The Painting
The painting shows a bust length portrait of a girl with porcelain skin, almond and slightly oriental eyes and a petulant mouth. She is depicted in line with the Gothic ideal of elongated features, indicated by her narrow shoulders, tightly pinned hair, and long forehead achieved though her tighly pulled back hair which is shaved at the top. She is dressed in exquisite cloth and jewellery and possesses an unusual elegance. Christus depicts her looking out of the canvas in an oblique but self-aware and penetrating manner that some critics and historians have described as unnerving in its acuteness. This is accuentated by the painting's crop, which focuses the viewer's gaze in a near invasive manner that seems to question the relationship between artist, model, patron and viewer.
Christus frames the girl in an almost architectural manner which is both rigid and balanced. She is placed in a narrow horizontal triangular space, while the wall behind her is largely flat. The image is divided by the right angle joining the inverted triangle formed by her dress, and the horizontal linear description of her neck, face and headdress. The rendering of the background departs somewhat from contemporary conventions in portraiture; Christus sets her against a parallel wall which is defined both in terms of material (the lower half is a wooden dado), and by its shadow, its distance from the girl. Here the model is set in a recognisable interior, naturalistic enough to be within her own home.
A soft light enters the pictorial space from the left, throwing shadows against the back wall, most notably cast from the hennin. The depth of space provided by the thinly sketched back wall gives room for the detailing of the light, which Sterling notes is indebted to van Eyck. The light that throws a murky but curved shadow on the wall behind her and acts as a counterpoint to the contour of her cheek and hairline. The curve of the tail of her head-dress is echoed and continued by the curve of her neck and shoulder.
This style of hat seems have evolved from the truncated hennin, also in fashion in Burgundy. A very similar style, with no tail, is seen on the older of two stylish girls who have donor portraits in a Presentation of Christ by the Master of the Prado Adoration of the Magi, a pupil of Rogier van der Weyden, in the National Gallery of Art, Washington. The black tail coming under the chin is found very rarely if at all in other images from the period, and has been interpreted as a style borrowed from the male chaperon hat, which always has a long tailing cornette, sometimes worn in this way.
Read more about this topic: Portrait Of A Young Girl (Christus, Berlin)
Famous quotes containing the word painting:
“The peculiarity of sculpture is that it creates a three-dimensional object in space. Painting may strive to give on a two-dimensional plane, the illusion of space, but it is space itself as a perceived quantity that becomes the peculiar concern of the sculptor. We may say that for the painter space is a luxury; for the sculptor it is a necessity.”
—Sir Herbert Read (1893–1968)
“His work was that curious mixture of bad painting and good intentions that always entitles a man to be called a representative British artist.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)