Task 4.1. Read a few examples of how pictures can be described.
Titian (1485/90—1576)
The more directly sensual and ostentatious side of Titian’s art may be seen in the “Venus and the Lute Player”. In this late work, the delicacy and richness of Titian’s colour reaches a new height with its sensitive glazes and surface mixings of paint. The broad sweeping lines of the composition carry the eye from side to side in a semicircle reaching from the little Cupid at the right to the tip of the musician’s lute and up into the mountains at the left. The nude Venus and the young poetic nobleman seem to have been interrupted in the course of playing music. She holds a flute in her hand and the young man turns from his lute to watch the little godling place a crown of flowers on her head. There is a feeling of things having stopped, of sounds hovering in the air. But this voluptuous and richly portrayed woman is far from a poetic type — not because she may to our eyes look somewhat overabundant but rather because the painter looks upon her in too matter-of-fact a way. She is a magnificent still life, a beautifully and materialistically handled piece of flesh, rich and splendid like the red curtains in the background with their warm shadows.
El Greco (1541—1614)
The spirit and meaning of El Greco’s art may be seen clearly in the well-known “St Martin and the Beggar”. The forms are lengthened and twisted; the heads become tiny entities resting on flame like bodies. Colour also is raised to expressive level. In order to achieve a spiritual rather than a physical effect, the artist distorts the actual colour of the objects and transforms them into mood symbols. The proportions of the figures in relation to the background are so altered that they seem to loom formidably over it and almost to absorb it with their great size. These thin-faced, elongated individuals are brought together by the cold yellow-green of the cloak which St Martin is dividing with the beggar, and by the mutual glances of their melancholy eyes. St Martin and his horse are so impressively large and looming that they seem to reach up into the very sky itself where greyish clouds part to make way for them. As is often the case in El –Greco’s art, most of the compositional elements seem to emphasize the upward movement.
If the St Martin picture (representative of his figure composition, “The View of the City of Toledo” is typical of the painter’s treatment of nature. “The View of Toledo” is a rather strange interpretation, considering that this city in the very centre of Spain would ordinarily be charged with sunlight – every form crystal-clear and crisp. El Greco had characteristically chosen to show the city in an unusual aspect — during or just before a storm — and the ordinary colour and space elements are deliberately altered for the artist’s purposes. The inhospitable greyish-greens that suffuse the picture are just as “unreal” as the arbitrary rearrangement of buildings and the movement of the space upward instead of back into the picture.
For El Greco this ancient place is not a city of joy and light; it is rather a symbol of doom and dark despair. On the right bank of the river in the lower part of the picture there are tiny wormlike creatures which seem to be human beings. But they are unimportant; it is the general emotional and mystical effect of this land that the painter wishes to convey. Never has such a landscape been painted. All the simplest and usual elements of a landscape painting are there: sky, hills, a city, meadows, roads. But the main thing is missing: the feeling of space and distance. Dominant instead is the feeling of activity and drama, a feeling usually conveyed only by the human figure. The sky is rent in a chaotic rush of clouds while the earth dashes to meet it in an upward surge. The menacing anger is accumulated behind the zone of Toledo’s most conspicuous and haughty buildings: the Cathedral and the Castle, the embodiment of the joint powers of the city, the Church and the State.