The painting that I chose to analyze was William Maw Egley’s Omnibus Life in London (1859). Painted on an oil medium, it depicts a scene of an omnibus, a horse-drawn carriage that acted as public transportation, pulled over at a certain stop along a particular route (Tate). In the painting, it features a crowded bus as more people attempt to board it. There are various people from every type of social class, which will be examined during the contextual analysis section to interpret the meaning historically. Also, this paper will analyze the formal structure of the painting through color, lines, space and mass, and composition.
The painting by Cole obviously depicts a landscape, especially one of the iconic bend in the Hudson river, but in fact there is much more to the piece. It is filled with distinct uses of line, space, shape, color, and value. The variation between the right and left sides of the painting are what most stands out, and symbolically show the contrast of the sublime to pastoral. In The Oxbow, line, shape, and color all aid in the symbolic contrast of the iconic painting.
Monsters that resemble familial bodies receive our attention through appearing as a construct of both, the understood and unthinkable, commanding to be seen. This existence demands the participation of the audience to define and categorise what it is to be normal, suggesting that the image of the monster is never fixed; constantly evolving through interpretation. When considering the monstrous within the Middle Ages, this is best represented in the depiction of the Sheela-na-gig that exist today often eroded or decayed due to the excess of human touch. The utmost importance of this source is that it reveals an audience desired contact and domestication of the obscene which may or may not have occurred in the medieval period. When scholars interpret the Sheela-na-gig to be representative of the offensive, analysis is thus partly superficial as it deals with investing their own narrative within an imperfect material.
This way the author, just as in Wincklemann ideas makes beauty out of simplicity and perfection. Furthermore, the drapery used be the artists to dress the figures is typically light and not restraining at all, another characteristic of the Greek art. (The purpose of the neoclassical movement is that of imitating the Greek art). The idea after all the paining is to transmit a message of simplicity, austerity, heroism and stoicism. We have a strong contrast in the painting depicted not by any means of decoration but by the posture of the men and women.
Nineteenth-century fin-de-siècle witnessed the emergence of the New Woman who is “an outspoken, independent and thoroughly modern woman, whose “masculine” behaviours made her something of a monster” (199). In fact, monstrosity in nineteenth-century gothic productions is “largely interpellated by the Symbolic gaze” that relegates the New Woman’s transgressive acts to oddity (Hock-soon Ng 2). Women’s assertive and aggressive behaviours contradict with “the Symbolic normative” that inscribes them within the discourse of monstrosity (2). In The Madwoman in the Attic, Gilbert and Gubar explain that women’s “assertiveness, aggressiveness – all characteristics of male life of “significant action” - are “monstrous” in women precisely because “unfeminine” and therefore unsuited to a gentle life of “contemplative purity” (28). The she-monster thus, not only crosses the boundaries of normativity but also jeopardizes the constructed conception of femininity and humanity.
That may sound deceptively simple; for behind it lies a great part of the Neo-Platonist philosophy of the Renaissance. Why did Shakespeare close Theseus and Hippolyta to frame his dream-story? This is the kind of question we ought to ask whenever he brings in mythological figures; because they are always more than ornament, they are part of his parable as well. The Theseus-and –Hippolyta theme – as it is presented to us here – is the turning of a war into a wedding, a sword into a ring: out of chaos has come a birth of beauty. It is to this that the regal couple in the background owe their stability.
Voiles, from Book I of Preludes by Claude Debussy was written during a time when Impressionism and Symbolism were thriving in music, art, literature, and poetry. With symbolism, artists broke away from traditional techniques in order to indirectly evoke specific emotions, images, and concepts without merely describing them. Symbolist poets often used strategic spatial placement, word sizing, and nontraditional grammar in order to add nuance to the meaning of the text. Impressionism was a similar art movement in that it avoided directly depicting images. Some have applied impressionist interpretations to the works of various composers, but impressionism was typically found in paintings where the images looked almost out of focus and oddly cropped, with the juxtaposition of contrasting colors that portrayed the effects of light.
The marble was polished to a high sheen and resembles beautiful, silky skin...the near-omission of the lower eyelids gives the face a dreamy expression, and contrast between the smooth skin and the rougher hair is remarkable” (Rijksmuseum van Oudheden). There is a clear deviation from the practice of sculpting the idealistic structured body common to the Classical period. Hellenistic sculptures embraced both the idiosyncrasies and imperfections of the subject matter in order to achieve a higher degree of realism. Ignoring the hard, chiseled form typical to the Classical period, Praxiteles’ modeling of soft flesh creates a sensuous and sentimental effect, emotions that play well with a subject matter like Aphrodite. His attention to detail has made Aphrodite the perfect embodiment of female beauty and sexuality, as it has been said that the sculpture was so lifelike, it aroused men and caused them to physically embrace the sculpture.
The inscription on the bottom of the painting also suggests Enriquez wants his painting to be revered akin to the original as it states: “Tocada à su Maravilloso Original, el día dos de Julio de 1789” meaning that his painting was sanctified by the original painting in 1789 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art). Additionally, the use of copper adds to the holy iridescence of the painting and Virgin Mary as the way the sunlight reflects on copper gives it a luminescent shine that glows from beneath the paint. The painting is also bordered by a golden frame and has golden details throughout the painting, such as the golden sun rays radiating form Virgin Mary. The Virgin Mary is depicted wearing a golden crown and a robe studded with gold stars and bordered in gold. She is wearing a golden cross pendant and golden bracelets on both her hands.
In the year of 1644 the French artist Claude Lorrain created a painting titled the “Ideal View of Trioli”. The painting that consists of two outstanding mediums; oil and canvas now resides in the New Orleans Museum of Art. The majority of the canvas focuses on the background that consists of a eerily creepy sunset in which the orange and pink colors combine perfectly along with the clouds and the ruins of what looks to be a decrepit roman city atop a rock covered mountain. Furthermore the city’s ruins in the background inhere a rounded building surrounded by tan columns. In addition to the columns that are stationed in the middle of the portrait there is a bridge that crosses a small, elegant waterfall on the left side of the background that ripples down the tan colored mountainside.