Interpreting a Work of Art in Context

So last week we were quite focused where we were talking about the kind of, I guess, you know, building blocks, or whatever, of analysis in terms of visual analysis. This week, by contrast, we go panoramic, and we look at the contexts surrounding works of art. And obviously they're very, very significant, kind of the way they impact the meaning of the works of art. Many, many contexts surround works of art and view them. And he was some, well, here's what I'll be looking at, the Civic and the religious context. This particular lecture will be mostly on the religious context for the work that we're looking at, but I'll touch on that briefly. The other lecture will be more about that civic context, the artistic context, just so we understand what is sort of significant about the works that we're looking at. Of course, the point that we keep making is all of these things are into woven in the actual task of interpretation. But we're sort of breaking them down. The industrial context, which, which we'll look forward to one week that we have on that, on that topic, in week 10, the functional and the patronage context, very important. And then at the end, hopefully I'll get to it, the problem of how to interpret these works when their context changes over time. In some ways, I'm hoping that, you know, we'll get to that as kind of, in some ways, the most interesting, the sort of the key, the kind of the most kind of complicated element of this whole topic. And you know, even like to start off with even, for example, we take for granted, I suppose, sitting in Melbourne thinking about a renaissance fresco cycle in a church in Florence, that obviously we're separated from that original sort of site, and therefore it's hard to get a sense of its original context. Although it's great that it's still sitting there in a chapel and it's got its context for us to sort of explore. We kind of think that Well, you know this sculpture, which is our other case study, Ron Robertson, Swan's vault, made for City Square in Melbourne in the late 70s still, you know, they didn't blow it up or anything. So it's still there. It's still sitting in a public, you know, art site in Melbourne. So we kind of think, well, you know, that should be pretty easy to reconstruct the context for that, because it's still in Melbourne, and that's not destroyed or anything, but, but actually, its context has also been lost its original context, and in some ways, it's actually almost equally difficult to interpret, reinterpret, regain that original context. So context is always changing, and I mean, the basic sort of role of the art historian is to try to reconstruct it, understanding how difficult that is. So just as a little segue, I'm going to be talking mostly about the fresco cycle, but just to say obviously, that both the works we're talking about today are works that are particularly attuned to kind of context surrounding them, because they're made to project out of their space into us. That's the whole point. And we've already looked at this, haven't we, you know, beginning stages of this subject, looking at this public sculpture by Cellini in the main Piazza in the central town, Piazza in Florencia, Piazza della Signoria, already sort of started to look at that. And, you know, literally, it's projecting out. It's projecting out of the ledge. It's projecting down in front of us, etc, above us. So the context, the site, specificity of where they are, is very important. And they're just made to project out, and obviously, to give some kind of message, meaning, etc. It's often with sculpture, to do with civic values. And we started to just talk about how this one was kind of almost about dominance, power, etc. But that was a civic value that that was sort of the those of power were trying to project. And you know, the world is littered with civic sculpture, although we often, you know, we're at a time in history where we don't really notice, in some ways, we sort of look through civic sculpture, rather than sort of look at Civic sculpture. And that's sort of an interesting thing to think about in itself. But, you know, there are big sculptures all over the place. The State Library in Melbourne is a good place to look because it was, and still is, in many respects, a very important sort of equivalent to that site in Florence, a civic, sort of concentrated, centralized site in Melbourne with these big, grandiose buildings projecting the solidity of Melbourne in the late 19th century, when they built it, and then sort of populated with all these statues of important people, important ideas, etc. I like the way at the front there's that sculpture by the wonderfully titled Petra spronk called architectural fragment. And I really like the way that sculpture is literally, kind of embedded into so it's related to its specific site to such a degree that it's kind of sinking into the site. And I also really like the way it's engaging with its context to the degree that, you know, skateboarders, you know, do their stuff on it and actually, kind of, obviously grind it down over over time. And, you know, this may be an argument