Transcript Portraits through time

Portraits through time
Why do people create portraits?
Ancient Rome: Imagines and Marriage
Portraits
To remember someone who
Is gone.
To show status of people
Still living
To create a reality that is
Pleasing to the patron
Renaissance: Giovanni Bellini
To show someone as being important
Or sacred
To explain ideas through symbols
To provide access to the idea of a
person
Renaissance: Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci
To tell a story about a person
To give an idea of someone’s
Personality
To show something about a
Person’s family
The Baroque:
Portraits with
Light and Tenebrism…
Rembrandt of the Baroque period
To create a mood that reflects
A person’s state of mind
To give a sense of the inner
Self….
To give a truthful view of an
Individual’s physical appearance
Caravaggio of the Baroque period
To tell a story with people
Who seem real enough to
Touch…
To heighten the experience
Of a person’s story through
A dramatic experience
To exaggerate the qualities
Of an individual to create
An ideal
Caravaggio
Neo-Classicism: Portraits that create ideals
Ingres created portraits
That commemorate a great
Individual
Here-he idealizes his own
Image
David of the Neo-Classical
Portraiture as propaganda for
An emperor…
Romanticism: Portraits that exaggerated
mood or feeling
Gericault painted images
Of people who had mental
Illness…and exaggerated the
Mood and atmosphere to
Communicate an idea
Photography: Portraits as Documentation
To document and/or commemorate
a person or people of a certain time
A much faster way to document
This is a daguerreotype
photograph-a portrait of a soldier
from the Civil War
Early Photography:
Portrait of an Artist
Some of the early portrait photography went
beyond simply documenting and ventured
into the realm of fine art- photography as a
fine art medium
This is a portrait of the Romantic artist
Eugene Delacroix, take by one of the early
innovators of photography Felix Nadar
PS- the VMFA show Artists as Art: Photographic Portraits ends this
Sunday (3/22)! Go see it while you still can! (free admission)
Photography & Portraiture: Dorothea Lange
Dorothea Lange’s photograph Migrant
Mother taken during the Great
Depression is an example of a candid
photograph.
Portraiture in photography can combine
fine art and documentation.
…and lets not forget emotion! This is a
photographic portrait that carries quite
a lot of emotional weight.
Photography & Portraiture:
Conveying Identity
Cindy Sherman was a photographer who did a lot
of staging: she set up very specific environments
with the intention of conveying information about
the subject’s identity.
This photograph is a self portrait which explores
identity in relation to gender (more specifically,
gender related stereotypes).
Portraits, regardless of media being used, can be
made with the purpose of representing (an aspect
of) the subject’s identity.
Portraits can challenge what we assume about a
person’s identity.
Photographic portraits are great, but what
becomes of the way portraits are created using
non-photographic media?
For example, how do painters approach the
portrait?
Going Beyond the “Real”
Artists like Van Gogh challenged the notion
that portraits had to be as realistically
rendered as possible.
Shift in focus: a portrait does not necessarily
have to render a person as realistically as
possible.
Expressive mark-making can be used to
convey emotional/personal information
about the subject.
Upcoming VMFA Exhibit featuring Van Gogh (Van Gogh, Manet, and
Matisse: the Art of the Flower) begins this Saturday (3/21)
20th century: Modern Art (Picasso)
Picasso begged the question:
what can a portrait be?
…and what is an important
function of a portrait in this
modern age?
…To show a truth about a
person that cannot be seen by
everyone…
Does a portrait even have
to depict a physical person?
Marsden Hartley’s Portrait of a German Officer
Hartley created this commemorative portrait by
painting symbols that represented the deceased.
A portrait can include or consist of symbols that
represent an individual.
For our prisma color self portraits we will be
employing more photorealistic techniques
Chuck Close
Gerhard Richter
Kehinde Wiley
James Valerio