Long live The Gioconda!

Round the world.

Mona Lisa started her trip round the world very early in history. The very same Leonardo who had painted Mona Lisa between 1503 and 1507, had taken her to France. King Francis I, bought her after the painter's death. From then onwards Mona Lisa lived in the Royal palaces.

Long live "The Gioconda"!

The expression on Mona Lisa's face inspired the painters and poets of the eighteenth century. Even philosophers talked about this famous painting. Today, The Gioconda is known all over the world. No personality in past or present has ever reached such great popularity.

In every nook and corner of the world, the face of The Gioconda is seen reproduced on post cards, stamps, matchboxes, cans, cups and many other articles. She has also been used in advertisements. Experts have often hotly debated over the real identity of Mona Lisa. But does it really matter who she actually was? Mona Lisa does not have any other identity but that of a face with a smile with crossed arms.

They can put a moustache on her face (like Marcel Duchamp, French painter did on a reproduction) or use her face in advertisements, but nothing can tarnish her image, her beauty and the tranquility on her face.

The 220th anniversary of J.Constabla's birth John Constable (1776-1837) has generally been regarded as the paradigm of the English landscape artist. Even in his own lifetime, and in spite of his general lack of recognition, he gave his name to that small tract of the Stpur Valley in Suffolk, between East Bergholt and Dedham which provided the subjects for so much of his painting. The son of a wealthy miller in Bergholt, he was a slow developer, and always suffered from his family's disapproval of his vocation as artist. Although he joined the Royal Academy Schools as a student in 1799, he at first owed little to that institution except a belief in the supreme virtues of nature, as expounded by Reynolds (a painter he always profoundly admired), and a love of the art of the past, especially Gainsborough, Claude, Ruisdael and Rembrandt.

From 1802 until 1820 his art was based on an obsessive involvement with the scenery of his native place, translated into pictures chiefly through the procedures of sketching in oils, which had been in vogue among young English landscapists since before 1800, but which were developed by him into a tool of unsurpassed refinement. The crowning* achievement of this Suffolk-based phase of Constable's work Is his most famous picture, The Hay-Wain which he showed in 1821 under the characteristic title of Landscape: Noon.

This 6-foot canvas was, however, painted in the studio, the third of a series of large Stour scenes designed essentially for exhibition, and specifically related to Constable's tardy recognition by the Royal. Academy, of which he was elected an Associate only in 1819. From then onwards he based hirriself in London and Hampstead, and although he continued to paint many subjects from Stour Valley sketches, his interests broadened to include many other parts of England, as well as much more purely aesthetic and even scientific problems related to landscape art. The 6-foot canvases of the 1820s came to be worked

Дата добавления: 2015-11-16