Mona Lisa

Florentine artist Leonardo da Vinci painted Mona Lisa (1503-1506, Louvre, Paris) in oil on a wood background. Originally, he portrayed the subject in a loggia with columns on either side, but in the end the artist decided to simplify the content. This painting is remarkable for many things, among them the way that the images are created with tones rather than lines. The Mona Lisa is as well known for its mastery of technical innovations as for the mysteriousness of its legendary smiling subject. This work is a consummate example of two techniques—sfumato and chiaroscuro—of which Leonardo was one of the first great masters. Sfumato is characterized by subtle, almost infinitesimal transitions between color areas, creating a delicately atmospheric haze or smoky effect; it is especially evident in the delicate gauzy robes worn by the sitter and in her enigmatic smile. Chiaroscuro is the technique of modeling and defining forms through contrasts of light and shadow; the sensitive hands of the sitter are portrayed with a luminous modulation of light and shade, while color contrast is used only sparingly.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Venus of Urbino

Venus of Urbino was painted by Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) in 1538. The pose was taken from an earlier painting by Giorgione and is a recreation of the classical Greek nude. This painting embodies the rich color and tone for which Titian was famous; its pictorial composition is flawless.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Judgment of Paris

The Judgment of Paris (1635-?) was painted by Flemish baroque artist Peter Paul Rubens. The painting is based on the Greek myth in which the shepherd Paris is asked by three goddesses to decide which of them is the most beautiful. According to mythology, this is the incident that sparked the legendary Trojan War. The sense of agitated movement, dramatic light, and earthy figures in the painting characterize Rubens’s work.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Jeanne Samary

This portrait of the actress Jeanne Samary was painted in 1879 by Pierre Auguste Renoir. The figure is bathed in light, and the artist’s unique brushwork gives it a glowing quality. Along with French painters Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro, Renoir was a creator of the impressionism movement in painting.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A Wheatfield, with Cypresses

From 1888 until his death in 1890, Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh painted his most important works. In these paintings, mostly landscapes such as A Wheatfield, with Cypresses (1889), van Gogh, like other postimpressionist artists, rejected the impressionists’ aim of depicting subjects naturalistically. Instead he made his paintings subjective through the expressive use of color and line.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Persistence of Memory

The Persistence of Memory (1931) ranks as one of the most famous paintings of the 20th century. A surrealist, Dalí referred to his work as “hand-painted dream photographs,” and claimed that his imagery often came directly from his own dreams. The strange form in this painting’s foreground, however, is based on an image from Hieronymus Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights (about 1505-1510). Dreams, according to Freud, were the royal road to studying the unconscious, because it is in dreams that our unconscious, primal desires manifest themselves.

What feelings and emotions do these pictures evoke in you?