the christmas art lectures.....

ok, so i asked for a set of 24 art lectures on dvd that i saw advertised in the new yorker sometime in early december....as a christmas gift that would entertain me as i walk the treadmill.....as well as expand my limited knowledge of painting beyond the notion of 'liking only what i would hang in my own home'......we are up to the early 1600's....and thankfully we are moving slowly away from religious art and into heroic scenes and portraits and landscapes and even portriats with landscapes/still life elements.....i have a soft spot in my heart for the madonna and child paintings......not so much because of the subject matter, but because of how the subject matter is portrayed in such a range of interpretations......take for example, the scrawny baby Jesus...popular with both Italian and Northern European painters.....this baby is painted with scanty flesh on its bones and one wonders if the painter was unfamiliar with the story and had no idea the baby would survive to adulthood....and then there is the disproportionate head baby- either too small or too big for its body.....and the non-swaddled babies......didn't the painters catch the part about Jesus wrapped in clothes.....certainly nothing in the Gospels about the baby Jesus flashing his private parts on the cold winter night.....and then there are the Mary variations......Mary as a middle-aged woman, Mary as a child, Mary with a single breast positioned under her chin so the nursing infant can be shown in the center of the composition.....though Mary is usually in blue...bright blue (UK rather than North Carolina)there is nothing in the Gospels to suggest that she wore this color on the night that the baby was delivered...and why does Mary look so calm and thoughtful when she has clearly given birth to a difficult baby who neither sleeps nor smiles (or at least on canvas).....and then there is the fact that none of these mothers and babies look the least bit Middle-Eastern.....enough of this curmudgeon rant about early art.......I suppose that this has something to do with the treadmilling.....I have walked for a solid hour each of the last 11 days.....and I have yet to feel the first bit of endorphin uplift......11 hours of walking with no afterglo? what is up with that?....a new wave of artists might find this visage worthy of a portrait....endorphin-deprived middle-aged woman talking back to art lecturer during daily treadmill work-out.....