https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/ 17th France This close-up makes it easier to see this as a mythological variation on an established late medieval chivalric theme of the lover kneeling to gaze in awe, worship, and desire at the "celestial" beloved. This mythological theme has something in common with Dante's love for Beatrice and with the larger theme of the religion of female beauty in Renaissance and Baroque humanist aesthetics, a subject treated most famously in literature at the end of Castiglione's "Book of the Courtier" and in numerous other writers including Bembo (Gli Asolani) and the Petrarchan sonnet tradition which governs most sonnet writing into the early 17th century. Another 17th-century example of this larger theme, translated into Dutch middle class domestic terms, is Ter Borch's Woman at Her Dressing Table, shown below in this art gallery, where a young page stares, transfixed. The eagerly mounting horses of Apollo, glimpsed above Endymion in this close-up of Poussin's painting, were a common motif symbolizing male desire, as seen in Holbein's image of a naked rider on a rising horse inscribed with a line from Petrarch, "And desire leads me on" - an image found in my 16th-century art gallery on this site. https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=97273697 97273697 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=98235416 98235416 The satyr stripping or ogling a sleeping nymph was very common in ancient Greek and Roman art and reemerged as a major theme in Italian Renaissance art in the late 15th century. At times, the satyr was left out as the male viewer was already well ensconced in that role outside the painting. Later artists all the way through Picasso and Matisse produced hundreds of variations on this theme, mostly set in arcadian landscapes to naturalize "feminine" beauty, sexuality, fertility, and male aggression. Seen in these more modern terms, it might be better to say these erotic landscapes naturalized masculine ideas and prejudices. https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=97273698 97273698 Disguised as a woman by his mother and hidden among the ladies in waiting of a princess to prevent him from going to war, Achilles admires his feminine beauty in a mirror while a satyr statue smirks from the upper left (seen 2 slides later) https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=100373398 100373398 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=100373397 100373397 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=100373396 100373396 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=123067283 123067283 Claude was the most successful and influential landscape painter in the history of art. Working almost exclusively for high court patrons, he endowed nature with courtly social and political hierarchies, eternal land ownership, absolutism empire in space and time (world history as a series of linked empires), mythological politics whereby the gods (and their earthly counterparts, the aristocracy) rule over everything and defeat all usurpers, and a new sense of poetic truth, grounded in hundreds of drawings and sketches made on site. His new visual truth confirmed courtly values as natural and eternal even as his refinement of style and subject (here court dance) triumphed over all lesser creatures and passions. Pending further revision, I will post my draft for a short book on the courtly politics of Claude Lorrain. This is one of 200 shots taken in the Toledo Museum of Art, a great mid-western museum. https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=97273695 97273695 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=101932718 101932718 Although Augustine's traditional attribute was the burning heart as far back as the 15th century, Philippe de Champaigne gives the motifs a new fiery drama in accord with a modern, Catholic Counter-Reformation emphasis on feeling and the burning heart. The latter appeared in the late 16th and early 17th century as a major motif in Jesuit emblem books and a leitmotiv in Pozzo's famous ceiling fresco of the Triumph of St. Ignatius. Images from Pozzo appear above in this photo album. . https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=97368018 97368018 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=98955946 98955946 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=78178417 78178417 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=98955947 98955947 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=98955948 98955948 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=97625659 97625659 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=99398641 99398641 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=128112280 128112280 Made during the devastation of the Thirty Years War, Blanchard transformed this allegory of Caritas into an anti-war image by introducing a relief of battling soldiers. The cruelty of that war was imaged in Callot's prints shown next. https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=100374947 100374947 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=128112279 128112279 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=99398642 99398642 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=99398643 99398643 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=99398644 99398644 2nd floor of Bernini's church, San Andrea, Rome https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=102141652 102141652 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=102141649 102141649 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=102141651 102141651 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=102141650 102141650 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=102141648 102141648 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=146263344 146263344 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=146263345 146263345 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=98443461 98443461 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=150358011 150358011 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=150358012 150358012 https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=150358013 150358013 Son's Love Garden seems to play on the late medieval French theme of the "Progress of Love" with its movement from conversation to embracing. https://socialhistoryofart.webs.com/apps/photos/photo?photoID=152039720 152039720