It’s a good story that the first month of the year is named January after the two-faced god of transitions, Janus. It’s a shame that isn’t exactly true.
Poussin
From Giorgione, Dürer and Altdorfer to Turner, Pissarro, Monet and Renoir: landmarks in the composition of landscape paintings.
Before the 19th century, most paintings of deserts were imaginary. Then artists started to paint them at first hand. Paintings up to 1864.
From Dürer and Poussin to Cézanne and Hodler, reflections have been important in many landscape paintings.
Paintings of knights in armour from Raphael in c 1502, through Ingres’ rescue of Angelica, to Arthurian legends and the Pre-Raphaelite movement.
Telling a story using shadows, and the nineteenth century controversy over the colour of shadows.
The fourth ‘basic plot’ is the story of voyage and return, for which we turn to Ovid’s account of this couple, and a dozen superb paintings. But does the model fit?
With its central role in visual art, light and its source plays a critical role in composition. It’s also one of the challenges to those painting in the studio or in front of the motif.
From abandonment by his father, to the reunion in which Medea tried to poison him, Theseus was a true and thoroughly flawed hero.
Compositional techniques in some of Poussin’s finest landscapes to establish the mode, and draw the eye into the distant mountains.
