Influence of Context in Understanding of Art - Essay Example

Influence of context in understanding of art through comparative analysis of sculpture and painting of Three Graces. Three Graces are quite popular subjects for description in the world history of art, implemented in different genres. The objects of comparison are two realizations of the famous goddesses: the painting of Three Graces by Sandro Botticelli, and the sculpture of Three Graces (Roman copy of a Greek work of the second century B.C. (marble). A difference between the artworks is the following: even though they both describe the same subjects, the sculpture itself demonstrates almost nothing but bodies of Charites, whereas the painting gives us much more semantic information about the subjects than the sculpture does. Botticelli’s painting of Three Graces (1482) is a fragment of the tempera panel painting “Primavera”; it describes three Greek mythological goddesses Aglaia, Thalia and Euphrosyne. They are pictured dancing and holding their hands, looking at each other. The women look a kind of alike, they have the same hair color and the textures of their dresses are also similar, which shows that artist intended to picture them as a separate part from the whole composition, but didn’t want to emphasize on each of them, on the contrary, Botticelli made them as one element of the painting. The lines on the painting are soft and precise; color and shading form a three-dimensional picture – these factors influent on the naturalistic visualization of the Graces. The curling hair of the goddesses and the translucent elements of their clothes create an impression of lightness and serenity of women’s characters, and the dark background simultaneously emphasizes on this impression by contrasting, but also alienates this group of characters from the others in the painting. Three Graces are depicted extremely naturally; with a high technique Botticelli succeed to describe the goddesses both mythically and realistically. The sculpture of Three Graces (Roman copy of a Greek work of the second century b.c (marble) is an image of three young women, holding each other’s shoulders, the one in the middle is turned backwards. Some of the women have their hands cut and they all don’t have a head details, the statue was damaged, the artist created this work is unknown. Because of the damages this work of art cannot be properly interpreted. The sculpture is made of marble, white color and smooth surface; the figures of goddesses are real human sized, they stand on ovoid base surrounded by two pillars on lateral sides. Elements of the sculpture were made smooth and polished; in addition, the connection between women in the composition is obvious: they stand interwoven with each other like they are both separate persons and simultaneously the one. A balance of light and shadow was definitely maintained by sculptor, because an emplacement of the figures was made perfectly to create a contrast between dark and light accents in composition. It’s hard to understand which sides the heads of the women are tuned towards, and to recognize the emotional aspect of the sculpture, which makes big problems in interpretation and analyzing of the figures. It is even possible to say that if the name of the sculpture wasn’t known, it would be hard to understand that it’s three Graces, who are depicted in the sculpture. So there is not as much interpretative value in this sculpture as in the painting we are comparing it with; probably, the sculpture is more valuable as antique artifact. Comparing these two descriptions of Charites, it becomes pretty obvious that they are just slightly similar. First of all, because of the form of realization: sculpture and painting. The sculpture is made of marble and it is wholly white, which means that a choice of colors and shadows can’t influent on viewer’s imagination like it does in the picture. Which is even more important is that the sculpture is lack of some details, as it was mentioned before, so this fact takes a lot of interpretation. The most visible difference between the works is that the Graces in the painting are dressed, but in the sculpture they have no clothes. Also, it is worth noticing that however the sculpture is volumetric itself and a viewer can consider it from all sides, Botticelli also made his Graces volumetric operating with lines, light, and shadows, so the only side viewer can’t see the women is back, which in fact doesn’t take much from the full perception of them. Looking at the poses of Graces in both art works it is more possible to recognize their characteristics through the painting than the sculpture: painted Graces are dancing, almost soaring under the ground, when marble ones just stand holding each other, which adds some gravity into their image. In Roman mythology three Graces are the analogies of Greek Charites, goddesses, who embody the eternal youth, virtue, joy; in the “Odyssey” by Homer they are handmaidens of the goddess of love and beauty Aphrodite. In “Theogony” by Hesiod they are Zeus’s daughters and their names are: Aglaia ("shining"), Euphrosyne ("virtuous"), Thalia ("blooming"). Actually, there are many variations of Charites’ names and the amount of them in different myths, but the main idea of these mythic characters is that they are a personification of the ideal of human virtue, chastity, and joy. Because of their image as lightness and mirth in art works the goddesses frequently are described as the enjoying themselves and dancing ones. Which is worth noticing, they are never separated from each other, each of them embodies different thing, but in fact they show that these things (joy, virtue, love, fertileness, etc.) have the same nature. The subjects in both art works we considered are three beautiful women holding each other, without knowing mythological and historical discourse a viewer wouldn’t been able to estimate whether the artists, who created the works, managed to image the Graces properly. In art Charites are usually are depicted in the following way: two of them stand facing a viewer, and the one in the middle stands back. This was their antique posture, lately copied by Renaissance artists. The way they stand may show that symbolically they are the one, so they usually stand close up to one another, and, forming a closed circle, cannot be separated. In different times Graces endowed with different allegorical meanings, which diversified the way they were positioned in relation to each other and whether they had clothes or not. A lack of clothes meant that the girls are so beautiful and frank that nothing must be hidden it their bodies – they are an embodiment of beauty and virtue. In the context of Botticelli’s “Primavera” they symbolize a moral part of human nature development, penultimate phase of man’s purifying. This probably was declined by Botticelli himself, which is obvious in consideration of three Graces together with the other subjects and their positions in the painting. The three Graces (Charites) are the characters with a wide meaning in the history of art. Evidently, Botticelli’s painting is much more comprehensive in the ways of representation of the subjects, because of richer means of the image implementation and wider context in which the heroines may be considered by viewer. Unfortunately, because of some damages, the sculpture cannot give us much information about the subjects, except the bodies and their position details. Works cited: Botticelli, Sandro. Primavera. 1482. Tempera on panel. Uffizi Gallery, Florence. Marble Statue Group of the Three Graces (Roman copy of a Greek work of the 2nd century B.C.). II century A.D. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Read More