Good & Evil

The painting created by the Mexican artist is in the exhibit “Sinners and Saints,” which is up at the University of New Mexico Art Museum.

“She was reputed to be a prostitute who found salvation. So she has her feet in both realms,” said Chip Ware, the exhibit’s curator. “It has two perspectives going on at once – the earthy and the contemplative.”

	If you go WHAT: “Sinners and Saints, 15th-19th Century Paintings in the Collection” WHEN: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Tuesdays-Fridays and 1-4 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. The museum is open today but will close until Feb. 3, although group visits may be scheduled in January. Call 277-4001. The exhibit will be up through March 11 WHERE: UNM Art Museum, Center for the Arts, UNM campus HOW MUCH: Free, but there is a suggested $5 donation

The theme of the exhibit title permitted the museum “to frame these particular works and within that it allowed me to perceive a theme of a dual nature that resides in all of us – good and evil. All of us entertain both of those poles,” Ware said.

One work in the exhibit that is drawn from the Old Testament is about Cain, who killed his brother, Abel, and was told by God to wander in the wilderness for the rest of his life. But in Lodovico Lipparini’s 1837 painting “Cain and His Family Fleeing God’s Wrath,” the sinner Cain is wary though retains a heroic quality.

“It’s an enormous physical tour de force. It’s a crowd pleaser. Their gazes are upward. The artist has lifted you up, and by the same token overwhelmed by these impressive figures,” Ware said.

His interpretation of the background of the painting is that the artist, Lipparini, was involved in the risorgimento, the 19th-century movement encouraging the unification of Italy.

“Lipparini being an academy artist in Italy is using an Old Testament narrative as reflective of contemporary politics,” Ware said.

The same artist, he said, also painted heroes of the Greek struggle for independence from Turkey, another example in art for Italians who wanted to unify their country.

Jacob Cornelisz Van Oostsanen’s painting “Virgin and Child With Saint Anne,” Ware said, shows a religious hierarchy. St. Anne is the largest figure because she is the mother of the Virgin, who in turn is the mother of the Child.

Paintings that inspired devotion seemed popular in Northern Europe in that period, he said. It was believed to have been painted about 1500.

“The style is very linear, very Northern Europe, very meticulous, very detailed versus in Italy, where there was a more painterly approach, more bold and with a much larger sense of illustration,” Ware said.

Cornelisz was a member of an artists’ workshop.

“We do know this artist worked in wood. He was a carver. So in the workshop he did more than paint. He probably made furniture. He did do woodcuts. This particular work demonstrates his mastery as a woodcarver since it’s all one piece (of wood),” Ware said. “Also, St. Anne was the patron saint of woodworkers, so he had a stake in it.”

The exhibit’s theme is also expressed in Giuseppe Marchesi’s 1740 painting “The Sacrifice of Iphigenia.”

The would-be sacrifice is based on Euripides’ play “Iphigenia at Aulis,” which derives from Greek mythology. Agamemnon, Iphigenia’s father, is leading his troops in ships to besiege Troy when the winds have calmed and they’re going nowhere. The goddess Artemis tells Agamemnon that for his ships to continue he will have to sacrifice his daughter.

“Agamemnon was disregarding his own compassion as a father and was willing to sacrifice his daughter,” Ware said.

At the last moment, Artemis intervened, sacrificing a deer instead of Iphigenia.

“She dodges the bullet. The idea is we are saved from our sins. It’s a theme that still pervades,” Ware said. “Greek narratives and ancient stories always present moral dilemmas, and they are resolved. They reflect the human condition.”

Some of the paintings in the exhibit moralize while others entertain. “The Sacrifice of Iphigenia” painting entertains, he said.

“One of the most notable things about this picture is its theatricality, seeing the action on a stage, all of the events happening in different parts of the painting that describe the narrative,” Ware said.

The exhibit has multiple purposes. One is to instruct, he said, through art history and religious history. Another is to simply highlight some of the gems in the collection.

Ware said that because the artists in the exhibit are “second tier, many of them not known to the general public, that can be an advantage when looking at the art without having to think about the artist as much, even though the labels describe who the artist was and what they did.”

Ware, the museum’s Raymond Jonson Gallery curator, chose eight works that are in the 2001 handbook “Highlights of the Collections” and several others not in the catalog. All of the paintings in the exhibit belong to the museum.

Ware said organizing the “Sinners and Saints” exhibit at the UNM Art Museum was a collaboration between himself and museum director E. Luanne McKinnon.