Decorum also determined that a pictorial or sculptural subject was suitable for an architectural setting, such as Vulcan's forge over a fireplace, or that kinds of buildings are fitting in urban or rural contexts or appropriate for persons of certain status.
Liturgical functions influenced by decorum dictate the placement of paintings, mosaics and sculpture in religious buildings. Originally a literary term, it was first used in relation to the visual arts in the Renaissance in the writings of Leonardo da Vinci — According to da Vinci's theory of Decorum, the gestures which a figure makes must not only demonstrate feelings but must be appropriate to age, rank and position. So must also be dress , the setting in which the subject moves and all the other details of the composition.
Such thinking greatly influenced academic art, in particular history painting, from the Renaissance through to the nineteenth century. According to his detractors, the cardinal sin of Caravaggio — , who refused to study either ancient sculpture or Raphael 's — paintings, was the lack of decorum in subject matter and his supposed unfiltered imitation of nature.
Such an unselective imitation became a leitmotif of seventeenth-century art criticism, and Giovanni Pietro Bellori — was its most vocal exponent.
In his influential essay "L'ldea" , published as the preface to his Lives of Modern Painters, Sculptors and Architects , Caravaggio was compared to Demetrius for being "too natural," painting men as they appear, with all their defects and individual peculiarities.
A color is deep or has depth when it has low lightness and strong saturation. Opposite to deep colors in both value and saturation are pale colors, such as lead-tin yellow, and white. Some paints are inherently deep, such as natural ultramarine and alizarin crimson.
Dendrochronology or tree-ring dating is the scientific method of dating tree rings also called growth rings to the exact year they were formed in order to analyze atmospheric conditions during different periods in history. Dendrochronology is useful for determining the timing of events and rates of change in the environment most prominently climate and also in works of art and architecture, such as old panel paintings on wood, buildings, etc.
It is also used in radiocarbon dating to calibrate radiocarbon ages. Dendrochronology has become an important tool for dating panel paintings.
However, unlike analysis of samples from buildings, which are typically sent to a laboratory, wooden supports for paintings usually have to be measured in a museum conservation department, which places limitations on the techniques that can be used. In addition to dating, dendrochronology can also provide information as to the source of the panel.
Many Early Netherlandish paintings have turned out to be painted on panels of "Baltic oak" shipped from the Vistula region via ports of the Hanseatic League. Oak panels were used in a number of northern countries such as England, France and Germany. Wooden supports other than oak were rarely used by Netherlandish painters.
The support of Vermeer's Girl with a Flute is a single, vertically grained oak panel with beveled edges on the back. Dendrochronology gives a tree felling date in the early s. In photography, the distance between the nearest point and the farthest point in the subject that is perceived as acceptably sharp along a common image plane.
For most subjects, it extends one-third of the distance in front of and two-thirds of the distance behind the point focused on. Although the human eye makes use of a convex lens there is no perception of depth of field because the lens continually changes its shape in order to bring whatever it is looking at into perfect focus.
In traditional forms of visual representation, even those which encompass expansive landscapes where the depth of field is very noticeable with a modern camera, there is no true depth of field. However, by the Renaissance , painters began to systematically soften the contours and modeling of objects seen at great distances as a means of enhancing the illusion of depth.
Art historians have made much of what seems to be a deliberate variation in focus in the paintings of Vermeer, presumably because the artist used an optical device called the camera obscura , which makes use of a single convex lens. It is presumed by some that by observing certain aspects of the camera's image, whose field of depth is exceptionally restricted, the artist was inspired and emulated such effects in paintings such as The Art of Painting and The Lacemaker , where the foreground objects are so blurred that they are barely recognizable.
The words " composition " and "design" when applied to the visual arts are often used as if they were interchangeable, but each connotes something rather different.
Composition is an arranging or pushing-about of the various parts of a picture—of the items, whether they be figures, architectural features or man-made props, of main interest and of secondary and tertiary interest—in such manner that the narrative picture explains itself and tells a given story.
Design , instead is the arranging of an agreeable or significant pattern , a formal framework that complements the composition and its story. Among many other elements of design, is the disposing of the dark masses so that they will balance agreeably with the light masses. In modern commercial art, as is well known, the designer makes great care of to properly relate the dark masses of his poster or advertising placard properly related to the light masses.