to be said, that that's perfectly appropriate, because it is a sculpture that is made to really engage on the street level, unlike the Cellini, which is kind of above, above our space and looming over, looming over us. And then, of course, out the front are these big, huge figurative sculptures, which was obviously the, you know, the norm that period in the very end of the 19th century, very beginning of the 20th century, when actually it was the trustees of the Felton committee. So actually was through the National Guard of Victoria that, back in those days, they commissioned these huge, grandiose public sculptures, which of st Joan of Arc on the right side and George and the Dragon on the left side. And they were kind of almost meant to reflect the cultural values of Melbourne as a colony, very much thinking about, you know, civilization, culture, art, great stuff. It all happens over in, you know, Paris or London. So we'll get these big words from Paris and London and put them here, and that'll make us feel kind of civilized. You already get a sense. And I really don't want to learn because we'll be talking about it more in the other lecture and in your tubes, but you already get the sense. Whereas where the Ron Robertson Swan work, because it's not figurative and it's what is it exactly? It is kind of upsetting all of the kind of standards, the norms of this more traditional civic figurative sculpture. So yes, it's a projection of, you know, your kind of like timeless ideas of cultural identity or whatever, supposedly, you know, set in bronze for forever. That's the idea. But you know, over time, they then just litter the landscape, and you kind of don't even notice them. Here's one that's right in the in the University of Melbourne, on the on the South Lawn, right next to the baby library. You might, you know, have had your lunch right next to it, and it's pretty full. But in its day it was a very another really big civic sculpture. It's called Charity, being kind to the poor, which and it's a late 19th century European Austrian sculpture. It's an allegorical work, that means it seeks to represent in physical form, like a person or something like that, a person or a thing or whatever that represents an abstract ideal or idea in just the same way, for instance, that this little, beautiful dog in the bottom of the arnol finial piece that you might have looked at last week is meant to be a symbol of fidelity, of faithfulness. So the dogs there because it's really cute dog, but also because it symbolizes the faithfulness that this couple have for each other. So this sculpture is the same kind of a thing. I mean, it's a representation of a woman sort of, you know, protectively, you know, helping these mother and child and little another teenage boy. But it's an allegory. It's a personification of the idea of charity.

And obviously good spot to put it is in the national cologne. What is it? National? Colonial, mutual life colonial. Mutual Life Assurance society building, which is this completely huge building in the CBD that they demolished, of course, in the early version of the big build that we're in right now, back in the 1950s and early 1960s so they demolished it, and then they thought, what are we gonna do with this old sculpture? Give it to the University of Melbourne, they'll take it. And so we did, and it's always just sitting there, but if you see it in the original photographs, you do get a much better sense, don't you how very significant its original context was as a sort of a nestling thing at the very kind of Keystone corbel of the main arch of this building. And what were they trying to say in this building and in this sculpture? Obviously, they were trying to say that times are tough, times are changing. We're in a modern world, etc. But you know, this bank is about as solid as you'll ever get. And even though times are tough and times are changing, and we need to do whatever financial things to stop the depression or whatever's going on at the time. We have a sort of a timelessness to us, because we're sort of affecting a kind of a classicizing, sort of old fashioned, as it were, visual style, style of architecture and style of the sculpture itself, within the context of a kind of a modern building. It's actually really interesting building. What a shame they demolished it. Yeah, all of that would have really made a lot more sense originally, if it was, is was still in situ. Even more powerfully you get that sense when you got that original photograph from the balcony, where you look out and you see, kind of, you know, like she's projecting over the city like a benign force helping people in need, and now she's just stuck on the south Lord, just to quickly foreshadow Burke issue we'll be thinking About is obviously the historical values of these sculptures, you know, they kind of remain embedded within them, even, obviously, when our values change over time, and we're currently, obviously, as you know, grappling with all of these issues to do with colonial Imperial legacy. Again, Melbourne is dotted with these sorts of things. This is one. This is a sculpture, a commemorative, huge sculpture right