Category: Art Essays
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Leonardo’s Vitruvian Man, a self portrait?
JMS PearceHull, England Amongst Leonardo da Vinci’s (1452–1519) unrivalled masterpieces are the Mona Lisa (c. 1503), The Last Supper (c. 1495–1498), Salvator Mundi (c. 1499–1510), and the Vitruvian Man (c. 1490). All have been subject to countless commentaries and learned descriptions.1,2 Just as the fictional works of novelists often include (albeit subconsciously) aspects of their…
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Portraits of William Hunter by Reynolds, Chamberlin, and Ramsay
Stephen MartinThailand The Hunterian in Glasgow University and The Royal Academy, London, have three portraits of the anatomist Dr William Hunter.1,2 They make a particularly interesting group with personalized, cryptic symbols and plain emblems of anatomy and the Enlightenment. Despite some discussion,3 their specific icons have never been analyzed. Portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds Reynolds…
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Picasso’s Blue Period and depression
Mary Ellen KellyDublin, Ireland Depression is one of the most common mental disorders globally. The mental illness affects millions and is responsible for an estimated 850,000 deaths per year.1 Depression rates among medical professionals are extremely high,2 and those suffering from depression often find it hard to convey in words the emotions they are experiencing.…
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Hendrick Goltzius (1558–1617): The artist’s hand
James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States In 1588, when Hendrick Goltzius created this striking drawing (Fig. 1) of his deformed right hand, the thirty-year old Haarlem draftsman and engraver was already one of the most influential, well-recognized artists in Europe. In a sense, the drawing was his signature writ large, as evidenced in an anecdote…
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Rembrandt: Tobias Healing His Father’s Blindness
James L. FranklinChicago, Illinois, United States Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn’s Tobias Healing his Father’s Blindness, painted in 1636, depicts the climactic moment in the Book of Tobit when Tobias returns to his father’s home and instills the gall (bile) he had taken from a giant fish into his blind father’s eyes, thereby restoring his sight.1…
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The vision of a visionary: JMW Turner RA
JMS PearceHull, England “The artist who could most stirringly and truthfully measure the moods of Nature.”– John Ruskin The preeminent artist Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851) was born in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, London, the only son of William Turner, a wigmaker, and Mary Ann Marshall. He entered the Royal Academy schools aged fourteen and…
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Anatomy and psychology in George Stubbs’ portrait of Joseph Banks
Stephen MartinThailandAidan JonesUnited Kingdom Medical investigation techniques applied to art history1 can help solve mysteries, as illustrated by a striking, late eighteenth-century portrait2 (Fig 1) recently acquired for an educational exhibition.3 Its history had been forgotten, but it was identified as an inheritance portrait by its dirty, dog-eared parchment property titles in legal pink ribbon.4…
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Piero della Francesca and Paul Klee (and cancer)
Scott SikkemaChicago, Illinois, United States “Man’s ability to measure the spiritual, earthbound and cosmic, set against his physical helplessness; this is his fundamental tragedy. The tragedy of spirituality. The consequence of this simultaneous helplessness of the body and mobility of the spirit is the dichotomy of human existence.”—Paul Klee (The Notebooks of Paul Klee) In…
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A trip to the museum
Sam WoodworthPortland, Maine I recently had the opportunity to visit the Frick Collection in New York City and was delighted to see Portrait of Comtesse d’Haussonville, a beautiful painting by the nineteenth-century French neoclassical artist, Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres. The subject of the painting, Louise de Broglie, appears to have just returned from a show…
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The paradoxical life and art of Robert Colescott
Mildred WilsonMichigan, United States In 1975, satirist Robert Colescott turned the art community on its head with Eat Dem Taters, a parody of van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters.1,2 He and other postmodernist painters of the period would appropriate images from other artists’ paintings, questioning the concept of originality,2 and his George Washington Carver Crossing the…