Cathy's Art Diary

Excellent online lecture from the National Gallery on the Rokeby Venus by Velazquez. Fiona Alderton talked about where the picture sat in Velazquez’s career and about likely inspiration for it from the Spanish royal collection including the Titian’s Poesie and works by Rubens. She then looked at it’s composition and in particular discussed the role of the mirror in the picture. Is it a commentary on aging? Is the woman actually looking at us via the mirror? She then talked about wo might have commissioned the work as it was actually to paint or own nude pictures at the time in Spain. She talked about how it was owned later by Manuel de Godoy who also owned Goya’s naked and clothed Maya before being bought by John Morritt of Rokeby Hall. She finished by talking about how the National Gallery bought the picture via a fund raising campaign and the incident in 1914 when it damaged by the suffragette, Mary Richardson, and the public reaction to that.    

Interesting online lecture from the National Gallery exploring the female nude in paintings. Fiona Alderton took us on a tour of female nudes in the galleries collection raising questions for us to think about when viewing them such as who they were painted for, where would they have hung and whether we felt they were an honest view of the female form. We talked about how body types had changed over the centuries, or I suppose the ideal of the female form had changed. Her choice of works ranged from a Mary Magdalene by Corregio as the earliest work to pictures by the Impressionists. She talked in some detail about the Titian mythological works and this Judgement of Paris by Rubens and how the chosen subject allowed the artists to combine pictures of women from a range of viewpoints.