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!
Scalinata della Trinità dei Monti
Artist: Giovanni Paolo Panini (Italian, Piacenza 1691–1765 Rome)
Date: ca. 1756–58
Medium: Pen and black ink, brush and gray wash, watercolor, over graphite
Dimensions: 13-11/16 x 11-9/16 in. (34.8 x 29.3 cm)
Classification: Drawings
This watercolor seems to have been intended as an artistic end in itself, since it is not a study for a known painting. Panini did use the composition, however, in a series of pairs of paintings executed between 1756 and 1758, representing picture galleries crowded with many views of either ancient or modern Rome. In the “Roma Moderna” of the first pair, which was commissioned by the Duke of Choiseul and is now in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Scalinata is seen from the same perspective as in this drawing. The “Roma Moderna” of the second pair, which is also in the Metropolitan Museum (52.63.2), includes the Scalinata as well, on the floor to the left of the Duke, just as it is in the Boston painting. In the third set, now in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, the Scalinata is high on the wall to the right.
At first this looks like a black-and- white drawing, but there are spots of color here and there, such as some green dresses and green plants. There are many people doing things in this picture, but I think the major point of the art is the architecture. What a lot of planning it must have taken to figure out how to lay the staircases, how to construct the buildings, how to finagle the fountain.
I’d like to see Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance up and down those stairs – and then fall into the fountain!
I printed out this picture and my grandson went to town with the colored markers.
I think this place is going to be overrun with anti-NRA teenagers in about three minutes who are protesting Washington’s inability to find any way to reduce gun violence in our country.
I, too, marvel at the overall achievement of this architecture — the buildings, stairs, fountain, etc. I also like the asymmetry of it all, the placement of all the humans, and the fact that for once the sun is off to the right of the picture.