Portrait Research.

This morning we were required to research two artists and explore two of their portraits. I chose to research the artists Edvard Munch and Leonardo Da Vinci. My research for these artists is below.

Edvard Munch.

Edvard Munch was born in a rustic farmhouse in the village of Adalsbruk in Loten on the 12th December 1863 and died on the 23d January 144, to Christian Munch, the son of a priest. Christian was a doctor and medical officer who married Laura Catherine Bjolstad, a woman half his age, in 1861. Edvard had an elder sister, Johanne Sophie and three younger siblings; Peter Andreas, Laura Catherine and Inger Marie. Both Sophie and Edvard appear to have inherrited their artistic talent from their mother. Edvard Munch was related to a painter Jacob Munch and histrorian Peter Andreas Munch.

Edvard has worked with various unknown artist in his career, and was artistically supervised by the artist Christian Krohg when he lived with a group of friends. in 1879 he enrolled in a technical college to study engineering, where he excelled in physics, chemistry and maths. He learned scaled and perspective drawings but frequent illnesses interupted his studies. The following year , Munch left left the college determined to become a painter. Munch's father viewed art as an 'unholy trade'. Munch adopted an undogmatic stance toward art, writing in his diary his simple goal: "in my art i attempt to explain life and it's meaning to myself."and in 1881 he enrolled in the Royal School Of Art And Design of Christiana, one of whose founders was his distant relative Jacob Munch. His teachers were sculptor Julius Middlethun and naturalistic painter Christian Krohg. That year, Munch demonstrated his quick absorption of his figure training at the Academy in his first portraits, including one of his father and his first self-portrait. (Depicted below.) His full lenth portrait of Karl Jenson-Hjell, a notorious bohemian-about-town, earned a critic's dismissive repsonse: "It is impressionism carried to the extreme. It is a travesty of art. Munch's nude paintings from this period survive only in sketches, except for 'Standing Nude' (1887), perhaps confiscated by his father.

Painted in 1893, 'The Scream' is Munch's most famous work and one of the most recognizable paintings in all art. It has been widely interpreted as representing the universal anxiety of modern man. Painted with broad bands of garish color and highly simplified forms, and employing a high viewpoint, the agonized figure is reduced to a garbed skull in the throes of an emotional crisis. With this painting, Munch met his stated goal of "the study of the soul, that is to say the study of my own self". Munch wrote of how the painting came to be: "I was walking down the road with two friends when the sun set; suddenly, the sky turned as red as blood. I stopped and leaned against the fence, feeling unspeakably tired. Tongues of fire and blood stretched over the bluish black fjord. My friends went on walking, while I lagged behind, shivering with fear. Then I heard the enormous, infinite scream of nature." He later described the personal anguish behind the painting, "for several years I was almost mad… You know my picture, 'The Scream?' I was stretched to the limit—nature was screaming in my blood… After that I gave up hope ever of being able to love again."
'The Scream' has four versions: three paintings (1893, 1895 and 1910), and one lithograph (1895). The 1910 painting was stolen in 2004, and recovered in 2006 with limited damage. The 1895 painting sold at auction on 2 May 2012 for US$119,922,500, including commission.

(Self portrait with skeleton arm, 1895.)

(The Scream, 1893.)

The image 'The Scream' depicts a sky turning red and different colours merging into what looks like a whirl wind so most of the image is distorted. There also seems to be what looks like a man screaming with what looks a little bit like the mask off of the well know film 'Scream.' I really like this image as it's different and unique.


Leonardo Da Vinci.

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci was born on April 15, 1452 and died on May 2, 1519 in the Tuscan hill town of Vinci, in the lower valley of the Arno River in the territory of the Medici-rules Republic of Florence. He was an Itailian Renaissance Polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer.
He was the out-of-wedlock son of the wealthy Messer Piero Fruosino di Antonio da Vinci, a Florentine legal notary, and Caterina, a peasant. Leonardo had no surname in the modern sense, “da Vinci” simply meaning “of Vinci”. His full birth name was "Lionardo di ser Piero da Vinci", meaning "Leonardo, (son) of (Mes)ser Piero from Vinci." The inclusion of the title "ser" indicated that Leonardo's father was a gentleman. In 1466, at the age of fourteen, Leonardo was apprenticed to the artist Andrea di Cione, known as Verrocchio, whose workshop was "one of the finest in Florence". Other famous painters apprenticed or associated with the workshop include Domenico Ghirlandaio, Perugino, Botticelli and Lorenzo di Credi. Leonardo would have been exposed to both theoretical training and a vast range of technical skills including drafting, chemistry, metallurgy, metal working, plaster casting, leather working, mechanics and carpentry as well as the artistic skills of drawing, painting, sculpting and modelling.

From that date until 1478 there is no record of his work or even of his whereabouts. In 1478 he left Verrocchio's studio and was no longer resident at his father's house. One writer, the "Anonimo" Gaddiano claims that in 1480 he was living with the Medici and working in the Garden of the Piazza San Marco in Florence, a Neo-Platonic academy of artists, poets and philosophers that the Medici had established. In January 1478, he received his first of two independent commissions: to paint an altarpiece for the Chapel of St. Bernard in the Palazzo Vecchio and, in March 1481, The Adoration of the Magi for the Monks of San Donato a Scopeto. Neither commission was completed, the second being interrupted when Leonardo went to Milan.
Leonardo worked in Milan from 1482 until 1499. He was commissioned to paint the Virgin Of The Rocks for the Confraternity of the Immaculate Conception and The Last Supper for the monastery of Santa Maria Delle Grazie.


'The Mona Lisa' is a half-length portrait of a woman which has been acclaimed as "the best known, the most visited, the most written about, the most sung about, the most parodied work of art in the world." The painting, thought to be a portrait of Lisa Gherardini, the wife of Francesco del Giocondo, is in oil on a popular panel, and is believed to have been painted between 1503 and 1506. It was acquired by King Francis I of France and is now the property of the French Republic, on permanent display at the Musee du Louvre in Paris.

The image 'Mona Lisa' is a portrait of a woman with very fine detail. Apparently this particular image appears to have hidden codes and hidden detail within it. To the naked eye the hidden codes and detail cannot be seen but with a magnifying glass they can clearly be seen. In the right eye appears to be the letters LV which could well stand for his name Leonardo Da Vinci while in the left eye there are also symbols but they are not as defined. Although probably one of his most used images everywhere, I really like this portrait because of the idea it has hidden codes and detail which makes it all the more interesting and gets you looking at the picture more closely.