Weather In The Far West Pacific -- July 11, 2015

Typhoon(s) bearing down on China.

See the winds / wind patterns here.

Looks like a one-two punch.

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A Note To The Granddaughters

We visited the Getty Museum in Malibu this week. We visit it every time we come out to California. If folks visiting Los Angeles have time for only one fine arts museum it has to be the Getty. Not the Getty Villa along the coast in Pacific Palisades, but the Getty Museum, high on the hill, in west Los Angeles, along the Sepulveda.

As usual, there were several temporary exhibitions. I really enjoyed the Andrea del Sarto exhibition. Del Sarto is apparently not as well known or as well studied as his peers until recently. With new information, it appears that del Sarto may have been the "engine" of  the Renaissance and "the transformer of draftsmanship."

His peers, all (?) Florentine: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Correggio, Parmigianino, Titian.

Del Sarto: 1486 - 1530
Da Vinci: 1452 - 1519
Michelangelo: 1475 - 1564
Rapheael: 1483 - 1520
Correggio: 1489 - 1534
Parmigianino: 1503 - 1524
Titian: 1488 - 1527

Today del Sarto is probably overlooked because of his focus on religious subjects, particularly the holy family.

It turns out there are 180 surviving works of del Sarto. The Getty owned four (4) of them; the most of any North American collection.

Of the 180 surviving works, the Getty in partnership with the Frick museum in NYC, exhibited 50 of the works, including the Medici Holy Family and Sacrifice of Isaac. Eighteen (18) works from Uffizi, Florence; the bulk of the rest from Palazzo Piti, Florence, including The Holy Family and Saint John the Baptist.

The exhibit will be shown only in the US: at the Frick Collection, NY; and, J Paul Getty, LA.

In the painting, The Holy Family, these were my thoughts before I confirmed them at wiki:

• Elizabeth, about 35 y/o
• Mary, about 19 y/o
• Jesus, about 18 months
• St John the Baptist, about 4 years old

I also noted the color of Elizabeth's robe and Mary's robe. Mary's: blue; Elizabeth's: red. And then I learned from May that Mary is always shown in blue.  From faqs.org:

The Madonna and Child pairing appealed greatly to Renaissance artists, writers, and preachers. Mary was increasingly portrayed as the compassionate, protective mother of a gifted, precocious child. Though the Madonna retained her customary red dress and blue mantle (red symbolizing passion and true love, blue heaven and spiritual love), her son was now shown naked or scantily clothed, fully revealing his male genitalia. Leo Steinberg, in his influential book The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and in Modern Oblivion, argues against the tendency to dismiss this as a natural display of maternal pride or casual reflection of contemporary child-care. He links the frequently exposed infant genitalia to the Renaissance emphasis on the doctrine of the incarnation– God's presence on earth in human form–translated artistically into a young boy who embodied the Gospel phrase, "the Word made Flesh."

Most interesting to me was the head coverings for Elizabeth and Mary in The Holy Family. Elizabeth wore a head covering / a scarf / a hijab; Mary did not. Any number of sites, including this one, suggest that Mary always wore a scarf / head covering:

Many Catholic women choose to cover their heads to emulate the Virgin Mary.  Mary the mother of Jesus covered her head and hair according to Jewish customs of the time and we will explore these and later Judaic hijab customs in the next article.

But in del Sarto's The Holy Family Mary was not wearing a head covering. The most often cited distinction for wearing / not wearing a head covering / scarf had to do with marriage. In Rome at the time of the birth of Jesus or during the Renaissance it was common practice that married women, but not single women, wore a head coverying. Elizabeth was, of course, married; Mary was not (though she was betrothed).

Del Sarto was noted for his use of red chalk.

The exhibition was excellent. For the first time, I had a new understanding of the holy family. The two saints, Mary and Elizabeth, were cousins (first? fourth? who knows, but they were "kin," but from different tribes or families).

Elizabeth was much the older, and pregnant with the future John the Baptist, at same time as Mary was pregnant with Jesus. Elizabeth, of course, was married; Mary, not. Elizabeth went to visit Mary, perhaps protect her, comforted her, and Mary is said to have responded with the Magnificat.

Other notes from the exhibit, regarding del Sarto:
rendering reality
cartoons: full-scale drawings

Bookstore:

My Dear BB, letters of Bernard Berenson and Kenneth Clark, edited by Robert Cumming,
Eloquent Nude, DVD, early landscape photography
Norton's Anthology of World's Religions, two volume, $100 at the museum; $52 at Amazon
1491, Charles C. Mann -- based on reviews at Amazon, will not get