Venus de Milo

The beautiful marble statue, Venus de Milo, stands 6.7 feet (203 cm) tall in the Louvre in Paris. It was created in about 130BC by Alexandros of Antioch. The French ended up with the Greek sculpture and named it Venus, even though this is the Roman name of Aphrodite, the Greek goddess of beauty and love. This sculpture has an interesting history which I will relay to you today.

She was found hidden away in a cavern on the island of Milos in the Aegean Sea in 1820. She was broken in pieces: upper body, lower body, top of left arm, left hand holding an apple, and inscribed base. The peasant who found her, Yorgos Kentrotas, knew that he should turn her in to the Turkish authorities but he found her beauty so great that he kept her for himself. He was probably also interested in how much money he could make if he sold her to the right buyer. Eventually, the officials learned of the discovery and took Venus de Milo from Kentrotas’ barn.

While visiting the island, a French naval officer d’Urville discovered the sculpture. He knew it was valuable and wanted to buy it for the French. The peasant was willing to sell it but d’Urville’s captain, uninterested in antiquities, said there was no room on the ship for her. When his ship reached Constantinople, d’Urville showed sketches of the sculpture to the French ambassador who immediately sent someone to buy the Venus de Milo for France.

The French arrived as the sculpture was being loaded onto a ship. It was to be delivered to the Sultan of Constantinople’s translator as a gift from the natives of the island. The French fought for the Venus de Milo and were victorious.
Once at the Louvre, the sculpture was put back together but the arms were not as well finished as the rest of the sculpture so they were left off. Experts later determined that the arms were original pieces of the Venus de Milo. The inscribed base told us who had created the sculpture, Alexandros of Antioch, but it dated the Venus de Milo much later than the French had originally thought. That piece of the base has mysteriously disappeared, though we haven’t forgotten the information it taught us.

French sculptors worked to create a new set of arms for the Venus de Milo but she was ultimately left armless. We do know that the right arm originally rested on the raised knee to hold up the drapery. The left arm crossed her body and held an apple. The sculpture was once painted in bright colors and decorated with jewelry but none of that remains.

Please note that I've added some links to the side bar: Art Knowledge News and Fine Art at Home.

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Current NaNoEdMo Hour Count: 4.25/50 hours

Etretat in Art

When I set out to write this post, I remembered having seen countless paintings of the cliffs at Etretat in France (Wikipedia image). It’s true, I have seen tons, but I didn’t recall exactly how many of them were by Claude Monet.

Monet rarely painted a scene only once. He painted many series, some of which you’ve seen on this blog (water lilies, Rouen Cathedral). Monet loved experimenting with light. He would paint the same subject at dawn, noon, dusk, night, and every time in between, using color changes to show the different lighting conditions. The cliffs at Etretat were no exception. Below is the Manneporte, Etretat, painted at different times by Monet.

And below is Monet’s The Cliff, Etretat, Sunset. I chose to show you this painting because I remember seeing it when it was included in the Monet in Normandy exhibition at the Cleveland Museum of Art last year and the image stuck with me. I love the sun in this painting.
It wasn’t just Monet who painted this scene, though. Below, find Gustave Courbet’s take on the cliffs in The Cliffs at Etretat and Etretat After a Storm.

Eugene Boudin’s Etretat, The Cliff of Aval (below).
Eugene Delacroix also painted the cliffs but I couldn’t find a picture online to show you. You can always go to the library and look it up in a book if you’re interested.

If you can think of any other artists who painted this scene, please leave a comment and I’ll try to add images. I'm sure I've forgotten some.

And since, in the writing of this post, I realized that I haven’t yet written about Monet’s life and work, look forward to that at some point this week.

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I am participating in NaNoEdMo, though I haven't signed up (and I'm not sure if I will). Also, I forgot about it until today (only one day late) so I'm slightly behind. I'll be caught up by tomorrow. The goal of NaNoEdMo is to dedicate 50 hours to editing a novel during the moth of March. This goal is not nearly as insane as that of NaNoWriMo so I'm confident I'll be successful. I just need a little something to spur me onward. This project will be finished by my birthday!

(Or at least much closer to finished...)

Current NaNoEdMo Hour Count: 2.25/50 hours

Cool Charcoal Project

There's a great project posted at Bookhou Craft Projects. You can create your own abstract masterpiece using charcoal and paper scraps. Go check it out.

Don't forget to check back here later for Monday's post, Etretat in Art.

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Art Institute of Chicago

Just a quick post so you don't feel neglected. The Art Institite of Chicago is packing up their Impressionist collection so they can do renovations on the museum wing in which it is kept. Ninety-two pieces, including Caillebotte's Paris Street, Rainy Day, van Gogh's The Bedroom, Degas' Yellow Dancers in the Wings, and Gauguin's L'Arlesiennes. This is a fabulous collection of art and for a limited time the people of Fort Worth, Texas will get the chance to enjoy them. The collection will be on display at the Kimbell Art Museum from June 29 through November 2, 2008.

Trust me; seize the opportunity!

Georges Seurat's Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte and several other mainstays of the Art Institute's collection will not travel.

Happy Leap Day! And have a great weekend!

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Complementary Colors

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, fifth edition, a complementary color is “a color that combined with a given color makes white or black.” This is something you can test on your own. Use yellow, red, blue, green, orange, and purple. Mix two colors at a time in as many combinations as you can think of. What are your results?

To make the idea of complementary colors easier to understand, I am linking to a color wheel. Go look at it before you continue reading.

Complementary colors lay exactly opposite each other on the color wheel. In the simple color wheel you just look at, yellow is complementary to purple, red is complementary to green, and blue is complementary to orange.
When complementary colors are place next to each other, both look bright. This has been used to great effect in many paintings. Below, look at van Gogh’s use of red and green in Night Café (above).
Renoir’s use of blue and orange in Boating on the Seine.
Yellow and purple in Degas’ Woman Drying Her Hair. (This was painting at the end of Degas’ life when his eyesight had begun to fail.) Look how much more intense the yellow in the wall is than the red when placed against the purple of the woman’s body.

Try placing complementary colors side by side in your own painting and notice how bright the colors look.

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