Analysis Of Roman Courtship By William Ernest Reynolds-Stephens

Roman Courtship is a 276.2 x 154 cm oil on canvas painting made by William Ernest Reynolds-Stephens in 1990. It was a gift given by Seymour Lasker in 1966 and is position in the Ringling Museum in the collection of European and American Art. This painting is two-dimensional and since it was oil on canvas it was able to be moved easier, especially since artist's travels all the time. In general artists chose oil on canvas because great effects were easier to pull off with the minimal materials needed. So this painting depicts a story about a couple that are in love and seek the approval of the gods for their relationship. They make an incense gift to the gods and Morta, the goddess of death appears. Morta is known to cut threads of

William Ernest Reynolds-Stephens balances the painting with the positions of the people in the painting. The are all closely connected and that brings them all together cohesively. This painting shows asymmetrical balance achieved by the lack of symmetry but the entire image holds the same visual weight. For example, the cheetah skin at the bottom left of the image helps to even out the image. When I imagine the picture without the cheetah skin I can see how it would be a little less visually pleasing to look

I was seeing painting after painting in the museum and they all looked the same to me. As it came to the end of the tour I was worried I wouldn’t have an image I actually wanted to talk about, then something about the way this was painted made me fall in love with the painting. I'm not usually the person that falls in love with a painting and imagines all the things it could mean but when I saw the clarity of Roman Courtship and the colors I knew that this was the painting I wanted to talk about. Another work I saw in the Ringling that caught my eye was Circe Entertaining Odysseus at a Banquet by Italian artist Giovanni Paolo Panini. This painting is an Oil on Canvas made in about 1718-19. This painting can be analyzed through contextual analysis. When I first saw the painting my first thought was that it was all about the architecture and daily lives of people but it actually has a story and I only know that because of the context given beside the picture in the museum. I could have never known from just looking that something was actually going on because everything is so far back in the