Strictly speaking, while the function of composition is narrative, that of design is aesthetic. The design—the pattern , so to say—of certain of Vermeer's works is superlatively beautiful. Such excellence is the more remarkable as it is a quality that does not appear in the work of most of the other Dutch painters. Their pictures are often admirably composed; they convey their motive and their story.
They are sometimes composed subtly and elusively. Yet the ablest of these painters were uninterested, as a rule, in the underlying pattern of their compositions. An exception among them, in this regard, was Carel Fabritius — , Vermeer's fellow townsman; and this circumstance gives one reason for supposing that Fabritius may have been intimate with Vermeer.
The methods of the two men as designers, however, were not closely alike, and Vermeer excelled in both composition and design. As his subjects were usually of the simplest nature, his compositional problems were not particularly intricate. Whatever story there was to tell, this was of the shortest and simplest; the intrigue required no elaborate working out.
The design, on the other hand, of a Vermeer, is often subtle, highly original, and, in his best works, very beautiful.
Some of Vermeer's works, withal, which contain his best painting, are not remarkable in design. Thus, the weakly patterned Studio of the Czernin Collection seems to have been painted for the sheer pleasure of the painting. As Vermeer's design and composition are so original and personal, it is strange that his work was ever mistaken for that of other me— Gerrit ter Borch 's — , Pieter de Hooch — , and Gabriel Metsu — , for instance, each of whom had his own mode of composition.
Ter Borch, as a rule, employed his background merely as a foil for the human figure. He made wonderful little figures which are the whole thing in his pictures; to them the background is entirely subsidiary, delightful as it may be in its manner of staying back. In planning a composition, Ter Borch apparently at first arranged his mannikins agreeably and then bethought himself of a fitting background.
De Hooch's plan of composing was quite different from Ter Borch's. A picture presented itself to his mind as an interior composed of beautiful lines and chiaroscuro. His figures look like afterthoughts, as in the one— Dutch Interior with Soldiers —at the National Gallery, London, in which lines of the background can be seen showing through one of the principal figures.
De Hooch, in point of fact, did not do the figure at all well. He is a painter of interiors, par excellence. A detail is an individual or minute part of an item or particular. The etymology of the word involves cutting, as in nouns like "tailor" and "retail. In modern art history, the study of detail is not just a specialty investigative tool, but a fundamental part of the discipline.
In the opinion of the art historian James Elkins , this model may also betray art history's desire to "become scientific, a desire that has long infected the humanities. Art historians generally work with two types of details.
The first regards the details of a painting's narrative , that is, of specific illusory objects or parts of objects which are represented in the pictured scene. Often, such details occupy only a minimum area of the painting's surface, but for the inquiring art historian they have great consequence on the final reading of the work as a whole. For example, a tiny, barely noticeable floor tile with a Cupid scribbled upon it in Vermeer's Milkmaid , a picture which has been traditionally interpreted as a hymn to domestic virtue, may, according to one analysis, suggest covert amorous undertones.
In this case, the amorous reading would be presumably strengthened by the nearby footwarmer which, according to one art historian, was at times associated with a lover's desire for constancy and caring but may likewise have carried sexual implication since most Dutchman would have known that the warmth of the coals moved under the skirt upwards towards the lady's private parts.
The second kind of detail regards an isolated area of the painting where the object of attention is not so much an illusory object but the manner or means by which it is depicted. The most frequently analyzed details of this kind are brush handling , peculiar paint or surface qualities and stylistic components which might distinguish the technique of one painter from that of another. Various art historians have argued that "the fragment played a central role in Romantic aesthetics ; it was taken to possess a greater immediacy than the whole, as well as a privileged relation to truth.
Artworks were understood to have been muted by systems of academic conventions and skills , and by concepts such as balance , symmetry, composition and especially decorum. Details were thought to be outside such systems" 2 and thus capable of revealing the artist's innermost nature. Giovanni Morelli — was an Italian art critic and political figure who developed the technique of scholarship, identifying through minor details that, revealed artists' scarcely conscious shorthand and conventions for portraying.
