Art and Eye

  There is so much detail that the eye could take in, yet there is so much empty space. This is foregrounded by Giorgione's precise rendering of multiple textures. The shine of the armour almost glistens as though the paint is still wet, and would have fitted with the chapel display beside a window, which also corresponds with the shadows of the figures. The dress of Saint Francis suggests weight and mass, especially as the arms of his clothing drape down to articulate his gestures. These realistic folds are repeated in the velvet, crimson draperies of the Virgin who sits atop the extreme vertical of her throne. Her weighted clothing has Northern European connotations akin to the works of van Eyck or Antonella da Messina. Texture extends to the drooping standard that Saint George wields, and also to the rendering of the naturalistic landscape behind the figures. The trees on the far right of the piece really could be bending in the breeze. Finally, there is architectural texture, m

As the only major oil painting by Rossetti to feature a nude figure, the eye of the male, Victorian consumer would settle on the sumptuous body of Venus. Only the highly conservative critic Ruskin seemed particularly repelled by Rossetti's representation. Though appalled by the sexual tones of the piece, he was perhaps too puritanical to voice the precise subject of his complaint, instead focusing on the flowers; 'awful in their coarseness'. Victorian society in the mid nineteenth century was well acquainted with the ability of flowers to evoke sensual symbolism. Floriography, or the study of the Language of flowers was a common interest. Equally by 1865 the sexual system of plant classification was also common parlance, thus eroticising flowers in the eyes of many viewers. Rossetti has amplified these tendencies in the honeysuckles right in the foreground of the picture plane - according to David Bentley they are nothing if not representations of 'sexual organs'. 

  Upon the advent of perspective in Quattrocento Florence, the eye of Donatello fixed on the use of one point perspective, echoing many other artists of the time. In this extremely tender relief of the Virgin and Child, the artist is using Brunelleschian principles to render space effectively. The two figures are contained within a well proportioned, box-like space - instead of the complicated perspectival backgrounds artists were often rendering at this time (Ghiberti's bronze doors of the Florentine Baptistery for instance), here there is no distraction from the intimate family moment. Our eye, using the orthogonals of this box, is concentrated on the faces of the Virgin and Christ, and to their inseparable, unblinking connection.  Donatello pioneered the technique of riliveo schiacciato which is expertly shown in this piece. This was a flattened relief, a system of carving creating effects through minute variations of surface modelling and extremely shallow cutting. Forms seem t