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Your fav classical old master paintings?

Started by The Plaque Goblin, February 18, 2006, 10:21:33 AM

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The Plaque Goblin

I'm doing a project involving classical old master paintings and would like to know which ones are your favourites, for whatever reaason.

Thanks.

wasp_f15ting

I love the Rokeby Venus



VELÁZQUEZ, Diego



Jean Leon Gerome, I do like the snake charmer better. I couldn't find a decent picture though, this is King Candaules

This is one of the most disturbing paintings to me. Its the realism of the painting that makes it as bad as it is.


No link I'm afraid, but Carravaggio's Doubting Thomas is a beaut. 'Chiaroscuro,' etc.

Is that an old master?

Edit: Those vegetable heads made into portraits representing the seasons, the ones in the Louvre by Giuseppe Arcimboldo,* they're good an' all. Again, not sure if they're old masterly though.

*may have made this name up

terminallyrelaxed



Experiment on a Bird in the Airpump - Joseph Wright 1768

This isn't a very good copy of it but for the size its the best I could do, alot of the others on google are too dark to appreciate it although this is grainy as fuck. Just for this picture Wright is up there with Caravaggio and Velasquez (I might whack up a couple of theirs later) as far as light is concerned. Its still one of the best examples of observance of light there is. Theres also a lot going on and a lot of information conveyed, a lot of drama from such a small light source.



Quotebyname WRIGHT OF DERBY (b. Sept. 3, 1734, Derby, Derbyshire, Eng.--d. Aug. 29, 1797, Derby), English painter who was a pioneer in the artistic treatment of industrial subjects. He was also the best European painter of artificial light of his day.

Wright was trained as a portrait painter by Thomas Hudson in the 1750s. Wright's home was Derby, one of the great centres of the birth of the Industrial Revolution, and his depictions of scenes lit by moonlight or candlelight combine the realism of the new machinery with the romanticism involved in its application to industry and science. His pictures of technological subjects, partly inspired by the Dutch followers of Caravaggio, date from 1763 to 1773; the most famous are The Air Pump (1768) and The Orrery (c. 1763-65). Wright was also noted for his portraits of English Midlands industrialists and intellectuals.

Bert Thung

My god, that's Peter Stringfellow holding his hand up.

Huzzie

That Joseph Wright painting is amazing, it is like a photograph.

The first one, Rocky Venus (whateveerr). Surely she can't see herself in the mirror, she would be seeing the painter, or us. Or is that the point? That would mean the angel is real then and I didn't think angels really existed.

Shoulders?-Stomach!

Don't know whether this fits in your idea of classical or master paintings, but this is painting I really like.

Lady of Shallott- 1888, John Waterhouse.



I love it, but he's certainly not my favourite artist.

terminallyrelaxed

Quote from: "Huzzie"
The first one, Rocky Venus (whateveerr). Surely she can't see herself in the mirror, she would be seeing the painter, or us. Or is that the point?

I don't think so. It looks to me that allowing for the angle of the mirror its exactly at the mid-point between our perspective and hers, therefore we see her in the mirror, and she would see us.

terminallyrelaxed



Gericault's The Raft Of The Medusa.

No, its not a very nice picture, and is a fucking harrowing story (the ship went  down, they got on a raft and proceeded to eat each other).

This guy has a lot more to say about it than I do:

QuoteThe start of the work was slow and difficult. The difficulty was to choose from the drama of the shipwreck narrative a single, significant, and pictorially effective moment. Gericault looked at scenes of battle, torment and death in the works of the masters, like Michelangelo, Rubens and Gros, for the appropriate feeling and expression to his subjects.

Gericault began by sketching several alternative moments of the disaster, a procedure which he had used in earlier projects. He was initially drawn to five episodes of Correard's and Savigny's account. They were the Mutiny, Cannibalism, Sighting of the Argus, Hailing the Approaching Rowing-Boat and the Rescue.

Gericault developed their compositions in concrete detail, concentrating on one after the other, testing each thoroughly before going on to the next. Gericault's characteristic habit of building his compositions was by successive additions and transformations and carried the figure motifs from one compositional version to the next.

From Mutiny and Cannibalism's distanced action, Gericault developed his composition of Hailing with the raft close to the foreground as to make the viewer feel transported onto its planks and to involve him in its drama as a participant rather than a detached observer.

From the episode of Hailing, Gericault turned to the Sighting of the Argus. Keeping the main features from the previous work, the Sighting retained the closeness of the Raft to the foreground, the diagonal recession of the whole, the coherence of the figure groups, and their orientation toward a point in the distance. The main change is in the relationship between the Raft and rescue vessel. Throughout Gericault further development of the scene, he steadily intensified the effect of extreme distance between Raft and rescue.