near the parliament building, actually, which says a lot about how important they felt it to be when they put this up to Charles Gordon, who is this kind of he was a sort of an enforcer of imperialism. He was a military person, and he was an enforcer of colonial and imperialistic policies. He went around the world basically fighting wars to subjugate colonial peoples, like first kind of invasion, British invasion of China in the 1860s and also in Africa. Ultimately, he was killed. It was a huge like, people were really upset about this. He was killed in the siege of Khartoum in the kind of later stages of the 19th century. So, but what, what interests me is, obviously, it's still there. It's still projecting all of this, but the context around it has changed over time. And in a way, we just look through this sculpture now rather than looking at it. Maybe that's the worst thing that can happen to these big public artworks over time. But on the other hand, there are some sculptures which we don't look through that. We look at and we're not happy about what we see. I'll just save that as something for you to think about when, when you when you get to that. That's going to be a very, very important topic. But, and let me get more into this week's topic, which, or rather my part of this week's topic, which is about the frescoes on the left, and they are, as it says, There site specific, and they're there still in the chapel, in the church in Florence for which they were painted, which is unlike almost every single Renaissance artwork that you will ever see in A museum. Because almost all, pretty much every Renaissance artwork that you ever see in a museum has been taken out of its original context and put into this new kind of decontextualized space that we call the museum. So when you walk into the Uffizi, which is pretty fantastic museum full of these pretty fantastic paintings. They've all been stripped out of churches. These are all altar pieces. They were originally sitting in churches in Florence or Sienna or whatever. At a certain point, you know, they were worth a bit of money, then Napoleonic troops came and sacked various historical moments. That meant that they became taken out of their original context and ultimately sold or gifted or whatever to the museum. That's the way museums are. They create a new context, and that's why we need to sort of try to see beyond the museum. When we look at all of these works, because they've lost their original context, they should go to Victoria on the right. That's a painting that you can see. It's on display right now, just a little panel, but it's a predella panel, which means it's another one of these things that's been ripped out from its original context. It's actually originally one of these small panels at the bottom of a bigger altarpiece was kind of there to sort of focus you a little more when you're getting anyone had a particular religious kind of devotional context or goal. Now, because it was ripped out from its original site, not just from its original site, but even from its original like artwork. So in some ways, it was doubly decontextualized and seen across the other world to Australia, where it remains today. So there's really a lecture about trying to reconstruct that in the context of this one work of art. And the basic point there is that, yes, in the real world, in the world of Florence, or wherever it is in the Renaissance, the art is interacting with its surrounding context in a very meaningful way. So first of all, it's helpful to think of Renaissance artworks, not as artworks in a sense, in the Florence or whatever, but more like billboards. They really function a little bit more like the billboard that you will see as you walk down the street occasionally, you know, helps make my point even more clearly when the billboard itself is a detail from the Renaissance fresco, as I believe that is. So that's really what we're trying to sort of get here, and that's what's going on in this work, in this in this chapel. First of all, though, let's just just get a really basic sense of what is why? Why were everyone? Why was everyone so, like, not knocked away and so impressed? So I thought this was such an incredible work of art at the time that it was unveiled. So what is innovative about it artistically? Let's just get that context again. We really can't convey that, because you've got to go magically off to Florence to see it. But in any event, I'll try to explain it to you and hopefully get a sense of it. It is incredibly illusionistic, and it really feels like, when you go into this box, like space, that you are looking at a series of ledgers with kind of like windows opening out with these little, I don't know what you call them, like theater seats or something, on two levels, and you can literally see through those windows and look through to these palpably physically plastic, kind of three dimensional figures. You know when you're looking at it that I'm just looking at a painting. I know I'm looking at a flat theme, but they're painted in this particular style, with a particular focus on illusionism and depth, and with this very bright, clear