The Secret Behind Paintings With Dirty Feet

Why Caravaggio’s paintings were rejected by the Christian patrons

**Madonna of the Rosary** by **Caravaggio** with special emphasis on the imagery of the feet.

Caravaggio was a famous painter in the 16th century. His chiaroscuro paintings narrated high drama, acute realism, and minute detailing.

But have you ever noticed the dirty feet in Caravaggio’s paintings?

Saint Matthew and the Angel, Crucifixion of Saint Peter, Madonna of the Rosary, and several others reflects the famous “dirty feet”.

The dirty feet got affixed to his art form, personality, and portrayed the catholic pauperism beliefs that were opposed by the Catholic Reformation.

Caravaggio’s early life and initial paintings

The baroque painter was born in Milan where he was baptized. His childhood and education were spent in catholic pauperism beliefs in the spirit of St. Charles Borromeo.

He did his initial training under Simone Peterzano and left for Rome from Milan in 1592.

Caravaggio’s naturalistic and unorthodox painting skills caught eyeballs of the Roman Catholic patrons during the counter-reformation in Rome.

The Boy Bitten by a Lizard in the National Gallery London was painted by him during his beginnings in Rome. This painting revealed the authenticity and realism; he painted the model with dirty fingernails and gave surmountable importance to the detailing of the inanimate objects like the sprig of jasmine inside the glass vase.

Caravaggio’s Paintings with Dirty Feet

Saint Matthew and the Angel

In 1599, he was contracted by the Contarelli Chapel to decorate the Church with the paintings of the Evangelist Saint Matthew.

His first version of Saint Matthew and the Angel was rejected by the Church patrons.

The dirty feet of the Saint and impoverished nature did not match the idealization of their beloved Saint Matthew. The Church leaders found it really crude and could not see the image of a poor peasant depicting as their Evangelist.

And so, he had to paint the second version The Inspiration of Saint Matthew depicting a more glorified and reverent image of the master that was accepted by the Church officials.

The Crucifixion of Peter

**The crucifixion of Saint Peter**. **Note highlighted are the sections with dirty feet.**

When Peter was crucified, he asked to be turned upside down to be the opposite of Jesus’ crucifixion. This painting too depicted the dirty feet of the man pushing up the cross.

Why the paintings were rejected by Church

The Counter-Reformation Popes in Rome opposed the ideology of pauperism. The Church patrons thought that all the poor; and especially the beggars, held no interest in the church reforms and were considered as ‘ignorant of Christian truth’.

According to them, the poor people were seen as sinners or criminals.

Therefore, the Church outrightly rejected paintings with dirty feet by Caravaggio at first look and wanted to promote more glorified images of their Saints.

Caravaggio’s school of thought was inspired by pauperism. And, so the naked and dirty feet of Caravaggio’s saints were the feet of those who believed that Jesus, the son of God was “made man” and lived in poverty.

His compositions were being asked to alter by the Church to suit the desires of the patrons during that era. But Caravaggio’s sense of authenticity, the rawness of human existence is still perfectly preserved in the Augustinian churches of Rome

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La Belle Ferroniere— Leonardo da Vinci

Because Da Vinci painted beyond La Gioconda.

‘La Belle Ferronière’ (c. 1490) by Leonardo da Vinci. Oil on wood. 62 x 44 cm. Louvre Museum

Some artists are irremediably linked to a painting, maybe two, and sometimes even three. They are communicating vessels, a flash in mind in the form of an image evoked every time we hear their names.

It happens to El Bosco and his The Garden of Earthly Delights. Something similar happens with Girl with a Pearl Earring and its author, Johannes Vermeer. These two cases illustrate how intimately linked author and work are in the collective imagination, that popular wisdom that makes us know a little of everything and that, when it comes to painting, creates these particular associations.

It also happens to Leonardo da Vinci is perhaps the clearest example of the phenomenon we are talking about. Two works come to mind when someone hears his name: La Giocondaand The Last Supper. They are two paintings that the entertainment world has used for countless products (from movies to novels of all kinds), increasing the preponderance of these two works when relating them to their artist even more.

However, Da Vinci is more than those two paintings. For example, the one we have below, known as Le Belle Ferronière, undoubtedly passes as one of his best works despite not enjoying the same fame as the other two.

In this portrait, we can observe a woman placed in a three-quarter position whose face is frontal and establishes eye contact with the artist and, therefore, with the viewer who watches the painting. It can be guessed that she has her hands folded, a classic pose in this type of Renaissance portrait. In addition, in his gesture, we can see a certain innocence but also attention to the person he is observing.

We can see that on her forehead, she wears a small jewel, like a necklace, around her head, which gives personality to the young woman. She undoubtedly belongs to the wealthy class of Milanese society (the picture was painted during Da Vinci’s stay in the Italian city of Milan).

There are small details that explain what was going through Da Vinci’s mind at that time. For example, his interest in optics and in how light worked on objects. If we look at the model’s left cheek, which is the exposed one, we can see slight echoes of red in the curve of the jaw.

