Art 201 Professor Wilson May 6th 2012

Final Paper- Comparison between two works of art
Pompeo Girolamo Batoni Diana and Cupid 1761 and Corrado Giaquinto The Lamentation 1740’s

Neoclassical Art was an art form that followed the Baroque and Rococo art periods. Neoclassicism was a way for artists to display their wish to return to meaningful art, to escape the frivolity of landscapes and still life paintings, and paint something that had a moral, educational or inspirational value to the viewer. Neoclassical art was an attempt to return knowledge and purity back to art. Neoclassicism was mainly focused on Greek and Roman arts and stories of the classical era with some new advancement. It was a revival of antiquity. In Pompeo …show more content…
The use of light seems natural almost as if the artist were sitting there painting them in that garden at the start of a sunset. The use of shadowing really emphasizes the main subject of the art because each of the subjects seems so bright compared to the rest of the painting.
In both paintings the subjects are also depicted naked and clothed, for each of these paintings the nude subjects have a different meaning, in The Lamentation Jesus’ is almost completely nude which was meant to depict him as a hero as was usually done in many other art forms, and in Diana and Cupid, Cupid’s nudity represents the mythological figure. Another similarity between the two paintings that is also similar of earlier time periods is the lack of femininity used for female subjects. The viewer can clearly see that the subjects in both paintings are women, but only because of their faces or hair. The bodies of the women depicted lack the physical attributes of a female. This is seen more in The Lamentation than it is in Diana and Cupid, but the emphasis on Diana is minute.
There is also a similarity in these works that is not common with the Classical or Renaissance time periods. The lines that the artists have created with the use of the subject’s bodies and other elements of the painting are not repetitive in any way, usually in Classical or Renaissance art the lines especially in human form show some kind of repetition, whether it be