light, the opposite of the Coronavirus Jones that we were looking at last week, that makes them seem incredibly plastically three dimensional and kind of credible, like painted sculpture or something. And that was a real revelation to people at the time, and we get a good sense of that from the words of Giorgio Vasari, who is a 16th century writer. So he's 100 years after this, but it's still a really important text. He wrote this book called Levite de PUE Torres et architecti lives of the most excellent painters, sculptors and architects, kind of the invention of art history. And he describes what he sees as really innovative about this work and as like what massacre does. And he says that Masaccio realized that painting is nothing other than the art of imitating all the living things of nature with their simple colors and design just as nature produced them. That's really important.

And then he also says, Masaccio entirely supplanted Giotto. We're going to see one of his works in a minute. People who came before him entirely supplanted Giottos manner of treating heads, strategory, architecture, nudes, color and foreshortening, which he created a new bringing into light the modern style that has been followed ever since. So what I really like about Vasari, and believe me, I've been reading Vasari for a long time, is that he's very specific. He doesn't just waffle on very good model for your writing, I would put it because he always illustrates. He always, he always illustrates the point, renders the general point that he's making tangible in specifics. That is the art of good writing. I'm generalized a waffle. Show us what you mean a specific thing he always does that he always is very specific about what he means, about what he's saying. So here, for instance, he goes beside Joe. Had excellent so he sort of, he sort of, he sort of breaks it down to more specific things. He says messenger had excellent judges. He reflected that all the figures that did not stand firmly with their feet in foreshortening on the level, but stood on tiptoe were lacking in all goodness of manner, and that those who do that show that they don't understand foreshortening. And he painted his works with good unity and softness, harmonizing the flesh colors of the heads and OF THE NUDES with the colors of the draperies, which he delighted to make with few folds and simple as they are in life and nature, very specific. You know, you don't, you don't stand on tiptoe you. You've got to understand for shortening you have to unify your colors. You have to soften your colors. You have to make sure that flesh colors harmonize with the draperies. Very, very specific. So what he means, for instance, it's true, if you look at something from, say, the 13th century or the beginning of the 14th century, like the Chima Bula on the left, it does look like they're standing on their tiptoes, and it does look like their faces are kind of gold, not naturalistically flesh colored. And even, for instance, Giotto, who Fauci really liked the sort of he thought, he thought he was almost the beginning, the origin of good painting. Nonetheless, Giottos understanding of foreshortening, for instance, is pretty basic compared with what you're about to see. In other words, it's quite a shallow kind of representation of space that he's showing here. So, so what he means, of course, is that massager is one of the first artists to really develop this idea that's coming on online, the beginning of the 15th century, of perspective, perspectival arrangement of space, without going in detail about what it was. And I'm sure, in a general sense, you get the sense of what it is. It's basically a kind of a system of geometrically arranging space so that you can create a sense of depth, movement into depth. And it's done around called a vanishing point, or a vanishing line, and then orthogonal lines, lines leading diagonally, almost as if you imagine this kind of line stretching from your eyeball to the point of the vanishing point at the end of the of what it is that you're representing. And then you kind of represent all the other things bigger or smaller in relation to that central point, that simple nutshell is what it is, but it's quite mathematical based on classical writing that they're kind of like rediscovering at this time. So He's the first person to invent Renaissance for shortening, but he's certainly one of the very first to sort of credibly create this really, really amazing thing that then leads to this whole swathe of guides about how to do it, etc. But he's kind of one of the first who does it in this amazingly powerful summative way, and that then becomes the basis for how artists represent space for that conference on hundreds of years, so that even in the 19th century, this artist here who's doing a painting of the railway station. So quite a sort of modern subject, obviously the Victorian period, it's totally perspectival and very traditional in that sense, it's really almost a copy of that plate in that book that's called oblique perspective, that technique, you grid it up and you draw these lines, etc. And even in the modern period, take an impressionist