It is a reflection of the dress of the same color, an effect that occurs when an intense light falls directly on a colored surface, creating reflections that can permeate nearby objects or, in this case, the face of the young woman.

That dress is another crucial point of the painting. We can observe some bows and gray strips of a vaporous texture. Although it does not reach the virtuosity that Flemish artists would display, Da Vinci’s work with the red cloth is more than remarkable, and its richness in craft is a clear indication of the high social status of the person being portrayed. Also, the necklace, a tailored ribbon, is another added value that reflects his place in the social hierarchy.

Da Vinci’s mastery of using shadows allows La Belle Ferronière to show much more pronounced modeling, thanks to the contrast of the luminous face with a dark background in which nothing is visible. The absence of a landscape or anything behind the model places one hundred percent of the viewer’s attention on the young woman portrayed.

There is an obvious parallel, or echo, between La Gioconda and Lady with an Ermine. However, in the case of this painting, the absence of the technique of sfumato (something that Da Vinci had not begun to explore, or at least to capture in his works) has caused that today the portrait is below in terms of popularity.

Venus De Milo-How She Might Have Looked

The unexpected discovery of one of the most famous statues in history

*Venus de Milo (*Between 150 and 125 BC) attributed to Alexandros of Antioch. 204 cm. Louvre Museum, Paris, France

The Venus de Milo has the incongruous distinction of being one of the most well-known objects in art and yet it remains an enigma.

The story of the statue’s discovery is shrouded in romantic mystique, and historians can only speculate on how she might have looked in her original form.

And yet the Venus de Milo continues to engross those who spend time looking at her. Carved in marble, partially nude, and wearing an inscrutable expression on her face — perhaps one of confidence — her story is a remarkable one.

An unexpected discovery

Sometimes known also as Aphrodite of Milos, the Venus de Milo was carved in marble sometime between 150 and 125 BC. The circumstance of the sculpture’s original creation is a mystery, but it is known that at some point it found itself interred in a small cavern or niche on the Greek island of Milos and left for hundreds of years.

Then, in the spring of 1820, a farmer by the name of Yorgos Kentrotas was roaming the rugged countryside in search of stones to use as building materials, when he stumbled upon a sealed chamber in a wall. Removing some of the stones, he found this antique treasure within its depths.

The statue was considerably damaged: split into several parts with its arms missing and a fractured plinth. Moreover, unbeknownst to those who first saw her, she had lost her original decorative colouration — since the sculpture was probably painted in vivid colours and adorned with jewellery as was the custom at the time.

For many years, it was believed to have been created by the great Greek sculptor Praxiteles. But as the years passed, more evidence was uncovered, namely an inscription found on a fragment of the plinth giving the name of Alexandros of Antioch — which was lost shortly after its arrival at the Louvre in 1821.

Its journey to the museum in Paris began when a French naval officer named Olivier Voutier anchored his ship in the harbour at Milos. Going ashore to hunt for antiquities near an old theatre, he noticed the local farmer Kentrotas had found something interesting.

The Frenchman felt certain that the sculpture was important and convinced his local vice-consul to buy it. They paid a good price for it. The statue came to France in 1821 and was given to King Louis XVIII, who gave it to the Louvre Museum, and there it remains today.

An extreme posture

Two distinct features of the Venus de Milo give the sculpture its memorable and inimitable charge.

The first is the extreme contrapposto posture, which describes the way the figure’s weight is shifted onto one standing leg. This is what gives the whole statue its natural “S-curve”.

In the case of the Venus de Milo, the twist of the hips and the kink in the left leg are unusually pronounced. Look again at the statue and let your eyes explore the shape of the form suggested by the beautifully modelled drapery of her robe.

The second aspect is the low waistline of the robe, which appears to be almost slipping off her hips, giving the sculpture more than a hint of eroticism.

It is this eroticism that provides the basis for the most likely identification of the statue as Venus, the goddess of Love — the Roman counterpart to Aphrodite.

How she might have looked

The Venus de Milo was originally found in several pieces, making her exact original form a matter of conjecture. The three main pieces that were recovered from Milos — the nude upper torso, a draped lower body, and a section of the right hip — seemed to fit together without controversy.

The fact of her missing arms prompted the local Milos farmer to continue to dig. He later found a hand holding an apple, two herms — square stone pillars with a carved head on top — and a further fragment of an upper arm.

A proposed restoration of the Venus de Milo (1916) by Adolf Furtwängler incorporating the arm fragments found with the statue at the time of its discovery.

Various artists and historians proposed how these parts might be assembled to form the complete statue, with some debate as to whether the stone pillars with heads on top were connected with the Venus statue.

In the latter years of the 19th century, the German archaeologist and art historian Adolf Furtwängler sketched out what might be the most convincing configuration, in which the figure’s left arm is resting on an unadorned pillar, with her hand resting on the pillar holding an apple.

The hand holding the apple, carved from the same Parian marble as the figure, seemed to confirm the identity of Aphrodite or Venus. In the Classical beauty contest known as the Judgement of Paris, Paris gave the prize of the golden apple to Aphrodite, the goddess of love, beauty and fertility, who in return promised to give him the beautiful Helen of Troy, thereby triggering the Trojan War.