The Morellian method is based on clues offered by negligible details rather than identities of composition and subject matter or other broad treatments that are more likely to be seized upon by students, copyists and imitators. Morelli's method has its nearest roots in his own discipline of medicine, with its identification of disease through numerous symptoms, each of which may be apparently trivial in itself.
Adopting Morelli's approach, one scholar has recently argued that the authorship or Vermeer's early Diana and her Companions and Christ in the House of Martha and Mary is strengthened by the fact that the toes of two females figures are painted in a similar manner.
The Morellian method of finding essence and hidden meaning in details not only influenced the course of art history but also had a much wider cultural influence. Some art historians object to the dangers of considering detail as the key, or "the last word" "that is capable of unlocking and exhausting all the meaning of all that is painted around it. In most cases it will be an emblem, a portrait, or some allusion to the 'events' of narrative history; in short, what the historian will have the duty of making the painted work 'confess' or give up will be a symbol or a referent.
This means acting as though the painted work had committed a crime, a single crime when the fact is that the painted work, pretty as a picture and good as gold, has either committed no crime at all, or, by cunningly exploiting the black magic of sight, is getting away with hundreds of unseen ones. Line , along with color, is considered the most basic elements of drawing.
Different lines have different psychological impacts depending on variations in their length, direction and weight. Diagonal lines suggest a feeling of movement or direction.
Diagonal lines create a sensation of instability in relation to gravity, being neither vertical nor horizontal, but also because they are not related in a static way to the edges of the artist's paper or canvas. They seem to tip in space. Since the periphery of the eye is sensitive to movement or to any diagonal, its calls for complete attention from the viewer which is why traffic signs designed to warn of hazards are diamond-shaped use diagonals.
In a two-dimensional composition, diagonal lines are also used to indicate depth, an illusion of perspective that pulls the viewer into the picture, creating an illusion of a space that one could move about within. Thus, if a feeling of movement or speed is desired, or a feeling of activity, diagonal lines can be used. Baroque artists in particular made use of the diagonal line to introduce energy and movement in their works. Although Vermeer's designs are generally thought of as predominantly rectilinear, the artist made continual use of strong, clear diagonals in order to introduce a visual dynamism and confer the sensation of ongoing narrative development.
One of the most effective uses of diagonal lines can be found in the Woman Writing a Letter with her Maid. In this picture, a series of three implied diagonal lines superimpose themselves over the rectilinear compositional structure invigorating the narrative tension, wherein the mistress has cast aside a letter she has just received see the letter and red wax seal on the floor in front of the table and hastily writes as her maid patiently waits to deliver the letter as soon as it is finished.
Originally, an admirer or lover of the arts, a connoisseur. Or, a dabbler in an art or a field of knowledge; an amateur.
Today, "dilettante" is more likely to be used in the latter sense, and taken by many—by the listener, even if not by the speaker—as an insult. It was more innocent in its original uses, as derived from the Italian word "dilettare," meaning "to delight. Later, the term came to refer to an amateur—someone who cultivates an art as a pastime without pursuing it professionally. From this meaning developed the pejorative sense the word carries now: a person who dabbles in an art.
In Florence, disegno "drawing" or "design" was viewed as the sine qua non of the artistic endeavor, the primary means for making painting approximate nature. Disegno was fundamental for all areas of art in the Renaissance: painting, sculpture and architecture. Although it is believed that the notion of drawing as the foundation for the art of painting and sculpture had been expressed at least as early as Petrarch, 5 the art historical concept of disegno "originated partly in the workshop of sculptors and had direct reference to the plastic quality of a work.
Giorgio Vasari — , the foremost art critic of the Renaissance, gave the concept its universal form by lumping together all the visual arts as arti del disegno and by initiating the foundation of the Academy of Design Accademia del Disegno in Florence in In Vasari's usage disegno points to the regular form or idea of things in artist's mind, that is, disegno is understood primarily as the right proportion of the whole to its parts and of the parts to one another.
On the other hand, in Venice, colorito , "coloring" was not only color but the fundamental means by which painted images could be charged with the look of life. Florentine color was frequently more vivid than the palette used in Venetian paintings; typically Venetian, however, was the process of layering and blending colors to achieve a glowing, natural richness.
