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Venus at Her Mirror: Velazquez and the Art of Nude Painting
Venus at Her Mirror Velazquez and the Art of Nude Painting Author:Andreas Prater The seventeenth century saw a tremendous thematic and technical development in the realm of painting as artists experimented with realism and anatomical exactitude, and gave free expression to themes of sensuality. Nowhere is this more apparent than in Velazquez Venus at Her Mirror, also known as The Rokeby Venus. In this absorbing and com... more »prehensive study Andreas Prater uses the much-studied and imitated painting to trace Venuss depiction in art through the centuries. Prater begins by offering a fresh and thoroughly detailed examination of Velazquezs masterpiece. He delves into its numerous levels of meaning as well as its impact on the nude paintings of its day. He also looks at the paintings fascinating history, including its attempted devastation by a suffragette in 1919. Velazquezs self-admiring Venus is compared to her depictions in other well-known works by earlier artists, including da Vinci, Giorgione, and Titian, as well as in works by later artists such as Manet and Cabanel, and into the modern world of advertising. These comparisons provoke intriguing perspectives on the evolution of eroticism, feminism, and Christianity in art, and offer a renewed understanding of the influence one artist and one work can have on generations that follow.« less