opera tag
According to the Roman author Pliny the Elder, painting was born when a woman, the daughter of Corinth, drew around the shadow formed by her lover’s profile. But up to the fourteenth century, painted figures - such as Christ, the Madonna, saints and angels - had no shadows; they seemed to be suspended on richly coloured floors, covered with carpets or fabrics. They were divine creatures, without a body of flesh and blood, so could not project shadows. Shadows were the proof that a person existed; without a shadow, that person did not belong to this world. The first artist to paint shadows was Masaccio, at the beginning of the fifteenth century. This was no longer the medieval world, with a vision of life that placed God at the centre of the universe and man as completely subject to the will and power of the Church. Humanism was born. From that moment, paintings no longer represented only supernatural beings, but true men and women, with shadows: there were Leonardo da Vinci’s sweet shadows, without hard edges; shadows lit with passion in scenes painted by Caravaggio and Georges de la Tour; nervous shadows in Pissarro’s landscapes; shadows symbolising anxiety in Edvard Munch’s work; monumental shadows painted by Giorgio De Chirico, which become true presences; and the shadows in the 66 works Andy Warhol called ‘Shadows’, which become the very subject of the artwork.
)
According to the Roman author Pliny the Elder, painting was born when a woman, the daughter of Corinth, drew around the shadow formed by her lover’s profile. But up to the fourteenth century, painted figures - such as Christ, the Madonna, saints and angels - had no shadows; they seemed to be suspended on richly coloured floors, covered with carpets or fabrics. They were divine creatures, without a body of flesh and blood, so could not project shadows. Shadows were the proof that a person existed; without a shadow, that person did not belong to this world. The first artist to paint shadows was Masaccio, at the beginning of the fifteenth century. This was no longer the medieval world, with a vision of life that placed God at the centre of the universe and man as completely subject to the will and power of the Church. Humanism was born. From that moment, paintings no longer represented only supernatural beings, but true men and women, with shadows: there were Leonardo da Vinci’s sweet shadows, without hard edges; shadows lit with passion in scenes painted by Caravaggio and Georges de la Tour; nervous shadows in Pissarro’s landscapes; shadows symbolising anxiety in Edvard Munch’s work; monumental shadows painted by Giorgio De Chirico, which become true presences; and the shadows in the 66 works Andy Warhol called ‘Shadows’, which become the very subject of the artwork.
