Seventeenth-Century Art Writing Assignment
Jan Vermeer's career spread over a century of great change- in art, technology, and social customs. In art, subject matter ceased to be the most important component of great paintings. This allowed artists to discover how to appreciate and portray the sheer beauty of the world. One of the greatest of these masters was Jan Vermeer, born a generation after Rembrandt. Vermeer did not paint many pictures in his life, and few of them represent important scenes. Specializing in genre paintings (subjects of everyday life), he mainly painted ordinary figures engaged in ordinary tasks, such as a lady reading a letter or a young lady playing a lute. Yet what made these paintings such masterpieces was the way Vermeer achieved meticulous precision in the presentation of textures, light, and colors without the paintings ever looking unnatural or harsh.
In his life, Vermeer painted in two distinct styles: the first style (from 1653-1664) was......
Join Now or Login to view the rest of this paper.
Approximate Word Count: 651
Approximate Pages: 3 (260 words per double-spaced page) |