To help you understand how we apply the principles of Smarthistory video production, we have annotated two of our videos. Our next lesson covers the technical side of editing videos in Screenflow.
The Seated Scribe, 4th or 5th Dynasty, c. 2500 B.C.E., Old Kingdom Egypt, painted limestone, rock crystal, copper, wood, 53.7 x 44 x 35 cm (Musée du Louvre) Speakers: Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Steven Zucker. See the original, unannotated video here.
Pablo Picasso, Gertrude Stein, 1905-6, oil on canvas, 100 x 81.3 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York). Speakers: Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Beth Harris. See the original, unannotated video here.
Egypt: Seated Scribe
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:06] We’re in the Egyptian collection in the Louvre in Paris. We’re looking at the “Seated Scribe.” This goes back to the Old Kingdom.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:13] This is more than 4,000, almost 5,000 years old. And I think what draws people to this relatively small sculpture is how lifelike it is, given how old it is.
Dr. Zucker: [0:25] It’s painted, which adds to its lifelike quality.
Dr. Harris: [0:28] That was not unusual for ancient Egyptian sculpture, although the amount of pigment and coloration that survives here is rather unique.
Dr. Zucker: [0:35] With a few exceptions, the sculpture is painted limestone. The exceptions are the nipples, which are wooden dowels, and the eyes.
Dr. Harris: [0:42] The eyes are incredibly lifelike.
Dr. Zucker: [0:46] That’s because they’re made of 2 different types of stone. Crystal, which is polished on the front, and then an organic material is added to the back that functioned both as an adhesive but also to color the iris. There’s also an indentation carved to represent the pupil.
[1:00] All of this comes together to create a sense of alertness, a sense of awareness, a sense of intelligence that is quite present. It collapses the 4,500 years between when the sculpture was made and today.
Dr. Harris: [1:11] He’s not idealized the way that we would see a figure of a pharaoh. The Egyptians considered pharaohs to be gods, and would never have represented the pharaoh in this relaxed, cross-legged position, and with the rolls of fat that help make him more human.
Dr. Zucker: [1:27] He looks so relaxed, almost like he’s just exhaled.
Dr. Harris: [1:30] That’s true. But there is also a real formality here. He’s very frontal. He’s meant to be seen pretty much exclusively from the front, and there’s almost a complete symmetry to his body.
Dr. Zucker: [1:42] The exception being his hands. His right would have originally held a brush or a pen, and his left holds a rolled piece of papyrus that he’s writing on, which is interesting because it suggests the momentary, even though the Egyptians are so concerned with the eternal.
[1:59] You said a moment ago that he is intended to be seen from the front, but that raises an interesting question. Was this sculpture meant to be seen at all?
Dr. Harris: [2:11] Well, he was found in a necropolis, southwest of Cairo, in a place called Saqqara, an important Old Kingdom necropolis. We don’t know his exact findspot, so we don’t know as much about him as we would have if we did, but you’re right. This is a funerary sculpture meant for a tomb.
Dr. Zucker: [2:21] We would know more about him if the base on which he sits was not cut. It probably would have originally included his name and his titles.
Dr. Harris: [2:29] What’s interesting is that the hieroglyph for “scribe” is quite pictographic and shows a writing instrument — a pen — a pot of water, and cakes of pigment. Scribes were very highly regarded in Egyptian culture. They were one of the very few people who could read and write.
[2:48] It’s impossible to know how much of a portrait this is because we don’t have this man in front of us. We don’t know the degree to which this sculpture resembles him.
Dr. Zucker: [2:56] The sculpture has been carved with real delicacy. The fingers are long and elegant. The fingernails are carefully inscribed.
Dr. Harris: [3:03] He has very pronounced high cheekbones.
Dr. Zucker: [3:06] The only clothing he wears is a kilt, which has been painted white. His skin is a pretty rich red-brown, and the hair and the rims of his eyes are accentuated with black.
Dr. Harris: [3:15] It is wonderful to have this sculpture reaching out to us from more than 4,000 years ago.
[3:20] [music]
Picasso: Gertrude Stein
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:04] We’re in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, looking at Pablo Picasso’s portrait of Gertrude Stein.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:11] Standing in this gallery, filled with paintings from the early 20th century, this really fits in, but the problem with that is that we don’t recognize necessarily how revolutionary this painting seemed in 1906 when Picasso completed it.
