Speaking of the Renaissance...

It's Easter and nobody wants to read about kitchen design today. So, I'm going to take advantage in the lull and run my mouth some more about the Renaissance. Indulge me.

The piece I wrote yesterday about the colorized ancient statuary got me thinking about the Italian Renaissance in general and Michelangelo Buonarroti in particular. Michelangelo sculpted his David in what was supposed to have been a commission to outfit the the Santa Maria del Fiore cathedral with a series of 12 old testament figures. The block of marble it's carved from was already on site when the guild responsible for the commission was shopping for a sculptor. Many of the greats of the time were called in to look over the marble, including Leonardo Da Vinci, but no one really wanted to work with the piece of marble in question.

Michelangelo Buonarroti was 26-years-old at the time and he convinced the guild that he deserved the commission. He got it, obviously, and spent the next two years of his life bringing his David to life.

Michelangelo worked in the Mannerist style of the High Renaissance. A key concept in Mannerism is the exaggeration of the human form to make a statement. In addition to David being rendered in a Mannerist style, he's also in a Classically Greek heroic pose. He's standing in contrapposto, his body is turned and his weight is shifted back onto his right leg. This shift back throws David's spine into an S shape and the contrapposto is why David seems to be caught in mid-movement.

Contrapposto and implying movement didn't start with Michelangelo though. Here's a Classical Greek sculpture, the Doryphoros, from 400 BC. Michelangelo and the rest of the Renaissance greats would have studied the Doryphoros and other surviving statues from antiquity. Through their studies, they could recreate and re-interpret these classical forms to make something new and fitting for their own time.

Amazing. While I was rooting around the Internet and looking for images of David, I stumbled up a website that made a point I'd never considered. The site, Michelangelo's David Correctly Oriented is the work of J. Huston McColloch, an Economics professor at the University of Ohio.

When the David was completed, its unveiling was met with a hail of popular acclaim and it never made it up onto the buttresses of the cathedral where it was intended to go. Instead, it was put on display at ground level. It remained at the entrance to Florence's Palazzo Vecchio for several hundred years.

The David is a work of unquestioned genius and it's also a pretty powerful political statement. Unlike most depictions of the story of David and Goliath,  Michelangelo's David is unique in that it shows the young man at the moment he decided to take on Goliath. David was usually shown after he'd slain the giant. So David, in contrapposto, is turning to face down his opponent. Make no mistake though, David is a political statement. Arguably, Michelangelo is using the character David to make a political point more than a religious one. David symbolizes the Florentine Republic as the Medici sought to defend themselves from the more powerful Borgias. Michelangelo's David = Cosimo Di Medici, Goliath = Caesar Borgia. Everyone who looked at this statue understood this and they also know how the biblical story turned out. No wonder it was so popular.

The David was moved into Florence's Galeria della Academia in 1873 and has been in that same position ever since. However, the view everyone sees today and the image everybody knows is actually the side view. McCulloch's site has this image of David in its proper orientation. Due to the size of the nave where the David's currently displayed, this perspective is impossible to see without the help of some digital imagery.

That certainly puts him in a whole new light. He looks menacing and poised to spring here and his movement is just not possible to see in the side view. Fascinating. David-as-Medici is easier to see from this perspective as well.

As I mentioned before, David is rendered in a Mannerist style. The Mannerists took liberties with the human form to make a point. Michelangelo made David's hands out of proportion with the rest of his body. David's hands are disproportionately large to show his intelligence and strength. Similarly, his musculature and symmetry are perfect beyond human standards. That's because David is a symbol of the best of humanity, he's not a representation of an actual person. David is an ideal. In typical Mannerist style too, his genitals are scaled down to the point where they indicate his maleness but don't distract. Mannerist, shrunken genitalia shout that this is a serious work, it's not erotica. Most amazing to me is that David's eyes are pointing in two different directions. Here's a close up of his face.

His left eye is looking into the distance, sizing up his opponent. But his right eye is looking down at the viewer. This isn't possible of course, but again it's Mannerist symbolism. David is sizing up his opponent and at the same time he's telling his audience that this is their fight too.

The David has so much going on with it that entire careers have been made out of studying it. But why is this important? Well, it's important because art doesn't happen in a vacuum. No human endeavor does. All human progress is based on the work, thoughts and ideas of the generations before. Henry Moore's work exists because Auguste Rodin's work came before. Rodin's The Thinker drew its inspiration from Michelangelo. Michelangelo carved his David because Polykleitos carved his Doryphoros. Polykleitos drew inspiration from the Egyptians and Persians. And so it goes back to the very dawn of humanity when an early Homo sapiens looked at his hand and decided to draw it on the wall of a cave.