Furtwängler rejected the idea that the herms were part of the original form, arguing that the aesthetic effect of such an arrangement would be “distinctly unpleasing”.

Given the inability of historians to agree upon the sculpture’s original form, the Louvre made the decision to show the Venus de Milo without its arms or an adjacent pillar. Two centuries later, standing alone yet somehow indomitable, the sculpture continues to be an all-important part of the museum’s collection.

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This Mythical Painting Still Puzzles Art Historians

Dare you enter this enigmatic scene?

An Allegory of Venus and Cupid (1540–1545) by Bronzino. Oil on panel. 146 x 116 cm. National Gallery, London,

A painting like this deserves to be looked at for more than just a few moments. It is at once a puzzle, a warning and work of eroticism.

At the centre of the image, a boyish youth clasps a woman’s breast whilst leaning forward to kiss her. They are, in fact, mother and son.

Several features about this painting are immediately striking. The way the boy — Cupid — sticks out his buttocks provocatively; the unadulterated smile on the lips of the woman; or what about the young girl in green behind, under whose dress it’s possible to see the scaly body of a lizard?

As for what the painting is trying to say, historians have long debated the exact meaning — and the conclusions are striking.

Mother and son kiss

The two central figures are both naked. They are supposed to be Venus and her son Cupid.

The two figures are locked in an embrace, with Venus coyly stealing one of Cupid’s arrows. Their kiss is pleasurable, their desire unrestrained.

It’s possible to recognise Venus, goddess of love and beauty, by the golden apple she is holding in her left hand, given to her by Paris when he judged her to be the most beautiful of all goddesses in a contest. A pair of doves — her traditional attribute — sit at the corner of the painting.

Detail of ‘An Allegory of Venus and Cupid’ (1540–1545) by Bronzino. Oil on panel. 146 x 116 cm. National Gallery, London

Her son Cupid is shown as a winged child. His attributes are a bow, arrow and quiver. When Cupid fires his arrows, those who are hit become lovers — or occasionally, as romance can sometimes go, sworn enemies.

This strange image is made even more curious by way that the two figures are posed, with each adopting a twisted, winding posture. It is most likely an influence of the Mannerist ideal of figura serpentinata, an idealised style of depicting figures that came into fashion in the late stages of the Renaissance. Originally formulated by the 16th century art theorist Giovanni Paolo Lomazzo, who compared the figura serpentinata to a burning flame, the serpentine shape was designed to emphasise bodily movement and potency.

One further detail in the foreground that catches our eye is a laughing child who is about to throw a bunch of rose petals over them — in celebration of their liaison.

Detail of ‘An Allegory of Venus and Cupid’ (1540–1545) by Bronzino. Oil on panel. 146 x 116 cm. National Gallery, London, UK

But look very closely and you’ll notice the laughing child is actually stepping on a twig of thorns and has pierced his foot. It is thought the child symbolises Foolish Pleasure or Folly — representing the lack of wisdom in the central characters.

And so, the meaning of this complex painting starts to become clear…

Love with a sting in the tail

It’s hard to look past the overt eroticism of this painting, most especially in the way Cupid grasps Venus’ breast and nipple. The painting was probably made at the request of the Florentine ruler Duke Cosimo de’ Medici. It is thought that he commissioned the artist, Bronzino, and had the painting sent on to King Francis I of France as a gift.

Notoriously lecherous in his appetites, the King of France would have taken pleasure in the conspicuous eroticism of the work, as well as the erudite puzzle it presented.

So, what is the deeper meaning?

It is thought that the whole painting is an allegory on the dangers of unbridled desire.

Take the girl in green with the scaly body hidden beneath her dress, for instance. She leans forward, proffering a sweet honeycomb in her right hand — whilst behind her back a long winding tail has a scorpion’s barb at its end. This dual-nature represents Deceit, or else the double-edged nature of love: pleasure and pain.

The other figures in the painting similarly emphasise the conflicts that might accompany unchaste romance.

In the upper section, an old man who represents Father Time (notice the hourglass on his shoulder) sweeps a rich undulating blue fabric across the scene. It is thought that the gesture implies the fleeting nature of time and how things may come to an end at any moment.

This interpretation is given added meaning by the figure shown opposite Time, who has eyeless sockets and a mask-like face, who is thought to signify Oblivion — the eternal nothingness that may face us after death.

The subject of death seems even more present when we turn our attention to the figure below on the left side of the painting. This hell-raised woman has been painted with extraordinary vigour.

It is believed she is a representation of Jealousy, or possibly Suffering with her expression of anguish. Alternatively, this tormented figure might represent the ravaging and sometimes deadly effects of syphilis — a disease that had reached epidemic levels during the 1500s, especially in France.

And so, when seen altogether, this claustrophobic painting begins to lose some of its salaciousness and take on a somewhat darker, chilling tone.

The unpleasant consequences of illicit or wanton lust are revealed like a riddle solved, encouraged by Folly and aided by Deceit.

Dare you enter this pleasure palace?