week #9

Byzantine and Early Medieval art both portray estouneshing features both in color, story, and picture as a whole. Today i chose to take a look at two pieces from our text book, David The Psalmist pg. 253, and Virgin Of Vladimir pg. 252. Both of these paintings are works of art that portray something real but unlike the naturalistic style that art of its time had been following, they began to divert away somewhat and become more "distorted." I believe the reason for this is to show the viewer importance in every part of the painting and not have one sole focus. In looking at the David The Psalmist, you can see it looks as if the two human figures are right on top of the animals, giving no depth for the viewer to know where things are placed, they are just there. Going along with the problem of depth, another charecteristic of this painting that is unnatural is the proportion of the animals to people. The scale is completely off in order to portray the picture as a whole even if the charecters are closer or farther in reality. Looking at the top right portion of the painting you see what looks like a woman peeping out from behind a pillar, if this woman was to be proportional she would be a giant. But instead the artist paints her to the same size as the other humans in the painting. These things all come together creating a style which is based off of but not exact to naturalism in art. Now taking a look at the Virgin Of Vladimir we also see a close depiction of naturalism but again with a twist. This painting also has a big charecteristic of of unproportion. At first glance the biggest thing that stands out is the size of the head of the adult (giant) compared to that of the child (minature). Not only does this through off the realistic resemblence of the human figure but it draws the viewer into that portion of the painting. Looking closely at the faces you can see the artist did not neglect the childs face when it comes to detail just because it is smaller, but instead he keeps the detail par with that of the adult. Moving on from just the faces when we look into the rest of the painting you can see that natural placement and posture has gone out the window. The position of the child is very unnatural in how she sits and also the position of the neck, both parts of the body obscure the painting enough alone to bring this painting away from the erra of naturalism. As you can see for yourself, even at a moments glance at both of these paintings the Byzantine began greatly to draw away from naturalism and come up with a style of there own.