Monday, May 12, 2014

El Greco Paintings And Manet Paintings

By Darren Hartley


El Greco paintings show mastery in Post-Byzantine art, following the footsteps of Greek artists. El Greco spent a great majority of his time in Rome developing his style, where he adopted elements from both Mannerism and Venetian Renaissance.

The best 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.

Depictions of everyday scenes of people and city life are what Manet paintings are all about. In the transition from realism to impressionism, Edouard Manet was considered a leading artist. The Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia are among his most famous works.

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.

Olympia is a one of the most famous Manet paintings. Victorine was the model for the prostitute featured in the painting, in all her glory except for a black ribbon around her neck and a satin slipper on her foot. She was completely naked again in The Luncheon on the Grass, but in this painting she was surrounded by two men who were fully clothed while enjoying their picnic together. She was featured as a bullfighter wearing very unsuitable shoes in Mlle V in the Costume of an Espada.




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