Speed Art - Part One

So, I took Allie and Elijah to see "Rembrandt, Rubens, and the Golden Age of Painting" at the Dixon Gallery yesterday. The collection, on loan from the Speed Museum, showcases (at the top of the spectrum) some works of genius and (at the bottom of the spectrum) some works of Hogarth.

We took a casual, interactive, docent-led tour with a group of (apparent) amateur art historians. While the group discussed shadows, oils, and the symbolism of clam-shell framing, I kept hissing to my fledglings, "This stuff is from the 1600's!" 

Right away, we discovered that the subjects of several paintings were naked - mainly the religious ones. Poor Adam and Eve. To be not only exposed to Judeo-Christian censure for millenia, but to be hung perpetually bare in museums across time just seems cruel and unusual. It's the sort of exposure Adam and Eve tried to avoid in the first place.

Add to that the more voluptuous female form preferred in earlier centuries, and I think we've put Eve to the permanent blush. (And if she's anything like her modern daughters, she can't be happy about how she looks in pictures.)

In fact, Eve's allure in a certain painting by an artist whose name I promptly forgot, bordered on larval. She is velveted in smooth folds, with a considerable largess not equaled in her garden mate. Her skin is palest white, and I get that, but the unnatural absence of any skin tone only exaggerates the sharp contrast between her glowing galumptuousness and Adam's peachier sinew. She is depicted in a sensually reclining sway, deliberately tempting Adam with fruit forbidden. Lowered eyelids hide her intent and mask her ambitions with seeming indolence, while in the background, a dragon-like serpent looks on suspensefully. As if he has a lot to lose.

At first look, I thought this seductive rendering of Eve trivialized the enormity of the events in the Garden of Eden, but then I decided the artist was correct to boil it all down as he did. Sometimes, there's no way to dress these things up (pun maybe intended).

But I still feel sorry for Eve. I would have probably given in for much less. Especially if that serpent had been totin' a can of Pringles. (Though many artistic renderings over the ages make it appear Eve may have had her fair share of those too.)


To be continued.........