#vedart2020

15-04-2021

'Salvator Mundi' by Leonardo Da Vinci🎂 (1500)

Period: High Renaissance

Genre: Christian art

Worth: $450 million (2017)

Trivia: The painting was sold in 2017 to an anon buyer at Christi's auction for whooping $450 million, highest ever price paid for a piece of art. Several reliable media outlets claimed that the painting was purchased by crown price Muhmmed Bin Salman of Saudi Arabia with a plan to rent it to Louvre Dubai museum. However the painting hasn't been in public eyes since its sale. Several art historian have alleged that painting wasn't actually painted by Da Vinci himself but by the students from his studio. The ambiguity surrounding the source of painting may have prevented the owner from displaying it publicly.

Today happens to be the birth anniversary of Da Vinci.

18-04-2021

‘The Lovers’ by René Magritte (1928)

Period: Surrealism

Location: MoMA, NY

“But the paradox of love is perhaps the same as that of art, which Jeanette Winterson so elegantly termed “the paradox of active surrender” — in order for either to transform us, we must let it turn us over and inside-out. That is what Rilke called love’s great exacting claim, and in that claim lies its ultimate reward.” ~Maria Popova, “Kafka’s beautiful and heartbreaking love letters”

14/06/2020

Widad Al Orfali - Untitled, 1981

“I think being in love with life is key to eternal youth”

11-09-2021

’Le Déséspéré’ (The Desperate Man) by Gustav Courbet

Style- Romanticism

Genre- Self-Portrait

I gain strength from my knowledge that in any given circumstances most men are the same; it is only the circumstances that are so various. There are other men who want to paint as I do, and in front of our pages or easels, our experiences are common to each of us. There are many brotherhoods without name. And if I had to give a single piece of advice to a young painter, I would remind him of this. Then it would not seem to him so important or tragic or embittering that most of those who talk about art are entirely ignorant.

12/10/2021

'Snap the Whip' by Winslow Homer (1872)

Style: Realism

31-05-2021

‘Woman sitting near a window’ by Pablo Picasso (1932)

Worth: $103 million (2021)

“It took me four years to paint like Raphael, but a lifetime to paint like a child” ~Picasso

08-04-2021

River landscape by Annibale Carracci (1590)

Location: National Gallery of Art, Washington, US

Period: Baroque

"Art does not imitate nature, it imitates a creation, sometimes to propose an alternative world, sometimes simply to amplify, to confirm, to make social the brief hope offered by nature. Art is an organized response to what nature allows us to glimpse occasionally. Art sets out to transform the potential recognition into unceasing one. It proclaims man in the hope of receiving a surer reply...the transcendental face of art is always a form of prayer."

John Berger, from "The White Bird", selected essays

20/09/2021

'Two Men Contemplating the Moon' by Caspar David Friedrich (1825)

Style: Romanticism

Location: Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden, Germany, Metropolitan Museum of Art (Met), New York City, NY, US