Word: painterly
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1990-1999
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...else. Yet seemingly mundane situation, such as befriending a pooch in "The 24-Hour Dog," are approached with equally fresh and keen perception. Winterson's quick scene changes, especially apparent in the latter story, can be jarring. But in another sense, it is as if she is a Cubist painter presenting varied perspectives in an attempt to avoid cliche and whisk you to the "other places" mentioned in the book's title...
...easel, the portraits of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (1780-1867) were seen as being more than personal likenesses. They had a defining character. Ingres's period has coalesced around his art. In the first half of his life, when he was in Italy, the Mecca of the aspiring French painter, his pencil drawings caught the upper crust of foreigners there--the milords Anglais and their families on the Grand Tour, the French officials who ran Napoleon's kingdom in Italy, his fellow expatriate artists--with stylish brio and steely exactness. It is fascinating to see him shifting through different levels...
...Pupil of David, history-painter." So he identified himself: heir to the Great Cham of French neoclassicism, Jacques-Louis David, and practitioner of the most exalted kind of art, the art that interpreted myth and history to an educated audience. (He never painted a still life and rarely did landscapes except as background to human figures.) But classicism means different things to different artists, and we need an idea of what it meant to him. It had very little to do with the rendition of abstractly idealized form, derived from Greco-Roman statuary. Other and lesser artists who had been...
...Ingres's art lay in his ability to invest figures with a dignity and a power that verged on the sacral. He was one of the last artists to whom the rhetoric of grandeur seemed not only possible but desirable. Of course it had to be for a myth painter doing an Apotheosis of Homer. But Ingres brought it into portraiture, most notoriously with his over-the-top portrait of Napoleon (1806) in his imperial coronation robes, as frontal and opulent as a Byzantine god. So weird was this attempt at deification that even David, Ingres's old teacher, found...
...this by claiming that furniture and architectural fragments in Botticell's "Mother and Child Jesus" made the scene less domestic and more dignified. Perhaps more convincing was his point that the prominent buildings in Botticelli's "The Madonna of the Eucharist" creates perspective in the painting and enables the painter to place characters in appropriate locations, thereby mixing humanism and realism Whereas before the importance of figures are placed in the foreground...