Five Portraits

Paper Summary:

This paper analyzes five different portraits - Manet's "Olympia", Goya's "The Naked Maja", Titian's "Venus of Urbino", Velazquez's "The Toilet of Venus" and Giorgione's "Sleeping Venus". It discusses how these five portraits collectively present us with a sense of how art shifted from the beginning of the Renaissance and thus the beginning of Modernist sensibility through the rise of the industrialized world into late modernism. However, while nearly everything changed in the world and in the world of art, the position of women in society and so the position of women on canvases changed very little over the course of these centuries.

From the Paper:

"Titian was perhaps the greatest colorist of the Renaissance, and by the time that he died in Venice in 1576 his use of color and the way that he blended it with form had forever changed the course of European painting. He most important contribution to European painting, as Huse (1993) argues, is that his works created a visual alternative to the sculptural and highly linear Florentine tradition that had been brought to prominence by both Michelangelo and Raphael and that during their own tenure seemed the only possible way in which to interpret the world."

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