Artworks

Question 1

L’Origine du Monde

Answer 1

Gustave Courbet
1866

Art historians have speculated that Courbet’s model for L’Origine du monde was his favourite model, Joanna Hiffernan, also known as Jo. Her lover at the time was the American painter James Whistler, a friend of Courbet.

Question 2

Porta del Paradiso

Answer 2

Lorenzo Ghiberti
1424-52

Product of possibly the first public competition of its kind in the history of art, and illustration of the new mode of thinking during the Renaissance, whereby artists were encouraged to vie with one another in the name of ‘artistic progress’.

An original set of bronze doors to the Florentine Baptistery was produced in the Gothic style by Andrea Pisano in 1300-1330. In 1401 artists were invited to compete in making trial reliefs for a second pair of doors. Ghiberti’s winning entry maintained Pisano’s scheme of 28 Gothic quatrefoils enclosing narrative scenes or single figures, but gave them greater depth (real and apparent), and abandons Gothic grace in pursuit of robust naturalism and more dramatic narrative. The success of this commission resulted in a commission for a third pair of doors.

This third pair of doors was completed in 1452 and was so highly regarded as to be given place of honour in the portal facing the Cathedral. The reliefs are fewer, larger, and gilded overall. A single scale of proportion is used throughout, and both a rectangular and circular plan building are incorporated into two central scenes to show mastery of perspective.

Question 3

The Ghent Altarpiece

Answer 3

1432
Jan van Eyck & Hubert van Eyck

Polyptych (multi-panelled painting) in St Bavo, Ghent. Contains 20 panels, 16 of which mounted on doors which fold in to cover the central 4.

Viewed externally when closed, the bottom row displays the two donors kneeling before simulated stone statues of St John the Evangelist and St John the Baptist (in grisaille). The upper panels depict Angel Gabriel providing his message to the Virgin. The top register show the two prophets and sybils foretelling the coming of the Redeemer.

When open, the central part of the top register is Christ, more than life-sized, enthroned and wearing the papal crown raising his hand in benediction, flanked by the Virgin and St John the Baptist and and angels singing praises. Adam and even are depicted naturalistically at the ends of the doors below simulated stone reliefs of Cain and Abel as the origins of sin necessitating redemption. The lower register shows a panorama of wooded hills with flowers of all seasons and towers and spires including those of Utrecht and Ghent, as a heavenly Jerusalem, with a community of redeemed, united in worship around a central altar on which stands the Lamb of God whose blood flows into a chalice. Above the altar flies the dove of the holy spirit. A fountain in the foreground is inscribed ‘this is the fountain of the water of life proceeding out of the throne of God’

A predella would have depicted Christ descending to hell or limbo to redeem the virtuous, but this was destroyed in a fire in the 16th Century.

This is the earliest known and surviving piece of work by Jan van Eyck