Jonathan Jones's Blog, page 256

The 3D model of Mary, Queen of Scots is the face of a historical divide | Jonathan Jones

Portraits from the past reveal that medicine plus the consumer society remade human beings in the 1960s

Their faces look back at us out of portraits, marble busts and old photographs. The people of the past are as human as we are, maybe more so, and yet their noses are longer, their faces thinner, the skin more sallow or dry or scarred. This is not just a product of different artistic styles, but a glimpse of a great divide in history.

A newly released 3D modelling of the face of Mary, Queen of Scots reveals how strange 16th-century portraits look if we see them as real faces: Mary, as in her paintings, has bags under her eyes and less-than-dewy skin. Her portrait is part of a recent vogue for revisiting portraiture in digital exercises of wildly varying scientific value, from medical reconstructions of faces to people who are descended from Napoleon and Cromwell being inserted into ancestral portraits to dressing classical statues in hipster outfits.

When the body of Richard III was discovered by archaeologists in a Leicester car park, one of the studies conducted on it was a facial reconstruction of the 15th-century king based on his skull. His living descendant Michael Ibsen posed beside the model: the picture was a snapshot of two worlds. The gaunt and severe face of Richard III contrasts with the plump and well-kept features of a 21st-century middle-aged man. It's as if we are more relaxed in our skins, yet also less striking and characterful, than our ancestors.

There was another remarkable thing about Richard III's scientifically modelled face: it looks just like his Renaissance portraits. Far from being invented by Tudor portraitists, the image of Richard III that has come down through history – long nose, hard features – is historically accurate. It is conventional to think of portraits before the age of photography as unreliable images, either idealising or occasionally demonising their subjects. But accuracy was highly prized.

It's not only Richard III's portraits that appear to be grimly truthful. When King Henry VII, who won the crown from the slaughtered Richard at the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, came to the end of his own reign he had his portrait taken by the Italian artist Pietro Torrigiano: I say "taken" because Torrigiano's terracotta bust is an accurate replica of Henry's appearance, made by moulding a death mask on the real face. In fact, it looks very akin to a modern facial reconstruction.

Faces from the past are often depicted with this kind of scrupulous accuracy in portraits, either from death masks or by acute observation, and the results are unsettling. People look less healthy, less primped, less beautified than westerners tend to appear today. Hans Holbein's portrait A Lady with a Squirrel and a Starling shows a 16th-century English woman with bad skin, fat under her chin and traces of blackheads on her nose. A bust of Michelangelo reveals the battered face of old age. Rembrandt's wife Saskia looks ill – and would die young.

In general, faces look less fleshed out and smaller, and more wizened. This is not just a quality of Renaissance and Baroque art but very visible in early photographs. The camera came along in time to capture the strange, dark-eyed face of Abraham Lincoln: are there any faces today like his? The brilliance of Daniel Day-Lewis's performance as the venerated president – and that of his make-up artists – was to recreate this totally archaic-looking human being.

Does anyone today look like George Orwell? Orwell was ill, and the dividing line between the present and the past that faces reveal is a gulf defined by modern medicine, health systems and an abundance of food. It is a gulf that Europeans crossed in the 60s, although North Americans got there a bit sooner. Christine Keeler in 1963 still looks modern. Mick Jagger at Glastonbury in 2013 can still live on how he looked half a century ago. Faces from the past reveal that medicine plus the consumer society remade human beings in the 60s – and are still remaking us.

ArtPaintingPhotographyJonathan Jones
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National Gallery buys 18th century painting that praises Islam

An Allegory of Asia by Franz Maulbertsch is a pearl of Rococo style and a subtly radical work portraying a lush daydream

The clue is a cup of coffee. In a curious and seductive painting that the National Gallery has just bought from a private collection, an exotically dressed servant pours tawny liquid into it in a crescent-like curve in a fantasy scene that celebrates the genius of the east.

The picture, An Allegory of Asia, was painted in Vienna in around 1750 by the court artist Franz Maulbertsch. It is a subtly radical work that praises the inventions and lifestyles of Islam at a time when Europeans were becoming less blinkered by Christianity.