Dr. Zucker: [0:23] There’s a famous anecdote that goes with this painting. Stein was an important collector. She was a poet and a writer. She asked Picasso to paint her portrait. According to Stein, she visited Picasso’s studio 90 times.
Dr. Harris: [0:35] At the end of months of sitting, he actually scraped away what he had done on the face and came back to it later. Although he spent 90 sittings, the face itself was not painted with Stein in front of him.
[0:46] The story that you alluded to is that when people saw this portrait, they said, “This looks nothing like her.” Picasso is said to have responded, “Everybody thinks she is not at all like her portrait, but never mind, in the end, she will manage to look just like it.”
Dr. Zucker: [1:00] Which is about the primacy of the portrait, the idea that the portrait will live on.
Dr. Harris: [1:05] A portrait by the great artist Pablo Picasso of Gertrude Stein, this is the way that we remember her.
Dr. Zucker: [1:10] Which calls into question, what is the function of a portrait? Is it likeness? This particular portrait may look more like an ancient Iberian sculpture, one of the archaic figures that Picasso was then studying, than Gertrude Stein’s own facial features.
Dr. Harris: [1:23] Which is an odd thing because a portrait for hundreds of years was about likeness. This is not about how she looked, but it is very much a portrait of her presence.
Dr. Zucker: [1:32] What a powerful presence. She’s got this great sense of gravity. That mask-like face seems to come towards us.
Dr. Harris: [1:38] She leans forward. Her body is in the shape of a pyramid, so you do have all that weight at the bottom of the canvas.
Dr. Zucker: [1:45] We know that Picasso was looking at several other earlier portraits, notably Ingres’ “Portrait of Monsieur Bertin” at the Louvre as well as two other portraits that Stein owned, one by Cézanne of his wife and one by Matisse of his wife.
Dr. Harris: [1:59] Clearly, Picasso has borrowed from all three of those paintings. There are aspects of them that inform his painting of Gertrude Stein. This is really radically different, especially that mask-like face, the disjunction between the eyes, the flatness of the plane of her face. These are things that don’t look right.
Dr. Zucker: [2:19] The sitter felt that this was the truest portrait that had ever been made of her.
Dr. Harris: [2:24] In fact, she wrote, “For me, it is I, and it is the only reproduction of me which is always I.” Although this isn’t about a likeness, she felt that this portrait really represented her.
Dr. Zucker: [2:35] Stein also asserted that she did in words what Picasso would do in paint. Stein was looking at words as if they were the kind of material that could be constructed and reconstructed as one places strokes on a canvas.
Dr. Harris: [2:47] Speaking of strokes on a canvas, we really see evidence of the artist’s work here. There are places where the paint is applied very thickly, for example in her fingers, even though they still seem very abstracted and unfinished. There are also places — for example, around the shawl that has a clasp around her neck — there’s areas of paint that are very thin, where we can almost see the canvas underneath.
Dr. Zucker: [3:09] There’s a tension here between Picasso’s love of illusionism and his interest in beginning to undo that illusion.
Dr. Harris: [3:16] The conventions of illusionism that had come down in European art beginning in the Renaissance just didn’t speak to the late 19th and early 20th century, and so this searching for a new visual language, both in African art and in ancient art or pre-classical art, where figures are represented very abstractly. This finding in abstraction [of] force and power and alternative language.
Dr. Zucker: [3:43] Look at the way that he’s finding the angles of the forms of her face, almost as if it’s a kind of architecture.
Dr. Harris: [3:49] The right side of her face seems to be at a sharp angle to the front of her face because of how stark that shadow is on the right side.
Dr. Zucker: [3:57] The left side of her face is further away from us. Her face is turned even though we have as much access to the left eye as we do to the right.
Dr. Harris: [4:05] The eyes are also very much abstracted. They’re not given a lot of expressiveness.
Dr. Zucker: [4:11] It’s as if the eyes are behind that mask.
Dr. Harris: [4:13] Portraits often have things in them that help us to identify the interests and personality of the sitter. If we think about Manet’s “Portrait of Zola,” for example, we have his library, images of art that he was interested in in the background, but here the background is sketchy.
[4:29] It’s even hard to make out the left side of that chair. It is a painting that refuses to give us the information that portraits generally are supposed to give.
[4:39] [music]
