This Grimshaw dude was really a major discovery. I haven’t been able to let go of these, and the longer you spend on them the more things you find in them - including devices I have never seen, or at least never thought about, in other people’s paintings before.
His sense of balance and proportion above however once again took me back to Raphael, who I think was one of the first and foremost masters of this. The Madonna in the Meadow (1506) below is perhaps my favourite painting by him, in part precisely thanks to this. As always with him you have this sense of sublime tranquility and masterly perfection over the painting. Everything is precisely grouped and ordered - cloud balanced against cloud, a large tree against a group of smaller trees, the diagonal formed by the cross and the Madonna’s gaze is countered by her extended leg and bare foot, the complexity of the city up left balanced by the complexity of the leaves down right. And yet it’s done with just enough variety and subtlety to prevent the painting from feeling stiff and calculated (also very much à la Grimshaw). Also note the stroke of genius with the marked red flower just behind her. It’s seemingly such a small detail, but yet it’s bright red colour helps both to connect the group with the background and give it a sense of depth and continuity (instead of the bi-layered, foreground/background it would otherwise have), and to somewhat pull your attention away from the foreground and the bottom corner. It all comes together to give the painting a quiet sense of proportion, balance, symmetry, depth and beauty.
But above all it’s of course about what he’s actually painted, and not just how he’s arranged it. The Madonna’s calm posture and peaceful expression, the idealized background, and the unruly children which brings life and commotion to the painting, and saves it from becoming boring. There are numerous sketches surviving of this incidentally - something like 20 or 30 I think - where he keeps rearranging the internal configuration of the children and the Madonna before finally getting it right, which also shows just how much work, thought and consideration it went in to making a painting like this feel so elegant and natural. As always with Raphael the end result is a work which seems to come from a world purer than our own, and artistically it’s such a step from the stiff and wooden paintings of these themes which had been done earlier.
For the record I mean things like this (and even worse examples if you go a couple of decades further back). This is by Raphael’s teacher - who is a painter I also really like otherwise - but you can tell he was neither one of the four Ninja Turtles or had been blessed by the insight of their inventions. It just doesn’t have the life, depth and calm elegance of his pupil’s painting - it feels stiff, flat and staged by comparison.
I’m sure I’ve mentioned this already, but the one art exhibition I’ve found myself at was at Lisitsa’s recital here two years ago (at the Arts Academy). I arrived early to check out the museum a bit, but due to the poor sound proofing I could immediately hear Lisitsa warming up as I entered the building. I hence skipped the museum and snapped on my mics instead and walked to the loudest sounding room adjacent to where Lisitsa was practicing, and there leaned against the wall to listen/record. After 10 minutes or so a lady I hadn’t even taken notice of got up from a chair in the corner of the room, walked up to me and asked what I enjoyed so much in her painting I had been staring at on the opposite wall for the past 10 mins.
