Riassunto esame Cultura inglese, prof. Loodbrook, libro consigliato English for the arts, Frederika

Woman holding a balance by Johann Vermeer

Vermeer’s painting Woman holding a balance describes the subject in her domestic task, which portrays a woman weighing her jewelers such as a gold chain and a pearl necklace. The woman, who is standing in her room, is dressed in a blue jacket that recalls images of the Virgin Mary. The way she is dressed reflects the period of the 1660s. Her gaze shows that she is very serene and it gives the painting a relaxing atmosphere, emphasized by the light that gently flows from the window. The balance point is right in the center of the painting. We can find different meanings within the scene, such as the mirror and the pearls which symbolize vanity and self-knowledge. Vermeer’s technique was to use a dark room to indicate different tones of light and a camera obscura to achieve optical effects. In this painting, we can see his sensitivity to the colors.

Perspective in high medieval painting practice

In the eleventh century, arts pay more attention to the biblical stories, which are now represented in specific parts of churches around the world. Each image symbolizes various periods in the biblical stories from the beginning to the end. Proto-perspectival elements help to separate and identify different scenes, as we can see in Duccio’s Maestà, where we can find three scenes that represent Christ and his apostles. The sequence starts in the bottom left-hand side and finishes to the far right. Giotto used the same technique in Padova for some of his works, as Piero della Francesca did. Many images develop a sequence, which tells a story; this helps the painting flow. It also reduces the size of the individual painting, focusing more on Christ and Mary and making the more important figures stand out. The main focus is always upon Christ, as it is the one thing that people, professing the same religion, have in common. Thus churches tend to use key-images that people can recognize more easily.

Camera obscura

Roger Bacon invented the camera obscura, which was a dark box or room with a tiny hole in one end. The same principles had been used by other thinkers in the early years, such as Aristotle. The hole where the light was coming from had to be small to view the image clearly, so one could copy the image by placing a piece of paper and tracing it back. This method was described by Giovanni Battista della Porta in one of his accounts. This new form was not seen in a good way by the public opinion, because they thought it was some kind of black magic. However, many other artists used this technique, such as Canaletto, Reynolds, and Vermeer. In the same period, lenses were invented and associated with the hole of the camera obscura. The meaning of lens came from the Latin lentils.

Different types of camera were developed over time, enhancing the ability to capture and replicate images accurately.