An Allegory of Asia reminds Europeans how much we can learn from Islam, whose crescent banner is at the heart of the painting, and not least how to drink coffee. In the early modern era, coffee houses spread across Europe from Istanbul. Coffee became the drink of the Enlightenment, the 18th century movement that questioned religion, promoted intellectual openness - and inspired this painting.

Coffee comes from the east, according to Maulbertsch. So does sex. Overlooking the lusciously coloured frolic floats Venus, the goddess of love. She watches over a mysterious love scene that seems to have come straight out of The Thousand and One Nights. A male figure who looks out of the painting proudly is clad, like his mistress, in fabulous skirts. The luxurious fabrics these people wear, in colours as evocative as perfume, are another Asian commodity beloved by Europe.

Obviously, this is not a realistic image of Asia. It is a lush daydream. The charm and beauty of this painting swept me up with a virtuoso riff of colour and texture when I was given a sneak preview in the conservation department at the National Gallery. The painting is on show from this weekend. Like later western artists including Matisse, what Maulbertsch most loves in his idyll of the "orient" are the blazing, many-hued colours he ascribes to its silks, flowers and rugs.

This is a real find by the National Gallery, a knockout work by an artist who has only recently started to be rescued from oblivion. Maulbertsch was in huge demand in his lifetime to fresco the ceilings of palaces and churches in the Habsburg empire. He was influenced by Venetian painters, especially Tiepolo. This painting is a pearl of the Rococo style, which its delicate alternation of crisp, even brittle textures and floods of moist colour typifies. It is a door on a lost room in the story of art, ideas and cultural encounters.

An Allegory of Asia can be seen at the National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London (Room 39).

National GalleryJonathan Jones
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Say hello to the rest of the planet – the week in art

Revolutionaries from Mexico, long-neglected stars from Sudan, and the whole Museum of Contemporary African Art hits the UK. Plus the house that lets you levitate – all in your art roundup

Exhibition of the week

Mexico: A Revolution in Art, 1910-1940

When did the art of the Americas first become globally influential? Was it when Jackson Pollock put canvases on the floor and dripped paint on them? Wrong. In the early 20th century, the art of the Mexican revolution dazzled Europeans and north Americans alike with a bold visionary freedom and new sense of space. This exhibition revisits one of the great stories of modern art, in which mural painters including Diego Rivera and Jose Clemente Orozco made art social in scope and scale. Pollock was inspired by them to paint big. Here is the liberating power of modern art at its most political.
• Royal Academy, London W1J from 6 July until 29 September

Other exhibitions this week

Ibrahim El-Salahi
This Sudanese modernist who incorporates African and Arab themes in a style not unlike Henry Moore and Graham Sutherland gets his first major British show.
• Tate Modern, London SE1 from 3 July until 22 September

Eduardo Paolozzi
The collages of Eduoardo Paolozzi are dreams of the consumer society pasted together from American magazines by an artist in austerity Britain – pop visions of things that were to come.
• Pallant House Gallery, Chichester PO19 from 6 July until 13 October

The Spirit of Utopia
The idea of utopia has waxed and waned in political thought since it was invented by Thomas More in the Renaissance, but it lives on in the artists in this show including Peter Liversidge, Superflex and Theaster Gates.
• Whitechapel Gallery, London E1 from 4 July until 5 September

Meschac Gaba
The Museum of Contemporary African Art is an installation that combines the structure of a museum with the atmosphere of a west African market.
• Tate Modern, London SE1 from 3 July until 22 September

Masterpiece of the week

Mosaic mask of Tezcatlipoca, Aztec/ Mixtec, 15th/16th century
The art of Mexico reaches deep into history. When Spanish conquistadors arrived in the 16th century they confronted the majestic and cruel Aztec empire, whose art is as searing and vibrant as its sacrifices were terrible.
• British Museum, London WC1B

Image of the weekWhat we learned this week

That every one of you can fly – and scramble up buildings like Spidey

That a new camera captures not just images but your favourite smells too

How sexy the new Vermeer show is

What the best of Arles photography festival looks like – a week before it opens

That LS Lowry was a Tory rent collector – and that he was twice offered the job as the Guardian's art critic

How to close the girl gap in the world of design

And finally...

