Glad to see Renaissance art form in today's mainstream media. This is the opening credits of second season of HBO's limited anthology 'The White Lotus'.
The work is titled Renaissance. The music is composed by composer Cristobal Tapia de Veer. While it seems at first glance that these are legitimate pieces of Roman art, they were actually designed by the creative team Katrina Crawford and Mark Bashore, with the help of illustrator Lezio Lopes. While images of actual historical paintings from the Villa Tasca in Palermo, Sicily were used, the final design adds latent details. Even though the title cards last under two minutes, they tell a complete narrative about a haughty society that collapses under the weight of its indulgences.
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The cover art of magazines like New Yorker & Vanity Fair has always fascinated me. So, I started exploring the artists who design these covers & came across Malika Favre’s work. I was instantly in awe of her style and I hope you all will have a similar experience.
Malika Favre is a French illustrator and graphic artist based in Barcelona. Her style of works could be characterized by pure minimalism within Pop art and Op art, where it sometimes described as 'Pop Art meets Op Art'. She combines simple illustrations with geometric patterns and has developed a unique style of illustration by using positive and negative space and colours, elegant layouts, especially of the female body and its curves. Get a glimpse of her work on her website.
Salvador Dali designed a surrealist ashtray for Air India in 1967 and asked for an elephant as payment, Air India flew a two-year-old elephant from Bangalore (India), accompanied by a mahout (keeper), to Geneva. These limited edition ash trays were gifted to Air India's first class travelers.
From the booklet that accompanied it:
"The ashtray is composed of a shell-shaped center with a serpent twined around its perimeter. It is supported by two surrealist elephant-heads and a swan. These supports are based on Dali´s double-image effect. The master explains: "The reflection of an elephant´s head looks like a swan and the reflection of a swan appears to be an elephant. This is what I have done for the ashtray. The swan up-side-down becomes an elephant´s head and the elephant inverted - a swan."
The ashtray is approximately 4" x 3" across and 2 1/2" tall. Ashtray is mostly unglazed porcelain with a glazed serpent around the lip of the ashtray.
Rosa Bonheur was master of painting animals. Almost all of her paintings feature animals: cows, tiger, lion, horse, etc. Check out her other paintings here.
'Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds' (ca. 1825), by John Constable
John Constable was not only one of England's greatest landscape painters, he also transformed the entire genre. The realism of Constable's work was innovative for its time, and it would go on to influence both modern artists and, later in the 19th century, the Impressionists. The work we see here is one of several full-scale studies completed prior to a final painting of Salisbury Cathedral. The work was commissioned by that church's bishop, and Constable's friend, John Fisher, who requested that Constable rework the sky in the artwork's early versions. It wasn't unusual for commissioned paintings to go through a number of revisions before reaching their final form, depending on the client's requests.
'Salisbury Cathedral from the Bishop's Grounds' by John Constable is in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
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“Even in a personal sense, after all, art is an intensified life. By art one is more deeply satisfied and more rapidly used up. It engraves on the countenance of its servant the traces of imaginary and intellectual adventures, and even if he has outwardly existed in cloistral tranquillity, it leads in the long term to overfastidiousness, overrefinement, nervous fatigue and overstimulation, such as can seldom result from a life full of the most extravagant passions and pleasures.” ~ An excerpt from ‘Death in Venice’ by Thomas Mann (Literature Nobel laureate)
'Two Men Contemplating the Moon' by Caspar David Friedrich (1825)
Style: Romanticism
Location: Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden, Germany, Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met), New York City, NY, US
The two men contemplating the sinking moon have been identified as Friedrich himself, on the right, and his talented young colleague August Heinrich (1794–1822). The mood of pious contemplation relates to fascination with the moon as expressed in contemporary poetry, literature, philosophy, and music. Both figures are seen from the back so that the viewer can participate in their communion with nature, which the Romantics saw as a manifestation of the Sublime.
Although the landscape is imaginary, it is based on studies after nature that Friedrich had made in various regions at different times. Both men wear Old German dress, which had been adopted in 1815 by radical students as an expression of opposition to the ultraconservative policies then being enforced in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars. The staunchly patriotic Friedrich deliberately ignored the 1819 royal decree forbidding this practice and depicted figures in traditional costume until his death.
’Le Déséspéré’ (The Desperate Man) by Gustav Courbet
Style- Romanticism
Genre- Self-Portrait
I gain strength from my knowledge that in any given circumstances most men are the same; it is only the circumstances that are so various. There are other men who want to paint as I do, and in front of our pages or easels, our experiences are common to each of us. There are many brotherhoods without name. And if I had to give a single piece of advice to a young painter, I would remind him of this. Then it would not seem to him so important or tragic or embittering that most of those who talk about art are entirely ignorant.
“But the paradox of love is perhaps the same as that of art, which Jeanette Winterson so elegantly termed “the paradox of active surrender” — in order for either to transform us, we must let it turn us over and inside-out. That is what Rilke called love’s great exacting claim, and in that claim lies its ultimate reward.” ~Maria Popova, “Kafka’s beautiful and heartbreaking love letters”
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