Wearing a garment identical to that of Hope, Charity also reveals a resembling face: the same model probably served Giotto in painting both virtues. The woman humbly smiles and bends slightly backwards, producing a set of graceful and plastic movements, and a subtle contrapposto. She balances easily standing on a few sacks of grain or [...]
Though the term “plasticity” is more often employed when describing sculpture, it can sometimes infiltrate the visual arts to a persistent effect. Giotto’s monochrome virtues and vices, painted on the walls of Capella degli Scrovegni, Padua, demonstrate what can be defined as “quasi-sculptural” plasticity: it brings the figures to life via subtle yet expressive movement [...]
The Gleaners stands out as one of Millet’s most familiar and iconic images: the highlight of his self-assigned mission to represent the minutiae and hardship of contemporary French peasant life. In many ways, it’s a triumph of that particular trend of the bucolic genre, which the artist himself largely plotted. Gleaning, which remains very much [...]
In The Wood Sawyers Jean-Francois Millet departs from the static melancholy of his open landscape pieces, such as The Angelus and the Shepherdess with Her Flock, and focuses on a loud, inherently agile activity confined to a seemingly enclosed, vaguely defined, almost abstract space. This is a very dynamic scene: the bodies of the workers [...]
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