10 Favorite Italian Artists Profile: Duccio

"I am Duccio," said Duccio, and Art Guy in Jeans dug it.

When Duccio created Siena's Altarpiece, the humongous Miesta, people thought it was freaky, people thought it was huge, and people thought it was so awesome that it was time to declare 3 bank holidays. So they did, and they paraded the giant altarpiece around the city. We're talking circa 1300 here. Was peak interest in the art world supposed to be 1500? I don't know. 3 bank holidays is a lot of days to parade around a cathedral altarpiece, you'd think maybe we were in some kind of Renaissance then.

But whoa, whoa, back up. Isn't Duccio more medieval?

Art Guy in Jeans would like to sit down and discuss this for a minute. Duccio's style is not what we would associate with the Renaissance, is it? At least not the traditional view of it. The perspective is...lacking, the figures are...stacked, the colors are...unnaturally bright and vibrant, the drapery is...stylized. What's so great about it?

"All those things you just mentioned," says our hero.

Siena and Florence were rivals, bitter ones. Florence's big guy at the time was Giotto; Siena's was Duccio. Weighty figures, linear perspective, and narrative focus were among Giotto's innovations. That just wasn't Duccio's or Siena's bag. Siena isn't about linearity. Just look at the streets. Look at the difference between the Piazza del Campo in Siena and the Piazza della Signoria in Florence, grand squares meant to outshine each other. Siena's is curvaceous and decorative. Florence's is heavy and authoritative. They both rock, and they were both innovative.

Back to Duccio. Compare his Rucellai Madonna to Giotto's Ognissanti Madonna. Duccio goes with a highly refined aesthetic rich with color, decoration, and other-worldliness. As you might know, I'm ripping a lot of this off my Syracuse-in-Florence Black Death professor Jennifer Cook. I learned this stuff in her class, and I highly recommend it if you take the Syracuse Junior Abroad Program in Florence.

Our hero wants to proceed with Duccio. Duccio is majestic, Duccio is powerful, Duccio is endlessly creative. Duccio is technically advanced, Duccio is Siena's standard for beauty (and you can't argue with Siena's beauty), and Duccio is an icon. Later Sienese innovators, such as Simone Martini and the Lorenzetti Brothers, were paying lip service to this king of Sienese color, even though their work uses a lot of Giotto's innovations.

Duccio, Cimabue, and Giotto. Just look at their stuff. They've each perfected a style. Art Guy would hesitate to say, for instance, that Giotto is taking what Cimabue was doing and just going the next step. Cimabue is no stepping stone. He's the master of the Cimabue style, and the Cimabue style is VERY distinct. Same thing goes for Duccio in spades. He went full-steam ahead with his own take on colorful religious other-worldly art, and the result is spectacular.

Art Guy in Jeans demands full praise of Duccio and his achievements, and he would like to see the artistic "Renaissance" as a process beginning almost right after the sack of Rome and going through hundreds of different trials and tribulations including the Byzantine, the Romanesque, the Gothic, the Sienese school, the Black Death style, the Giottesque Revival, the Northern 15th century, the Medici patronage era, the Perugino style, the style in the manner of Michelangelo (aka Mannerism), the Italian Baroque, the Northern Baroque, and so on and so forth until contemporary art. Our hero thinks there was a high interest in art throughout this entire period; some call it the "Long Renaissance." Calling half of those things the Renaissance really isn't fair is it? There is just as big a leap from Piero della Francesca to Leonardo da Vinci as there is from Duccio to Masaccio. Duccio marks the absolute peak of one of these niches. Go Duccio.

Just look at this stuff, man!

10 Favorite Italian Artists Profile: Michelangelo

Art Guy in Jeans digs on Michelangelo. "David" wiped away the old version of beauty in the eyes of man and put a new one in its place.

80 years between Pietas but Art Guy still can't decide which one he likes more. All he can say is Casa Buonarroti has those marvelous torsos in relief that he couldn't envision any other way. This stuff is idealized, yes, and that's what's so great.

But seriously, let's talk about Capella Medici, since we've been avoiding it. Um...it's awesome. Okay, so the women look a little manly. According to Michelangelo, they look better that way, and Art Guy in Jeans suggests we let the man with the chisel do his thing since sculpting in marble is a good way to break your back if you hit it the wrong way. Can it really be possible that a space works so well together? So well proportioned, architecturally and sculpturally. The space is intimate and monumental at the same time, a near impossible, and our hero emphasizes, a near impossible feat.