Share your art about water (which is now even easier via GuardianWitness)

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ArtMexicoFrida KahloDiego RiveraTate ModernLS LowryJonathan Jones
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Vermeer and Music: a seductive show that plays up the master's erotic side

Everything from the instruments to the interiors are sexually charged with the Dutch master's baroque blues

Seventeenth-century musical instruments hang in space inside their glass cases at the National Gallery's exhibition Vermeer and Music: a cittern, a viol, a guitar. These are works of art in their own right. The exhibition even has a resident ensemble playing the sounds of the baroque age. But the music that wins out here is not baroque. It is the blues.

Vermeer's blues are silent, but they touch your soul. In his painting A Young Woman Standing at a Virginal, a blue-upholstered chair in the foreground matches the blue silk on her dress. Both are ultramarine blue, an expensive pigment obtained from the rare mineral lapis lazuli. Vermeer also uses green earth: this young woman's face is richly tinged with it. The effect is to darken the emotional atmosphere – to fill the eye with blue notes.

Music was the food of love in 17th-century Netherlands. In a tradition that goes back to the early Renaissance, lutes and sweet harmonies were the stuff of seduction. So here we see all kinds of variations on this sexy theme by artists of Vermeer's day. In a painting by Pieter de Hooch, a man and woman chat flirtatiously in a shady courtyard to live musical accompaniment.

Vermeer takes it to another level. Painting during the scientific revolution, he is the Isaac Newton of love. He examines desire under the microscope. The microscope was, in fact, being developed in Holland at the time, and his painting The Guitar Player is a fantasia on optics: brilliant light plays on surfaces we seem to see as if magnified, the glow of intense colour transfiguring pearls, clothes, and guitar strings into near-abstract luminescences. Look at her hair: it is like a sea creature in close-up.

Vermeer's women play music, and the music is sexual. That young woman at the virginal stands under a painting of Cupid. Another woman sits at a virginal; a prostitution scene hangs on the wall behind her.

But Vermeer goes beyond the art of symbols. Dutch art in his age is replete with meanings, teased out best by Simon Schama in his classic book The Embarrassment of Riches. But Vermeer stands back from social commentary; his women gaze out silently. Their beauty is pale and enigmatic. All those blues and greens cool his painted world in a way that is deeply erotic. Instead of the comedies of love painted by Jan Steen, he creates a crisply serious and bold erotic intrigue.

In his painting The Music Lesson, a man stands by while a woman plays the virginal. The tension between them is understated, yet electric. Their stillness and apparent coldness intensifies the sexual drama. The room they stand in is a deep pool of light and shade, where an ultramarine chair and blue-tinged shadows fill the atmosphere with ambiguity. This is a masterpiece, one of Vermeer's greatest. It adds a deep bass note of mystery to this seductive exhibition.

Johannes VermeerPaintingArtJonathan Jones
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Are 'free' museums overcharging us?

With visitors paying £16.50 a head for its Lowry show, Tate Britain seems to be setting a new high in exhibition fees

LS Lowry may or may not be the hottest ticket in town – but he is the most expensive. Tickets to see Tate Britain's exhibition of his work cost £16.50, provoking much comment in the thread under Adrian Searle's review. Is this an outrage? Are ticket prices for art shows going nuts?

I can't resist mentioning here that the Lowry show is co-curated by the great Marxist art historian TJ Clark. Maybe the old revolutionary is deliberately revealing the cogs that make the capitalist art machine go round?

Still, £16.50 does seem to be a new high in exhibition prices, and means it is more expensive to see Salford's matchstalk cats and dogs than it is to see the frozen corpses and frescoes of ancient Pompeii – for the British Museum's blockbuster costs a mere £15. David Bowie Is at the V&A costs £15.50, as did the recent Roy Lichtenstein exhibition at Tate Modern.

Split the difference between 15 quid and £16.50; the fact is that blockbuster exhibitions are becoming a costly day out. It's cheaper to visit less intensely awaited shows: £11 to see outsider art at the Hayward, a comparative bargain. But the fact is, people are paying a lot to see art at public museums. This is paradoxical because, famously and proudly, Britain's national museums are free. Aren't they?

