Latest news with #RenaissanceMasterpieces
The Guardian
23-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Raphael's School of Athens review – rewarding study of Renaissance fresco
Here is the latest in the series of high-minded, low-tech studies of Renaissance art history from Howard Burton, a theoretical physicist turned art historian, who has launched a series of films called, with admirable Ronseal-ness, Renaissance Masterpieces. Having already looked over Botticelli's Primavera, Burton now turns to Raphael's wall fresco in the Vatican palace, arguably the high point of the artist's prodigious output and a work to rival Michelangelo's Sistine chapel decorations. Burton has already tackled The School of Athens as part of his mammoth survey of Raphael's entire oeuvre, Raphael: A Portrait, but here he gets to drill down in considerable detail for the film's 81-minute running time. Admittedly, the visuals are as rudimentary as Burton's previous offerings – it looks like a glorified PowerPoint, with Burton's sonorous commentary overlaid in unpunctuated voiceover – but as before, the tone works: Burton is scholarly without being dull, and clear without being obvious. It's also unusual, to say the least, to hear about some of the names Burton pulls into his disquisition – Neoplatonist thinkers such as Gemistos Plethon, Nicholas of Cusa and Marsilio Ficino – as Burton ruminates on the symbolism of the painting's imagery, from the postures of the figures involved, to their much-discussed (but surprisingly mostly uncertain) identity, to the meaning behind the spectacular masonry backdrop. Burton is also very good on the mechanics of the fresco's creation, and how the details of the architecture of the former papal apartments play into its meaning, in concert with the complementary works on the ceiling, floor, and adjacent walls. He even takes a 15-minute mea culpa for having not paid much attention to Renaissance chronicler Giorgio Vasari's religion-based interpretation of the painting, suggesting that Vasari might have been right to identify the foreground figures (one of whom is supposedly inspired by Michelangelo himself) as the four evangelists, rather than the classical philosophers that they are routinely ascribed to be. Not light viewing, for sure, but rewarding all the same. Raphael's School of Athens is on Prime Video from 24 April.
The Guardian
29-01-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Botticelli's Primavera review – lucid study of a Renaissance masterpiece
Here is an interesting, thoughtful and well-reasoned study of a single Botticelli masterwork, the late 15th-century painting that is the perhaps slightly less well known companion piece to The Birth of Venus – though, as this film is at pains to point out, they were not painted as a pair. Primavera is the somewhat left-field first subject in a series of hour-long films in a series called Renaissance Masterpieces issued by Ideas Roadshow; it follows its lengthy, and admirably thorough Raphael: A Portrait, which emerged last year. Like the earlier film, this is the brainchild of Howard Burton, a theoretical physicist and philosopher who is not an art historian by training, but you wouldn't really know it. As with his Raphael magnum opus, Burton's calm and clear voiceover is the meat of the film, resembling a scholarly lecture that, for all its dryness, is lucid and very listenable. Burton foregrounds some nice archive and architectural material which – again like Raphael film – is used to support his analysis; key, it seems, is exactly when and where its existence was recorded in various key property inventories. Visually, Burton's film is not going to win any prizes, though its fairly basic graphics and PowerPoint style presentation get his points across with undeniable clarity. What's rather impressive, however, is the combination of highmindedness and clarity on show here; Burton is a film-maker not afraid of referencing Seneca and Ovid, or getting in visual quotes from the likes of Antonio del Pollaiuolo and Lorenzo Lotto. Well, Burton makes a convincing case for what he calls Primavera's 'highlighting of a golden pastoral past' through its assembly of classical-era literary fragments, with the painting itself acting as a marriage gift to one Semiramide Appiano, wife to powerful Florentine nobleman Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici. And at a crisp hour in running time it's as easily digestible as it is informative. Botticelli's Primavera is on Prime Video from 31 January.
