The Museum Without Walls

Dürer's greatest achievement in printmaking were the three engravings of 1513-14, regarded as his masterpieces. "Melancolia I" is by far the most complex of the three master engravings. The winged genius, representing the figure of Melancholy, rests her head on her hand, in a reflective pose, and holds a compass. Around her are geometric shapes, including a sphere and a giant polyhedron, along with scattered woodworking tools. The tools are drawn from the field of measuring and building, in other words, architecture.

Zárraga was arguably the first 20th-Century artist to explore the world of soccer. "Futbolistas en el llano" freezes a rapid sequence of events: the man in the far distance is looking at the ball he just kicked while one of the defenders falls under the body of the player wearing a green shirt attempting a header goal. The tall keeper rejects the ball with his two fists. The pyramidal construction Zárraga employs here —- one of his favorite compositional structures —- underlines the strong diagonals of the pink goal keeper. Sun rays increase the tension and suspense in this masterfully crafted mise-en-scène.

Vincent van Gogh was fascinated by the vast fields of wheat that stretched above Auvers-sur-Oise, a town north of Paris where he lived during the last two months of his life. He painted many views of these fields in his last days, including this landscape with a reaper cutting the golden grain while the stacked sheaves recede toward a village and the distant blue hills. He sought to express what was for him the essential character of the landscape, but also to "disentangle," as he once put it, what he understood and felt of nature's "expression and soul"—to evoke "a more exalting and consoling nature than a single brief glance at reality … can let us perceive."

In order to imbue a sense of order and permanence to his images of momentary events, Vermeer carefully bound together the pictorial elements of his canvases. In the "Astronomer," two distinct realities of the work are brought into relation, its perspective construction (which creates illusion of depth) and the painting's rectangular flatness, the so-called picture plane. In the diagram to the right, we can see that the geometrical center of the painting (indicated by the point where the two yellow diagonals cross) and the vanishing point (indicated by the point where all the light gray perspective orthogonals meet), in fact, fall precisely on the same point.

In 1347, following a particularly long siege, the city of Calais was obliged to surrender to Edward III, the King of England. Six burghers were willing to sacrifice their lives and accepted to hand over the keys of the city to the King. Rodin said of this sculpture: "It is the subject itself which (…) imposes a heroic vision of all six figures being sacrificed to one single communicative expression and feeling. The pedestal is triumphal, it has the rudiments of an arch of triumph intended to uphold, not a quadriga, but human patriotism, self-abnegation and virtue."

Relying on draftsmanship more than on texture or color, in "Paris Street; Rainy Day" Caillebotte created a composition that combines apparent spontaneity with precise choreography. Each well-dressed couple or individual strolls in a different direction, avoiding eye contact; no narrative incidents result from their random proximity. Yet the figures do relate to one another formally, for their glances, postures, and relative sizes all complement and reinforce the converging diagonals that dictate the painting’s perspective.

In this quintessially Romantic painting a lonely figure on a mountaintop confronts nature in astonished reverence. Friedrich's figures habitually turn their backs to gaze into the horizon or stare from windows with rapt attention. His Wanderer, frock-coated and stick in hand, has climbed to a rocky peak above swirling mountain mists; the viewer looks with his eyes, the angle of vision being exactly aligned to their level in the picture space. The foreground, the conventional plateau to give the viewer a fix on the subject, has been entirely dispensed with.

The so-called "Hundred Guilder Print" is Rembrandt's most famous etching. It illustrates passages from Chapter 19 of the Gospel of St. Matthew. According to the text, Christ had come from Galilee, a large multitude following, and he began to preach, healing the sick. The crowd look to the Lord, waiting for their turn to be healed. Near the center, to the left, a young mother with a child advances to Jesus. St. Peter interferes, restraining her, but Christ makes a counter-movement. It is the moment when he says the famous words: "Suffer the little children, and forbid them not, for of such is the kingdom of heaven."