Rather than beginning with careful drawings where contours are fixed with meticulous certainty, Venetian painters often worked out compositions directly on the canvas, using layered patches of colors and visible brushwork , rather than line, to evoke the sense of space and form. Venetian painters paid much closer attention to the effects of light than the Florentines and used this knowledge to create both movement and volume in composition.
This debate, which raged throughout the Early Renaissance c. The debate between the two positions involved theorists as well as artists and regional rivalries as well as aesthetic concerns. Roger De Piles — , a French art critic who gave an important contribution to aesthetics in his Dialogue sur le coloris "Dialogue on colours" , broke with tradition and argued strenuously that color was not simply accidental ornamentation, but the main condition of an object's visibility.
Thus color, to de Piles, was part of the natural order of painting. It is an attempt to assess the achievement of the major artists since Raphael — , De Piles awarded marks out of twenty for each composition, design or drawing, color and expression, De Piles' evaluations have been denigrated after the decline of Classicism, and his ranking is now considered his "most notorious contribution to criticism" even though his "decomposition of the overall quality of the work into four properties was revolutionary and ambitious at the time.
De Piles' table of artists is reported below. Each painter was given marks from "0" to "18" in composition, drawing, color and expression which was intended to provide an overview of aesthetic appreciation that hinges upon the balance between color and design. The highest marks went to Raphael, with a slight bias on color for Rubens, a slight bias on drawing for Raphael.
Painters who scored very badly in anything but color were Giovanni Bellini, Giorgione c. Rembrandt — , who is today considered one of the world's greatest draughtsmen, was given a desultory "6. In optics, a disk of confusion also referred to as halation, blur circle, circle of confusion and circle of indistinctness refers to the effect of non-converging, unfocused light rays that have entered a lens. When light waves don't converge after passing through a lens, they produce a larger optical spot, instead of coming together at a single point, as in the case of a specular highlight.
Under normal conditions, disks of confusion are not seen with the human eye because "it quickly shifts focus to the object being momentarily considered so that most persons are unaware that the If the eye did not shift focus as quickly as it does one might be able to notice circles of confusion forming on the retina, but experimentation shows that the out-of-focus image formed on the retina is useless for picture-making purposes even if one is aware of its existence.
Art historians have equated certain globular highlights of light-toned paint found in many of Vermeer's paintings with circles of confusion that the artist presumably observed through a camera obscura. It must be assumed that once Vermeer had understood how the disks of confusion are produced by the camera obscura and how to imitate them with paint, he employed them with considerable artistic license to enhance the effect of light as it plays upon natural surfaces.
Although Dutch painters experimented with a number of techniques to represent highlights , which are key to creating the illusion of light conditions usually intense , on shiny surface textures , only Vermeer adopted circular highlight in a methodical manner.
Perhaps the only other instances of such highlights in Dutch painting are those on a pair of slippers in the foreground of Gabriel Metsu 's — Woman Reading a Letter , a picture that was likely inspired by Vermeer himself.
Both writers experimented with actual camera obscuras focused on mock-Vermeer still lifes in attempts to replicate the effects seen in Vermeer's paintings.
In the seventeenth century, Dutch and Flemish artists presented a strange new face to the public in their self portraits. Rather than assuming the traditional guise of the learned gentleman artist that was fostered by renaissance topoi , many painters presented themselves in a more unseemly light.
Dropping the noble robes of the pictor doctus , they smoked, drank and chased women. Dutch and Flemish artists explored a new mode of self-expression in dissolute self-portraits, embracing the many behaviors that art theorists and the culture at large disparaged.
Dissolute self portraits stand apart from what was expected of a conventional self portrait , yet they were nonetheless appreciated and valued in Dutch culture and in the art market. Dissolute self portraits also reflect and respond to a larger trend regarding artistic identity in the seventeenth century, notably, the stereotype "hoe schilder hoe wilder"["the more of a painter, the wilder he is," a reference that reappears throughout the century, both in print and in paint] that posited Dutch and Flemish artists as intrinsically unruly characters prone to prodigality and dissolution.
Artists embraced this special identity, which in turn granted them certain freedoms from social norms and a license to misbehave. In self portraits, artists emphasized their dissolute nature by associating themselves with themes like the Five Senses and the Prodigal Son in the tavern.
