Week 2 - The deathly goldfinch

A few years ago I visited "het Mauritshuis" in the Hague with my brother. It is an art museum with various lovely paintings, primarily from the renaissance period. There was one painting in particular that caught my eye when we went there: "het Puttertje"(the Goldfinch), by Carel Fabricius. It is actually quite a sober painting of a goldfinch but it's beautiful in its soberness. When I got an assignment this week to remediate an existing artwork, I knew I had to go with the painting of the goldfinch.

Figure 1: het Puttertje, by Carel Fabricius

The assignment basically stated to take an existing piece of art and remediate it into a creative artefact of your own. To get started I decided to research the painting to better my understanding of it. Het Mauritshuis actually has a wonderful website giving a detailed backstory of the painting, you can find it here (Ontdek in vogelvlucht het verhaal achter Het puttertje, n. d.). Going through some analyses of the painting I found out that the goldfinch has various symbolic meanings and was used widely by renaissance painters. In the hundreds of analyzed religious paintings produced in Europe between the latter part of the Middle Ages and the late Baroque, the goldfinch is present in approximately 80 percent of them (Friedmann, 1948) .The goldfinch can be a symbol for death, the soul, sacrifice and healing, amongst other things (Friedmann, 1948; Schnier, 1952).

The reason that the goldfinch symbolizes these topics can be traced back to Christianity (Hall 1983, Falvo 2014). When Jesus was crucified, a goldfinch supposedly came by and pulled a thorn out of Jesus's thorn crown. In doing so, the little bird got blood on its face, painting it red. The bird would have the red mask forever, referencing the crucifiction of Jesus. With a history like that it becomes more clear why the goldfinch became a symbol for death and sacrifice.

I personally like to play with symbolism and it is often something that inspires me. Therefore, for remediating the painting I decided to focus on its distinctive red face and its meaning. In the original painting the bird is rather cute, even though there is a certain sadness to it as well. I wanted to make the bird more ominous, and its red mask more prevalent. After experimenting with various ways to lay the focus on the red mask I came up with the idea of making a rather ghostly bird with a literal red mask. There actually was not too much reason behind this I must admit. It was one of the ideas that came up and stuck with me. I had been wanting to experiment with smoke effects in Blender for a while now and it seemed like a good time to do it. The end result turned out like this:

I am rather happy with the final result. I want to redo the animation however and make the video a bit longer. Due to time constraints I couldn't but there is more I want to experiment with. The animation is not very smooth either and stops a bit abrupt at the moment. The smoke effect turned out to be rather easy to set up as Blender 2.8 has a bunch of settings to play with in the physics section. I had never gotten to try it out but now that I had the opportunity to do so, I'm hooked! I definitely will be experimenting with it more.

List of References

Falvo, P. G. (2014). The Madonna of the Goldfinch by Raphael: Chamera of Perception. EuroMed 2014: Digital Heritage. Progress in Cultural Heritage: Documentation, Preservation, and Protection, 706–715. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-13695-0_72

Friedmann, H. (1948). The Symbolic Goldfinch, Its History and Significance in European Devotional Art (Vol. 7). Princeton University Press. https://www.jstor.org/stable/2853687

Hall, J., Clark, K., Archer, M., & Grazzini, N. F. (1983). Dizionario dei soggetti e dei simboli nell’arte. Longanesi.

Ontdek in vogelvlucht het verhaal achter Het puttertje (no date). Available at: http://puttertje.mauritshuis.nl/nl/ (Accessed: August 21, 2021).

Schnier, J. (1952). The Symbolic Bird in Medieval and Renaissance Art. American Imago, 9(2), 89–117. https://www.jstor.org/stable/26301450?seq=4#metadata_info_tab_contents