The size and delicate decoration of this bottle are remarkable; few such large or painterly examples of enameled glass are known. The polychrome phoenix on the neck soars above the central scene of mounted warriors wielding maces, swords, and bows. The warriors might well be participants in a horsemanship exercise, outfitted as combatants from the rival Ilkhanid and Mamluk states. Apart from its astonishing technological accomplishment, evidenced by its size and variety of colors, the most extraordinary aspect of the bottle is its figural decoration.

As a musician, the gypsy in this painting is an artist; as a traveler, she has no clear social place. Lost in the self-absorption that is deep, dreaming sleep, she is dangerously vulnerable -— yet the lion is calmed and entranced. "The Sleeping Gypsy" is formally exacting —- its contours precise, its color crystalline, its lines, surfaces, and accents carefully rhymed. Rousseau plays delicately with light on the lion's body.

Vedder's pilgrim, in his ragged robes, appears to have made a long and difficult journey through an inhospitable wilderness in the hope of hearing some great truth from the implacable statue. His success is uncertain, for the skull of another questioner lies in the foreground, a mute witness to the occasion. Broken columns, remnants of human activity, lie strewn in ruins, almost buried by the shifting sands. Vedder wrote that in this painting, he sought to portray the hopelessness of man before the laws of nature; to the modern viewer, it also resonates with the uncertainty that accompanied the Civil War. r.

Mummy portraits or Fayum mummy portraits is the modern term given to a type of naturalistic painted portraits on wooden boards attached to mummies from the Coptic period. They belong to the tradition of panel painting, one of the most highly regarded forms of art in the Classical world. In fact, the Fayum portraits are the only large body of art from that tradition to have survived. They usually depict a single person, showing the head, or head and upper chest, viewed frontally. In terms of artistic tradition, the images clearly derive more from Graeco-Roman traditions than Egyptian ones.

Picasso painted this large work in the summer of 1902 in Barcelona. It is one of the most important items of his Blue Period, when the tragic mood of monochrome blue and bluish-green came to determine the whole structure of his paintings. In its static, symbolic nature, the composition recalls monumental religious art, summoning up direct associations with representations of the meeting of the Virgin Mary and the ageing Elizabeth, mother of John the Baptist, and with the ascetic figures of medieval mourners. The women seem to form a human arch, an architectural entrance to a mysterious, cosmically endless world.

Nowadays, when Memorial Day for most Americans means a trip to the beach or mall, it's useful to remind ourselves that it originated as a day of mourning for those soldiers, North and South, who had fallen in a bloody civil war. Peter Fendi was an Austrian, not an American, artist -- and a minor one at that -- and had been dead a couple of decades before the Battle of Gettysburg took place. But some aspects of war know not the restrictions of time or place, and Fendi manages to capture here perhaps the most poignant moment of any conflict -- the one in which someone has to tell someone else that a loved one has perished.

Daumier's fame rests not upon his paintings, but as a graphic artist and illustrator, the great satirist of his age and pioneer in the techniques of lithography. Appreciated by only a few fellow artists during his lifetime, these paintings today have the look of modern works. Consider this "Don Quixote." The Man of La Mancha has been stripped down (abstracted) to his essentials. Rosinante has been painted with a series of thick, fluid brushstrokes, comparable to those favored later by expressionists like Kokoschka. The background is simple, yet expressive in its coloring.

One of Mexico's most prolific contemporary artists, Ocampo has carried on the tradition of Hispanic surrealism with admirable flair, as evinced here in one of his many tributes to the world's first surrealist hero. Over the years he has developed a unique "metamorphic style," one characterized by sometimes wryly sardonic, sometimes evocative paintings in which detailed images are intricately woven together to create larger images, the optical illusions fading back and stepping forward as you study the pieces, notice the details, and finally recognize the large scale intention.

"The Bride of the Wind" ("Die Windsbraut" or "The Tempest"), Kokoschka's best known work, is an allegorical picture featuring a self-portrait by the artist, lying alongside his lover Alma Mahler, while a storm rages around them. Kokoschka met Mahler, then recently widowed from Gustav Mahler, in 1912. A passionate romance ensued, with the artist producing numerous drawings and paintings of her. When Alma broke off the affair in 1914 for fear of becoming "too passionately engaged," Kokoschka's expressive brushwork grew even more turbulent as his life and career took a turn for the worse.