St. George Slaying the Dragon
Book of Hours, in Latin
Belgium, Bruges, ca. 1450
Illuminated by the Master of Jean ChevrotThe Master of Jean Chevrot was named after the frontispieces he painted in a two-volume manuscript (today in Brussels) of St. Augustine’s City of God that was made in 1445 for Bishop Jean Chevrot of Tournai. The Chevrot Master had firsthand knowledge of the art of Jan van Eyck, having collaborated with him on the Turin-Milan Hours, an infamous manuscript that took seven artistic campaigns and over fifty years to complete (partially destroyed; the surviving portion is in Turin). Especially Eyckian is the Chevrot Master’s attention to detail, as seen in George’s armor, the birds in the sky, and the dragon’s genitals.
The Morgan Library
Queen of Swords
Bonifacio Bembo or family
Visconti-Sforza Tarot Cards
Italy, Milan, ca. 1450The Morgan Library
Giovanni Bellini, Predella of Pisaro Altarpiece, 1471-74, Musei Civici, Pesaro
(via the-wicked-knight)
Follower of Tiziano Vecelli (Titian), The Head of Saint John the Baptist, late 16th century
Follower of Jacopo Robusti (Il Tintoretto), Saint George and the Dragon, late 16th century
Domenico Tintoretto - Penitent Magdalene (1598-1602)
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Département des manuscrits, Latin 920, detail of f. 317v (St Martha and the Tarasque). Book of Hours, use of Rome. 15th century
San Marino, Huntington Library, HM 01046, detail of 245v (fall of Lucifer and the rebel angels). Offices for the week, compiled by Andrea Matteo Acquaviva. Southern Italy, 1519
Sandro Botticelli - The return of Judith to Bethulia (ca. 1470)
The Virgin and Child with Saint John and an Angel (detail), about 1490, Workshop of Sandro Botticelli
(via caravaggista)
Walter Pater: The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873)
So just what Dante scorns as unworthy alike of heaven and hell, Botticelli accepts, that middle world in which men take no side in great conflicts, and decide no great causes, and make great refusals. He thus sets for himself the limits within which art, undisturbed by any moral ambition, does its most sincere and surest work. His interest is neither in the untempered goodness of Angelico’s saints, nor the untempered evil of Orcagna’s Inferno; but with men and women, in their mixed and uncertain condition, always attractive, clothed sometimes by passion with a character of loveliness and energy, but saddened perpetually by the shadow upon them of the great things from which they shrink. His morality is all sympathy; and it is this sympathy, conveying into his work somewhat more than is usual of the true complexion of humanity, which makes him, visionary as he is, so forcible a realist.
(via caravaggista)
Bibliothèque nationale de France, Français 1537, detail of f. 16v [Pierre Crygnon, ‘Pourpre excellent pour vestir le grand roi ‘]. Chants royaux sur la Conception, couronnés au puy de Rouen de 1519 à 1528. 16th century
Demonic cloth-dying.