Surely the rising cost of exhibitions undermines that claim. If you go to the British Museum once a year and pay £15 to see a blockbuster, you are in effect paying a hefty entrance fee. Only if you visit a museum without seeing an exhibition can entrance be called "free".

The cheapest shows to see in London are those at the Courtauld Gallery: they cost £5. The twist is that the Courtauld charges for entry, and £5 is its flat rate whether or not you want to see anything. Similarly, Museums abroad that charge entry fees tend to include the exhibitions – even huge ones – in the initial price.

Yet I visit the Courtauld far less than I do other galleries; only a good show drags me there. The glory of free museums is that you can go in casually, frequently, for 10 minutes in your lunch hour, see a painting and leave. It makes for a deeper engagement with art.

But if exhibition prices get steeper and your own visits to galleries tend to revolve around these behemoths, you are being cheated into subsidising my free visits to permanent collections. Thanks!

I don't really know the answer to all this. Critics get a lot of access for free, anyway – let's be honest – so your view is more important than mine. Are museums massively overcharging? Is it a covert entrance fee or a subsidy for free entry? Or is £16.50 bloody good value to see a show like Lowry at the Tate?

Tate BritainTate ModernLS LowryArtV&AMuseumsArts fundingJonathan Jones
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Why Gaudí's birthday deserves its Google doodle celebration

His fantastical buildings are hard to situate in time, but their utopian spaces are indelibly placed in Barcelona

On 7 June 1926 a shabbily dressed old man was knocked down on a busy road in Barcelona. Assumed to be homeless, he was given second-rate medical treatment. Finally, as he lay dying in hospital, the great architect Antoni Gaudí was recognised.

The manner of Gaudí's death encapsulated the mystery of a man who never quite seemed to fit his time. This is his birthday (he was born on 25 June 1852) and he has been honoured by a Google Doodle. He is famous, but is he any more understood than he was in 1926?

For Gaudí is an anachronistic genius – a modernist giant who was addicted to the past. His buildings are at once futuristic and backward-looking. Fantastical intruders in their day, they now have a timeless quality that makes them profoundly pleasurable. Where other modern buildings proclaim their century proudly, his could equally well come from medieval Africa or 25th-century Mars. He was mocked by Picasso for being old-fashioned, and by George Orwell for building modern monstrosities.

In fact Gaudí had a lot in common with the British critic John Ruskin whose book The Stones of Venice champions the idea that gothic architecture is more communally enriching than the ugly edifices of the commercial age. Gaudí's visionary buildings offer a utopian gothic alternative to the businesslike city around them. The most renowned are in Barcelona, decorating its streets like mad jewels.

Gaudí's most beautiful creation is the Casa Batllo. It has a drop-dead facade, a complex confection of skeletal columns framing wavy windows that do much more than connect house and street. Passing through it feels like entering another realm. A good analogy is the overture of an opera by Wagner, for like a Wagnerian performance, the Casa Batllo is a total work of art that absorbs and consumes you. The grandiose facade leads the visitor into another reality – and the interior lives up to that sense of wonder. Deep colours, organically orotund spaces, and sinuous wood carvings lead you from room to room as if wandering through an undersea palace.

The roof is a fairytale sculpture, laden with mosaics. This enchanted realm high above the city is mirrored by the public spaces of Park Guell, where glittering mosaic salamanders, multicoloured seats and subterranean terraces create a dream that restores and liberates everyone who goes there.

Gaudí died alone but his art – including the still-unfinished Sagrada Familia, his attempt to recreate the age of the cathedral – is for all. He is shared and loved, as he deserves to be. His vision humanises the modern city.

Antoni GaudíArchitectureGoogle doodleInternetSearch enginesGoogleJonathan Jones
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Renoir's celebration of the flesh is beautiful to behold

Gilles Bourdos's film about the passion of the elderly impressionist for a young woman glows with the painter's own delight in the body and its pleasures

It's good to see a film about the private life of an artist that is not judgmental about his need for sex and beauty.