One of the most effective manners for seventeenth-century Dutch painters for achieving pictorial depth within domestic settings was the so-called doorkijkje , or "see-through" doorway which permits the spectator to view something outside the pictured room, whether it be another room, a series of rooms, a hallway, a street, a canal, a courtyard or a garden. The doorkijkje offers the painter an opportunity to create a more complicated architectural space and contemporarily expand narrative.
Nicolaes Maes — painted six versions of an idle servant eavesdropping or an encounter between a man and a maidservant glimpsed through an open door. However, no Dutch artist made use of this device more than Pieter de Hooch — in both interior and exterior scenes. In the Courtyard of a House in Delft , we see it in the sequence of full light on the foreground bricks, contrasting the quieter shade of the covered tiled passageway, and the open door to the sunlit street beyond.
The art historian Martha Hollander found that among more than paintings attributed to De Hooch, only twelve do not exhibit this technique of a doorkijkje revealing secondary and tertiary views to other rooms, courtyards or the street beyond. It has been pointed out that in the twentieth century, the Italian film director Luchino Visconti, somewhat as seventeenth-century Dutch painters were centuries before, was particularly fond of framing his actors through doorways doors in art and film or, on the contrary, by blocking our view onto another character we would like to see; so deliberately withholding information.
In all, Vermeer painted three doorkijkje motifs: the early A Maid Asleep , The Love Letter and lost work described in a auction catalogue as " In which a gentleman is washing his hands in a perspectival room with figures, artful and rare Although there is obviously no way to envision the lost doorkijkje , after A Maid Asleep Vermeer never again opened a view on another room beyond that in which the scene is set.
Doorsien is a Dutch word that literally means "plunge through. Doorsiens not only enhance the sense of depth in a picture but also helped the artist structure complex scenes with large numbers of figures, convincingly situating them on different planes. The Dutch painter and art theorist Karel van Mander — even criticized Michelangelo's Last Judgment in the Sistine Chapel because it was lacking in sufficient depth. In his influential Schilder-boeck Painter book of , Van Mander wrote:.
Our composition should enjoy a fine quality, for the delight of our sense, if we there allow a view [ insien ] or vista [ doorsien ] with small background figures and a distant landscape, into which the eyes can plunge. We should take care sometimes to place our figures in the middle of the foreground, and let one see over them for many miles.
He distinguishes perspecten from the natural opening provided by rocks and trees in landscapes but notes that they have the same effect. In various interiors by Vermeer, evidence exists of another optical phenomenon that reveals the artist's keen interest in capturing the activity of light: the so-called double shadow.
These complex shadows are cast on back wall by objects close to it and caused by the light which enters simultaneously from two windows. For example, in The Music Lesson the wider shadow to the right of the black-framed mirror is caused by the near raking light entering from the window closest the background wall. But it is partially weakened—and here the double shadow appears—because light from the second window closer to the spectator enters the room at a less oblique angle and invades the most external part of the wider shadow.
In the same picture, the lid of the opened virginal also creates a double shadow. Double shadows are also present in The Concert and A Lady Standing at a Virginal , The Guitar Player and, although more tentatively defined, in some of the artist's earlier interiors. By obscuring one of the two windows all double shadows are avoided. Since the top of the mirror leans a considerable distance out from the wall, the shadows would have been much wider and more angled and would have appeared as they now do only if the mirror had laid flat against the wall.
According to Steadman, the artist evidently wanted to show both the reflection of his own vantage point in the mirror the painter's easel and canvas can be seen in the reflection and have the mirror appear to hang in a more normal, near-vertical position, requirements that are obviously incompatible in reality although they are made to look compatible in the painting.
The double shadow which descends downward from the window sill in A Lady Standing at a Virginal, however, is not caused by the light of two different windows. Although difficult to understand, the profile of the outermost shadow may have been caused by a building outside Vermeer's studio which blocked some of the light entering the studio. The innermost profile is caused by the light of the sky which descends from a higher angle, blocked by the thickness of the wall above the window frame.
