Art and Eye

  Evelyn De Morgan constructed her chalk and pencil study from a richly coloured, highly detailed oil on canvas she called  Earthbound. Here, a grasping king swathed in orange and pinpricks of gold attempts to desperately claw at the last of his coins, whilst an angelic being swoops over him. In the distance, a lone figure bathed in light gestures up towards the ombre heavens, in an indication of the underlying religiosity of De Morgan's oil painting. None of this becomes evident, however, from her chalk and pencil study of two reclining figures. What is the purpose of exploring these preparatory sketches? Why are they important or useful? In the oil painting, De Morgan's miserly king is noticeably male, from his bushy grey hair and beard. In the chalk study, the artist has chosen a female figure in both instances, to work out her final composition, firstly in the nude before layering the draperies onto the figure. It highlights the constraints of the nineteenth century female...

  The amount of detail contained in the small panel of St Thomas Aquinas is hard for the eye to quantify. It is even more staggering when a viewer realises that this is but one section of the so-called Demidoff Altarpiece, produced by Crivelli in 1476 for the church of Ascoli Piceno. As a whole, the altarpiece includes complex tracery and gold work in the International Gothic style, the latter of which is repeated on the gold leaf backgrounds that saints sit upon, through both tooling and gilding methods. The figure of Thomas Aquinas, ageing and dressed in a Dominican habit, is positioned on the right-hand side of the altarpiece's upper tier. He looks to the left, betraying his position on the edge of the panel, as he gazes towards the figure of St Stephen. Although he does not open his mouth, his eyeline suggests dialogue. Directional gazes, coupled with illusionistic detail, are constantly employed by Crivelli to bridge the gap between reality and the divine.  Aquinas' inqui...