Art Institute Gallery Tour
The Art Institute offers free guided tours every day. This one introduced us to intriguing works of art in sections of the museum that we hadn’t seen before. The docent was a former art history professor, and we learned quite a lot.
We started in a gallery with paintings by European Old Masters. One wall held an impressive collection of paintings by El Greco. Coincidentally, we had just seen many other El Greco masterpieces in Madrid and Toledo. The painting we focused on was The Feast in the House of Simon. In the foreground, with their backs to the viewer, are the wealthy couple who commissioned the painting. At the rear, Mary Magdalene anoints Jesus’ head with perfume. The perspective of the painting is unusual. Most of us are used to linear perspective, where objects that are further away appear smaller, and lines converge at a vanishing point in the distance. Instead, this painting seems to have reverse perspective, where lines converge in space toward the viewer. The docent explained that El Greco learned this reverse perspective while training as an icon painter in his homeland of Crete. He showed us a classic icon from the 15th century with similar reverse perspective.
The next stop was another gallery with European art, where we studied a diptych from 13th-century Constantinople. It was painted on two small wooden panels connected with a hinge, probably as a portable altarpiece for a private home. We talked about the rich pigments, the gold leaf (particularly for the halos), and the piercing gaze of each painted face, as if the religious figure were staring at the viewer instead of vice versa.
Next we went way back in time to ancient Egypt, and way back in space to the gallery of Egyptian art, in the basement at the other end of the museum. We looked a “mummy portrait,” a painting of the deceased person that covered the face of the entombed body. We were surprised by how life-like this portrait was, compared to the stylized face on King Tut’s burial mask that we had just seen in Asheville. The arresting gaze of the man in this portrait, and other Fayum portraits like it, may have been the inspiration for the piercing eyes of the religious icons painted later by European artists.
We also looked at a statue of the Egyptian goddess Isis, with her son Horus on her lap and the sun like a halo on her head. This image must have resonated with early Christians because many icons portrayed the Virgin Mary and the Child Jesus in a similar way. Such interesting artistic connections, spanning a millennium.
