Art Appreciation 101

On Monday this week, in the absence of my wife and no longer armed with a Corvette weekend to occupy my time, I did some scouting of things cultural. Now, you say "You John, doing something cultural?" Yes, I know I tend to spell 'Kulture with a K', but this town literally is crawling with highbrow things to do, so I decided to throw myself into a brand new pond in my old age.

Besides, on Mondays it's open for Free Admission, as a stipulation in the Ringling Last Will and Testament, granting free access to the people of Florida when he donated these works of art. That guy standing next to the painting is a docent, who guides people through all 21 galleries of the John and Mabel Ringling Museum of Art. For a docent, he was pretty decent and didn't talk down to us even as he could have - instead he educated us as to periods of art, and the artists that Ringling collected. And those were artists I actually had heard of, being a liberal arts graduate and all around bon vivant.

Velazquez, Van Dyck, Gainsborough, and perhaps most well known Rubens (he's that guy that paints all those BBW's). Then there was the courtyard, which was full of early twentieth-century bronze and stone casts of Classical, Renaissance and Baroque sculptures. Now, I really did learn some stuff, like how early paintings had to show halos around the heads of religious luminaries since the people were generally uneducated but venerated religious icons. How early painters had difficulty in painting people to proper scale in still life tableaus and how it took perhaps two hundred years from the Classical to the Renaissance period to develop a more realistic depth of field to separate background from foreground.

I am, last but not least, a student of background, which probably explains that third "art appreciation" photo showing what had to be the most exciting object d'art in the place. Too bad I didn't get her name, but then again she didn't hear the shutter trip, so my best lines went unused. If you want to know more, I'd suggest www.Ringling.org as an appropriate link. The John & Mabel Ringling Museum of Art is The State Art Museum of Florida, under the auspices of The Florida State University. As you'll recall from earlier blogs, both my daughter and my money went to Florida State.