Carrara replica of Michelangelo's David, anyone?

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A small group for a small group - Cervietti family for clientele.

The exhibit "Quali Cose Siamo" at the Triennale Design Museum is the latest installation conceived by Alessandro Mendini, which exhibits over 800 objects. One of the first objects on display, when initially entering the gallery, is a plaster reproduction Michelanglo's David. Placed close to it was this discription:
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"The Cervietti family's marble statue factory has been operating in Pietrasanta since 1962...This plaster David was executed from real life on the basis of techniques of extremely precise measurements: it is 4.10 m in height (5.17 with the base). From this, five copies have been produced in statue-quality marble from Carrara (like the original), fabricated on order. A marble David costs around 200,000 euros. Michelangelo sculpted his David in Florence, at the age of 26, in about 3 years."

This is a great example of a small group working for a small group...the Cervietti family working for a very specific, niche clientele to produce and sell marble replicas of Michelangelo's David. This is furthermore a testiment to Michelangelo and his original masterpiece; it is so widely-recognized that in the 21st century percise marble reproductions of the statue are still being requested.

L.H.O.O.Q. translated: "She has a hot ass".

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Yesterday in class we spoke about Marcel Duchamp and Dada. The L.H.O.O.Q. is a work that Duchamp referred to as a "readymade", where he took a Mona Lisa postcard reproduction and drew a moustache and beard in pencil and appended the title.

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The meaning is interpreted as being an attack on the iconic Mona Lisa and traditional art, thus promoting Dadist ideals. Perhaps Duchamp decided to use his readymades to not only critique established art conventions, but also to force the audience to put aside what they had thought before and look at something with a different perspective. By making the gender of the Mona Lisa ambiguous, Duchamp presents his audience with a new perspective of a classical work of art.

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Overall, Duchamp's Mona Lisa can be classified as an individual for a big group (the audience and media), but the Dadist movement in general can be viewed as a small group for a big group, where a rejection of pevailing standards in art through anti-art cultural works by a small group was intended to impact society at large.

Duchamp Mona Lisa 1919

Mona Lisa Mania

This blog post is about, well, Mona Lisa mania...The Mona Lisa is the most replicated and reproduced work of art in history. Below are examples of some of the most artistic reproductions to-date.

An individual for a small group: Korean designer Kwang Hoo Lee for a niche group of consumers (not including art historians, some of whom protested about the value of this painting being reporduced to sit on!).

Lee's chair is an example of a painting you can sit on. You can also choose to hang this chair on the wall when it is not in use, because the frame of the chair also acts as a frame to the replica.



A small group for a small group: A "commissioner" and an 3D artist for their community. Tania Ledger of Croydon England employeed a 3D artist named Chris Naylor to create the Mona Lisa Portrait sculpted into her lawn to promote a "Brighten Up Britian" campaign, a revelation encouraging Brits to combat the credit crunch misery by brightening up their homes and communities.

An individual for an individual: A tattoo artist from HeadOVMetal tattoo parlor took the below picture at the Seattle Tattoo Convention in 1995. This individual got a painfully artistic full-back tattoo of the Mona Lisa, a great example of the individual for an individual case, in which a tattoo artist tattooes the customer on the basis of personal desire.

A small group for a large group: ASUS management for ASUS employees who created a "Mona Lisa Motherboard". In the lobby of the Asus Headquarters (a multinational computer product corporation) in Peitou, Taiwan, a Mona Lisa is made entirely from recycled PC motherboards. Management says that "The work represents two things: a reminder of the technology that Asus built its fortune on and the company's ethos to encourage and support any kind of crazy idea".

A big group for a big group: Over 300 employees of Takashimaya's department store in Osaka, Japan for curious shoppers of the Takashimaya department store. The employees reproduced the Mona Lisa using 320,000 old train tickets obtained from the nearby Nankai Namba station. The reproduction consists of "pixels" formed by overlapping black and white tickets in intricate patterns. About 300 employees sacrificed their breaks and free time for three months to complete the masterpiece.

Coffee Cups Recreate the Mona Lisa

A small group for a big group. Specifically, 8 people for 130,000 curious eyes.

The Mona Lisa has been recreated with 3,604 cups of coffee and 564 pints of milk in Sydney, Australia. The 3, 604 cups of coffee were each filled with different amounts of milk to create different sepia shades of the painting. It measures an impressive 20 feet high and 13 feet wide and took a team of eight people and three hours to complete.

This was created for the Aroma Festival at the Rocks in Sydney in early 2009. It uses only variations of two shades; black coffee, light coffee, latte, and milk.

"A smile so pleasing, that it was a thing more divine than human to behold" - Giorgio Vasari on the Mona Lisa

An individual for big group.

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In the last post we explored that the famous painting of the Mona Lisa was an example of an "individual for a small group" case since Leonardo da Vinci was commissioned by Francesco del Giocondo to paint the work for his family.

However, one may argue that today the example of the Mona Lisa has moved from an "individual for an small group" case to an "individual for big group", because anyone that visits the Louvre can enjoy viewing it.

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To prove that the Mona Lisa is part of the group an "individual for everyone", I want to present to you some very interesting statistics about the Mona Lisa, now held in the Louvre:

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- About 6 million people view the painting at the Louvre each year. Source: BBC Faces of the Week 2006-09-29.

- Visitors generally spend about 15 seconds viewing the Mona Lisa. Source: "Smile, please" guardian.co.uk. London. 2004-10-19.

- Guinness World Records lists the Mona Lisa as having the highest insurance value for a painting in history.