Renoir, directed by Gilles Bourdos and starring Michel Bouquet as the impressionist master, is the story of an old man's obsession with a young woman. It is set during the first world war, almost entirely on Pierre-Auguste Renoir's estate in the south of France. Renoir is old and ill, but his artistic fire burns bright, rekindled by a new model, Andrée, played by Christa Théret.

Cue a lot of nakedness in the golden light of Provence. Théret poses for Renoir in his studio, in a meadow, in a stream. The wizened, almost immobile old artist is unembarrassed. He knows what he likes. "The flesh", he exclaims, is all that matters. "If you have not understood that, you have understood nothing."

He sees himself as continuing the tradition of Titian, who painted and slept with Venetian courtesans. He exults that Titian would have wanted to sleep with Andrée as well as paint her.

The film sees no reason to apologise for Renoir's male voyeurism. And why should it? Renoir was one the last European painters to celebrate pure hedonism unselfconsciously. That's who he was, it is how his art works – as a playground for the eye.

Art critics overvalue seriousness. Is it really so much better to paint a storm than a flower? Renoir painted lots of flowers, as well as women, assignations and Paris in the rain. In his late years, he was hooked on a classical idyll of beauty. The nude played a fuller part than ever in his pleasurable vision.

This film's portrait of a decrepit painter's passion for the naked body of a beautiful woman is magnificently uncritical. Renoir the film reveals that art is freedom. What it does less well is develop a drama out of its gorgeous components: there's not much tension, even when the artist's son Jean comes home wounded from the war and promptly falls in love with his father's model. Jean is of course destined to become one of the greatest film directors of all time. Unfortunately his character is not well-drawn. He gives no hint of the Jean Renoir who was to create Boudu Saved from Drowning and La Bête Humaine. Jean Renoir admired his father, so there's no great Oedipal drama.

It is all very civilised. Even the love triangle between father, son, and Andrée cannot disrupt this film's simple pleasure in naked flesh and southern sun. In that sense, it is true to Renoir himself. "Go and see Titian's courtesans in the Louvre," says Renoir, if you want to know what art is about: the flesh, the flesh.

Pierre-Auguste RenoirPaintingArtPeriod and historicalDramaJonathan Jones
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Art Everywhere: which masterpieces would you choose for the UK's streets?

Vote for your favourite artwork to appear on billboards around the country via this crowdsourced venture

What great British works of art would you like to see put up on billboards around the country this summer? Art Everywhere, a philanthropic venture aiming to do just that, has today released its long list of 50 British artworks from Tudor times to today.

Everyone is invited to register a favourite from the list online, and votes will decide the artistic wonders to be pasted up across Britain. Small donations are sought – give as much as £15 and you get a limited edition badge by Bob and Roberta Smith.

Looking through the list, what are my favourites? I find myself thinking in terms of context – where will the posters appear? I would love to see A Wall in Naples by the Welsh 18th-century painter Thomas Jones on billboards across Wales, and Lucian Freud's self-portrait on the streets of West London. I would also like to see Chris Ofili's No Woman, No Cry just about everywhere.

However, thinking about it, surely what we need to see on billboards and bus stops is something that does not belong there – something introspective and profound. Art can save your life. It can fill your heart and change your day. That, surely, is the point of Art Everywhere. Incidentally, I would suggest that if they do it again it should be international, not just British – why do we just want to see British art at the end of the street?

Personally, I would not choose a contemporary work on the grounds that it is going to look too much like ... well, like a clever poster. Instead I want a picture that anyone can relate to without knowing anything about it, that is genuinely arresting, unexpected, thought-provoking and emotionally nurturing in a public place.

So my choice is easy: William Hogarth's painting Heads of Six of Hogarth's Servants (1750–55) from Tate Britain. This is a portrait of everyone – a democratic masterpiece.

But what do you think? What are your choices to hang in the nation's open air living room?