In Dutch painting double shadows were avoided as much as possible because they tend to create compositions that seem restless and confused. Judging from the paucity of period art treaties and modern art historical literature that address the topic, one would never think that the representation of drapery has been one of the primary preoccupations in Western art from Classical time onward.
In fact, until , it had not been the exclusive subject of any published work. For the painter, the movement of drapery is nearly inexhaustible in its variety and capacity to suggest things other than itself. Drapery can be stretched softly to suggest peace, relaxation or the flow of nature, or taut, to suggest tension or alarm. Folded upon itself, drapery may convey shades of passion, confusion, wealth or sensuality.
Vertical folds may convey strength while horizontal may convey repose and diagonal folds, movement. Sometimes, drapery seems able to move by its own will. The high number of Renaissance and Baroque figure drawings that show the lavish attention bestowed to the actions of drapery but only a scarce few lines to define the anatomical features which emerge from them attest to the wealth of aesthetic solutions which helped the painter develop narrative and mood.
It is impossible to imagine the splendor of color in European easel painting without drapery. The character of painted drapery is strongly linked to both the age in which it is painted and the individual artist who treats it.
But one of the main attractions of drapery for the painter was technical. In all but the most meticulous forms or realism, the representation of drapery allows freedom in paint handling that other motifs do not, and after the High Renaissance drapery is often painted in a looser stylistic register than that of the figure to which it belongs, without, however, disrupting illusionist verisimilitude.
Drapery is, perhaps, more easily imitated with the brush and paint than any other motif. In collaboration with the shape of the brush and the natural flow of paint , the anatomical articulations of the body favor easy, rhythmic back-and-forth movements of the arms and wrist that are particularly adapted for describing the sweeping curves and angular character of drapery's folds and flat planes. For artists who followed Titian's c. Members of the French Academy believed that the depictions of different kinds of fabrics could potentially distract from the essence of painting, some praising the sober manner in which Nicolas Poussin — and Charles Le Brun — had depicted drapery.
Velvet, satin or taffeta should be avoided in favor of more generic, non-reflective fabrics. Sir Joshua Reynolds — , who continued to defend the "grand style" of history painting well into the eighteenth century, wrote, "as the historical painter never enters into the details of colors, so neither does he debase his conceptions with minute attention to the discriminations of drapery. It is the inferior style that marks the variety of stuffs. With him the clothing is neither woolen nor linen, nor silk, satin, nor velvet—it is drapery; it is nothing more.
Drapery was a fundamental part of Vermeer's art. He employed colorful costumes to create mood and define the social standing of his sitters. He hung tapestries in the foreground to force spatial depth and energize his compositions. Anonymous tablecloths bridge differently shaped objects and conceal compositional distractions.
Richly patterned imported carpets were thrown over tables to create compositional structures, sometimes geometrically shaped, but more frequently sculpted by deep valleys and tortuous folds to evoke the psychological states of his sitters.
Their rich reds vibrate against the cool grays and pure blues which dominate the artist's palette. Marieke de Winkel, an expert in seventeenth-century Dutch fashion, published an interesting study regarding the identity and function of the costumes portrayed in Vermeer's scenes.
It has been long debated if the outward flare of the fur-trimmed morning jackets that appear various times in the interiors of Vermeer is the result of pregnancy or fashion because this would have pivotal importance in assigning meaning to the pictures in which they occur.
Some critics have described the colors of Vermeer's costumes, especially those painted with natural ultramarine, and a few have noted how the realistic folds of the works of the s gradually succumb to the heavy stylization of the late works. Drawing is a form of visual art in which an artist uses instruments to mark paper or other two-dimensional surfaces.
Drawing instruments include graphite pencils, pen and ink, various kinds of paints, inked brushes, colored pencils, crayons, charcoal, chalk, pastels, erasers, markers, styluses, and metals such as silverpoint. A drawing instrument releases a small amount of material onto a surface, leaving a visible mark. The most common support for drawing is paper, although other materials, such as cardboard, wood, plastic, leather, canvas and board, have been used.
Temporary drawings may be made on a blackboard or whiteboard. Drawing has been a popular and fundamental means of public expression throughout human history. It is one of the simplest and most efficient means of communicating ideas. The wide availability of drawing instruments makes drawing one of the most common artistic activities. In addition to its more artistic forms, drawing is frequently used in commercial illustration, animation, architecture, engineering, and technical drawing.
