Lighting is used to emphasize the rich drapery hung just behind the woman, giving her the illusion of privacy from the other women while the vertical line of the drapes forces the vision to the woman’s pubic area.Īt the time it was first made public, Edouard Manet’s painting “Olympia” (1863) was greeted with a widespread public scandal not because of the nude state of its central figure, but because of how it depicted the female character. The suggestion of the lines gives the viewer the sense that they are seeing this woman as if through a window, giving her a degree of separation from the viewer that is only slightly less than the separation from the women in the other room. This technique is used in the decoration of the background to indicate the servant women are in another room as well as to depict the rich quality of the palace the woman is lying in.
Straight lines are then drawn on the canvas to represent the horizon and ‘visual rays’ connecting the viewer’s eye to a point in the distance” (Exploring Linear Perspective, 1997). The system originated in Florence, Italy in the early 1400s … To use linear perspective an artist must first imagine the picture surface as an ‘open window’ through which to see the painted world. “Linear perspective is a mathematical system for creating the illusion of space and distance on a flat surface. Titian makes heavy use of linear perspective and light to suggest that the woman is very available while also providing her with a private, secluded space. This Venus is a flesh-and-blood beauty, awake and fully aware of the viewer’s presence” (Hill, 2006). “Titian’s painting is purposefully sensual … She displays none of the attributes of the goddess she is supposed to represent: she is not demure, idealized, unattainable, or remote. She looks directly out of the painting as if daring the viewer to step into her world, but at the same time she seems sweet and almost innocent in her expression. The woman is stretched out across the front bottom half of the canvas with her near arm was thrown back and over her head and the far arm resting comfortably in such a way that her hand covers her vulva at the center of the image. Titian’s oil on canvas painting “Venus of Urbino” (1538) is a painting of a naked woman lying provocatively on a bed in the foreground while two maids work in the background to dig her clothing out of chests placed along the wall. These ideas can be found in a comparison of two similar paintings created more than a century apart such as Titian’s “Venus of Urbino” and Edouard Manet’s “Olympia,” both of which seek to reflect and define their culture’s conception of beauty and expectations of the female gender ideal. Through this skip through history, it is easily understood that art can be used for several purposes and it is often inspired or developed in some way to build on the past. The art of the Middle Ages was dominated by themes of Christian religious myths as a means of rejecting the Paganism of the fallen Roman Empire giving it both religious, political, and educational purpose while the art of the Renaissance was inspired by the re-discovery of these ancient art forms giving it a historical and experimental purpose (Gombrich, 1995). The Romans adopted elements of the Greek style to fuse with elements of the Egyptian style and developed an artistic approach all their own intended to inspire and celebrate their cultural achievements. The Greeks created art as an aid to worshipping their gods and goddesses as well as to preserve their cultural myths. Ancient Egyptian art seems to have been created as a means of commemorating important people.
Archaeologists have hypothesized that art was originally practiced as a magical means of controlling events such as calling a successful hunt or discovering healing rituals, though there is no definitive proof this was so (Gombrich, 1995).
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