Manhattan, 1660
oil on canvas, 20 x 42 inches, framed 28 x 50 inches
signed and dated lower right, L.F. Tantillo 2008
$30,000
Painting Description and Details
When I decided to pursue a career as a professional artist, I was determined to devote all my efforts to the visual documentation of the heritage of New York State. That was 30 years and hundreds of paintings ago. With few exceptions this theme represents the body of my work at this time. My subjects have represented every region of New York from Buffalo Harbor to Plum Island and every era from the pre-contact period of native people to the present. Up until a few years ago I focused on the upper Hudson and Mohawk regions. Recently, my interests have taken me down the Hudson to 17th century Manhattan.
Depicting the skyline of Manhattan in any time period is a daunting task. Setting an historical painting in the colonial period with no photographs and a few primitive period images to refer to complicates the project immensely. Careful and time-consuming research is required to determine even the general texture of that era. In terms of New York City, I soon discovered that Stokes’s “Iconography of Manhattan” was an invaluable source of historical reference material.
Sometime around 1670 a surveyor from Belgium named Jacques Cortelyou created a birdseye view of Manhattan. His map provides us with the only detailed contemporary image of New York City as the Dutch community of New Amsterdam. Cortelyou’s drawing, commonly referred to as “the Costello Plan”, survives to this day in a museum in Florence, Italy. Historians often debate the credibility of the Costello Plan since so many of the building sites seem to be over simplified and idealistically portrayed. The test I apply to artifacts of this type has always been; how much of it’s data agrees with later documentation. In the case of the Castello Plan I was satisfied that, for my purposes, it was generally acceptable as a reference for the layout of building lots. Although some architectural elements are out of scale or stylized, many bear up to the scrutiny of comparison with other sources.
The first challenge I faced was how to correct the Costello Plan to get it to dimensionally agree with the actual scale and street layout of modern Manhattan. I accomplished this by locating an early survey of the city made with precision instruments. I used a detailed survey of lower Manhattan produced in the late 1890s. This scaled site map was very well drawn and contained numerous property line measurements. My hope was that some of the street pattern of Dutch Manhattan had survived and would be visible in the latter map. I was pleased to discover that most of what I was looking for was there.
Once the Costello Plan was redrawn to scale I had a realistic base on which to set adjusted property lines and buildings. It’s important to note that a plan is just a footprint of an object. No matter how carefully crafted and researched this two-dimensional representation may be problems instantly present themselves when speculative buildings emerge from the ground plane.
Picturing historical buildings with little reference material is not easy. Relying on many years of architectural experience, I try to imagine what influences the environment and the individual resident would have on the overall look of a period structure. Although much of the visualizing process is conjectural, my decisions are based on closely examining factual data, no matter how fragmentary. I have always realized that it is unlikely that the end result my efforts is an absolutely accurate subject but I do feel that my work realistically conveys a credible representation of place and time.
Picturing facts is one thing but painting is something altogether different. A good painting elicits an emotional response from a viewer. It’s true that I want you to believe that what I express on canvas is historically accurate, but that is just subject matter. My goal is to make a viewer feel something about the subject. Feel what I feel. This is much more difficult to accomplish than all the research that precedes it. This is the challenge and the ultimate goal of every work I undertake. “Manhattan, 1660” is the beginning of what I hope will become an important an interesting series of paintings that capture the essence of an important chapter in the American experience.