Music is a key part of culture that is found across the world and throughout history. However, music can hold different meanings depending on the context. Picasso’s Girl with a Mandolin and Titian’s The Pastoral Concert are both paintings that depict the playing of music, but there are key differences despite their similarities. Both use perspective as a way of demonstrating the scene’s mood. The presentation of female nudity holds significance in both paintings. Both attempt to make the dimension of time and its importance apparent. The way in which these pieces differ point to some of the most important distinctions between the styles of cubist and Renaissance paintings. The works cited in this essay help to deepen the understanding of these …show more content…
The Pastoral Concert, by Titian, is a brilliant example of Renaissance Art. Paintings of this era were significant because they evoked a feeling of depth and realism through perspective. Renaissance artists strove to depict people and their environments in ways that reflected the beauty of both, allowing the viewer to feel a sense of spiritual awe at the grace of God’s creation. The significance of cubism lay in its ability to inject a new dimension into images. The artistic movement of the Renaissance had introduced the third dimension – cubism took this dimension and repurposed it in a way that depicted the fourth dimension: time. Picasso’s Girl with a Mandolin is a perfect example of a cubist painting because it reflects the general values of the style: analytical cubism pieces “appear as a busy interweaving of planes and lines with the subjects (whether an object, person, or landscape) fractured or broken up, making them look rather like the surface of crystal” (Cubism Student Resource). To thoroughly analyze these two pieces, one must look at the ways in which the artists interpreted similar