A quick, freehand drawing, usually not intended as a finished work, is sometimes called a sketch. An artist who practices or works in technical drawing may be called a drafter, draftsman, or draughtsman. It seems somewhat surprising that not even a single preparatory or finished drawing by Vermeer has survived.
One would expect that such meticulously balanced compositions and problematic perspectives could be most efficiently resolved through preparatory drawings which would allow the artist to easily correct any errors.
There were many ways to transfer drawings efficiently and accurately to canvas. Only scant traces have remained of the initial drawing methods on Vermeer's canvases although evidence seems to suggest that it was deliberate and controlled. It was once thought that Vermeer revealed some of his own working procedures, including his drawing methods, in The Art of Painting.
On a toned canvas the artist represented in Vermeer's picture has laid in the contours of the model in white paint or chalk and has begun to paint in various shades of blue the laurel leaves. However, there exist many discrepancies between real working habits seen in representations of painters' studios of the seventeenth century and those illustrated in The Art of Painting.
While some of the indications given by The Art of Painting of the painter's technique may be factual, others may have a more symbolic function and, in any case, they do not seem to correspond closely to what were most likely Vermeer's own methods. This is one of the major cracks in the paint layer.
Also called "alligatoring. A drying oil is an oil that hardens to a tough, solid film after a period of exposure to air. The oil hardens through a chemical reaction in which the components crosslink and hence, polymerize by the action of oxygen not through the evaporation of water, turpentine or other solvents. Drying oils are a key component of oil paint and some varnishes.
The more drying oil is introduced into paint , the more the paint becomes transparent and glossy. Some commonly used drying oils include linseed oil, sunflower oil, safflower oil, poppy seed oil and walnut oil. Each oil has distinct mixing and drying properties and each creates a different type of film when it dries.
The use of drying oils has somewhat declined over the past several decades, as they have been replaced by alkyd resins. Nondrying oils are mineral oils and vegetable oils, such as peanut oil and cottonseed oil that resemble animal fats and, because they do not oxidize naturally and harden, are unsuitable as a binder for paint. The only question that was more difficult to determine was: is it good art?
By way of contrast, Danto explains, conceptual art compels viewers to think about the very nature of art. The postmodern answer to this question is not only philosophical—namely, that art is a concept because it cannot be identified visually, just by looking at it—but also sociological.
Art is, as Danto himself declares, whatever the viewing public and especially the community that has the power to consecrate it—by exhibiting it in galleries and museums, buying it, writing books about it, critiquing and reviewing it—says it is.
A priori, art can be anything. A brillo box, a toilet seat. Yet one is called trash and the other pop art. We can add in parentheses, as E. Gombrich observes in The Story of Ar t London: Phaidon Press, , that the notion of the representation of what the eye can see has changed throughout the history of art. Needless to say, visual reality is also shaped by social assumptions. The last thing that might occur to its viewers—were it not for the title—is that it features a nude.
The invention of photography had a lot to do with the move away from visual representation. To say that photography eliminated the need for representational art, however, is an overstatement. Undoubtedly, the invention of the camera encouraged artists to experiment with other means of representation in the same way that the invention of machines displaced hand-made crafts.
The camera probably did for painting what the industrial revolution did for artisanship. For what the human imagination, sensibility, eye and hand can create will always be somewhat different from what can be made with the aid of machines.
Similarly, the texture, sense of color and vision that are captured by painters are not identical to those that photography can produce, even though photography can bring us closer to visual reality and even though photography can be artistic. Verisimilitude, or the true-to-life physical representation of objects, was brought to life by classical Greek, Hellenistic and Roman art, all of which rendered the beauty, movement and sinuosity of the human body especially palpable in their breath-taking sculptures.
In classical Greek and Hellenistic art in particular, the human body conveyed what was perceived as the essence of beauty: the glorification of divine powers and aesthetic ideals were embodied in the human form.
Gombrich and other art historians credit the architect Filipo Brunelleschi with the invention of one-point perspective as it was enthusiastically adopted by Italian Renaissance painters. Perspective entailed the application of geometrical principles to convey in painting the relative size of objects in terms of their distance from one another and from the viewer. The Story of Art , The most famous Renaissance artist, Leonardo da Vinci, added another dimension to making the objects represented in art seem almost real.