PaintingArtCrowdsourcingJonathan Jones
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Vermeer, Lowry and a cauldron scandal – the week in art

Music is the food of love for the Dutch painter, plus Lowry as a serious modern artist, a Thomas Heatherwick plagiarism row, and photos from space – all in your weekly artistic roundup

Exhibition of the week

Vermeer and Music
In Vermeer's age, music was the food of love. His art is realistic and precociously modern, and yet the musical instruments in his paintings and their association with amorous encounters draw on images and conventions rooted deep in the Renaissance. For instance, the early 16th-century painter Giorgione was said to be both an ardent lover and a gifted musician: in his friend Titian's Concert Champêtre, two clothed men and two naked women enjoy a country music-making session that drips with longing and love. In Vermeer's art, these associations of music and desire play out in silently cinematic ways. In his painting A Young Woman Seated at a Virginal, a canvas we can see hanging on the wall behind her shows a scene of prostitution. Music-making is flirtation, suggests Vermeer.
• National Gallery, London WC2 from 26 June until 8 September

Other exhibitions this week

Robert Irwin
New works by this revolutionary American artist of light and space.
• Pace Gallery, London W1 from 21 June until 17 August

Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life
Provocative exhibition that champions Lowry as a serious modern artist.
• Tate Britain, London SW1 from 26 June until 20 October

Mary, Queen of Scots
Portraits and relics of this fascinating woman of the Renaissance tell a dark history.
• National Museum of Scotland, Edinburgh from 28 June until 17 November

Enlightenment
A celebration of the radical, creative 18th century at a museum rich in masterpieces by the Enlightenment artist Joseph Wright of Derby.
• Derby Museum and Art Gallery, Derby from 22 June until 25 August

Masterpiece of the week

In 1654, Delft, where Vermeer lived and worked, was devastated by a terrible accident. A gunpowder magazine exploded, wrecking a wide area and taking many lives. With a cool observant eye typical of 17th-century Dutch art, this haunting picture records the aftermath of disaster.
• National Gallery, Trafalgar Square, London WC2

Image of the week What we learned this week

That Thomas Heatherwick has been accused of plagiarism in his Olympic cauldron design

That a series of unseen Lowry artworks have gone public – with drawings of girls in stocks and paintings of giant rats

That Nasa is going to take a photo of the world from Saturn on 19 July. Say cheese!

That live art screenings are taking over

That a battle of the beefcakes has commenced at the ICA in London

What spomeniks are – and why they look like alien art

And finally …

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PaintingArtJohannes VermeerJonathan Jones
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Johannes Vermeer is a pearl – not a diamond

In worshipping Vermeer's realistic images we're sticking with the familiar. But other ways of seeing are far more original

Johannes Vermeer is one of the most popular artists of all time. His lovelife has been imagined on the page and on screen, and exhibitions of his work – there's one about to open at the National Gallery – are often hugely attended.

We make too much of him.

Vermeer is not one of those artists who were famous in every age. He's not an evergreen like Leonardo da Vinci. In the 18th century he was little known, a minor master. His modern fame started in 19th-century France. In fact, it is entirely a phenomenon of the photographic age, already under way when he was rediscovered by writers such as Thoré and Proust.

Vermeer's paintings look photographic, and that's why he has such a natural appeal today. It makes us give him more attention than we ever do to artists who are more rewarding and more exciting, but who look less immediate to eyes dulled by the camera.

Even though he lived in the 17th century, Vermeer's pictures have a cool, silent precision that can be emulated by photographers. In fact, it seems very likely Vermeer used a camera obscura in his work. He doesn't just look photographic – he is a pioneer of photographic art.

Of course, I am as seduced by Vermeer as anyone. His pictures are enigmatic, sensual and a bit spooky.

But in worshipping Vermeer, we are sticking with the familiar. We live in a world of photographs; we are used to seeing the world reproduced in the straight way the camera sees it. So when art that looks like photography materialises in a museum full of bizarre old paintings, it's like coming across a bit of home in a strange country. Among all those strange, unreal styles, the frilly fantasies of the rococo, say, or the grand postures of history painting, the camera-crisp art of Vermeer is something to latch on to.

Yet the joy of art – seen through time – is, precisely, how different the world looks through different eyes. Artists such as Gainsborough and Cézanne see the world in very unusual, completely unphotographic ways. Why not sample that plenitude of vision?

If you go to the National Gallery's Vermeer show, take time to tour its permanent, free galleries and take in some styles that are the opposite of photographic. Pearls are not the only jewels.

Johannes VermeerPaintingArtNational GalleryJonathan Jones
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