I say this stuff important because it helps me keep my life and my ideas in perspective. The life I lead and the thoughts I have (and the life you lead and thoughts you have) are the direct result of everyone who came before me. Nothing's original. Not my life, not my thoughts, not my likes and not my dislikes. 

So to sum it all up, does this look familiar?

This is an image of Hermes Kriophoros (the ram-bearer) from 500 BC.

Now where do you think this image below might have come from?

Maybe the Renaissance missed something

I get a quarterly magazine from Sherwin-Williams called Stir. Stir is dedicated to the study of color and it's usually well worth the read when it arrives. The latest issue landed on my desk this week and on its cover was an image of a brilliantly painted statue of an ancient Greek archer. Here's the image that was on the cover.

I dove right and and I learned a thing, several things in fact. My comment yesterday about art history being your friend is true, true, true; and never more so when somebody figures something out that upsets the apple cart. That image is from a museum exhibit that's been making the rounds for the last couple of years. You can read more about it on a site called Archeology, a publication of the Archeological Institute of America.

Now, I always knew that a lot of Greek and Roman sculpture was painted. But that was always theoretical, none of the sculpture in question still had its original colors intact. The ancient Greeks and later, the Romans, made paint from finely ground pigments in an organic binder. Over the course of the last couple thousand years, those binders have broken down and the original colors have dissolved. All of that color information was lost to time. Or so I always thought.

Vinzenz Brinkmann, formerly a curator at the Glyptothek Museum in Munich, has spent the last 25 years of his life pouring over ancient statues and looking for traces of their original colors. Once he found evidence of color, he researched the pigments that would have been available at the time of the piece he was studying. He'd then recreate the piece he was studying and make it appear how it would have originally. Recreated ancient sculpture that would have looked familiar to an ancient Greek or Roman. Cool!

So take a look at the archer up there and notice the pattern of his leggings. They're kind of hard to miss now but here's a scanned image of what Brinkmann started with.

That's his thigh, and you can make out the pattern pretty well. Going from the image directly above to the fully realized, richly painted archer at the top of this post is an act of studied bravado that really thrills me. Pretty cool stuff. But wait, it gets better. Here's a colorized Greek bas relief.

And here's the scan it started with.

Here's a Greek lion that I think is really cool. I was familiar with it as a color-less stone sculpture, but to see it in authentic period colors really fires up my imagination.

Check out the detail that's carved into its face.

And finally, here's how it would have looked to someone almost 3000 years ago.

This stuff's fascinating to me. I love the opportunity to reach back through time and see the world in a way similar to how it would have appeared to ancient people. Homo sapiens hasn't really changed much since we evolved as a species and the need to decorate with color seems to be something we're hard wired to do. Western civilization stands squarely on the shoulders of these ancient people and it's a fulfilling thing to find these threads that extend back through time.

Looking at these colorized sculptures made me think of something else too. The Renaissance got a ball rolling that's still rolling. That ball is the value placed on knowledge and learning. Prior to the rebirth of making knowledge a priority, the Renaissance started out as an artistic style. The Medici of Florence wanted to reclaim the glory of Rome and they started with art and architecture. Michelangelo, DaVinci, Bernini, Raphael, Titian and all the great names from the Italian Renaissance studied the forms and styles of ancient Rome and Greece. Then they recreated it in Siena, Florence, Venice and Rome. The Renaissance was the original revival movement. Since these guys studied the ruins and remains of Greece and Rome, the sculpture they saw was white marble, sans paint. 

Here's an example that uses a bust of Caligula. The background image is what you'd expect a Roman bust to look like. The image in the foreground is what a Roman would have seen.

Michelangelo's David is in white marble because Michelangelo Buonarroti didn't know the classical Greek and Roman forms he studied were painted originally. Hmmm. Michelangelo's David is a masterpiece in every sense of the word, but imagine how different things would look today if the Renaissance masters knew about the colors the ancients used.

And had the Renaissance masters not missed the color thing, imagine how tasteful this would be with a fluorescent color scheme.