The study and representation of human anatomy and of nature, foreshortening, capturing human movement and expression, one-point perspective and the creation of soft shadows which give the illusion of three-dimensionality to painted forms — all these techniques which took centuries to develop—have the magical effect of making objects represented by art come to life before our eyes.
For instance, some of the paintings of the surrealists were realistic in their anatomically accurate and three-dimensional representation of the human body, but fantastic in their rendition of reality. There are several movements in contemporary art that perpetuate the tradition of verisimilitude for our times. Photorealism, pioneered by the American painter Denis Peterson, revealed human talent as a rival to what the camera can do. Hyperrealism takes photorealism a step further.
Not merely copying reality, it provides a more compelling, monumental rendition of the real. It brings to life an image down to its finest details yet at the same time reveals it as created and contrived: unreal. While being an optical tour-de-force—in emulating the reality we see so minutely—hyperrealism also stimulates philosophical reflection on the nature of the reality it represents, and of reality itself.
Perhaps this is why hyperrealism is the tradition of representational art that is most enthusiastically embraced by postmodern critics today. In this philosophical treatise Baudrillard claims that symbols and signs—such as ads for beauty products, models, brand names—seem to emulate reality, but in truth they become the symbols of contemporary reality, or the hyperreality, that governs contemporary societies.
The swimmers so perfectly represented by Carole Feuerman in different poses—down to their subtle smiles, the closed eyes perhaps relishing a recent victory; a tranquil pose resting after a challenging swim; the drops of water shimmering on their taut skin—show more than specific swimmers.
They are the representation of athletic rigor and perfection; the symbols of aspiration; the symptom of endurance; the sign of the kind of victory contemporary society seeks not just in the athletic domain, but also in business, in law, in government, in almost every field. Verisimilitude, Hyperrealism and Artistic Freedom.
Spike, has managed to render her hyperrealist sculptures so palatable not only to the general public, but also to contemporary critics, who usually tend to favor non-representational forms of art. Unlike Baroque clarity of form, sober colors, shallow space and classical subject matter characterize it.
Look at "Tribute Money" by Masaccio in the Pictures folder. Do an outline and critical analysis of this work like on pg. Subject Matter and Medium: Tribute Money by Masaccio depicts Jesus and his disciples, in the background one can see Peter giving money to one of the Tax collector.
The painting is a fresco painting, which is a work done on wet-plaster with water-soluble paints. The image becomes a part of the wall surface as opposed to being painted on it. The painting is realistic and the scenery is life-like. Composition, Line, and Shape: The painting has two distinct areas. An edge blurs between the two. Color: The color within Tribute Money vary.
It is composed of primary, secondary as well as tertiary colors. Focal Areas: Jesus is the primary focal point. In the painting Peter is another focal point as well as the scenery.
The surrounding is an important detail in the painting. The artists ensured there was contrast between their faces and clothes. This essay was submitted to us by a student in order to help you with your studies. If you use part of this page in your own work, you need to provide a citation, as follows:.
Non-objective- not representing objects known in physical nature 2. Abstract- thought of apart from concrete realities, specific objects, or actual instances 3. Drawing- a graphic representation by lines of an object or idea, as with a pencil; a delineation of form without reference to color 4. Pastel- a kind of dried paste made of pigments ground with chalk and compounded with gum water 6.
Intaglio- incised carving, as opposed to carving in relief 8. Serigraphy- a print made by the silkscreen process Postmodern- extremely modern; cutting- edge Value- relative worth, merit, or importance Texture- the visual and especially tactile quality of a surface Impasto- the laying on of paint thickly Variation- the act, process, or accident of varying in condition, character, or degree Perspective- a technique of depicting volumes and spatial relationship on a flat surface.
Verisimilitude- the appearance or semblance of truth; likelihood; probability Chiaroscuro- the distribution of light and shade in a picture. Fresco- Uses pigments suspended in water and applied to fresh wet plaster 2. People argue that documentary photos does not have art because its just a picture being taken and there are no color manipulations 3. Define the ways of achieving focal areas.
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