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(cheerful music)
Dr. Steven Zucker: According to legend,
St. Luke had a vision of the *** Mary and Child,
and painted that vision.
As a result, he is the patron saint of painters.
Dr. Beth Harris: You'll notice that St. Luke's eyes
are half-closed, so we know that he is not
actually seeing the *** and Child in front of him,
but having a vision.
Dr. Zucker: It is not his painting, in a sense.
He is literally the hand of this angel.
St. Luke's image, then, of the *** Mary
and Child has a kind of authority
because it is God's, actually, and not his.
Dr. Harris: What's interesting then is that the artist,
Gossaert, is painting his *** Mary and Child
not from the same authority as
the painter St. Luke, in his painting.
One wonders about what it was like for artists
to paint heavenly figures.
How does one imagine the *** Mary?
How does one paint Jesus Christ?
These are, I think, difficult questions always for artists.
Dr. Zucker: Right; we have absolutely
no historical references to their likenesses,
and so where is the authority of any painter
who is transcribing their images?
And that issue of even the legitimacy
of transcribing an image is called into question
in the top right corner, where the artist has rendered
[in grise], in greys, a sculpture of Moses.
You can tell it's Moses because he's holding
the two tablets with the 10 laws.
Dr. Harris: The 10 Commandments.
Dr. Zucker: In the Christian tradition,
he's shown with horns on his head,
and so we know it's Moses.
Moses seems to actually be pointing at something,
and one of the laws is to not render people,
not to render the fish below the sea,
not to render the birds in the sky.
The idea that the artist tries to take on
the role of God, perhaps, by trying to create.
Dr. Harris: "Thou shalt not create graven images,"
might be how most people know that commandment.
Gossaert is living right at the time that
the Protestant reformation begins,
and one of the things that Luther's followers
talked about is the danger of images,
of people worshipping images instead of
using them only as an aid in prayer.
This is certainly reflecting on the role of the artist
and whether images have a legitimacy or not.
Dr. Zucker: Well, that's right.
This is absolutely supporting the legitimacy
of the artist creating religious imagery.
Dr. Harris: Because one of the writers of the gospel,
St. Luke himself, painted Mary.
Dr. Zucker: And the artist has blown out all the stops.
He is rendering every detail with a precision
that comes out of the Northern tradition.
Dr. Harris: We know that Gossaert copied Van Eyck.
He's fully steeped in the Northern Rennaisance
tradition of painting everything with a clarity
and exactitude and attention to different textures.
Dr. Zucker: Well, look at the angel's wings.
Look at the detail of the relief carving in the architecture.
This is an arist who is just enjoying
the ability to magically render form.
Now, look for just a second back
at Moses and those two tablets.
Notice the way that the shape of those two tablets
rhyme with the architectural space.
I think when most art historians look at this painting,
they look back to this tradition of dividing
the earthly space from the spiritual space.
Certainly, that central column does that;
but it also makes the entire painting two tablets.
There is this way in which the tablets
that Moses holds is actually embodied
in the architectural space itself.
Dr. Harris: That's true.
Although we think about the space as being
very classical-looking, looking like Ancient Roman
architecture, with those round arches and pilasters,
it's still to me a very mysterious space,
much more like Northern Rennaisance spaces,
where, as we look back toward Moses,
we have those repeated round arches, moving back
into a space that we can't quite determine there.
Although the foreground of the painting seems to be
carefully mapped out according to the rules
of linear perscpective, which obviously Gossaert
has learned as a Northern Rennaisance
artist from traveling to Italy,
but we see so much of the North here.
If we look at the drapery that St. Luke wears,
it's typical Northern Rennaisance,
angular folds of drapery that we see in
the art of Campin or Rogier van der Weyden.
Dr. Zucker: And so is the color.
Dr. Harris: The green that that angel wears against
the complementary red color worn by St. Luke.
There's a real thoughtfulness about color here.
Dr. Zucker: This is an artist who was working
in Antwerp, which was one of the great merchantile
cities of the 15th and early 16th Centuries.
That was a culture and an economy that was based
on importation, that was based on trade, and,
in some ways, this is a painting that is also trading.
Dr. Harris: That idea of the North
and the South coming together that we see
in the work of [Dore] and beginning with
Michael Pacher in the late 15th Century.
(lively music)