Submitted by Christiana Campana on the 2017 winter session program in Italy sponsored by the Department of English…
Two days ago in class, we discussed the ways that the ancient art we saw at the Uffizi Gallery used rhetoric to convey the message it was looking to get across. For example, an artist would use red or blue to convey royalty or they used light to highlight a certain feature in a person. There was also an incredible amount of symbolism in many of these paintings, something that I never really realized before.
Typical art (paintings, etc.) has never really been something I have been too interested in until we saw some of the paintings in the Uffizi Gallery. The painting that had the biggest impact on me was definitely Caravaggio’s Sacrifice of Isaac. The way that Caravaggio used light to not only highlight the desperation in the angel’s grasp of Abraham or the absolute terror on Isaac’s face was amazing to me. There was also so much expression in all of the subjects’ faces. This was very different from the statue we saw in the Duomo museum. Abraham was simply holding the knife near Isaac and they both looked relatively calm. The artist was probably trying to just give a general idea of what happened – not necessarily a highlighting of emotions as Caravaggio did.
The fact that artists used so much symbolism in their pictures- carefully selecting and placing people in certain garb in certain places in these paintings to display a certain message was incredible to me. Another painting that struck me was one of Michelangelo’s only known non-frescoes “Doni Tondo”. Not only did he display the Holy Family in a way they typically were not portrayed in at the time (relaxed, looking like a real family) but the symbolism was incredible. My favorite example of symbolism in this painting is the bridge between the old, pagan “barbaric” religion (portrayed by the naked men Michelangelo painted in the background), and then the transition to Christianity (portrayed by Saint John the Baptist). Michelangelo’s incredible realistic portrayal of this family surrounded by symbolism is what makes it so absolutely incredible to me.
