An Art History Brain Dump for the Beginning of August

Feature image: Paul Gauguin, The Loss of Virginity, 1890/91, via Google Arts & Culture

Seven paintings, five centuries, four continents, no connecting thread beyond the fact that we keep returning to each one.

This early work by Bosch depicts the moment in the Passion narrative when Pontius Pilate presents the scourged Christ to the crowd in Jerusalem. Christ stands crowned with thorns, his body marked by fine, bleeding wounds, while below him a crowd rendered with unusual psychological precision demands his crucifixion, their words, Crucifige eum, inscribed in gold Gothic lettering along the canvas. Rather than staging the scene indoors, as was conventional, Bosch set it at the edge of a contemporary town. The Städel Museum's own research has revealed that the panel underwent significant alteration after its creation: Christ's original loincloth was overpainted with a floor-length garment, and a donor family once portrayed in the foreground was painted out. Both were uncovered by X-ray in 1983 and have since been reversed.

Goya painted this small canvas during his formative years in Italy, where such mythological scenes were a practical necessity. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Goya received no institutional stipend for his Italian sojourn and instead produced modestly scaled works tailored to the tastes of specific clients to fund his stay. The composition depicts Venus weeping over the body of Adonis, killed by a wild boar, with the diagonal trunk of a tree dividing the canvas into two zones: a lit, vividly dressed foreground against a turbulent Baroque sky. According to the Fundación Goya en Aragón, an X-ray of the canvas reveals no compositional alterations, evidence of the speed with which Goya both executed and sold this category of work while abroad.

Krishna, an avatar of the Hindu god Vishnu, and Radha, his consort, appear throughout Indian devotional painting as a pair whose romance stands in for the soul's longing toward the divine. This particular work comes from Kishangarh, a small Rajput kingdom in Rajasthan whose court painters became known in the 18th century for an especially lyrical, romanticized treatment of the couple, elongated features, tender physical closeness, and a courtly refinement distinct from other regional schools. Here, Radha and Krishna sit together on a marble terrace under a night sky, watching a fireworks display, their features rendered nearly identical, Radha's slightly thinned and Krishna's slightly thickened, a formal device emphasizing their spiritual oneness. Attendants surrounding the couple play tanpura and veena and hold phuljharis, sparklers that release cascading streams of fire toward the terrace floor. The composition derives directly from a Mughal work made in Delhi roughly forty years earlier, depicting women of the imperial harem observing a nightlong Islamic vigil before Ramadan, a scene Sitaram adapted into this Hindu devotional one.

Gauguin completed this painting during his first stay in Tahiti, describing it to his friend Daniel de Monfreid as a severed head "nicely arranged on a white cushion, in a palace of my invention and guarded by women also of my invention." Two events likely shaped the imagery: a public guillotine execution Gauguin witnessed in Paris in 1888, and the death of the Tahitian king Pōmare V shortly after his arrival in 1891. Gauguin's invented funeral scene bears little resemblance to Pōmare V's actual Protestant service, and scholars instead read it as a staged pre-colonial rite meant to underscore the foreignness of the Pacific for a French audience. The inscribed Tahitian words arii and matamoe, meaning "noble" and "sleeping eyes," together imply death.

Lempicka, who rebuilt her life in Paris after fleeing the Russian Revolution and trained under André Lhote before developing the sleek, geometric style that came to define Art Deco portraiture, painted two women here in close proximity against a muted, architectural background of blues and grays, their hair precisely styled, their lips a vivid red against the painting's otherwise restrained palette. The figures carry her signature polish, sharply defined contours, a smooth and almost armored surface, traits she brought to the displaced aristocrats and reinvented elites of interwar Paris, a world she belonged to herself. The physical closeness between the two women suggests an intimacy the painting never resolves, consistent with the rest of Lempicka's portraiture from this period and with her own bisexuality, which shaped how she painted women throughout her career.

Attributed to the Italian Mannerist painter Federico Zuccaro, this canvas depicts Cupid subduing Pan by the ear as onlookers react with theatrical alarm, while an allegorical winged figure observes from above. The subject illustrates a line from Virgil, omnia vincit amor, love conquers all, with Pan personifying carnal lust and Cupid a higher form of devotion, their combat staged within an Arcadian landscape notable for its depth and atmospheric handling of trees and distance. According to the Getty, the attribution rests on the composition's clear derivation from the Sala d'Ercole fresco at the Villa Farnese in Caprarola, though scholars have proposed the canvas may instead be the work of a Zuccaro collaborator; its early provenance remains unknown, and it was previously attributed to Giuseppe Cesari, known as Cavaliere d'Arpino.

Vieira da Silva painted this canvas while living in Brazil, having fled Europe during the Second World War with her husband, the painter Árpád Szenes. The work reflects her characteristic method of building composition from dense, fractured, tile-like patterning, here applied to a subject of maritime disaster; the sea reads as a tightly gridded field of splintering color, closer in effect to architecture than to a marine scene. Vieira da Silva trained under Fernand Léger and the sculptor Antoine Bourdelle before committing fully to painting, and in 1966, more than two decades after completing this work, she became the first woman awarded France's Grand Prix National des Arts.

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