Every Thursday, as part of my personal “enriched environment” initiative, I post a piece of art, usually from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which recently released online some 400,000 high-resolution images of its collection. All artwork will show a sun (or sunlight) somewhere.
I won’t name the piece or the artist, but instead invite you to study the art and post a comment addressing one or more of these questions:
- What is going on in this picture?
- What do you see that makes you say that?
- What more can you find?
If you have another idea, run with it.
Special Update! The New York Times website does this same exercise every Monday with a news photo that is uncaptioned and contains no text (click!). The Times asks viewers the same three questions:
- What is going on in this picture?
- What do you see that makes you say that?
- What more can you find?
However, at the end of the week, the Times posts the background information on the picture. So, I’ve decided to do the same. I’ll still post an unlabeled piece of art on Thursday. But return on Sunday (for the Sunny Sundays post!) and you’ll find an update on the artwork here.
Note: To embiggen the image, click on it!
Venice, from the Porch of Madonna della Salute
Artist: Joseph Mallord William Turner (British, London 1775–1851 London)
Date: ca. 1835
Medium: Oil on canvas
Dimensions: 36 x 48 1/8 in. (91.4 x 122.2 cm)
Classification: Paintings
Description
Turner drew on his considerable experience as a marine painter and the brilliance of his technique as a watercolorist to create this view, in which the foundations of the palaces of Venice merge into the waters of the lagoon by means of delicate reflections. He based the composition on a rather slight pencil drawing made during his first trip to Venice, in 1819, but the painting is really the outcome of his second visit, in 1833. He exhibited this canvas to wide acclaim at the Royal Academy, London, in 1835.
Gorgeous painting. Dreamy. Romantic. The ships in the center are coming at you.
If you “embiggen” the painting you’ll see birds flying in the sky, but they’re minuscule. That’s how detailed this painting is, yet massive in scope, too. It looks like a market is going on with the boats in the middle. They seem to be from China (the humans look Chinese) and have a lot of goods on them, baskets and textiles. The other large boats moored on either side are covered with tarps and have no visible humans. Gondolas seem to be ferrying people about like taxis do in other cities. The top half of the painting is all sky – humanity and its trappings are confined to the painting’s lower half. The sun is off screen and to the right. Debris seems to be floating in the water in the lower left corner.
By the way, thank you for these weekly art excursions. Happy New Year to everyone, too!
OMG !!! I had never been 2 Europe but if this is Venis, I want 2 go !!! NOW !!!!
OMG !!!
It is a lazy Sunday in Venice.
There are no wakes behind the boats so everyone is drifting.
What’s up with the flotsam in the lower right? Did our boat just breakup against a piling? Some of the boats are floating rather impossibly high in the water. I love the color of the water juxtaposed against the sky.
Great exercise – thanks
A