![]() ![]() It was a huge painting with dramatic lighting effects which made it seem as if the details in the painting were moving. The Panorama was exhibited in a building designed for it with special lighting effects. All over Europe viewers were excited by the Panorama-a huge circular painting on a circular wall, usually of the city it was exhibited in sometimes viewers walked around the painting or sometimes they remained stationary while it revolved on rollers. New media in the first half of the nineteenth century also contributed to the development of realism. This means that ordinary people were becoming accustomed to seeing their own world in "popular art"-in magazines and on their own walls. There were different expectations from prints, however they often were not thought of as "high art" and typically they illustrated interesting contemporary events, people, and places. ![]() A lower middle-class person could afford a single print like the one above it could be framed and used as household decoration. By the nineteenth century etchings and aquatints had developed so that books could be easily illustrated. With the advent of prints visual representations were available in multiples and therefore inexpensive. Furthermore, paintings were a luxury item seen by a small and exclusive audience. But this "realism" was restricted to the upper and middle-classes. Somewhat later, artists rendered settings carefully in genre paintings. Weren't Renaissance men and women, for example, interested in their own world? The key to this question is the phrase "their own world." In the Renaissance painters did depict wealthy persons who could afford to have their visages recorded. One might reasonably ask why the term "realism" is used so late in the history of western art. Realistic artists, then, will focus on ordinary, real subjects depicted in natural unposed ways. Even though the figures are arranged in the center of the canvas in the High Renaissance pyramidal composition, their attitudes seem natural and they seem unposed, not even facing the viewer-the way real people appear, as if in a spontaneous snapshot. The painting on the right, Honoré Daumier's The Beggars, is more realistic. Even feeling extreme emotions, people rarely use these kinds of artificial gestures with outflung arms and eyes rolled up to heaven. The engraving at the left of a late 18th century painting is stagey and unnatural, in short, unreal. Realists were often seen as rebels because they departed from the standards of these authorities who controlled the art schools and the exhibit spaces.Ģ) Treatment of subject. The rejection of subjects deriving from historical and literary sources is essentially the rejection of the "Academy," or the art authorities of the day. See, for example, the banner above, a detail of Courbet's Funeral at Ornans, which depicts the funeral of one of his unheroic relatives in an unimportant town. Instead of the Death of Socrates or the Death of Sardanapalus, a realist might paint the death of an ordinary person. Whereas Neoclassical artists were attracted to Greek and Roman subject matter and Romantics often painted medieval and Biblical subjects, realists were interested in contemporary events and ordinary life. ![]() Realism can be defined in two primary ways.ġ) Subject matter. ![]() Toward the middle of the nineteenth century, when some artists were still painting works clearly defined as "Romantic," a new movement was afoot: realism. Some changes in artistic aims take decades. ![]()
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