Three Days To See Analysis

Even with the innate deficiency of blindness, the renowned Helen Keller enjoyed picturing a “compressed” perspective of history through the art that was engendered during those periods. As highlighted by her essay “Three Days to See”, Helen Keller remarks about the choice of artistry she would like to see if she had, in a literal sense, three days of eyesight, naming Moses by Michelangelo. “I have passed my hands over the plaster cast of Michelangelo’s inspiring and heroic Moses. ” Moses is a plaster sculpture formed by Michelangelo Buonarrati, an Italian Renaissance sculptor that created this piece after his patron, Pope Julius II ,requested a commission to build his tomb, the church of San Pietro, from 1505 to 1545. The sculpture

In composition, it portrays Mary Magdalene, Virgin Mary, and Saint John mourning over the body of Jesus Christ while washing and anointing him in Golgotha. Like in the Last Judgement, the use of color tonality is also employed to help decipher the scene. The austere, monotoned city of Jerusalem is painted gray to the left and the muted green hues of the landscape seems to lament over the death of Jesus in the background. The bright primary and secondary colors of the figures’ form of dress greatly juxtapose to the grave image of Jesus Christ, dressed up in his flimsy offset white cloth covering his pelvis area. The color hues and saturation of their faces also reveal the gravity of the situation-Jesus is the only figure whose face is gaunt and devoid of any color as opposed to his caretakers who are a fleshy pink. David utilizes straight laced contour lines to encompass the angular figures of his painting- the abnormally straight legs of Jesus Christ, the unusual angles of how his caretakers are placed,the shadows matched up to the folds of their dresses, and the only object standing upright: the cut off cross in the left of the background. With space, Jesus Christ is placed knowingly in the center to draw focus while the