Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pg | Hacker News Reader

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Actually you're mistaken in all 6 cases:

1. easy refutation - go to sistine chapel, look up

You're claiming that the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is better (not just as good, but better) than everything Leonardo and Bellini ever painted. The number of art historians who'd agree with that statement is zero.

2. This is not how people painted with oil until the 19th century.

http://static.squidoo.com/resize/squidoo_images/-1/draft_len...

3. completely unsupported.

Your counterclaim is likewise completely unsupported. But anyone who wants to settle the matter can choose any "how to paint" type book published in the 20th century, and they'll see that was considered the default technique.

4. carving marble is much easier

Carving marble requires more specialized training, but the kind of difficulty I was talking about was how critically viewers judge the result. They are tough on sculpture too, but I think they are as tough on line drawing. The less there is, the more closely it's examined.

5. At the time it was painted in thin, transparent layers that did not allow the kind of reworking

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pentimento

http://www.escholarship.org/editions/data/13030/d9/ft1d5nb0d...

6. If you want to offer any actual counterargument about Cezanne's drawing, feel free.

Wow, you really want to do this?

2 - I like Frans Hals too!

3 - Yes, that's how painting is taught now, to the kind of people who read 'how to paint' books.

4 - Nice weaseling.

5 - Notice how those carefully fixed errors show fully-drawn hands, feet, etc., rather than a cloud of "rough drafts" like you would see in a painting done in the modern style? Another nice demonstration of the point that oil painting was not a fluid, iterative medium in its first few hundred years.

6. Try one of the numerous image links in the thread.

As for 1, Aaron Swartz sent us both this quote the first time you and I had this argument, and I'm surprised you've forgotten it. It's from Graham Larkin, curator of the National Gallery of Canada, whom he asked to adjudicate your claim:

""By even the most conservative standards (which your buddy seem to be applying), you'd need to go at least a few decades further, into the High Renaissance. Julius II's didn't even start commissioning Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling and Raphael's Vatican Stanze (School of Athens &c) didn't start until 1508. These works don't exactly represent a decline, except by Preraphealite standards which would judge them as over-sophisitcated and lacking in primitive simplicity.

(That's IT: your friend's a Preraphaelite! Well history is not on his or her side; such Victorian predilections are a mere blip in the history of Western aesthetics.) The generation after the giant Raphael (and the giant Durer in the North) is a much better candidate for cultural and artistic decline--a story complicated by Michaelangelo's inconvenient longevity. Historians have often pointed to the 1527 Sack of Rome as a downturn in artistic ferment, or at least in the unparalleled ascendancy of Italy. I would add that Western painting of around 1500 can scarcely be separated from the other visual arts, including the still-young (to the West) technology of print, brought to incredible levels of sophistication by Durer and others in precisely the post-1500 decades. One wonders whether your friend meant "1500" or "like, 1500.""

Of course, Dr. Larkin gets one thing wrong. You're not a pre-Raphaelite, you're just a big ole weenis.

Weenis? Really?

From what I can tell, Mr. Graham, at best, might be wrong about a handful of (evidently fuzzy) facts about painting. I do not see the logical bridge from that to his status as "big ole weenis." That's disappointingly puerile.

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