@meettheoldmasters.bsky.socialNot a spot-the-difference puzzle. Two Virgins of the Rocks, almost the same, one in Paris and one in London. Both genuine. Leonardo da Vinci.
The record: from the contract of 1483 to the final payment took twenty-five years.
@meettheoldmasters.bsky.socialThe man who dug up Nineveh spent his later years digging up forgotten painters. Austen Henry Layard, from Assyrian ruins to Renaissance panels.
How he rescued early Italian painting, then dismissed as "crude", was not what you'd expect.
@meettheoldmasters.bsky.socialAt the very front of this Annunciation, in the best seat in the house, sits a cucumber. And the painter kept doing it. Carlo Crivelli.
The record of this episode: his story begins with a Venetian court record of 1457.
@meettheoldmasters.bsky.socialBotticelli signed exactly one painting in his life: the Mystic Nativity.
It carries an inscription that reads like the end of the world. The painter of Venus, in his last years, is in London.
@meettheoldmasters.bsky.socialFebruary 1497. A bonfire the size of a house in Florence's main square: the Bonfire of the Vanities. The story goes one painter threw in a picture of his own. Botticelli.
The record of this episode: the only painting he ever signed hangs in London.
@meettheoldmasters.bsky.social'A geometric painter' is usually a figure of speech. With Piero it is not.
On days he did not paint, he wrote mathematics. The manuscripts survive. In front of his pictures I find myself lowering my voice.
@meettheoldmasters.bsky.socialA painting in London that quiets the room if you stand before it for five minutes. Nothing moves: not the figures, not the wind, not the dove.
The stillness is geometry. Piero della Francesca really was a mathematician; his treatise survives.
@meettheoldmasters.bsky.socialUccello's real name was Paolo di Dono. 'Uccello' means bird: a nickname.
Vasari says he loved birds. That is legend. But he did paint a duck and a woodcock into a fresco corner where the story needed neither.
@meettheoldmasters.bsky.socialA shepherd boy draws a sheep on a rock. A passing master, Cimabue, takes him on. The boy is Giotto.
The source is Vasari; whether it happened, nobody knows. A shepherd who becomes a painter: the story people wanted. That it survived is a record too.
@meettheoldmasters.bsky.socialWatch the video:
youtu.be/g4SMkeIc9ZY
#MeettheOldMasters
@meettheoldmasters.bsky.socialCatalogue number one at the National Gallery: Sebastiano del Piombo's Raising of Lazarus.
Its first owner was not a museum but one man, an immigrant marine insurer. The nation's number one came out of a private drawing room.
@meettheoldmasters.bsky.socialA battlefield where nobody bleeds, lances in rows so tidy it borders on the absurd. Uccello wasn't painting war; he was showing off perspective.
The record of this episode: his daughter Antonia, one word in a 1491 death register, "pittoressa".
@meettheoldmasters.bsky.socialSeven hundred years ago, on a day nobody recorded, European painting suddenly got heavier.
The Virgin used to float in gold. Then she came down and held the weight of a child. Episode 2 meets the two men credited with that: Giotto and Duccio.
@meettheoldmasters.bsky.socialThe nation's first art museum wasn't founded in a palace. It began in one man's drawing room.
In 1824 Parliament bought 38 paintings from a marine insurer for £57,000. Episode 1 walks that story, and the Sainsbury Wing itself.