But what about that Sistine Chapel - Art Guy in Jeans was hoping you'd ask! Remarkable, yes. Awesome, yes. Biblical, yes. Orangish, no. I think we should do whatever is in our power to restore the original colors of artwork, which has so graciously been done to the Sistine Chapel Ceiling. So all those scholars whose Michelangelo/colorism dissertations took for granted the orangishness of the Sistine Chapel Ceiling, Art Guy in Jeans wants you to go and rewrite it all. All of it. Until it's correct.

Our hero also thinks we should remove the painted pants and t-shirts of the Last Judgment. They should all be gone. Art Guy in Jeans wants naked men to spill down into the chapel like a waterfall of flesh. Imagine how much more intense the emotions would be. Our hero likes Mike.

Bacchus = awesome. Piazza Campidoglio = awesome. Doni Madonna = awesome. Santo Spirito Crucifix = awesome. For more information, consult Art Guy in Jeans' favorite partner blog,

Michelangelo and Nutella

There is a glorious tribute on this page, a tribute the likes of which Art Guy in Jeans will some day return to the creator of the Michelangelo and Nutella blog, an artist with as capable a hand and as fiery a passion as Mike himself. The one and only Alyssa Giangregorio, esteemed BFF of Michelangelo and actual BFF in past life.

Art Guy in Jeans wants you to rest on what you have learned. When you have fully researched and observed the glory of Michelangelo, it may be time to view the Duccio profile - but not until you're ready to be open minded, or it's wasted on you.

The Value of Critiquing, Bashing, and Disliking

After the bizarre conclusion of Art Guy’s adventure in the old library, I’d like to explore the importance of saying, “This doesn’t appeal to me,” when looking at art. Depending on who you are with, this can take a lot of nerve to say or no nerve at all. If you are unenthused about the Louvre, and you are in the Louvre with a group of other unenthused tourists, it’s not as daring as you think it is to say you don’t like the Mona Lisa. Likely, nobody in your group will disagree. In fact, most people I talk to about the Louvre go out on this very limb to say that they didn’t think much of the Mona Lisa when they saw it. Perhaps it was smaller than they thought it was going to be.

I can’t name a single person in my generation who was jarred or overwhelmed by the Mona Lisa. Appropriately, I am less surprised each time someone rejects it. The complaint about the Louvre is that it is “overwhelming,” while the Mona Lisa is “underwhelming.” Leonardo da Vinci is not around to hear this critique. Nor is Napoleon, whose stolen bounty comprises much of the Louvre’s collection. The only people around to hear the critique is the new hipness-driven generation. In this day and age, the Mona Lisa isn’t as hip as, say, Klimt’s The Kiss. The Louvre isn’t as hip as, say, the MoMA. It’s time to accept that it’s no longer daring to bash Mona; rather, it’s become quite normal. In fact, if I raved about the Mona Lisa, I would reveal myself as a simple-minded dinosaur, a relic of the old days, and I would be doubly bashed for liking something that “everyone likes.”

We should hesitate before we take this trend to heart and conclude that Mona Lisa hasn’t stood the test of time. The “test of time” is a flimsy concept I’ve never really taken to. Victorian art was steadily plummeting towards worthlessness in the 1970’s, but there has been a recent revival in interest. Medieval icons art were out of fashion since the dawn of the Renaissance, until 20^th century scholarship has revealed its genius of color, otherworldly stylization, and religious monumentality. Maybe it’s coming time for someone to say, “Quit bashing the Mona Lisa. It’s a gorgeous painting.”

My Mona Lisa example serves as a foil for the rest of my study. I’m trying to say that the most important critiquing isn’t the easy kind. It’s the kind where the targeted artwork is getting more praise than it deserves for irrational reasons you can pinpoint. It is important to note that every artist can have a bad day. The perfect test is to go through a museum without looking at the labels and pick your 10 favorite paintings. Then look at who painted them. My former roommate, a Michelangelo buff while we studied in Florence, thought the statues in the Medici Chapel were just dreadful.

If you go on praising the artists that are used to praise, you are burying their lesser-known contemporaries. Sometimes these artists deserve praise too, and the curators can’t hang everything. Poor Marsden Hartley, an American Impressionist who doesn’t fit into any of the MoMA’s “movements,” and therefore is absent from America’s great modern art museum. Poor Botticelli, for hundreds of years seen as an underdeveloped stepping stone on the way to Raphael. It took the Pre-Raphaelites, critiquing the style of Raphael, to shed light on the importance of Botticelli. So if you don’t get negative about art you don’t like, you’re ultimately suppressing art that you do like.

If you critique something or someone, and someone says you’re being mean, think about it. I think it’s mean to bash people that everyone bashes, like Britney Spears. I think it’s a lot less mean to bring everyone’s not-so-heroic hero back to Earth. Ultimately you have to ask yourself, do you like it or not? You’ll find that result very hard to negotiate.