like Kaya bot at the top there, who's one of the artists that you might choose from, by the way, for your first exercise, which is coming up, which we're going to talk about in week five. It's still very perfect, either the way he set that up, even though, yeah, so even though he's got to be avant garde and rule breaking and very contemporary, it's still very traditional in that sense, in the way that represents space even. Andreas Gursky, contemporary photographer, beautiful photograph about the whatever, the pointless sort of capitalistic consumption. I mean, it's really amazing photo, nonetheless, is highly perspectival in some senses, very traditional in the way that it arranges space. So that's the artistic innovation and the artistic context of what's important about it. And another interesting context is the industrial context, because actually, just want to do this very quickly. But it's important to note, everyone talks about Masaccio. It's almost like we just this was just painted by Masaccio. It wasn't just painted by masacci. It was painted by Masaccio and his partner, marzolina. So it's actually painted by two of them, and they really, brilliantly, really interesting. It's a very fascinating story. Set up a partnership sort of arrangement so that they pulled their resources, quite expensive, as I'm sure you can imagine, to maintain a painter's workshop and to maintain a painter's business, and do all that, it's often a good idea to do, you know, two heads better than one. So they created this partnership, and they then created this kind of combined style, where they kind of absorbed both of their styles into almost like a third head or a third hand. Indeed, you know, one hand, another hand, the third hand, which is their sort of common style, but if you look at their work very carefully, you can actually detect differences. And Vasari does talk quite a lot about this. He says that Masato had a slightly more kind of simplified, forceful, sort of a style, and particularly in terms of the way he represents his figures and the light is almost they kind of stand out more clearly, whereas marsolino is slightly more elegant and arabesque and sort of sinuous in the way he represents forms. And so on that basis, even Vasari noticed, and it's been one sort of comments on this, you know, it's been a commenting point about many, many hundreds of years. Is that these two frescoes, one is the temptation of Adam and Eve, and the other is the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. So it's kind of the beginning and the end of the temptation sort of thing. And they sit on two sides of the instruments of the to the fresco cycle. The one at the top is by masolino, and the one at the bottom is by masacha. So if you look at it carefully, maybe even in your shoots, you can sort of detect that even though they do have this kind of combined style, they nonetheless paint in different inflections of that style. And then if you look really carefully at other things like this, which is another it's an altarpiece that was in all different bits and different panels that was all put together and then at a certain stage, just like what I was talking about just before, for the SATA thing in the Nashville Victoria, it was dismembered, it was taken apart, and all the bits of this beautiful painting was sent to different museums around the world and so on. The things that the art historians had to do was to try to work out, okay, yes, this is by massage on Mars Leno, but who did what? And again, on the same basis of sort of carefully looking at each painter, they worked out that this painting on the left, slightly more craggy than the other. That's by massacre, and this is by marzolino. How do they do that? They apply this thing called connoisseurship. And we've been talking about styles. This is a little throwback to what we talked about last week. We're talking about verflin And we're talking about this going at this sort of idea of broad period style. This is Baroque, this is Renaissance, etc, etc. Well, another really important sort of originator of sort of ways of analyzing style was this person called Giovanni modeling in about the same period in the 19th century, and had this very clever idea of comparing the minute details, like the ear lobes of artists or their fingers or whatever like in their paintings. And he discovered that artists did have a kind of a signature way of representing almost the most secondary, or, you know, not major parts of an artwork, because, you know, like the major part, like a crown or something, let's say that's more likely that you might be copying that from someone else, but you might, you probably won't be copying how to do the earlobes from the painting that you might be copying. At least, that's the theory that you sort of betray your individual psyche as a painter, your individual hand, your style, even when you try to copy someone, you portray it more in those secondary elements, like earlobes or fingers or whatever. So I literally went around doing that's really amazing. Thought drawings of how these different artists do their ears, very interesting. And that, of course, is the