A focused look at the milieu surrounding two Gardner Museum gems.

Welcome to an alarming book. In it Matthew Collings, known for his TV programmes and books about new art, tells you how to look at the old masters. Of course you can look at them however you like. But this book gives you some art historical facts as the context for what you're looking at - Collings gives you the resources you need, in order to make sense of what you're seeing. And he gets you to think for yourself. In art culture today all you hear about are literal meanings, about subject matter and ideas. Matt Collings objects to the droning repetition of that stuff. He looks to the past for a different model of art, one where the surface, the form, the look of something, is part of the idea, maybe even the main thing. We can't have the past back as a complete package, of course. That would be mad. But we can find critical principles in it that we can use to make something better out of our own time. The key figures he has chosen are Titian, Rubens, Velasquez and Hogarth. The first three stand for the highest that painting can go - rich, free, flowing, grand. In art historical terms, this is the 'painterly' stream of art. The last one didn't punch quite so high, but in him Collings sees a principle of adapting your understanding and admiration for what seems higher and greater than yourself - the achievements of the past - to your own sense of what is alive and real.Matthew Collings' new book gives a unique approach to the paintings of the past.

Love, desire, and beauty are intimately connected in Greek and Roman mythology, dominating the lives of gods and mortals. The texts that focus on these themes ? Homer?s Iliad and Odyssey, Ovid?s Metamorphoses, and Virgil?s Aeneid, among many others ? were revered by Renaissance and Baroque artists, who aimed to represent them in a powerfully expressive manner.00This fully illustrated catalogue offers a detailed study of mythological paintings by Titian, Veronese, Allori, Rubens, Ribera, Poussin, Van Dyck, and Velázquez. Inspired in some cases by a desire to emulate and in others by a sense of rivalry, these artists were responsible for the creation of a fascinating interpretative sequence that reflects the adaptability of the mythological tradition and its potential for constant renewal.00Exhibition: Museo del Prado, Madrid, Spain (02.03.-04.07.2021).

From 5th September until 1st March 2020 the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia, in conjunction with the City of Antwerp, VisitFlanders and the Flemish Community, presents 'From Titian to Rubens. Masterpieces from Antwerp and other Flemish Collections', an exhibition curated by Ben Van Beneden, director of Rubenshuis in Antwerp. The Doge's apartments will be transformed into veritable 'constkamers', rooms filled with exquisite art demonstrating the riches of Flemish collections. Featuring artists including Titian, Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck and Michiel Sweerts, the exhibition offers an array of works. Three icons of Venetian painting return to their hometown of Venice: Titian's Jacopo Pesaro presenting Saint Peter to Pope Alexander VI, the altarpiece of the former San Geminiano church, covered by the press worldwide as David Bowie's Tintoretto', and Titian's Portrait of a Lady and her Daughter (thought to be a depiction of Titian's mistress Milia and their daughter Emilia). A special section of the exhibition will be devoted to Flemish composer Adriaan Willaert who settled permanently in 'la Serenissima' to become Maestro di Cappella of the Basilica di San Marco in 1527. It was Willaert who founded the Venetian School of music that was to instruct, among others, Giovanni Gabrieli and Claudio Monteverdi.

A study of the relationship between Rubens and his Spanish patrons.

This insightful volumes the use of imitation and the modern cult of originality through a consideration of the disparate fates of two Venetian painters - the canonised master Titian and his artistic heir, the little-known Padovanino.

Michelangelo regarded portraiture as a trivial genre, and Peter Paul Rubens did not instantly develop a preference for it either. Yet Rubens succeeded, as none other, in endowing his portraits with an almost palpable sense of immediacy, and was to become one of the greatest portraitists of all time. His most beautiful and surprising portraits are those of his immediate family. These intimate pictures were not intended for public display and are therefore considerably freer and more experimental than the likenesses he painted of influential patrons. Nothing about these private images seems idealized. They are uncommonly honest and veracious and at the same time expressive of great tenderness. While the hundreds of letters he wrote reveal very little about his emotional life, Rubens s portraits of family members testify in a special way to the affection he felt for his first and second wives, his brother and his children.