Saturday, May 10, 2014

Paintings Of El Greco And Manet

By Darren Hartley


Mastery in Post-Byzantine art is shown in El Greco paintings, in the footsteps of famous Greek artists. While in Rome, El Greco devoted a great majority of his time to the development of a style from elements of both Mannerism and Venetian Renaissance.

The best masterful El Greco paintings were produced in Toledo, Spain at a time when El Greco truly blossomed as an artist. The focus of his work was on highly expressive and visionary religious works. The rare times he ventured away from the genre produced compelling portraits, landscape paintings, mythological works and sculptures.

Undulating forms, epic scale and expressive distortions were the notable aspects of El Greco paintings in his later years. The most important element of painting, according to El Greco, is color and because of this, he believes that color should have primacy over form. Dramatization and not description was the focus of his more mature works. His audience is directly affected by his works because of their strong spiritual and emotional content.

Manet paintings depicted everyday scenes of people and city life. Edouard Manet was a leading artist in the transition from realism to impressionism. His most famous works include The Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia.

Most arresting among Manet paintings is a portrait showing a young woman wearing a black ribbon around her neck and a dashingly blue ribbon in her hair. The model for this portrait was Victorine Meurent, who also happens to be the model in one of the most notorious paintings in the world, also done by Edouard.

Victorine posed as a prostitute, completely naked except for a black ribbon around her neck and a satin slipper on her foot, in Olympia, listed among the most famous of Manet paintings. She posed as a naked woman again, this time in the company of two fully clothed man in The Luncheon on the Grass during a picnic. She was a bullfighter in very unsuitable shoes in Mlle V in the Costume of an Espada.




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