Paintings of the Nursing Madonna presented artists with a unique problem. How do you show the Virgin Mary with a single bare breast for the Christ Child to suckle whilst maintaining her modesty?
Known as Madonna Lactans, devotional images of this kind grew in popularity during the late Middle-Ages as…
This painting is brimming with symbolism. It shows Venus reclining on a rug of blue fabric in the setting of a bower, where the goddess of Love takes shade beneath a tree.
Next to her stands her son Cupid. He is recognisable by the wings on his back and the…
Sometimes a painting or a sculpture breaks through your conscious mind and leaves an impression that lasts for years, perhaps even a lifetime. I’ve chosen five paintings that had that effect on me and ultimately changed the way I look at art. …
Edgar Degas painted young ballet dancers with an almost obsessive curiosity. Nearly half of his oil paintings and pastel works depict ballerinas at the corps de ballet at the Paris Opéra.
Many of the works focus on the backstage preparations: teaching classes, rehearsal and dressing room scenes. A backstage friend…
Most artworks occupy dimensions in space. In the case of a painting, for example, the image has a certain height and width, and within those dimensions, a composition.
Composition is the way in which elements within an artwork are combined. …
It can take a few moments for your eyes to adjust to the crepuscular light of this intriguing painting. The lustrous band of yellow that billows across the canvas tends to draw the eye upwards, away from the mist and shadows of the lower section.
If you closely you’ll notice…
What does it mean? What is it showing us? What is it trying to say?
When someone sees a work of art, these are the natural questions that many people ask.
The dilemma I want to address here is: who is the best person to answer these questions? Is it…
The story of Proserpine — or Proserpina in Latin — is told in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Proserpine is the daughter of the corn-goddess Ceres, who whilst out gathering flowers in the Vale of Nysa was seen by the powerful god Pluto, King of the Underworld.
According to Ovid, Pluto was struck…
We are familiar with the concept of the gap year: a year-long break from the treadmill of study and work, designed to broaden the mind and open the heart.
Many head for Europe to visit the sites of artistic Paris and ancient Italy. It is a coming-of-age excursion that some…
On August 21 1911, the Mona Lisa painting vanished from the Louvre Museum in Paris.
Three men disguised as museum staff quietly slipped away with the painting stowed beneath a blanket. They had hidden in the museum overnight. And with the stolen painting freed from its frame and glass, they…
