Composition
Art historians note new features in the composition: "earlier Florentine portraits were in profile. The woman's three-quarter pose, with her hand on the window frame, was Botticelli's own invention". The portrait is thought to be the first example of a three-quarters pose in Florentine portrait painting. "By abandoning the profile pose traditionally used in depictions of Renaissance women, Botticelli brought a new sense of movement into the portrait." The innovation was adopted by later artists.
The painting helped art historians to identify the sheer overdress worn by the Mona Lisa, a "similar" guarnello. The sitter also wears a cotta, a light summer gown. The location is unknown: maybe it is a loggia, or open-air colonnade.
Read more about this topic: Portrait Of A Lady Known As Esmeralda Brandini
Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“Vices enter into the composition of virtues as poisons into the composition of certain medicines. Prudence and common sense mix them together, and make excellent use of them against the misfortunes that attend human life.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“If I don’t write to empty my mind, I go mad. As to that regular, uninterrupted love of writing ... I do not understand it. I feel it as a torture, which I must get rid of, but never as a pleasure. On the contrary, I think composition a great pain.”
—George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)
“Pushkin’s composition is first of all and above all a phenomenon of style, and it is from this flowered rim that I have surveyed its seep of Arcadian country, the serpentine gleam of its imported brooks, the miniature blizzards imprisoned in round crystal, and the many-hued levels of literary parody blending in the melting distance.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)