Every Thursday, as part of my personal “enriched environment” initiative, I post a piece of art, usually from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which recently released online some 400,000 high-resolution images of its collection. All artwork will show a sun (or sunlight) somewhere.
I won’t name the piece or the artist, but instead invite you to study the art and post a comment addressing one or more of these questions:
- What is going on in this picture?
- What do you see that makes you say that?
- What more can you find?
If you have another idea, run with it.
Special Update! The New York Times website does this same exercise every Monday with a news photo that is uncaptioned and contains no text (click!). The Times asks viewers the same three questions:
- What is going on in this picture?
- What do you see that makes you say that?
- What more can you find?
However, at the end of the week, the Times posts the background information on the picture. So, I’ve decided to do the same. I’ll still post an unlabeled piece of art on Thursday. But return on Sunday (for the Sunny Sundays post!) and you’ll find an update on the artwork here.
Note: To embiggen the image, click on it!
The Burial of Punchinello
Artist: Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo (Italian, Venice 1727–1804 Venice)
Date: ca. 1800
Medium: Pen and brown ink, brown and yellow wash, over black chalk.
Dimensions: 13 7/8 x 18 5/8 in. (35.3 x 47.3 cm)
Classification: Drawings
Domenico Tiepolo’s 104 drawings illustrating the life of Punchinello trace in amusing and elaborate detail the story of this popular commedia dell’arte character, from his parentage, birth, and childhood, to his diversions and adventures in near and distant lands, to his illness, death, and the apparition of his ghost.
Nine sheets from the series are in the Robert Lehman Collection. This example shows the deceased Punchinello being lowered into the ground before a group of bystanders. Both subject and composition allude to representations of saints’ burials, imparting sacred overtones to the scene and emphasizing Punchinello’s role as a secular everyman.
This would look like a carnival if it weren’t for the fact that a man’s body is being lowered into the hole in the ground, face up. Is he going to flip some switch underground that will, say, turn the colorful street lights on? Also, I noticed some people are barefoot. When and where is this picture taking place?
Yes, I agree, this does look like a cross between a Mardi Gras festival and a burial, although there are questions. Why are they lowering the body into the ground through a rectangular opening in the street that’s like a doorframe or a window frame? Why, in this culture which has developed such impressive architecture, are many of the people barefoot? What is the purpose of the dunce caps and the long-nosed masks? Is the contraption in the lower right corner a kind of wheelbarrow? What is the relationship of the old man on the far right to the body that’s being lowered into the ground? He looks the most distressed.
Based on the shadows, the sun is off screen and to the right. Note also the lamp hanging in the archway on the right. The entire right side is more open – to the sun and to air and space – while the left side is crowded with people and with architecture. It’s claustrophobic. But even though the sun itself is to the right of the picture, the sun’s rays are bouncing off the white clothes of the crowd on the left, making the left side brighter compared to the right.
My guess is that they’re lowering the body into a catacombs.
Maybe they’re lifting the body OUT of the ground, not lowering it INTO the ground.
In addition, to follow the line of some of the previous comments, the curved line suggested by everyone’s heads and hats reveals a hillock of humans squeezed together on the left (curving up), and a valley of nothing much on the right.