Bartolomeo Vivarini’s painting of Mary and Christ in 1475 is one of my absolute favorites. The use of colors and shades allow the center of the piece to be Mother Mary and her child. The piece itself is filled mainly with their bodies. The mixture of cool and warm tones in the painting contrast and compliment all angels of the piece.The way that it is painted to look so real with the detail and craftsmanship of it is intricate compared to an early painting done by Duccio in 1300.
The painting done by Duccio in 1300 was very dark and cool, it did not have many colors with the mother Mary wearing an all black robe and baby Christ wearing a dark red cloth, with both of them having very little to no shading done on their faces except a little bit of faint pinkness on the cheeks, and thats as far as different colors were used in the painting. And for the background it was a very bland brownish tan color with no details in the majority of it. And with this painting baby Christ looks like a grown man just in a baby size so the realism is not very present in this painting.
But the painting by Bartolomeo Vivarini in 1475 is almost the exact opposite of the one done by Duccio in 1300, With his painting both Mary and baby Christ look as if they were in modern times, with an extremely warm and vibrant background and the whole painting saturated with color from the details and color of the sky to smallest lines and texture of baby Christs undershirt. One of the main reasons I liked this painting more than Duccios is because of the use of realism in this one by Vivarini both Mary and Christ are proportionate for the size that they should be and details of their bodies, they both look how you would expect people to look like. And with the background of this one it looks like theres something to it, kind of like the artist was there painting as Mary and baby Christ were sitting down because of the great detail that was put into it.
With those things being said about both paintings and by both artists you can tell the level of craftsmanship and degree of detail has evolved over time and the perception of how things were viewed changed as time went on, both paintings had the same idea just with two different viewpoints and techniques on how it should have been painted. With earlier ones having less detail and color, and then with the later ones having more color than three older ones combined and the craftsmanship of someone that would paint today.
