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Explore masterful paintings of the 1400s–1500s. Masaccio’s panel of St. Andrew, Sebastiano’s Pope Clement VII painted on slate, the Halberdier by Pontormo, Van Dyck's Agostino Pallavicini, and La Tour's Gabriel Bernard de Rieux reveal how works of art had functions and reasons for existence for the patron and artist alike. Created by Getty Museum.
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- Can we truly holistically understand an artwork if it's been abstracted from it's meaning and place? Can we understand the meaning of that Masaccio piece in a gallery?(5 votes)
- I would really say yes and no. It's lost all its meaning and its place, but it's still an amazing piece of artwork, and we can learn from it, and appreciate it. If you take away a paintings soul, is it still a painting? Yes, but it's not quite the same.(3 votes)
- Are all pieces of artworks commissioned? Even for that period of time 1400's -1500's .(1 vote)
Video transcript
Male: If Masaccio were to come in
to this gallery to see his painting, which he painted in 1426
for a church in Pisa, he would be most surprised to see
this painting hanging on the wall the way we see it today. It was painted to be on the top
of a very large altar complex, some 15-16 feet tall. Works of art had functions. They had reasons for existence, both for the people who commissioned them, that is, the people who actually
paid for the painting from the artist as well as for the artist himself. This is one of the earliest
portraits in the Getty Museum. It's by an artist named
Sebastiano del Piombo. We know the name of the sitter. It was painted for Pope Clement
VII, who was a Medici pope, who commissioned Michelangelo and
Raphael to do works of art for him. This picture is painted
on a slab of slate. It weighs about 60 pounds. Clement VII, as Sebastiano, were both aware that slates
would somehow last forever, so the concept of an eternal
portrait became even more significant by the selection of the support which
the artist was then to paint on. If Sebastiano's portrait of Clement VII was meant to be seen as a very formal
state portrait presented to a public, who might not have known him personally, Pontormo's portrait of an anonymous
young man from the same time is a very different thing indeed. Pontormo's "Halberdier" presents
himself in a very specific way. He wants to be seen not only as
a soldier possibly protecting whatever fort he is standing in front of, but he is also very
subconsciously presenting himself as a man of fashion, a man as conscious of his
small waist and his clothing, as he is of anything else. He wears these marvelous red
pantaloons with a matching beret, a hat with a small hat badge on it, what's called an "insignia," that depicts Hercules and Antaeus in it made by jewelers specifically for men. This particular sitter has found
the perfect artist to represent him. This is a portrait by Van
Dyck of Agostino Pallavicini, one of the noblemen of Genoa. It was a portrait obviously painted to
impress not only Agostino Pallavicini but anybody who looked at the picture, as well as to advertise the fact that
Van Dyck was newly installed in Genoa and ready to paint portraits
of its local inhabitants. I think Van Dyck has really presented
here a tour de force of painting of red silk and red satin, from the table cover to the
garments that Pallavicini wears. But somehow, he doesn't lose sight
that Pallavicini is a human being. My hope is that a museum goer will
look at portraits and be aware that they were commissioned by specific
individuals from individual artists at a given moment in time, that they want to depict
themselves in a very certain way, that they want to preserve
themselves for posterity.