This article is introduced with a statement about the author’s involvement with El Greco studies and her attempts to understand the manifestation of mysticism in his art. The research focusses on the visual experience of two different kinds of beholders in El Greco’s oeuvre: the virtual backturned figures in paintings beholding a vision as part of the representations, and the beholders in real space viewing the complete paintings. The presentation in each of the seven works discussed is mediated by an internal backturned beholder, forming a nodal figure in the composition, who views a mystical vision as the main theme presented in the painting, while the beholder in real space views the beholding backturned figure, his vision and the total composition.

In the vestry of the cathedral church of Santa Maria in Toledo hangs a large painting by El Greco entitled El Espolio, the ‘Disrobing of Christ’. Executed shortly after his arrival in Spain the painting marks a major stylistic departure from the artist’s earlier work and would command attention on that basis alone. The subject, while iconographically obscure, is, at another remove, utterly familiar as a Passion scene tied to a well known iconographical canon. Compositionally, the Christ figure predominates but the ‘legionnaire’ occupies a contrasting and almost equivalent space in his carapace of steel. These figures beg for further elaboration I will argue that this painting can be read as a nexus between a reformed liturgy and a post-Tridentine programme of Church renewal in Spain allied to a monarchical programme of nación under Philip II (1527-98) that was essentially one and the same. The salient questions needing a response are these: How, in a vestry, can we expect such a subject to have much impact beyond the very limited audience it was designed for? This is the crux of the matter in many ways. What in the painting suggests more than the straightforward analysis of the subject matter? What in the times suggests another reading of this great work of art? The pursuit of the answers to these questions constitutes the driving force behind this investigation. Biography, the intellectual and artistic formation of the artist, are positioned with reference to the intellectual ferment of the period, the religious upheaval iii in Christendom, the advances in the understanding of the nation state. More specifically, the altered relationship between the monarchy and the church in Spain, following the Council of Trent (1545-63)will be shown to have a reflection in El Espolio. El Greco’s work has mostly been treated as the product of a painter of the spirit, of religiosity, even of mysticism. El Espolio has been interpreted here within a broader frame of reference and the argument suggests our understanding of El Greco’s oeuvre has been somewhat narrow. / Thesis (Master, Art History) -- Queen's University, 2011-09-15 16:13:04.047

The imagery in Jackson Pollock's three extant sketchbooks which date from c.1934-1939 is dependent on that of other artists, especially El Greco, Rubens and Tintoretto. By 1947 however, the painter achieved a mature synthesis, distinctly his, which influenced contemporary painting, and was seminal for the work of a number of artists of the succeeding era. This dissertation is an attempt to document the phases of Pollock's artistic style from the early 1930s through to the middle 1950s, and to investigate the forces which may have catalyzed his temperament and precipitated his late style. The early sketchbooks begun in c.1934 represent Pollock's engagement with the art of the Old Masters and the teaching techniques of Thomas Hart Benton that utilized works from the Renaissance. The third sketchbook from c.1937-1939 induced him to re-examine the work of the Old Masters in a dialectical approach which incorporated new masters with old, but remained preoccupied with the sacred imagery found in the first two books. It is a resolution of these seemingly opposing modes of representation which produced several influential paintings in the early 1940s, including Guardians of the Secret and Pasiphae. At the same time these works display structural emulations related to those of Old Master paintings that would become increasingly prominent in Pollock's art. The canvases of 1947-1950, produced in what is commonly termed the “Classic Poured Period,” appear to represent a quantum leap beyond the concerns of Old Master works and European precedents. By this point Pollock had developed a fluency and assurance in his use of color and line that seems to extend further than the studied paradigmatic repetitions of his early sketchbooks. However, despite the radically new technique his paintings still exhibit pictorial and formal infrastructures derived from Renaissance paintings which were absorbed into Pollock's new idiom with surprising ease. In 1951 Pollock enters what Francis V.O'Connor termed as ‘his fourth phase'. The Black paintings of 1951-1953 betray a further exploration and adaptation of Old Master ideas, both iconographic and aesthetic and were created in Triptychs and Diptychs, typical altarpiece formats. With these paintings Pollock's forms acquired a confident plasticity and invention derived from the sculptural practices of Michelangelo, and progressively fewer individual images are quoted verbatim. An understanding of Pollock's early preoccupation with old Master painting is essential to comprehend the formation of the aesthetics of much of his later art. Significantly the underlying infrastructure remains fixed to old Master precedents and it was precisely these models of Renaissance and Baroque art which became the medium through which his mature synthesis was achieved.

ANNOTATION: The work The Mirror of Reality in the Imagery of Dreams of the 19th and 20th Centuries - Creative Individuality versus the Chaos of the Time is based on the assumption that dreams are inseparably linked to the concept of existence in human life (Michel Foucault). The study touches on the ways in which dreams are depicted in visual culture that does not coincide with chronologically organized historical events, but is an expression of a free alliance between artists in the European space and centuries of common experience. These works are generally socially critical, exposed to unimaginable pressure from public censorship. The artist must pretend it is only an innocent game, a crazy idea, a whim. At the same time, these paintings are not an expression of boundless imagination, but they are subject to the firm rules of spatial construction of the painting. This is due to the traditional delimitation of dark depths - the underworld of Virgil's Saturn myth of pre-Roman culture, alternating with the vertically felt open heavens as variants of the original Plato's The Myth of Er, which in the 20th century paintings is replaced by the idea of an open landscape with illumination on the low horizon. The work deals with the work of Albrecht Dürer, his copperplate Melancholia I (1514) and his so-called...