New domain name

My 500th post will appear here in four short days. In anticipation of that milestone, I'm moving to my own URL. I just made the switch tonight, so effective immediately, my new URL is www.KitchenAndResidentialDesign.com. 

Blogger's still hosting me, so there's a redirect from my old URL to my new one. The redirect is automatic, you don't need to change a thing. If you subscribe to my feed in a reader, there may be some interruption in my feed but there shouldn't be. I'll know for sure tomorrow. I post every day so if you don't see anything from me in the morning, please let me know.

If you link to me, you shouldn't have to do anything either but let me know if there's a problem.

Thanks for everything gang. Onward!

Better prices AND better service on line

Recently, I've become acquainted with an online plumbing supplier called Designer Plumbing Outlet. DPO was founded in 2003 by Eric Strand, a certified master plumber in Vail, CO. Eric wrapped up a large development project in 2003 and had overbought for the job. He was stuck with quite a bit of inventory and decided to try selling off his excess on eBay.

Eric's eBay test was a rollicking success and he realized that it really was possible to sell plumbing fixtures on line. From that early success Eric and his family moved to West Palm Beach, FL and set up shop as Designer Plumbing Outlet.

I take it pretty seriously when I make a vendor recommendation to my clients and readers, and DPO passes every test I have for a vendor. When I ask myself if I would buy from them, my answer's an unequivocal yes.

They have an enormous selection and sell brands that range from Delta to Herbeau, from Kohler to Toto, from Blanco to Grohe. If you need it, they have it. Shipping's free on all faucets with a $99 purchase too. In the world of kitchen and bath faucets, $99 is a pretty low minimum to meet.

What I like about them too is that they are owned an operated by a master plumber who takes training his reps seriously. Typically, when I talk to a phone rep from an online plumbing distributor, I know more than the rep does. This makes me feel superior, but I really don't know very much about plumbing. When it comes to something as important as plumbing fixtures, I want to buy them from someone who knows more than me. 

DPO's phone reps know what they're talking about, they know the right questions to ask and they know how to trouble shoot over the phone. Faucets, sinks and the rest of them always have supplemental parts that have to be purchased separately. It's vitally important that whoever's doing the selling understands this and knows what parts a specific job needs.

DPO's reps know what they're doing and having technical people like that to back me up means the world to me. More than that, it allows me to make a living.

So think about it. DPO has pretty much anything you could want in the world of plumbing, their prices are the best I've seen and they have free shipping on faucets over $99. What's not to love?

Reader question: Where do I look at granite slabs?

Help! I'm renovating my kitchen and want to put in natural stone (Granite or marble) countertops. Can you give me the name of a supplier who has full slabs that I can go and look at? 

I want to be able to pick my own slab and have that turned into my countertop.

Hmmm. You didn't tell me where you are so I can't recommend anyone. But if I were you, I'd do a Google search using terms like "granite fabricator + [my town]." The addition sign isn't needed any more but old habits die hard. Your instinct to look at slabs of stone before you buy anything is the correct one though.

Wanting to look at slabs is a good idea, but it's more than just a good idea. It should be the standard operating procedure of every vendor involved in your kitchen renovation. Never buy a natural stone anything from someone who won't let you look at full slabs. I don't care how tight and repetitive the granite pattern in question is, natural stone needs to be seen as full slabs. All natural stone has color variations and some of them are hugely consequential. It is impossible to get a feel for what granite looks like from a small sample. The same goes for marble, quartzite, gabbro, serpentinite, limestone, sandstone, travertine, sinter or any other dimensional stone.

I have boxes full of 4-inch by 4-inch granite and marble samples, but I use them to put palettes together. As in, "here's your cabinet wood and color, your floor tile, your wall tile, your wall colors and your granite color." I'm using those granite samples to illustrate colors, not to make decisions about patterns.

If you're renovating your kitchen, a really smart first step would be to talk to a kitchen designer. When you're interviewing the designer,  make sure that he or she is planning a field trip to a stone yard as part of the process of putting a design together for you. Any kitchen designer worth his salt has a relationship with a stone fabricator already. He or she should be willing to use that relationship to educate you first-hand about your counter options. That can only be done in a stone yard.

Scattered throughout this post are a bunch of granite samples. They are similar to the size samples that home centers use to sell granite counters. This borders on criminal activity and here's why. All of these samples are close ups cut from the slab below.

Imagine falling in love with the first or second samples only to have the slab up there show up after you've already spent several thousand dollars. Oy!