basis for the science, quite unquote, of attribution or connoisseurship. And that's where specialists like me or whoever, whoever becomes a special sort of artist, go about the world and say, That's by that artist. That's not by that artist. This is worth $5 billion this is not worth $5 million and basically, well, you do lots of things, but one thing you do, just like more really, is you compare very small details of the, say, two paintings to try to determine which, which is the original as well, which is the copy, which is the word by follower, or whatever. So the one that we see here is a comparison of two paintings, one is by Rembrandt With The multiple, multiple, multiple, millions of dollars. And the other one is by a follower of Rembrandt called Nicholas innenberg, who's perfectly okay painter, but not that great. And that would probably be worth about wall item. Not that much, half a million. I mean half a million. So they compare these details to say, Yes, this stone. One of them is by Rembrandt. One of them is by a pretty bad painter. So do you, what do you think? Do you which can you tell? Can you tell? Can you tell? So, for instance, these details which relate to the painting at the top. That's one painter. And then these details which relate to the painter over there, the bang on the bottom, another painting. So do you think these details were painted by Rembrandt? Put your hand up if you think it was painted by Rembrandt. Okay, not many people. And what about these details? These were painted by Rembrandt. Many more people wrong, It's tricky, right? It's tricky. It's not easy. Supposedly, the way you tell is this, in this instance, is a great master, quote, unquote. It's so great that the master is doing it instinctually. The master doesn't have to labor what he or she is doing. So when Rembrandt actually paints a nose, he's pretty free and easy with the way he scumbles that highlight on the bridge of the nose. He goes little, little.on the on the bottom of the nose. This is a little dab, because he's not trying too hard, whereas gulenberg, the other guy, who's a bit of a hack, who's trying, trying hard, to even say master, really, trying really hard. And then, and then this here. This is a really, this is probably the kicker. I would say. This is the whatever it is, the fluid in your eyeball, or whatever it is, you know what it is, and you can see that Rembrandt has gone, dot, dot, dot, dot, just little dabs. And he would that would have taken him, what half a second done, whereas this guy is really like, so Rembrandt ullenberg, that is the science connoisseurship, just think about because we're really going to be talking about it in few weeks, in week 10 millions and millions of dollars. Hang on that just me going, remember. So let's get more specific now about the site of the chapel, the space it's in. This church is the church of Santa Maria del Carnaby May, a Carmelite church. So it's that's important anyway, because so it's maintained. It was maintained by nuns and a religious order, and that's the facade of the church, actually, that's already giving us an interesting clue, because it's telling us they never finished the facade of the Church, which may possibly be telling us, well, it tells us that they ran out of money, so maybe they've not a hugely rich kind of Order, and they didn't attract huge amounts of money. And then that's the inside of the church that's looking back from the high altar towards the entrance. And then that's looking from the entrance towards the high altar. The high altar is this pit here at the end. And looking at that, I can already tell that it's a not incredibly impressively rich church. It's a sort of a local neighborhood church, but it's not hugely rich. And there are lots of ways I can tell that. One is I can see it didn't get finished till the 18th century. And I mean, there are lots of reasons why that might be the case. And I actually partly was because of the because of a fire, but that's sort of obviously one thing or another, telling us that maybe there wasn't a lot of hugely significant patronage going on in, say, the 15th century, which is when these ones were done we're looking at. And these are all these, these, these paintings here. They're also altar pieces. These are altars. These are, in effect, chapels all the way down the nave. But they're not, you know, they're not very, sort of deep, and they're not particularly, they just don't look particularly lavishly maintained. So, so I'm getting a strong vibe looking at this. This is a church which is not a hugely, lavishly endowed, rich church already. Obviously, you're not necessarily kept that view when you just walk in, but that's the kind of thing, the information about the context that we need to sort of build up. Obviously, also it's important to take into mind the basic layout of a church which is on the Christian church is on the the shape, obviously, of the cross on which Christ was crucified. And you have the name, that's where you enter. That's where the sort of main body of the worshippers sit or stand or whatever when they're going to mass or some kind of religious service. And then there's