pictures [Theme] Page 2

- Well done, five ... five years of your studies were paid in vain.

Before the era of oil painting, medieval artists used in their work, gold leaf. Later, the gold disappears from the painting and used only to process frames. However, the paintings themselves often showed a simple demonstration that can be bought for money or gold. The true subject of art became a commodity.

The credibility of oil painting makes the viewer believe that he is very close to depicted on the foreground of the image objects (can literally touch them). If it shows the person such proximity implies a certain degree of intimacy.
However, the official portrait is intended, on the contrary, to stress the distance. That is why (and not because of lack of skill from the artist) person on the average portrait, painted in the traditional way, looked so constrained and motionless. This artificiality is rooted in the requirements of the image: the object needs to be seen both near and afar. You can draw an analogy with samples examined under a microscope. Here they are in front of us, we can study them, but you can't imagine the same way they treated us.

The idea of the craftsmanship behind exaggerated quality to remain unchanged throughout the history of oil painting.
In earlier traditions of art glorified the wealth. But then, wealth was a symbol of the established social and divine order.
Oil painting celebrates the richness of the new sense - dynamic, finding justification only in the highest power of money, i.e. purchasing power. Consequently, painting had to find a way to demonstrate how coveted everything that you can buy for the money. And the visual desirability of what can be bought lies in its tangibility, in how it will respond to a touch on the hand of a master.

What distinguishes oil painting from any other species of painting is its ability to render the tangibility, texture, luster, density that it represents. For oil painting real is what you can touch. Its ability to create illusions much more significant than the sculpture, although the image on the canvas is two-dimensional - in fact, an oil painting offers the viewer objects that have color, texture and temperature, occupies a place in space and (it is implied) filling the whole world.

Oil painting made with the visible world what capital did to social relations. Everything was reduced to the commensurability of things. All became subject to the exchange, because everything became a commodity. All reality was mechanically measured on the basis of its material nature. Soul - thanks to the Cartesian system - is preserved as a separate category. Oil painting had something to speak to the soul through what she sent, but not how it is portrayed. Oil painting expressed the idea of vneshnosti.

For the average European painting of a Nude model, never seen her main character. The main character - the viewer standing before a painting, and it is assumed that he is a man. All addressed to him. It should look like the result of his presence. It is for him a figure in the painting gained its nakedness. But he is, by definition, a stranger, and all his clothes on it.

At times I felt like some kind of elite prostitute from painting.

Original paintings are silent and still. It can not boast of information. Even the reproduction hanging on the wall, incomparable in this respect with the original, where silence and peace pervade the material itself, the paint, allowing to trace directly the movements of the artist. And thus reduced the temporal distance between the creation of the painting and our staring at her. In this specific sense, all paintings are thoroughly modern. Hence the immediacy of their testimony. The historical moment is literally standing in front of our eyes.

In the era of reproducibility images, the value of the paintings are already not assigned to him; its value is transferable: that is, it becomes a kind of information, like any information, it is either used or ignored; information has no special power by itself. When the picture is used, its value is either modificarea, or completely changed. We must clearly realize, what exactly this means. It's not about the fact that the reproduction is unable to correctly reproduce certain aspects of the original; a reproduction makes it possible (and even inevitable) that the image will be used for a variety of purposes, and a copy, unlike the original, will be able to adapt to them all.

Camera isolated momentary images and thus destroyed the idea of their timeless nature. Or, in other words, the camera showed that the idea of time passing was inseparable from the visual experience (this applies to everything except painting). What you see depends on where you were and when. What you saw was derived from your position in time and space. It became impossible to continue to assume that everything converges on the eye as the vanishing point of infinity.
I don't want to say that before the invention of the camera men believed that everyone sees everything. But the prospect of organized visual space as if it actually was the ideal. Every drawing or painting using perspective, tells his audience that he is the center of the world. However, the camera - especially the camera - shows that center there.
The invention of the camera changed the way of seeing the world. Visible has come to mean for us something different. This instantly had an effect on painting.
For the Impressionists the visible world is another, he does not wait, when people will consider it. On the contrary, the visible becomes fluid and fleeting. For the Cubists the visible - it is not something that may catch one's eye, but a whole host of possible views on the subject or the represented person.

Looking at the "virgin of the rocks", the visitor of the National gallery (thanks to all that he heard and read about this picture) would feel about the following: "I stand in front of her. I can see it. This painting by Leonardo is not like any other painting in the world. The National gallery stored its original. If I'm diligent enough to look at her, you can sense its authenticity. "Madonna of the rocks" Leonardo da Vinci: it is authentic and therefore beautiful!"
To reject such feelings as naive would be wrong. They correspond to a complex view of specialists in the art, to which is written the catalogue of the National gallery. An article about "the virgin of the rocks" one of the longest in it. It is fourteen pages in small print. And not a word about the meaning of this picture. It tells about who ordered this picture, on the legal disputes about who she belonged to, about the probable date of its creation, the families of its owners. For this information there are years of researches, aimed to dispel the slightest doubt that this picture really painted by Leonardo. The second goal is to prove that is almost identical to the picture stored in the Louvre is a copy that hangs in the National gallery.
French art historians try to prove the opposite.

Yellow drops - Sunny glare
Warm spots, happiness and summer.
Quiet tenderness will be spilled
In pink as clouds at dawn.
Drops green freshness combines -
The leaves and grass in wet ground.
Transparent drops - drops of sorrow,
Tears of rain on cold glass.
Droplets of scarlet beads of blood
I will heartbroken;
Drops of dairy - those that will cover
Warm lips suckling.
Blue droplet spray of the sea
In memory of seagulls, freedom, and wind.
Black droplets splash mountain:
Drops of fear, drops of death.