Delacroix often took his subjects from literature but added much more by using color to create an effect of pure energy and emotion that he compared to music. He also showed that paintings can be done about present-day historical events, not just those in the past (Wood, 217). He was at home with styles such as pen, watercolor, pastel, and oil. He was also skillful in lithography, a new graphic process popular with the Romantics. His illustrations of a French edition of Goethe's "Faust" and Shakespeare's "Hamlet" still stand as the finest examples in that medium.
Delacroix' painting "Massacre at Chios" is precisely detailed, but the action is so violent and the composition so dynamic that the effect is very disturbing (Janson, 678). With great vividness of color and strong emotion he pictured an incident in which 20,000 Greeks were killed by Turks on the island of Chios. He showcased the underdogs, though painting detail on the fancy uniform of the Turk militiaman who is intermixed with overlapping figures of traumatized victims.
These artworks by Vermeer, Canaletto and Delacroix were described, because they clearly demonstrate the changing periods of outlook from the age of Enlightenment to that of Romanticism.
In the period of Realism during the late 1700s and into the 1800s, imagination was put aside for a view of the world as it actually existed. Physical detail was emphasized by writers and artists. People and scenes were described and painted in greater detail than ever before, and the depictions included very trivial and irrelevant information. The detail was not only visual but often appealed to all five senses. Ordinary characters were displayed. Unusual characters or heroic characters, or characters that stood out in some way, were not as common as in previous literature and art. Ordinary people doing ordinary things, such as businessmen, janitors, nurses and street vendors were most important (Art: A World History, 458).
Artists saw themselves as a product of the times. Changes in artistic style, subject, composition, technique, and movement are a result in the main of changes in the social and economic environment in which the artist lives. Gustave Courbet was born in Ornans in 1819, the son of a wealthy bourgeois farmer of peasant origin. He was thus much aware of the class divisions that existed in rural France at that time. In 1839 he went to Paris to study art and found that the whole of Europe was experiencing revolution. In 1850 he produced the first of his great masterpieces, "Burial at Ornans." This painting shocked critics and viewers because of its huge size and ugly themes (Perl, 225).
Burial at Ornans," which is 21 feet by 10 feet; strongly impacts those who see it for the first time. During Courbet's time, paintings of this size were reserved for religious or mythological subjects, not a peasant funeral in rural France (Hoving, 229). The composition contains about 40 people, with the male and female figures separated according to the custom of that time. It is a sad painting with the only bright color seen in the clergymen's vestments and women's scarves. The strength of the people forces the viewer to concentrate on the figures, with the open grave only partly in view. This was not the romanticized ideal of peasant life that people were used to. It confirmed the troubled times and clearly faced reality. The grim faces of the peasants show their hard lives and grief. This shows how Realism can turn a commonplace event into an historical one.
In the mid-1800s the cultural scene once again entered a new phase of experimentation and change. Modernist literature rejected19th-century traditions and wanted to disturb their readers with complex and difficult new forms and styles. In fiction, the accepted chronological story was upset by Joseph Conrad, Marcel Proust, and William Faulkner, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf attempted new ways of tracing the flow of characters' thoughts in their stream-of-consciousness styles. In poetry, Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot completely altered the earlier forms of their art (Eysteinsson).
The modernist art movement is closely associated with the term modern art, both characterized by a departure from emphasis on literal representation. With invention of photography, the realistic approach to painting and sculpture became unnecessary, and artists began looking for new ways to visualize nature as well as new materials and function of art. Artists entered a new realm of freedom of expression and experimentation. They believed that art should stem from color and form and not from depiction of the natural world. Paul Cezanne is often considered the "Father of Modernism." From his search for underlying structure of the composition came Cubism and then Abstraction. Cezanne's use of color as tone and the formal elements...
Art of classical antiquity, in the ancient cultures of Greece and Rome, has been much revered, admired, and imitated. In fact, the arts of ancient Greece and Rome can be considered the first self-conscious and cohesive art movements in Europe. Style, form, execution, and media were standardized and honed to the point where aesthetic ideals were created and sustained over time. The art of classical antiquity in Greece and Rome
Renaissance Sculpture The division of Renaissance art into three distinct periods began with Giorgio Vasari, the great Florentine art historian and chronicler of the lives of the artists. Vasari concluded, based on his universally accepted perception of Michelangelo as "Il Divino," that Renaissance art reached its most sublime expression in the works of Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci. However, some modern art historians wonder how valid or valuable this categorization and
(Mulcahy and Wyszomirski 139) However, this is not art for art's sake; it is art for our children's sake. If one has to put on the back burner that Picasso was a cubist for the sake of challenging a child to look at a painting and just experience it, than so be it. The very act of simply experiencing the art of an artist can have profound effects on the
The dress is refined, but oversized and ill-fitting as befits a young boy. Here too, an Americanism is no doubt being added. Rather than make Henry Pelham appear too formal, as the scion of some great house in a European portrait, Copley reminds us that his subject is quite young and probably wearing hand-me-downs, or else some cost-saving garment into which he will eventually grow. It is a budding
Western Art and Christianity During the past millennium, Western art has been heavily influenced by Christianity. Art is an extension of the many complex thoughts and images that swim within an artist's mind. Because many Western artists have traditionally been raised in a Christian environment, it is difficult for their religious beliefs to be fully separated from their artwork, and oftentimes it is embraced in the works, or a patron has
His experiments in anatomy and the study of fluids, for example, absolutely blew away the accomplishments of his predecessors…the sheer range of topics that came under his inquiry is staggering: anatomy, zoology, botany, geology, optics, aerodynamics, and hydrodynamics among others. (Renaissance 2010). Da Vinci questioned the prevailing faith in the written word of the bible and instead sought knowledge of nature in nature. He simply observed the physical world and
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