a so called Crossing, and these two transits and the chancel on the high altar. So in terms of general, simple point, in terms of sort of religious energy and prestige of this sacred space, the closer you are to the chance on the high altar, the more prestigious you are. So the sort of most important, as it were, parts of the church, in terms of the sort of almost religious power of the space the high altar is extremely important, but the space where people will then try to insert themselves by patronizing art, etc, the really important parts of these two transits, the North and the South transit, close to this high altar, and that is the case for the fresco cycle we're looking at, because it's not in the naves, not sitting there in the nave. It's sitting over here in the south transit, the right side of that cross near the high altar. That's actually the high altar there, although it wasn't originally there back in the 16th century, 15th century. There it is. That's what we're looking at. Yeah, I won't stress the poem too much, but it's very beautiful. Obviously it's very important, but it's nothing compared to all the big churches in Florence. This is the high altar of Santa Cocha, the Franciscan Church in Florence goes up and up, and it's full of gold, and it's got this massive crucifix. It's got all this stained glass very everything's very expensive. Everything's very big. That's the gold standard, as it were. And then it's the chapel, which is in the equivalent space in this church, Santa Clara, to the one we're looking at. You know, is huge, is lavish. There's all these frescos and stained glass, and it's much, much, much, much, much bigger than the one that we're looking at.The one we're looking at is, you know, is much more modest on that level. But of course, it's incredibly significant artistically, of course. So that is what we're looking at. And so that's also somewhat reflected in the actual just the location of the church itself. This is a view looking from the church across back towards the center of Florence. That's where we're sent. You know that central Piazza with the chilini sculpture that we were looking at before? This is like way over this part of Florence, and just a little bit more clearly here. This is a central that's the central Piazza that we're looking at before. And this is our church down here. This is the far side of the Arno. It's called the altar. No, it's like the left back. It doesn't mean, you know, if you live there or whatever, you were poor and you were desperate, was hopeless, no. But in relative terms, it was not as prestigious as being over here. And in particular, in terms of the, you know, absolute, sort of the like, basic sort of power zone of Florence. You had the Piazza della sigurie, which is the city government here. And then you had the the Cathedral of Florence, the baptistry, where everybody was baptized here. So this is a sort of absolute central node of Florence. It's way over here, off to the side, beautiful. But like, kind of a neighborhood church that's looking back at Florence from the other side, from the old tomato looking and there's the, you know, there's a piazza Delson area in the blood so be of the town hall there. There's a church we were looking at before Santa Cocha, huge. And there's the cathedral, obviously massively big as well. So why, why do people go to all the trouble to pay massager mausoleum, all this money to do these chapel frescoes? Obviously, this is about patronage, and it's what we're talking about, is about the subdivision of public space into privatized spaces. So you should think of these little chapels off to the side of these churches as being somewhat like, I guess you might say, corporate boxes in, in in, you know, sports stadiums in the MCG or whatever, what they're doing is, is the priests or whatever, are basically selling off parts of the church to get the almost rental, if you like. Well, literally, as it were, from, you know, rich and important aristocratic families, or just, you know, important personages to maintain their own spaces in their own church. It's how they made their money, basically. And the reason that the people are doing this, paying them all this money, they'll be paying them like money, to say, a mess for the for the memory of various family members, you know, for the rest of time immemorial. So they're paying them to do that, and then they're creating this lavish space to represent family and the legacy of the family to the rest of society. And there was a lot riding on from their point of view. Obviously, there's a prestige in a public setting, but there's also, literally, they're doing this to get access to heaven because the idea was that you needed someone to pray for you on a pretty regular basis to get you out of Purgatory and into the good graces of you know, up there. That's the belief, and that was why they were spending all this money to gain the patronal rights to these sections of the Church, which obviously the religious orders were very happy to sell them, because they got the revenue that way. Some people didn't like that. And this is contemporary Dominican priest who was really