2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25
Multi-figure composition is a type of composition that consists of a large number of figures combined into one group. This variety is considered one of the most difficult in painting. Although the silhouettes are of great importance in the semantic content of the picture, the interior space is no less important.
Multi-figured composition in painting
It is interesting to know how the famous artists of the past and the masters of the present coped with the problems associated with this artistic direction.
The Sistine Chapel is the greatest creation of Michelangelo. To paint it, he used various biblical scenes that tell about the creation of the world and the appearance of people on earth, etc. With the help of scale - the large size of the main figures - the painter achieved the effect of special expressiveness of key scenes.
Michelangelo's figures of people are distinguished by their vivid expression, each gesture has its own deep meaning. It is also easy to find and read. For example, a person clasping his head with his hands conveys thoughtfulness, detachment. Imagehunched figure expresses despondency and sorrow.
The multi-figured composition symbolizes in poses and gestures not only the expressiveness of the action, but also reveals its content.
It's interesting that often a gesture conveys the author's intention, plays his role. Drawing the viewer's attention to some phenomenon with the help of an outstretched hand helps to expand the boundaries of the plot, indicates what is happening beyond it.
No less important is the view of this art form, what it is facing. Thus, you can connect individual figures or combine them into a group, cut off one character from all others, thereby highlighting it.
In this direction of art, one-figure, two-figure and multi-figure compositions are distinguished.
Static group portrait
For many centuries, this type of painting occupied the most important place. Many artists made money by painting portraits. After all, at a time when there was no photography, painting a portrait was the only way to capture an important moment for a long memory, to perpetuate the image of yourself and your relatives. While posing, each of the members tried to look attractive and rich.
New trends
Over the years, a static portrait has lost its relevance, as artists have always tried to create something new, to go beyond the usual.
One of these creators was H. Rembrandt - one of the largest representatives of the golden age of Dutch painting. He is nothe was afraid to break traditions and made a revolution in the direction of drawings of a multi-figure composition, creating the canvas “Night Watch”. The characters in this picture - the fighters of an elite company - were depicted not in the front, but in the usual service environment. The portrait is filled with lively gestures and natural facial expressions.
The 19th century brought a new artistic direction in multi-figure composition - a genre group portrait. In such paintings, people were carried away by common activities - conversation, playing with children. Landscapes or home interiors served as backgrounds.
Religion and mythology in painting
The most impressive multi-figured silhouette compositions are found in canvases with sublime themes. An excellent example of this are the works of Renaissance artists: Michelangelo, Sandro Botticelli, Titian, Caravaggio, Donatello, Raphael Santi.
Modern artists
Painters of our time do not often use complex multi-figured compositions. Stanley Spencer applied this technique in his work, writing a series of paintings on the theme of Christ, including The Last Supper, Resurrection. The British artist interpreted these religious events in the customs of modern times.
Interior space
Creating an interior in a painting has certain difficulties. Even Giotto di Bondone, an Italian artist and founder of the Proto-Renaissance, painted a multi-figure composition in the interior, which was often in open space. The painter added to the imageoutdoor architectural forms: columns, gables and roofs. Sometimes several interiors were depicted on one canvas.
At that time, this technique in the artist's work was perceived not as a closed space, but as an architectural design that separates events and makes them deeper in content.
The evolution of the interpretation of a multi-figure composition in the interior in painting is most successfully described in the works of the Proto-Renaissance period. This is a period in the Renaissance, which lasted from the second half of the 13th and into the 14th century. Attention in them is mainly concentrated on the development of rules for direct perspective, which is easiest to show by examples of the interior, while the problem of isolation remained open. The term "interiority" has always been tantamount to a deviation from strict norms in a direct perspective, it had a special figurative spatial task.
The insularity and size of the interior became most profoundly understood as soon as the art reached the appropriate stage of development. Techniques have appeared to create the impression that the viewer is present in the interior.
An essential component of the image is the closure of the frame, its size and the feeling of the presence of the viewers themselves in the picture.
Types of building space
As follows from the theory of constructing architectural space, the emergence of a direct linear perspective is associated with the need to use the image of architecture.
Natural landscapes are less dependent on it, and in silhouette painting, the use of directprospects and even more difficult. After all, the construction of space directly depends on the plasticity of objects and bodies.
In such canvases, where the figures of people occupy a central place, space appears only as a result of the synthesis, direction and movement of forms.
A striking example of such a picture is the work of El Greco's "Resurrection". The central axis is the images of the defeated warrior and Christ. Around the central action, you can observe the movement of figures. Figures of warriors are depicted in the third plan in a spiral manner.
The classic picture includes inseparable linear rhythms and the plastic construction of the group.
In modern painting, such a direction as a sculptural still life has almost completely disappeared. The use of a group of plastic-related figures is also extremely rare.
More often the paintings depict a scatter of figures, a wide arrangement of objects.
Spatial system
Its each type has its own figurative tasks and solutions.
At the same time, the classical perspective takes a subordinate position, and the direct (linear perspective) helps to build an open wide architectural space or an interior scene of action.
Object and space, the nature of the presentation of the object and space and the relationship between them is very important.
The type of composition also depends on this kind of connection.
Conclusion
Object space and placement (deletion) systemobjects are created using color, tonal, linear perspective. In this direction, space is subject to the subject. At the same time, another situation is also possible, when space dominates as a medium that absorbs objects.
For example, on Rembrandt's canvases, dark colors dissolve the contours of objects, and the twilight of his later works is no longer just the color of an object changed by the environment, but a materialized space.
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