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Portrait Of A Man Playing A Luote Analysis

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Portraits have always been an important genre in painting. Portraits were primarily created for royalty and nobles because they exuded power and wealth. If you were able to commission a portrait of yourself, you were a very important person. As time went on though, portraits became less exclusive and middle-class people were able to commission or purchase portraits as well. After a visit to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston where I observed several paintings, I found three portraits that interested me that I will now analyze and compare - Bartolomeo Passarotti, Portrait of a Man Playing a Lute, 1576; Jan de Bray, Portrait of a Boy Holding a Basket of Fruit, 1658; and Hippolyte-Paul Delaroche, Marquis de Pastoret,1829.
Bartolomeo Passarotti is an Italian painter in the Late Renaissance/Mannerism period. His painting Portrait of a Man Playing a Lute is from 1576 and features a man with short brown hair …show more content…

It has the realism that many painters use. There is no beautification to the subjects. They are painted as they truly appear - flaws and all. The boy is painted without de Bray changing anything to make him fit the characteristics of classicalism. The boy is not painted to create a certain mood and his emotion-less expression doesn't have an effect on the painting as a whole. The colors of the painting do reflect the Dutch Baroque, with the rich red of the ribbon under his chin and the cuff on his arm and the deep green of the ivy draped over his left arm; these dark but vibrant colors were very common in the Baroque era. I did not find any special interpretations of the subject when I first saw the painting, but the placard suggests that the ivy, which is known for being invasive and usually overruns other plants, and the fruit, which is something that comes from diligent cultivation, may symbolize a poor and good upbringing of the

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