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That , too , one can find in Leonardo 's early work , and most significantly in the first figure which seems to come from the depths of his imagination , the angel in the Louvre Virgin of the Rocks . Courbet subsequently called this couple ' amateurs mondains ' , but she is painted with great warmth , and she is obviously there simply because he liked the look of her . Changes or transformations in the appearance of an object seem to occur in a number of directions : they follow the alternating rhythm of vertical bands but also the contrapuntal system of horizontal bands . Finally , we must allow - or force - ourselves to look past the deadly line of the glittering blade at the pathos of Saint John 's painfully bound body . To my mind , the man and woman are a couple , as the position of their hands suggests , but they are a couple so lost in misery that they cannot communicate ; they have nothing to give each other . " To understand Picasso 's circumstances at that time helps us not only to grasp his life but also to grasp his subject matter . Yet , one can not assume a class effect based on the heterogeneity observed between the 3 individual NSAIDs . " Grunewald 's work may thus remind us once more that an artist can be very great indeed without being ' progressive ' , because the greatness of art does not lie in new discoveries . Morisot regarded this painting , although summary in its execution , as completed , since she signed it , which was something she did not routinely do . Homer 's paintings , I believe , come to us as marks of confidence in the importance of observation , its intimate relation to life , and the ultimate reality of nature . Of course the same would be true of Raphael or of any classical painter of the high Renaissance ; but they would have transformed ordinary experience because they believed that sacred persons should be endowed with unusual physical perfection . We achieve these ways of being and acting in a complex network of ever widening social experience to which we contribute : who we are in our family ; who we are as individuals in a larger social environment ; what our work will be and , once we have chosen it , how we fare in it ; whether we will marry , and what that choice will mean in relation to the paths of the older and younger generations in our family ; who we have become in our middle years and its relationship to our earlier dreams ; and as we near and enter old age , what our lives have meant , to others and to ourselves . Her chariot had been driving from left to right with her veil blowing backwards , but , hearing the strange love song , she turns round and smiles , and all the lines in the picture , from the love-gods ' arrows to the reins she holds , converge on her beautiful face in the very center of the picture . He shows us so convincingly how each figure reflects the grief of the tragic scene that we sense the same grief in the cowering figures whose faces are hidden from us . But I am fairly certain that Botticelli was a man of the finest intelligence which he applied to the subjects of his pictures as well as to their design : that , for example , his St Augustine in the Ognissanti is the result of profound meditation on the Confessions , and that in the Nativity every movement has a meaning which becomes apparent only when we have steeped ourselves in the thought and imagery of his time . Following , as they believed , the example of their master Michelangelo , they considered colour as a mere bedizening of form and a concession to the senses which detracted from the high seriousness of art . My hope in this book is to bring alive in the reader 's imagination the person and artist Winslow Homer , the man who gave us who gives us pictures that on first look are transparent ; at closer study become reticent ; and on reflection evoke what is ultimately inexplicable , the course of human life and the universe in which it unfolds . Rivalling , or perhaps exceeding , Manet , Monet , and , she produced here a performance of extraordinary freshness and bravura . While no one would deny Bonnard engages our eye as a fine painter , and our emotions with his domestic hedonism , he also challenges our patience , our sense of proportion , and our historical understanding of modernism . The motif figured prominently in her relatively limited repertoire of subjects taken from the world of the modern , upper-middle class woman , the sphere to which she restricted herself following the social conventions and constraints of her gender and class . Instead of solid figures occupying a definable area , as they had done in Italian art since Giotto , and still do in the dizzy perspectives of Tintoretto , El Greco 's figures fill the whole surface of the picture with shallow intersecting planes . We do know , however , that we ourselves have a complete palette of drives , a range of information and beliefs and attitudes toward our parents , toward our own sexuality , toward war , toward scientific explanation , toward the transcendent . And we see ourselves through that distributed eye as pale , limited creatures .