensively on art and culture in the British press including the Times, the Guardian, the Independent on Sunday and Arena, Art Monthly and Blueprint magazines.
He is visiting lecturer at Winchester School of Art and an examiner on the Sculpture MA and former Creative Director of Sculpture at Goodwood.

Leonardo da Vinci

Leonardo da Vinci - Self portrait

Leonardo da Vinci (1452 -1519, r.), Italian painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal There has never been an artist who was more fittingly, and without qualification, described as a genius. Like Shakespeare, Leonardo came from an insignificant background and rose to universal acclaim. His Last Supper (1495-97) and Mona Lisa (1503-06) are among the most widely popular and influential paintings of the Renaissance.
We can always tell a Leonardo work by his treatment of hair, angelic in its fineness, and by the lack of any rigidity of contour. One form glides imperceptibly into another (the Italian term is sfumato), a wonder of glazes creating the most subtle of transitions between tones and shapes. His notebooks reveal a spirit of scientific inquiry and a mechanical inventiveness that were centuries ahead of his time.

The Private Life of a Masterpiece

Winner of the Royal Television Society Education Award, this landmark documentary is a scholarly look at Leonardo da Vinci‘s masterpiece Last Supper (1495-97).Viewers who watch it carefully will be rewarded with one of the most enjoyable educational show available on art. It is packed with information and more than that it is lively, entertaining and satisfying

Raphael ( Raffaello DSanzio)
(1483-1520)

Raffaelo Sanzio was the youngest of the three giants of the High Renaissance. He was born in Urbino in 1483 and received his first instruction in the techniques of painting from his father, Giovanni Santi, a minor artist.

In 1504 Raphael went to Florence. The intensive debates surrounding the new directions being taken in art at that time must have made a forceful impression on the young 21-year-old. It was a period in which Leonardo, just returned from Milan, was astounding the public with his Mona Lisa. One of the most frequently discussed and best-loved paintings of the Renaissance is Raphael's so-called Sistine Madonna. For many people it remains the supreme example of western painting, and its popularity is virtually as great as that of the Mona Lisa.

Titian
(Tiziano Vecellio 1490 – 1576)

Titian came under the spell of Giorgione, with whom he had a close relationship. In 1508 he assisted him with the external fresco decoration of the Fondaco dei Tedeschi, Venice, and after Giorgione's early death in 1510 it fell to Titian to complete a number of his unfinished paintings.

Titian was recognized as a towering genius in his own time (Lomazzo described him as the 'sun amidst small stars not only among the Italians but all the painters of the world') and his reputation as one of the giants of art has never been seriously questioned. He was supreme in every branch of painting and his achievements were so varied - ranging from the joyous evocation of pagan antiquity in his early mythologies to the depths of tragedy in his late religious paintings — that he has been an inspiration to artists of very different character. Poussin, Rubens, and Velázquez are among the painters who have particularly revered him. In many subjects, above all in portraiture, he set patterns that were followed by generations of artists. His free and expressive brushwork revolutionized the oil technique: Vasari wrote that his late works 'are executed with bold, sweeping strokes, and in patches of colour, with the result that they cannot be viewed from near by, but appear perfect at a distance... The method he used is judicious, beautiful, and astonishing, for it makes pictures appear alive and painted with great art, but it conceals the labour that has gone into them.'

Rubens
(1577-1640)

Flemish painter who was the greatest exponent of Baroque painting's dynamism, vitality, and sensuous exuberance. His work is a fusion of the traditions of Flemish realism with the classical tendencies of the Italian Renaissance. Though his masterpieces include portraits and landscapes, Rubens is perhaps best known for his religious and mythological compositions.. He organized his complex compositions in vivid, dynamic designs in which limitations of form and contour are discounted in favour of a constant flow of movement. Rubens' voluptuous women may not be to the taste of modern viewers but are related to the full and opulent forms that were the ideal of womanhood during the Baroque period.