cross about this. And he said, everywhere I look, I look at all the convents, you will find the field with the coats of arms of those who are. I have built them. I lift my head to look above the door. I think there's a crucifix, but there's a coat of arms. Further on, lift your head another coat of arms. You know that they put coats of arms on the back of vestments. So the window pretty stands at the altar, the arms can be seen well by all the people. So this is very similar, isn't it, to the contemporary debates that we're having about sports sponsorship and those really horrible, you know, betting things that are really, really terrible, the labor was so completely hopeless about recently. But let's leave that aside, and a similar obviously, conversations and debates take place about museum sponsorship and the idea that, for instance, Rembrandt, when they had the big Rembrandt exhibition in the National Gallery Victoria, they stuck the sign the logo of shell on his hat. And I mean shell, among other things, are very, very, very bad polluters and kind of post colonial bad corporate citizens. So, you know, did Rembrandt deserve that anyway? That's another story. But this is essentially what patronage is. It's about inserting yourself into that situation. So just quickly, I think I've already made the point. I'm not going to make it too much, because I really want to just talk about the how the context changes. But clearly the brancarchi would not have very I've already sort of set up. They were sort of a significant second ranking, packed family, and you can sort of tell that from where they're located, you know, the nature of their fresco, everything. I'll leave that because I want to just get to the very last point about how things change over time. Because now, of course, we can still see the fresco, which is really wonderful, but you could argue that in some ways, we can't see the fresco. At least we can't see the fresco in the way that it was originally created. That's what you see today when you're in the church looking across, up the alt there to the chapel. That's me taking some photographs looking across but actually, that's not how you access these frescoes today, because the frescoes have been kind of incorporated into a kind of a, you know, touristic kind of museum kind of framework. Actually, what you do is you make a book used to be going to, you know, queue for hours and hours. Now you have to make a booking. And then you shuffle in there, and you shuffle around this cloister, and then you come in here to the gift shop. Always enter via the gift shop. And then you shuffle up some stairs and you enter is. So you never enter the church. You never enter the church. I mean, you do enter the church because you go to see this chapel, but you don't enter the actual church environment. So most people know, and they don't care about the religious context of these works of art. And so in some ways, they're sort of experiencing them just as if they were a decontextualized painting in a museum. And so they really don't have that, even though they're in the church, even though they're in the chapel. And then, of course, this has been further kind of decontextualized by all of the changes that have happened to this space, like a time, obviously, you look at it now, you go, that's weird. What's going on there? What's going across the top of this space here? Well, as you might have already got, if you've read any of the done the reading, etc. This is because they restored the space. And in the process of restoring the space, they made the decision to decontextualize it further by removing this very beautiful, very important sort of covering made for the high altar piece here, which is a tabernacle made out of marble. And the reason they did that is because when they were conserving the frescoes back in the earlier restoration, they discovered all of this painting underneath, underneath the original, this tabernacle. And so what they did is they took the tabernacle away. They took all of the signs of religious direction, like, you know, the candles, the crosses, etc, and they sort of denuded all of that in order. So we could just focus on the art, which is fun. I understand it's one of the great masterpieces of the Renaissance. I get it, but you lose the religious experience as a result. And this is what you see instead, as sort of, it's like sucked out all the religion and turned it into a sort of a quasi little museum environment. And what I really don't like is the way they took that tabernacle, because they discovered those, and then they thought, You know what? What are we gonna do with the tabernacle? We can't put it on a skip. We gotta put it somewhere. We'll put it at the side of the gift shop, and there's this really ugly set of cards here, right? You know, right. Next one looks at this. No one cares about this tabernacle. I care about the tabernacle, but I'm in the minority. So. So, you know, even though it is still in its context. Actually, it's not. That's my sort of fundamental point, leave it there, thank you very much and then we'll tour about the modern period and civic sculpture in the next lecture.