What’s an artist to do when he’s bursting onto the scene just after greats like Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael recently left it? This was the dilemma faced by the Italian Mannerists, artists who had to figure out a way to emerge from the shadows of Renaissance greats and define their own style.

One look at Parmagianino’s most famous painting, The Madonna with the Long Neck, tells us he was trying to do exactly that.  Unlike the muscular Madonna by Michelangelo or the graceful, grounded Madonnas of Raphael, Parmagianino elongates the figure of the Madonna, and every other person in the painting.  The Christ Child seems to slip dangerously off of her lap; bones seem rubbery within legs and fingers.  To add to the effect, the painting is larger than life–really emphasizing the length of her limbs. 

Things to think about How does your eye travel through this painting?  What kinds of tricks does Parmagianino use to help your eye along this path?

Venus of Willendorf, at the Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna, Austria. Image by Wikipedia User MatthiasKabel via Wikipedia.

The so-called Venus of Willendorf is one of the oldest and most famous ladies in all of art history, and she’s small enough to fit in the palm of your hand.  Her small size gives us an important clue to the people who made her: she’s portable, hinting that her makers moved around a lot (hunter-gatherers, in other words).  Her 4-inch high frame isn’t the most “realistic” of figures: her female attributes are quite exaggerated.  On top of that, creating figurines of women was much more popular than creating ones of men.  No one knows quite why this is–but most guess that it has something to do with the culture’s great reverence for women’s ability to bear children. 

And where does her name come from?  Like almost every single older work of art, this isn’t the name the artist gave her, but rather the name that stuck after her discovery.  Willendorf is the place in Austria where she was found (she now resides in the Naturhistorisches Museum, Vienna).  As for Venus, the ancient Roman goddess of love, she predates classical mythology by over 20,000 years–prehistoric female figures found in the 1920s, like this one, were often bestowed with the name ‘Venus’.

Answer me this What do you think it is is it about this diminuitive statue that has stood the test of time and fascinated people for so long? Does it draw you in the same way?

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