by Lindsay Shapka in Art History, Artists, Art, Travel
When my sister recently came home from a trip to Paris she seemed impressed with everything that she had seen — except for the Mona Lisa.
One of the most recognized works of art in the world, reproductions of it usually come in poster sized prints while the original, hung behind thick, bullet proof glass and guarded by a velvet rope is miniature in comparison.
Read Moreby Lindsay Shapka in Artists, Art, Art History, Travel
In 1501, Michelangelo (yes, the same guy who painted the famous Sistine Chapel located in the Vatican in Rome) accepted a commission to carve a marble sculpture of the biblical David to be placed high atop a buttress on the Florentine Cathedral.
Read Moreby Lindsay Shapka in Art, Art History, Travel, Artists
The Venus de Milo is one of the most famous statues in the world, but like most famous art, one has to wonder what makes this piece more important than any of the other statues collecting dust in the galleries and storerooms of museums.
Well, first off, you can’t argue with the fact that she is beautiful.
Artists and critics have long praised the work as being the epitome of graceful female beauty, so much so that her image used to be on the seal of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons.
On the other hand, though, there are many beautiful statues — and many that still have arms.
Venus de Milo (Aphrodite of Melos), circa 150 BCE
No, Venus was not created without her upper limbs. She did originally have arms but was found with them already broken off. The buzz created by scholars over the mystery of the placement of her arms and what she may have once held has aided in her popularity. Only adding to the mystery is the fact that fragments found with the statue when it was dug up on the Island of Melos in 1820 have been lost.
The fragments, if reconstructed, would have been from the right arm of the statue and would have shown her holding an apple. Because the fragments were made of stone that was rougher than the rest of the statue, it was concluded that they were from an earlier restoration and so were set aside without being documented properly. They have now disappeared.
Scholars have recently speculated that the fragments were the originals and were carved differently because they would have been above the viewer's line of sight and so did not require a smooth surface (a common sculpting practice at the time of her creation). Without the fragments themselves, however, this can not be proven.
Adding to her beauty, and the mystery behind her arms, is the fact that is is still not known who actually created the statue and for what purpose. Though it has been speculated that the artist may have been Alexandros of Antioch and she once sat in a high niche in the wall of an ancient city, none of this has been confirmed.
Though all of these facts are interesting, they do not add up to the kind of information that would attract the attention of the rest of the world.
The main reason that this marble Venus is so recognizable is because of good ‘ol fashioned propaganda.
In 1815, France was forced to return the Medici Venus, which had been stolen by Napoleon Bonaparte, back to the Italians. It was (and still is) regarded as one of the finest classical sculptures in existence and to a country considered to be the art hub of Europe at the time, this was a HUGE blow to the ego.
When the Venus de Milo arrived at the Louvre so soon after the loss of the Medici Venus, French Officials immediately began promoting it as a greater treasure than what they had lost and voila, we now revere and recognize her as one of the most stunning and mysterious statues of the Hellenistic period.
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by Lindsay Shapka in Art History, Art, Artists
In April of 1874, a group of 30 French artists (including Degas, Monet, and Renoir) agreed not to submit anything to the annual Salon exhibition and to create their own exhibit together in Paris.
In France at the time, the French Academy had complete control over the display of art and artistic standards and until 1874 the Salon had been the only place to show art that would garner any respect or influence.
The French Academy had strict standards on what was considered ‘art’ and rejected works that weren’t done in classical or approved styles (portraits of famous historical figures, biblical stories etc...). The work of artists like Degas, Monet and Renoir had been rejected by the Salon numerous times because, to them, it looked unfinished and haphazard.
The exhibition outside of the Salon, called the Corporation of Artists Painters, Sculptors, Engravers, etc., was a declaration of independence from the academy and was the beginning of the end of the Salon’s hold over the French art world.
At this first exhibition, a writer from a comic journal took the title of one of Monet’s paintings, Impression, Sunrise (1873) and dubbed the entire exhibition “impressionist”. The artists were thrilled with the label because it represented how they captured an instantaneous impression of a scene from nature in their art.
At that moment, Impressionism was born, and Monet, Degas, and Renoir would go down in history as famous art revolutionaries.
