Young woman at the toilet (Bellini)
Young Woman at the Toilet is a painting by the Italian painter Giovanni Bellini dated 1515. He painted it a year before he died at the age of about eighty. Bellini's painting is considered to be the purest embodiment of ideal nudity among the idealized portraits of women - the beauty of Venetian art. Otto Pächt called the picture an “ apotheosis of seeing”.
The painting is in the possession of the Gemäldegalerie of the Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna . The picture dimensions are 62.9 cm × 78.3 cm and the frame dimensions 75.2 cm × 92 cm × 4.5 cm. A signature in the name of Joannes bellinus faciebat MDXV is located on a piece of paper at the bottom right.
At one takes that Bellini's image the subject Sacred Love and Profane Love by Titian an idealized portrait of a newly married wife represents in a single figure. Here she represents the various tasks of a woman: socially dictated humility and sexual submission. A workshop copy reveals that the curtain was originally deep red, a color that is symbolic of love and was used for wedding dresses in Venice in the 16th century.
Image description
The female body, posing on a bench covered with a carpet, represents the probably first Venetian act without biblical, mythological or moral motivation . The wall right behind her on the right is dark green and through an opening on the left the viewer can see the distant landscape. Your torso shares these boundaries, as well as the frame shares the picture above your legs. She is holding a hand mirror to see the back of her head in a circular wall mirror. Her hair is tied in a beaded network of blue-green patterned brocade, the color of which is picked up by the storm clouds over the landscape. Only single women were allowed to wear their hair down; the "hair net" that surrounds her hair is interpreted as the symbolized yoke of marriage. In the wall mirror, the viewer can see the slightly blurred image of a red border around the pearls and part of their raised arm.
Playing with the mirror enabled the artist to increase the erotic and poetic appeal of the scene by giving the viewer an undisturbed view of a stripped woman who is trapped in her own reflection. With the mirror in her right hand, she performs the movement of a Venus pudica (chaste Venus), partially covering her breasts.
Painting technique
An infrared inspection of the image in 1989 revealed that Bellini had fully elaborated his composition in advance, using the signature as a means of recording the design on the gesso primer. The examination of the painting Young Woman at the Toilet shows Bellini's innovative use of a structured, colored undercoat. In 2005, passages of a weak black signature were then better recognizable using an infrared reflectogram. The outer contours of the figure defined in the signature were retained when the layers of paint were applied. Additional folds were added to the signed folds of the cloak as it was painted. Instead of hatched shadows, the woman's signature contains several carefully outlined details, such as the curtain shadow under the woman's elbow, the line of her collarbone and the curve of her shoulder, which were first modeled with the paint.
While many of Bellini's paintings have fingerprints on the surface or the imprimitur , the X-ray image made it more apparent that the painting Young Woman at the Toilet has a dotted texture made with a brush in all areas except the figure.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b c d David Alan Brown, Sylvia Ferino Pagden, Jaynie Anderson, Kunsthistorisches Museum (Vienne), National Gallery of Art (US): Bellini, Giorgione, Titian, and the Renaissance of Venetian Painting . Yale University Press, 2006, ISBN 978-0-300-11677-9 , pp. 219 and 287–288 ( google.de [accessed on July 25, 2020]).
- ↑ Young woman at the toilet. In: Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien . Retrieved July 25, 2020 .