Renaissance Mish Mash

This final portrait lighting assignment is the Renaissance portrait. The intention was to find a Renaissance period portrait and recreate it using a student from the class. Once again I used Cora as my subject and tried to use photoshop to place here face on top of the girl in the painting's face. I took this picture using a Nikon D3100 digital camera, and various lighting techniques to illuminate her face.

1/15 f.8

Madonna Pietra degli Scrovegni

The Renaissance was a period of classical art, musical and culture mainly between the 14th and 17th centuries. The masters of the Renaissance, Da Vinci, Raphael, and Michelangelo introduced new techniques in painting and sculpture. One of these techniques was the use of perspective. This changed the way people saw the world through art. Art was now used as a way of preserving the feeling of the time. High Renaissance, the period of the masters explored expression and light to capture the emotion of the scene. As well as the discovery of religion which influenced hundreds of paintings throughout the Renaissance time period. 

The artist of this painting is British pre-Raphealite painter Maris Spartali Stillman. Stillman is considered one of the great female painters of the Romanticism and Renaissance revival time periods. She frequently used Renaissance costumes and props in her art to re-create the atmosphere of the time. There is little known about her painting style besides the fact that she admired the Renaissance.

One of Marie Spartali Stillman's more famous works is Madonna Pietra degli Scrovegni. Now hanging in the Liverpool Museum of Art, this painting is a mixture of body colour and watercolour paints. The subject is a character from Italian poet Dante. She is descirbed as being a " heartless lady in green" holding a crystal ball with Dante's reflection.