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.

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.

One of the most arresting portraits among Manet paintings shows a young woman called Victorine Meurent, wearing a black ribbon around her neck and a dashingly blue ribbon in her hair. Victorine was a constant model for Edouard. As a matter of fact she was the model for one of the most notorious paintings in the world, also 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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