3 curious facts about famous works of art
Different people perceive works of art differently, and the viewer's point of view can radically differ from what the artist himself put into his work. And many famous paintings have…

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What Censorship Looks Like at Christian College
For many centuries, it was religion that prompted brilliant people to create their masterpieces. It was during the construction of churches that architects revealed their talents, and most of the…

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Secrets of the Four Seasons
This year marks almost 430 years since the death of Giuseppe Arcimboldo, an Italian artist known for his original portraits of fruits, vegetables, flowers and fish. Giuseppe so skillfully portrayed…

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genre of fine art

How Pavel Tretyakov competed with the emperor

Before the revolution, patronage of the arts was considered not only charitable, but also beneficial for the donor himself, and the point here was not taxes at all. According to the ideas of merchants in the old days, this activity avoided the terrible temptation – the power of money. Most often, wealthy industrialists became patrons of shelters, hospitals, and educational institutions. At first, the partners and competitors laughed at the Tretyakov brothers’ passion for painting, but time, of course, put everything in its place.

Pavel and Sergey Tretyakov were the eldest children in a well-known merchant family. Continue reading

Ciphers, signs and self-portraits: How artists of the past signed their paintings

Not every masterpiece of painting contains the signature of the artist. There were reasons for this, both at the dawn of the Renaissance and in the modern era; they are now. Some of the works were “signed” by the masters in unusual ways – symbols in which an indication of the identity of the author was hidden. Bones, butterflies, cats appeared in the paintings for a reason.

Why it was not customary to sign a work before

Having finished work, put your signature in the lower right corner of the picture – a custom that entered the practice of artists during the early Renaissance. Alas, authorship of earlier works is often not possible to establish – primarily because of the lack of signatures on them. Continue reading

GENRES IN THE VISUAL ARTS

Works of fine art, mainly painting, are divided into genres.
Depending on the subject image in the seventeenth century, the genres were divided into “high” (grand genre) and “low” genre (petit genre). The” high “genre included the historical genre: battle, allegorical, religious and mythological; the” low ” – scenes from everyday life: portrait, landscape, still life, animalism.
Having become a form of representation of life, the genres of painting are not immutable, they develop together with life, changing with the development of art. Some genres die or acquire a new meaning (for example, Vanitas, Capriccio and Veduta), there are new, usually within the pre-existing (for example, within the landscape genre appeared cityscape, seascape and interior), and some are combined (now Nude, household, historical, mythological, allegorical, religious and battle genre is often replaced by the term figurative). Continue reading

Dumas' Three Musketeers for Almost 175 Years: Masterpieces Illustrations Drawn in Different Years
Many in adolescence were read by the works of Alexander Dumas, and especially the novel “Three Musketeers”, filled with adventures and historical events of 1625-1628, as well as entertaining illustrations.…

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Yuri Shatunov - 46: Is it true that the star of “Tender May” will no longer sing “White Roses”?
On September 6, the famous singer, former soloist of the band "Tender May" Yuri Shatunov celebrates his 46th birthday. In the mid-1980s he was the idol of millions of Soviet…

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Secrets of self-portraits of famous artists: Reflection in the mirror, portrait-bacon and other oddities
Self-portrait in most cases is an instrument of narcissism, an attempt to leave your image in eternity. But if a genius takes up the matter, his image on canvas can…

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