Notes

I was just googling for images from Rubens to annotate one and I found a painting from Rubens that is similar to the one that I annotated yesterday when I annotated “Leda and the Swan” by Michelangelo. It is the same motive the only thing that has changed is maybe a little bit of colour and the background but the pose of Leda and the Swan was copied from Michelangelo’s version of that mythological story.

 Image from http://www.only-apartments.com/images/only-apartments/643/rubens-ausstellung-madrid.jpg (Accessed 22 Dec 20111)

 I find that very interesting that famous painters copy another ones work – I also realised that that happened quite often.

Comparing and contrasting the two annotations that I just finished:

I annotated Poussin’s “Pharaoh’s Daughter Find Baby Moses” and Ruben’s “The Three Graces” and one of the main things that I noticed is the fact of idealising the human body. In Poussin’s painting the idealisation of a woman’s or a man’s body was still obvious, the well proportioned shape of a woman’s body and the muscularity of a man’s body. In Ruben’s painting the idealised shape of a woman’s body seems to have changed to a curvier, fuller, more feminine body shape with flushed cheeks, a smile on the lips, adding all the attributes of a feminine woman. What I also noticed is that Ruben’s painting looks more natural as in the colour of the skin and the whole posture than Poussin’s.