Thursday 30 December 2010

The Art of the Portrait (Masterpieces of European Portrait Painting 1420-1670)

The Art of the Portrait (Masterpieces of European Portrait Painting 1420-1670)
T.schen | ISBN: 3822865222 | 180 pages | PDF | 105 MB

This work sets out to analyze some of the major works of early modern portraiture and takes a close look at 50 major works, including paintings by Jan Van Eyck, Holbein the Younger, Raphael, Mantegna and Botticelli. The portraits presented here are selected exclusively from works executed between the late Middle Ages and the 17th century - for it was then that portraiture came into its own. The portraits themselves have been chosen on the basis of their subjects' rank and profession. The value of this method of selection is its proximity to both the painters' intentions and their patrons' requirements.
The Art of the Portrait focuses on about a 200-year period, from the late Middle Ages to the Renaissance, during which the genre of painted portraiture flourished. For the first time since classical antiquity, interest in and attention to this type of painting grew. As a consequence, new visual types of portraiture--full length, profiles, groups--emerged, and a wider range of subjects (outside the traditional circle of royalty and clergy) was explored in the canvasses, along with psychological and atmospheric elements. During this heyday innumerable masterpieces were painted by a wealth of different artists. But the 19th century, with the advent of photography and impressionism, among other developments, put an abrupt end to the boom.

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