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Showing posts with the label Portraiture

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The Slave Market and the Theatre of European Anxiety

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Author Brian Hawkeswood.                                                                                                   Nach unten scrollen für die deutsche Übersetzung https://artelbestudio.blogspot.com/2025/04/orientalist-beautiful-form-of-realism.html When Jean-Léon Gérôme exhibited The Slave Market in 1871, Europe was not an innocent observer of slavery. The Atlantic system had only recently been dismantled in parts of the Western world; Brazil would abolish slavery in 1888. European empires were expanding across Africa and the Middle East. Racial hierarchies were being codified in pseudo-scientific language. Anthropology, colonial administration, and academic painting shared an overlapping visual culture.         ...
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The Eternal Mirror: A Human History of the Portrait

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Author - Brian Hawkeswood.                                                          Nach unten scrollen für die deutsche Übersetzung Arguably no artistic genre strikes as directly at the human soul as the portrait. Across millennia, we have returned again and again to the depiction of ourselves and others—not merely to capture likeness, but to reach toward memory, identity, love, power, longing, and even the divine. The portrait is not simply a face rendered in pigment or stone; it is a cry across time: I was here. I. Origins: Prehistoric and Ritual Portraiture The first attempts at human representation emerged not with kings or saints, but in the quiet shadows of caves. In Jericho (modern Palestine), around 7000 BCE, archaeologists uncovered plastered skulls —real human skulls modeled with clay to reconstruct facial features. Shells formed t...
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