Two brides for one groom: The riddle of a picturesque plot about the mystical betrothal of St. Catherine
Among the works of Renaissance masters and later periods in the history of painting, there are often those that depict "the mystical betrothal of St. Catherine." At the same time,…

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How Pavel Tretyakov competed with the emperor to create the most famous art gallery in Moscow
Before the revolution, patronage of the arts was considered not only charitable, but also beneficial for the donor himself, and the point here was not taxes at all. According to…

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Sentimental paintings about the village children of Frederick Morgan
Today, lovers of sentimental painting are given the opportunity to get acquainted with the magnificent gallery of genre paintings by the English artist Frederick Morgan, who worked at the turn…

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High Renaissance Titans: Who They Are and What Their Contribution to Art History

The Renaissance refers to the rediscovery of ideals from classical antiquity. Artists no longer thought about the art of antiquity. Now they had the tools, technology, knowledge and confidence to create in their own direction. In general, the Renaissance was a revolution in realism, when artists and sculptors developed new methods to make their work more realistic.

The High Renaissance also represented a rapprochement of geniuses – an unthinkable wealth of talents concentrated in the same field in the same time interval. While this revival took place in many creative fields – the poetry of Dante Alighieri, the architecture of Filippo Brunelleschi, the scientific experiments of Galileo, works of visual art act as the most iconic representations of the Renaissance. Continue reading

Creativity for the Mentally Ill: A Book That Changed History

Sometimes you can hear such a statement that in order to create a masterpiece, you must be either a genius or a madman. Tarragon – the hero of the play “Waiting for Godot” by Samuel Becket, said that “we are all born crazy. And some of them remain … “Yes, and where is the line that separates genius from madness? In 1922, a German psychiatrist published a book in which he showed the work of the mentally ill, and this book made a splash among both the psychiatric society and artists.

The fact that some very talented, and even brilliant people suffered from various mental disorders is not news. So, it is known that Gogol suffered from manic-depressive psychosis, and Leo Tolstoy often had bouts of depression that alternated with numerous phobias. Maxim Gorky was prone to vagrancy and pyromania, and some experts insist that Lermontov suffered from a form of schizophrenia that he inherited from his mother.

Mental suffering – whether they are caused by objective life difficulties or real mental disorders, really somehow affect people’s creativity. And the German psychiatrist Hans Prinzhorn undertook to investigate this influence. Continue reading

Unknown portrait of Da Vinci’s brush: Did the great master really write “Princess Leonardo” and whom he portrayed

It may seem that the legacy of Leonardo da Vinci has many paintings – this artist, who died five hundred years ago, is mentioned too much and too often in the modern world. In fact, only one and a half dozen paintings by da Vinci and a few more works are known, whose belonging to Leonardo’s brush is only supposed. Therefore, any loss of the work of a great artist, as well as the sudden discovery of previously unknown, becomes a sensational event, affecting the history of fine art itself. Moreover, each such episode is reminiscent of a detective story, where there are victims, and criminals, and the hero revealing the secret, and most importantly – the priceless masterpiece of Leonardo.

How at the end of the 20th century another Renaissance masterpiece was discovered. Continue reading

7 beloved women by Pablo Picasso
“If he had not become an artist, he would have become Don Juan,” once said a friend of Pablo Picasso, the French playwright Jacques Cocteau. And it’s hard to disagree…

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Secrets of the painting “A Lady with a Parrot by the Window”: How the Smile of a Heroine and a Bird are Connected
Caspar Netscher is a Dutch artist of German descent, an outstanding portrait painter, and also a master of depicting everyday scenes of the Dutch elite. He also developed a technique…

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How Peter Konchalovsky managed to avoid repression and why the artist was called the Soviet Cezanne
Not many painters who disobeyed the socialist regime in times of bloody repression managed to escape punishment. Today I would like to recall the name of one of them -…

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