During the nineteenth century, the Pre-Raphaelites brought new vigor to Renaissance art: an art that combined a sense of humility and spirituality with the humanist idea that man was the center (and measure) of all things.  Stylistically, Renaissance art likewise reflected a mixture of tradition and innovation.  It united the flatness and luminosity of medieval icons with the depth, volume, play of light and richness of the unparalleled artistic innovations of Giotto, Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci.

If any artist can do that for our times, it is Csaba Markus.  His feminine figures evoke the stylized beauty of Botticelli’s Venus: full, elongated bodies, elegant necks; expressive almond eyes, sensual mouths. Their bodies combine the flat, beautiful, ornamental iconography of the early Renaissance - found in the works of Giotto - with the volume and sensuality of the high Renaissance and Baroque - visible in the works of Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci and Titian.

Nonetheless, Markus’ painting, like that of the Pre-Raphaelites, does not merely reproduce Renaissance styles and themes. It is also a pastiche: a way of mixing art historical allusions to induce viewers to think about their times.  As the works of the Pre-Raphaelites did for the Victorians, so Markus’ art has the paradoxical capacity to make the Renaissance feel simultaneously distant and illegible and fresh, immediate, challenging and thought provoking for our times.

Dr.Claudia Moscovici

Assistant Professor of Humanities and Rhetoric. BA, Princeton University; MA, PhD, Brown University