"Christ entering Jerusalem"

 

“Christ entering Jerusalem”

Maesta Altar

Artist- Duccio

Tempera on wood, Size: 40x 21”

                Duccio was significant to his time as an artist, because he was one of the first to change the way art was created.  He moved the style of art from the High Middle ages toward the Renaissance.  What Duccio succeeded at is creating a great amount of space in such a small area.  He achieved this by using linear perspective, which was based on the view that parallel lines appeared to converge as they go further from the viewer, while meeting at a vanishing point. 

                The painting “Christ entering Jerusalem,” portrays various amount of color and puts the viewer at an angle where everything would be seen as if to be present.  He uses a great variety of red orange to make the painting stand out and feel vibrant.  All the lines are going toward the middle pointing to Christ, so that way the point of action is on him.  Duccio opened a door for many more great Renaissance artists to come, by introducing Christianity into art and using different perspectives.

               

"Pallet of Narmer"

Pallet of Narmer

3100 B.C. slate, height 25”

Egyptian Museum, Cairo

This is a piece of pottery made from the ancient Egyptians.  It displays great proportion of the human body, with the use of geometric shapes and two dimensional lines.  The Egyptians used the form of the human body the same way for 3,000 years.  They use grids to outline the head and body so it will be to scale and so it will be well proportioned. 

                Egyptians used the same scales, and grids no matter how big the piece of work.  They would decorate their pharos’ grave sites all around the wall, and also build great sculptures.  Nonetheless, they only things that would change would be the position of the arms and legs. 

               

 "The Embarkation for Cythera"-Jean-Antoine  

Wattuea (1728-19?) canvas-50.5 X 76.5

In this painting Watteau uses a variety of implied lines and atmospheric perspective.  For example, there are Angels from the bottom right of the picture up toward the top of the sail.  This is done to give the viewer a chance to navigate through the painting instead of just having to focus on one spot alone.  The viewer is placed right in front of the painting as if almost viewing everything in person on top of a hill or nearby. 

                The use of atmospheric perspective is shown by the color change of the sky and angels as they get further away.  Also the mood of the painting is calm and peaceful; this was done by the use of cool colors such as blue, green, white, yellow to present a place of serenity and love.

                “What is usually accepted as shown in both versions has been neatly expressed as ‘the embarkation of pilgrim lovers for a distant Elysium of ideal happiness.”-K.T. Parker-Drawings of Antoine Watteau.