A World of Art, Sixth Edition, by Henry M
chapter 11 Painting Fig. 280 Giorgio Vasari, The Art of Painting, 1542. Fresco of the vault of the Main Room, Arezzo, Casa Vasari. Canali Photobank, Capriolo, Italy. arly in the fifteenth century, a figure known geometry, astrology, and music. While the liberal arts as La Pittura—literally, “the picture”—began were understood to involve inspiration and creative to appear in Italian art (Fig. 280). As art his- invention, painting was considered merely a mechani- Etorian Mary D. Garrard has noted, the emer- cal skill, involving, at most, the ability to copy. The gence of the figure of La Pittura, the personification of emergence of La Pittura announced that painting was painting, could be said to announce the cultural arrival finally something more than mere copywork, that it of painting as an art. In the Middle Ages, painting was was an intellectual pursuit equal to the other liberal ISBN never included among the liberal arts—those areas of arts, all of which had been given similar personifica- 0-558-55180-7 knowledge that were thought to develop general intel- tion early in the Middle Ages. lectual capacity—which included rhetoric, arithmetic, 220 A World of Art, Sixth Edition, by Henry M. Sayre. Published by Prentice Hall. Copyright © 2010 by Pearson Education, Inc. Fig. 281 Artemisia Gentileschi, Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting, 1630. 1 Oil on canvas, 35 /4 ϫ 29 in. The Royal Collection. © 2007 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Photo: C. Cooper Ltd. possessing all the intellectual authority and dignity of a Leonardo or a Michelangelo. Though in her time it was commonplace to think of women as intellectually inferior to men— “women have long dresses and short intellects” was a popular saying—here Gentileschi transforms painting from mere copywork, and, in the process, transforms her own possibilities as a creative person.
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