Taking the Sighting scene as his base, Gericault went on to expand his composition unit by unit. He recorded every step of this process in a separate drawing or a painted study. Whenever possible, he borrowed figures from the discarded projects of Mutiny and Cannibalism, for example the group of Father and Son.

Gericault's next step was to give the composition greater unity and to increase its dramatic force. For this effect, he reversed the orientation, making it face to the right.

Gericault tried to give force and clarity to the image's he gathered the figures into four distinct groups. By fusing several bodies in one motion, and by drawing all the figures into a single, strong pattern, he not only avoided confusion but actually turned the number of his figures to compositional advantage.

The division of four dramatic groups determined the entire subsequent composition. The group of dead, dying or despondent men was the core from which the whole composition originally grew and the first group to be fully developed. The four men who stand, alert and watchful, on the other side of the mast form a second group. This group took shape very early and changed little in the further development. The third group composed of men who struggle to rise to their feet. It is the most vividly pantomimic of the groups, Gericault kept modifying these figures until the end, gradually increasing their number from three to five. The fourth group consists of three men who mount some barrels at the Raft's forward end and signal to the Argus. It is the most important of the four groups, that gives a culmination to the dramatic narrative and compositional structure of the Medusa. Yet it is the last that he invented. The Nero's powerful torso stands out against the sky high above the horizon, the cloth unfurling in the wind from his uplifted arm and gives the scene a splendid climax.

Now that the composition was settled, his interest shifted to the Raft's wider setting of water and sky. He improvised a luminous cloudscape and a wide expanse of wind-ploughed sea around the Raft. He had spent half year in preparatory work.

Gericault began execution by transferring the composition to the canvas, producing a huge contour drawing. With the concept of the composition in mind and a contour drawing of it on canvas, he went on directly to execute the figure from life. He posed his models singly, placing each in the proper light and exact position prescribed by the design. Then he painted their bodies into the contours.

Gericault's sketches can be divided into two groups. Ones that accompanied the early compositional designs was to define postures, placements and board areas of light and shade. The later studies from life expresses Gericault's concern with the effects of light, colour and texture during his work on large canvas.

From first to last, Gericault gave his figures, the living and the dead, the appearance of athletes in the vigorous health. His concern with the reality of the event centred throughout on what he regarded as its essential drama, not on its precise aspect.

The special difficulty that he faced in the Medusa was to express the human reality of his subject, its content of terror, anguish and tension. To achieve this realism, he drew and painted many studies from life, as a stimulation and relief. The most astonishing among them are the portraits of dying patients at the Hopital Beaujon, and the still-life of dissected limbs and severed heads, painted in his own studio, where for a time he kept these human fragments to observe and record their gradual decay.

This exposure to death helped him to gain insight for a special authenticity to his work. If his picture was to carry conviction, it had to express genuine experience. He familiarized himself with the sight and smell of death, and tried to live with it day by day, as had the men on the Raft.

Its not a very good picture, and I don't think you'll find a good one on the internet, but it'll blow your socks off if you strand in front of the original. I think its in the Louvre, can't remember now.

^ I think there's a whole chapter on that in Julian Barnes' 'History of the World in Ten and a Half Chapters,' which describes it very well.

terminallyrelaxed

Yeah, I've read that, its where I first heard of it. Looking back on it though, I think Barnes is a bit of a pretentious tosser. a history of the world in ten and a half chapters bizarrely concluded by a wank fantasy about heaven and shagging Marilyn Monroe, or soemthing.

terminallyrelaxed

By the way, which definition of 'old master' are we looking for here? I don't want to start flinging Renoir around if he's irrelevant...

Clinton Morgan


terminallyrelaxed

Oh, so we're just going for "kind of old, generally" then?

terminallyrelaxed

I'm also a bit partial to Vermeer. Not so much the people as the style of that day is pretty grim, but he's a single-light-source whore so I love his stuff.



The Milkmaid.



The Art Of Painting.

I also like Canaletto for his perspectives, once it'd been discovered he really went to town on it. For some reason I'm always getting his confused with Tintoretto (sort of understandable) and Titian (nothing like him at all).




Piazza San Marco, Looking Towards San Geminiano.

terminallyrelaxed

Here's a smaller but better quality job of the Wright:



Just look at this:



A Philosopher giving that Lecture on the Orrery.

That guy was a fucking dude.

Baxter

Vermeer's Woman holding a balance.

i like it more for the meaning behind it,

She's not acctually weighing anything but instead is holding an empty balance between her earthy material wealth and the Last Judgment.




sproggy

Pretty much anything by Heironymus Bosch.  He epitomised 'ahead of his time'



EDIT: spelling spackery

The Plaque Goblin