Happy Birthday Diego Velázquez
Friday, June 06, 2008
Google launched another new logo to celebrate 409th Birth aniversary of Diego Velázquez, a Spanish painter who was the leading artist in the court of King Philip IV. He was an individualistic artist of the contemporary baroque period, important as a portrait artist. In addition to numerous renditions of scenes of historical and cultural significance, he painted scores of portraits of the Spanish royal family, other notable European figures, and commoners, culminating in the production of his masterpiece Las Meninas (1656).
From the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Velázquez's artwork was a model for the realist and impressionist painters, in particular Édouard Manet. Since that time, more modern artists, including Spain's Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí, as well as the Anglo-Irish painter Francis Bacon, have paid tribute to Velázquez by recreating several of his most famous works.
thankyou for this 'scribble'. it practically made my day to see 'las meninas', a masterpiece of tremendous social and aesthetic value created by a genius, incorporated into the kind of ephemeral logo that usually assaults and ulls my senses. i feel like google has gone out on a limb , in america at least, to rightly pay tribute to the powerful and sublime lifes work of the master who defines spanish painting in the golden age.