10 paintings by great artists
Before the invention of photography, People kept the memory of various historical events in the paintings. Such paintings often romanticized the struggle or presented various scenes in a distorted form…

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How Russian artist Makovsky painted a portrait of the US president and opened the “Russian style” to Americans
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Western world discovered the Russian style. Sundresses, kokoshniks, furs and precious fabrics, boyars and feasts - this is exactly such Russia that…

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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…

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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

10 world famous paintings in which hidden symbols and messages are hidden
In the old days, when people were forbidden to express their opinions or beliefs publicly (or it was considered rude to publicize their true feelings), paintings and sculptures were a…

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"Love Letter" by Jan Vermeer
At the first glance at Jan Vermeer's famous painting “Love Letter”, the name seems far-fetched, because the letter itself is hardly noticeable. But the lute in the hands of a…

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How Russian artist Makovsky painted a portrait of the US president and opened the “Russian style” to Americans
At the beginning of the 20th century, the Western world discovered the Russian style. Sundresses, kokoshniks, furs and precious fabrics, boyars and feasts - this is exactly such Russia that…

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