the thing i like best from them, of course, is that they are in the cusp of people learning how to paint, but not quite knowing how...thats impt, i think not because the painting afterwards was better (some of it was, some of it wasnt) but that it took us 400 years to lean how to stop painting like this, or more accurately, to value those who painted away from this...

so the small pink houses meant to be far away, or the undulating blueblack waves, or the claustrophobia of the waves, or the almost succeding but techincally failing at forced perspective, and the early paintings seems so different (more naive, thats the wrong word, because how well they fuck with how we think and how we look, how much they force us away from simple moral narratives and into something stranger, but "less well" painted) then the seinna paintings, you know that he put all of his knowledge, all of his expereince, into the love of the catherine work, and they fray towards the edges...compare how for example fra angelico frames dozens of angels in 1480, to how giatto did it in 60 years earlier and de paolo working in between...

there is something about this work, even on the web, that haunts me and i think its that space where i ask, what happened if people didnt progress past this...we wouldnt have had carvarggio but we could surrive 500 years of french painting

(maybe i like early flemish painting because its flatter--and the pure flatness of clare, esp, didnt see any body come even close till olympia--that was the triump of manets painting, was the belief that flat, surface painting, w/o any attempts towards realism or naturalism was more emotionally pure then anything else...its why olympia works better then lets say renoir, but it doesnt explain why urbino works as well as olympia, how manet didnt trump titian...)