Picturing Mary: Yesterday and Today

Christmas may be Jesus’ “birthday,” but, as any mother will tell you, his mother Mary really deserves the applause. Providing the humanity half to join with Christ’s divine side, Mary volunteered to play a part from the Incarnation to the Crucifixion to the Resurrection as everything from an active participant to an interested bystander, depending on your interpretation of Christian scripture. Picturing Mary: Woman, Mother, Idea, a new exhibition at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC, takes a closer look at how artists, especially women artists, depicted Mary in the more faithful past as well as how modern artists, especially women artists, still use Mary in the secular present. By making Mary the star of the show, Picturing Mary shines a light on how we see Mary reflects on how we see ourselves. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Picturing Mary: Yesterday and Today."

I'll Be Your Mirror: Michael Fried’s “The Moment of Caravaggio”

“I'll be your mirror,” The Velvet Underground sang in the song of the same name, “Reflect what you are, in case you don't know.” In The Moment of Caravaggio, Michael Fried argues that the art of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio captivates us by reflecting back at us the interior life we the viewer project into it. Fried adds to that dynamic another “moment,” in which the artist himself finds himself captured by his own painting, which he must cast off if it is to live as an independent art work. One of the most intriguing and subtle art critics writing today, Fried casts new light into the work of the master of chiaroscuro and presents a fresh approach to understanding just why Caravaggio’s art lingers in the mind and holds our attention even today, four centuries after his death. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "I'll Be Your Mirror."

[Many thanks to Princeton University Press for providing me with a review copy of Michael Fried’s The Moment of Caravaggio.]

A Delightful Surprise

When the women artists of today look back in history for examples to follow, they usually limit themselves to the artists of the twentieth century. Sure, an Artemisia Gentileschi here and a Rosa Bonheur there pop up to prove that women have fought for their rights over the centuries, but the larger pattern has been of successful women artists playing the male-dominated game. That dearth of historical heroines makes the lack of attention paid to nineteenth century French artist Adélaïde Labille-Guiard all the more criminal. Laura Auricchio’s Adélaïde Labille-Guiard: Artist in the Age of Revolution, the first book in English to tell the great pioneering portraitist’s story, rights that wrong in a delightful, insightful way. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "A Delightful Surprise."

[Image: Adélaïde Labille-Guiard, Head of a Young Woman, French, 1779. Pastel on paper, 21 1/2 x 17 1/2 in. Los Angeles, J. Paul Getty Museum. 96.PC.327]

[Many thanks to Getty Publications for providing me with a review copy of Adélaïde Labille-Guiard: Artist in the Age of Revolution by Laura Auricchio and for the image above.]