The Martyrdom of Saint Ursula by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio completed in 1610.
According to legend, Saint Ursula traveled with eleven thousand virgins to Cologne, where the chief of the Huns besieging the city fell in love with her. When she rejected his advances, he killed her with an arrow.
In this haunting depiction, Caravaggio places the two figures improbably close to each other, maximizing the contrast between their expressions: Ursula’s perplexed gaze at the agent of her martyrdom; the tyrant’s conflicted reactions of rage and guilt.
Caravaggio includes himself as a spectator, straining for a glimpse, while another figure thrusts his hand forward in an abortive effort to prevent the saint’s execution. The exaggerated contrasts between dark and light seem not merely a dramatic device but a symbolic allusion to sin and redemption, death and life.
I am a big fan of John Martin. If I ever get the chance i want to buy a reproduction of one of his works to put in my house and make them as big as the actual paintings. Chances are you might be familiar with his work even if you think you aren't, because he was hired to make the engraving for a 1824 publication of Paradise Lost which turned out so good they are now the default visuals of the work. His main skill was making shit look absolutely fucking huge. There is a scale on his paintings that few other artists ever matched. Some of the architecture in his works almost looks out of Warhammer 40k due to how fucking huge it looks.
He had a decent life and his start on art was usual, but his big break came from his painting Sadak in Search of the Waters of Oblivion catching the eye of a MP. It was based on a popular book at the time called The Tales of the Genii which was a sort of Arabian Nights and Persian Fairy Tale kinda meme. It was on a exhibition for a while and was popular, but when it was taken down Martin got a offer from the MP William Manning to buy the painting for 50 guineas. Apparently one of his sons had died, and the painting was one of the last he ever saw in a exhibition and Manning's "dying son had been moved by its depiction of the slight solitary figure clinging perilously to a ledge."
You really should maximize the pics, to really understand the scale.
Ilya Yefimovich Repin (1844-1930) was a talented painter of the Peredvizhniki School, who was held up by the Soviet government as an artist to be imitated by the new school of Socialist Realists. At the age of 22, Repin began his art career at the Imperial Academy of Arts in St. Petersburg, the same time as the “Rebellion of the Fourteen,” when 14 young artists left the school after refusing to paint mythological paintings for their diplomas. These artists would later form the Society of the Peredvizhniki, which Repin joined in 1878. Repin and the free thinking “itinerants,” as they were also called, rebelled against the formal academy, insisting that art should reflect real life. As an art student, his travels took him to Italy, Paris and Impressionist Exhibitions, and although he was exposed to the vivid colors and quick brush strokes of the impressionist style, he remained true to his unique form of realism.
Ahasuerus at the End of the World by Adolf Hirémy-Hirschl completed in 1888.
The legend of the Wandering Jew was born sometime in the 13th century of medieval Europe; the story claims that the Jew, Ahasuerus taunted Jesus on his way to be crucified, and was therefore condemned to walk the earth until the second coming of Christ.
Death holds the scythe and stands in a pose emblematic of that of Christ on the crucifix which becomes a reminder to Ahasuerus of his punishment. Here he is a decrepit old man escorted by Death over a polar landscape, trailed by the angel of Hope. Before him lies a dead woman, the personification of humanity and life frozen facedown into the ice, as ominous crows gather.
The earliest oil paintings by Gustav Klimt are study heads datable to the period between 1880 and 1883.
As one of their first commissions, the “Künstler-Compagnie” created ceiling paintings for the salon of Palais Sturany, a mansion on the Ringstraße in Vienna designed by Fellner & Helmer. The four ceiling paintings, executed in 1880, depict personifications of the arts, with the allegory of music created by Gustav Klimt.
Even the drawings from his first years as a student, when Klimt trained by copying plaster statues and sketching portraits, reveal the artist’s outstanding talent.
The second discipline in which Klimt trained early on was drawing from life. Having switched to the painting and drawing class in 1878/79, he did a large number of drawings of male nudes in diverse poses. They illustrate that during his studies Klimt explored the male anatomy in depth. Particularly impressive in this context are the convincing foreshortening of the limbs and the skillful accentuation of individual groups of muscles through shading.
The allegory of sculpture is a nude inspired by antiquity and depicted in a gracious pose carrying a small bronze of the goddess Victoria (Nike).
The allegory of sculpture is standing in front of a bronze Boy with Thorne, a scaled-down image of Pallas Athena and a monumental head of Juno.
the painting Schubert at the Piano was lauded by the majority of critics in 1899. The Austrian author Hermann Bahr even called it “the most beautiful painting ever painted by an Austrian.”
The square-format painting, with its frame designed by Klimt himself, leaves no doubt whom it represents. Klimt had the name of the Greek goddess, “PALLAS ATHENE,” written in capital letters along the upper strip of the frame. In strict frontality, the figure presents herself as a defiant woman: she wears a shiny golden Greek helmet with a nose guard, a shimmering gorgoneion, and a scale cuirass (aegis) over a red chiton. With her left hand she leans on the shaft of a lance. In her right hand, Pallas Athene holds a small Nike supported on a sphere.
..if one compares Klimt’s depiction of Pallas Athene in the spandrel of the staircase of the Kunsthistorisches Hofmuseum, which is about eight years older, with the Wien Museum’s picture, the military and aloof appearance of the goddess in the later oil painting is striking.
Between 1898 and 1907, Gustav Klimt painted a group of small Symbolist paintings depicting enchanted and mysterious underwater scenes.
One of Klimt’s most controversial works in 1899 was Nuda Veritas. This tall and narrow painting shows a nude young woman in strict frontality, her appearance stylistically reminiscent of the Belgian painter Fernand Khnopff. White daisies adorn her red mane of hair, and with her right hand she holds up a mirror reflecting the light. Blue and violet lines behind the figure of Naked Truth, the title of the painting translated into English are interpreted as purifying water or veils.
Gustav Klimt is known today as the author of impressive and monumental female portraits. But he only began to stand out in this genre at the age of thirty-six, with the portrait of Sonja Knips, followed by the painted likenesses of Serena Lederer and Trude Steiner, with which he increasingly established himself as the Painter of Women.
[/COLOR]In Portrait of Helene Klimt he depicted his niece, who was six years old at the time, in strict profile. He was the guardian of the daughter of his brother Ernst, who had died in 1892, and the latter’s wife, Helene. In the portrait the child resembles a young adult, as any clue as to her young age is erased by the hairstyle and clothing.
The Portrait of Sonja Knips ranks among Gustav Klimt’s most famous portraits.