Name: How to do visual (formal) analysis in art history
Uploaded: 2019-09-20T17:44:42.000Z
Duration: 9 min 53 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

- [Steven] We're in the National Gallery in London,

This is a Renaissance painting from Venice.

as a vehicle to highlight the tools of visual analysis.

- [Beth] So here's what we're not gonna talk about.

how this painting fits in with the history of paintings

We're not gonna talk about the symbolism that we might see

in some of the animals in the background.

We're not gonna talk about the commission

- [Steven] We're not gonna talk about the political,

social, or economic context in which this painting was made.

Instead we're gonna focus on the things we can see.

So we're gonna talk about scale, composition,

- [Beth] Let's start with the issue of scale.

So here we can talk about the scale of the painting,

- [Steven] Well, we're in a gallery with paintings

of all different sizes, there are very large altar pieces,

and there are some very small paintings as well.

When you stand in front of a very large painting,

you tend to stand back, we want to take it all in.

Whereas when you walk up to a very small painting,

we tend to come in very close, to see as much as we can.

- [Steven] But she fills a third of the frame.

- [Beth] And that brings us to the composition.

Not only does she fill a third of the frame,

but the clothing that she's wearing, the drapery spreads out

across the bottom length of the painting.

- [Steven] Creating, in essence, a pyramid.

- [Beth] And pyramids are a very stable form.

We also notice that the child in her lap is contained

- [Steven] The artist has placed her very close

to the foreground, so that she towers over the horizon line,

But there is also a significant amount of landscape

that surrounds her, that, in a sense, frames her.

Bellini has created this pyramidal foreground,

in front of a series of what are really horizontal bands,

You see a band in the foreground of greenery,

and even the clouds create horizontal bands in the sky.

- [Beth] She's framed on one side by trees,

and on the other side by the vertical forms

- [Steven] Another way we can talk about composition,

is to think about the way in which the artist

Look at the lovely, gentle tilt to the Virgin Mary's head,

which corresponds to the angle of the Christ Child's head.

But I'm also struck by the volume in between the hands

of the Virgin Mary, who holds her fingertips together,

defining an internal space, that has the same kind of volume

- [Beth] The diagonal line that forms the slope

of her right shoulder corresponds to the diagonal line

of her forearm, and the diagonal line of the child's body.

- [Steven] Let's turn next to pictorial space.

is creating an illusion of three-dimensional form

and an illusion of space on this flat surface.

she's seated on the ground with the child on her lap.

So we have, immediately, a sense of one thing

in front of another because of overlapping.

- [Steven] But in addition, the pictorial space

If we look at the sky at the top of the painting,

the sky that is closest to us, it has deep, rich blues.

This is a technique that's meant to replicate

the natural phenomena of looking at a great distance,

Details become less vivid, color becomes paler,

Subtitles ListPlay Video

How to do visual (formal) analysis in art history

perspective

context

figure

illusion