Highlights from European Painting

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Rosso Fiorentino was trained in the Florentine High Renaissance tradition, but reacted against its emphasis on beauty, balance, and harmony. As an early mannerist artist, he instead painted asymmetrical, emotionally charged compositions. His work was admired by the poet Aretino, and Rosso was named painter to the king of France . He died in France, possibly by suicide.

The subject of this unfinished painting is still unknown. The woman in blue at the right is the Virgin; she holds the frightened Christ Child in her arms. At the left the young Saint John the Baptist reclines in a troubled sleep and almost appears to be dead. The identity of the old woman at the left is unclear. She may be Saint Anne (mother of the Virgin), Saint Elizabeth (mother of John the Baptist), or a Sibyl from classical mythology who foretold the future. This haunting image is one of the museum's masterpieces.

Mannerist artists often were influenced by other works of art. Here Rosso portrayed the young Saint John in a posture reminiscent of the dead Christ in Michelangelo's Pietà, a source easily recognized by viewers of the day, but Rosso abstracted the figures to project an intensely personal vision. His rapid application of the paint, more noticeable because the painting is unfinished, reinforces the work's uneasy urgency and visionary quality.

Guido Reni studied at the influential academy founded by the Caracci in Bologna , a school that expounded a style uniting the classicizing characteristics of the great masters of the preceding generation, among them Raphael, Tintoretto, Titian, and Correggio. Like them, Reni drew on history, mythology, and religion for subjects for his narrative paintings, the kind most prestigious and in demand during his time. Nevertheless he completed several portrait commissions; his depiction of Cardinal Roberto Ubaldino is one of the most vivid formal portraits of the seventeenth century. It may show the influence of van Dyke's celebrated portrait style.

The cardinal's pose is traditional, established by Raphael's and Titian's earlier portraits of popes. In its clear and carefully balanced composition the work emulates paintings by Raphael, Reni's idol, yet the cardinal is not idealized. Reni's desire for classical idealization is balanced by a seventeenth-century literalness that attempted a faithful transcription of the cardinal's physical and psychological presence.

A cousin of Pope Leo XI and an envoy of Pope Paul V, Cardinal Ubaldino, a subtle and astute diplomat, was papal nuncio to Paris in the early 1620s. He may have commissioned this portrait for the Jubilee of 1625. The cardinal is portrayed before a theatrical swag of drapery; a grand arcade recedes into the distance, providing a view of a formal garden and the park beyond. The setting, accessories, and brilliant play of reds and scarlets combined with the superb rendering of delicate lace contribute to an image of the cardinal as a man of refinement and power.

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Masterpieces from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
European Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art

Throughout his life Rembrandt treated the stories and parables of the Old and New Testaments in accessible, familiar images. Because the Dutch Reformed Calvinism of his time forbade religious art in churches, public commissions for paintings of biblical subjects were virtually nonexistent, but an enthusiastic private patronage for them thrived, which helps account for the preponderance of religious subjects in Rembrandt's work.

The Raising of Lazarus is Rembrandt's only painting of this miracle marking the culmination of Christ's ministry, but he also made drawings and etchings of the same subject. Christ's divine and human nature is revealed as he stands in the cave where Lazarus was buried, his hand raised to perform the miracle, his face filled with apprehension and triumph. Rembrandt interprets Lazarus's rising not only in direct correspondence with Christ's forceful gesture but also in response to the divine power it has unleashed by evoking faith

Around Christ and the tomb huddle the astounded witnesses—among them Mary and Martha, Lazarus's sisters—whose gestures and expressions record successive states of awareness and awe before what is unfolding. The dramatic darkness of the cave does not obscure the subtle colors--mauve, rose, and aqua--of the costumes or the glinting highlights of the quiver and scabbard hanging at the right.

Purchase catalogues:
Masterpieces from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
European Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Los Angeles County Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections

Although Georges de La Tour spent his entire artistic career in provincial France , far from cosmopolitan centers and artistic influences, he developed a poignant style as profound as the most illustrious painters of his day. In his lifetime his work appeared in the prominent royal collections of Europe . La Tour's early training is still a matter for speculation, but in the province of Lorraine he encountered the artist Jean Le Clerc, a follower of the Italian painter Caravaggio. From this source likely came La Tour's concern with simplicity, realism, and essential detail.

Mary Magdalen was traditionally depicted in her grotto or as an aged woman. The absence of explicit narrative in this painting emphasizes Mary's state of mind and heart rather than time and place. The simple composition of vertical and horizontal shapes draws the viewer into the Magdalen's contemplative world. The skull, books of Scripture, and scourge set the mood, but the chief symbol and true subject of the work is the candle at which Mary gazes in her meditation. Rendered in extraordinary detail and modulation, it emits the light that followers of St. John of the Cross called "the living flame of love," toward which spiritual pilgrims are drawn out of the "dark night of the soul."

La Tour scrupulously conveys the tactile quality of surfaces. The polished skull and leather books have different reflective qualities; Mary's heavy skirt, thin, wrinkled blouse, smooth flesh, and hair are meticulously distinct. Each spare detail is carefully regulated to achieve an overall balance of form and light.

Purchase catalogues:
Masterpieces from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
European Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Los Angeles County Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections

Jean-Baptiste Siméon Chardin's work gained public attention just as a reaction to the elaborate style of rococo art was setting in. He was admitted to the French Royal Academy as a still-life painter in 1728, a rare honor, as still life was then considered far less valid than paintings of historical, mythological, or courtly subjects. Even though his work reflected the ordinary images, decorum, and morality of the bourgeois life from which he came, Chardin's talent was recognized in artistic and aristocratic circles.

Chardin began to paint genre subjects in the late 1730s, evoking through his observation of everyday life a contemplative atmosphere that in France had largely remained the domain of religious painting. In some ways his compositions heralded the values of the art of the Enlightenment, with its emphasis on rational content, naturalistic imagery, and qualities of truth and directness in subject matter.

Soap Bubbles is carefully composed in the simplest of geometries, with the window forming a rectangular space to frame the pyramidal grouping of the youth and the boy transfixed by the spherical bubble; these shapes are reinforced by the masonry, angles of the youth's arms, and the pair of heads. Chardin renders surfaces carefully but without distracting detail. A sense of timeless contemplation transforms the ephemeral pastime of the pair into a compelling allegory about the transitory nature of life. This is far from being a scene of carefree, youthful abandon.

Purchase catalogues:
Masterpieces from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
European Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art
Los Angeles County Museum of Art: Handbook of the Collections