Photo: GV
It’s worth a book to the first who gets it right.
Archive for April, 2010
Photo: GV
Who are these two? What are they doing? Who’s the artist?
Where is the work?
Prize: A book.
Photo: GV
Where (what museum), and what artist?
There’s a book for the first to get it right!
GV
Photo: GV
Most of the great art of the European Middle Ages was devoted to religion. As was much of Europe’s finest art for centuries thereafter.
Toward the middle of the 15th century the great Sienese painter Giovanni di Paolo captured Christ in the Decent from the Cross with a spiritual intensity matched only by Christ’s Resurrection, as captured in a bronze three centuries later by the famous Roman artist of the Baroque period, Gian Lorenzo Bernini.
Both works are small but immensely powerful. And they are only a feet apart, in the master paintings galleries at the Walters.
Photo: GV
If you had a choice – which of course you do not – which one would you prefer to own?
Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum since 1994, has been with the Baltimore institution for more than 20 years. A native of Minnesota, Gary received his B.A. from Carleton College in 1967 and his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1976 before working as Senior Associate for Byzantine Art Studies at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C.