Lydia Bauman

Ever since the rediscovery of Greek mythology in Italian Renaissance, there has been a tendency to represent woman as Venus - as the goddess of love and beauty, her main job was to recline and look seductive and beautiful. The canon had become so entrenched that centuries passed before artists began to cast a more […]

Music Though paintings are silent, artists have long sought to make music visible. From medieval and Renaissance altarpieces showing heavenly orchestras as symbols of divine harmony, to accurate depictions of secular polyphony in 15th-century Ferrara, music signified order and culture. In 16th-century Venice it evoked a poetic Golden Age; in 17th-century Holland and Victorian Britain […]

Dance In European painting, dance is rarely shown as mere leisure. Instead, artists use it symbolically: as ritual and elemental force in circular dances and the medieval Dance of Death; as a vehicle for moral judgement, whether condemning impropriety in Dutch genre and Orientalist art or enforcing social etiquette in Victorian painting. Even when depicted […]