- It painting was assessed at US$100 million on December 14, 1962, before the painting toured the USA for several months. Taking inflation (Consumer Price Index) into account, the 1962 value would be approximately US$713 million in 2010.

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- Number of Mona Lisa items sold by the Louvre gift shop per year: 350,000. This includes 200,000 postcards, 20,000 magnets, and around 10,000 puzzles. Source: Chicago Sun-Times, 4/3/2005

- Average number of visitors the Mona Lisa receives: 1,500 per hour. The Mona Lisa is the Louvre's most popular piece of artwork. Source: Chicago Sun-Times, 4/3/2005

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- Average number of fan letters received by the Mona Lisa: One per week. Cecile Scaillierez, Mona Lisa's curator at the Louvre, says many of the letters are "bizarre." Source: Chicago Sun-Times, 4/3/2005

- Number of times the Mona Lisa has been stolen from the Louvre: 1. On Monday August 21, 1911, when the museum was closed to the public, the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre. Over two years later, an Italian art dealer named Alfredo Geri received a letter offering to sell the Mona Lisa. In December 1913, Vincenzo Peruggia, a house painter by profession, walked into Geri's gallery in Florence and office and offered the portrait for 500,000 lire. After Geri was taken to see the masterpiece which was hidden in a chest in Peruggia's hotel, Geri called the police, and the painting was reclaimed. Source: Smithsonian, 11/1/1987

- OverstockArt.com, the leader in handmade oil painting art reproductions, released a list of the top 10 oil paintings featured in the media in the last decade. Topping the list was Leonardo Da Vinci’s internationally revered Mona Lisa. Source: overstockArt. Jan. 19, 2010.

The Renaissance Commissioner

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An individual for a small group.

Who was Renaissance art originally intended for? Well, the buyer of a work of art, named the commissioner, would commission artists to paint according to needs and desires. Somestimes a self-portrait, other times a commemorative painting, to remind of devotion, to instill civic propoganda...these are merely some of the reasons in which an artist would be commissioned to paint a work. Paintings were rarely completed "by the individual for the individual". The majority of Renaissance works had a purpose; purchased with fixed specifications, a contractual agreement, and a paid sum (usually instalments among partial-completion).

These "individual for a small group" paintings give us two important insights. Firstly, an insight into the life, culture, politics, and motives of the Renaissance individual. Secondly, an insight into the status of art during the time. There were many active commissioners and thus active artists, indicating that there was indeed an interest and thus a market for the arts during the age known as the "re-birth".

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The relationship between the artist and the comissioner is a perfect example of an "individual for a small group". Below and along the side of this blog are some examples:

Federico da Montefeltro (1420-1482) was a condottiere, and his wife Battista Sforza, died in 1472. This double portrait, known as a diptych, had been commissioned after her death as a memorial. Federico and his wife were the Duke and Duchess of Urbino. Note their lands, the rolling hills of Urbino, in the background. Also note her jewels, a symbol of status and of the court. She is a pail white, which may symbolize the afterlife, but was also very popular for elite women of the time. Also popular with court women was bleached blond hair and an unnaturally far hair line. Federico is shown painted left because it is known that his nose and left eye were distroyed in an accident.

Piero della Francesca, The Duchess and Duke of Urbino, c. 1472

Leonardo da Vinci was commissioned in 1503 by the ruling body of the Republic of Florence to paint the Battle of Anghiari, a scene celebrating the a famous Florentine victory. All interior walls of the Salone dei Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio were to be painted with scenes of civic Florentine propoganda. Due to Leonardo's experimental fresco technique, this painting was never realized.

Copy of Leonardo da Vinci's Battle of Anghiari by Peter Paul Rubens

Raphael was commissioned in 1511-12 by Pope Julius II. Notice several features; the pattern of the papal keys and tiara in the curtain, his beard which he grew as a symbol of mortification at having lost the city of Bologna in 1511, and his elderly features (he was to die the following year at the age of 70).

Raphael, Portrait of Pope Julius II, 1511-12

"The noblest pleasure is the joy of understanding." - Leonardo da Vinci

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An individual for an individual.

Leonardo da Vinci was an individual who worked for himself. He recorded and sketched and wrote. His notebooks are extensive and detailed and contain drawings, scientific diagrams and his thoughts on the nature of painting. He did this for himself. These unprecedented notebooks reveal the curiousity and the scope and depth of his interests. There was no commissioner here, nor was he completing them to impress the intellects and scholars of the time. He wrote in them well...because he wanted to. It is a sheer expression of his interests and curiousities.

Leonardo da Vinci, Self-Portrait in red chalk, c. 1512 - 1515

Interesting fact: Leonardo wrote in his notebooks using "mirror writing", cursive starting from the right hand side of the page moving towards the left, not from left to right. Only when he was writing something intended for others did he write in the traditional direction. Scholars use a mirror to read his notebooks. Contemporaries of Leonardo left records indicating that they witnessed him writing and painting with his left hand. Being left handed was extremely unusual and unaccepted during the Renaissance. Because Italians were (and still are, I may add), superstitious, children who naturally started using their left hands to write and draw were forced to used their right hands.

Above: A sample of Leonardo's writing.

Using a mirror to review the same text.

Scholars suggest several possibilities as a possible explaination for Leonardo's "mirror writing":

• Smugging occurred when writing with the left hand using ink, so he chose to move his hand from right to left to prevent smearing as his hand moved across the page.
  
• Hiding his ideas from the Roman Catholic Church, whose teachings sometimes disagreed with what Leonardo had observed.
  
• Attempting to making it more difficult for others to read his notes take ideas.