What is smiling realism

Does "La Joconde" offer her viewers a coquettish invitation or leering contempt? I'd argue that Leonardo's greatest smile actually appears in his "St. John the Baptist" ca. Indeed, St. John's knowing smirk is a much more common phenomenon in the history of Western art. Credit: Leonardo da Vinci.

By the 17th century in Europe, aristocrats had decided that baring teeth -- in public and in art -- was a lewd expression reserved for the lower classes, drunks, and theatrical performers. The Dutch, though, were particularly engaged with depicting everyday life, smiles and all. Due to the many painters who freely captured smiling, revelrous members of the lower classes -- Jan Steen, Franz Hals, Judith Leyster, and Gerrit van Honthorst among them -- "'Dutchness' in painting, and in life," Jeeves writes, "was often a society shorthand for licentiousness.

In these pictures, however, the deviant drunken and sexual overtones are explicit: The fiddler in Van Honthorst's picture doffs a cup of wine to the viewer; his ruddy cheeks clearly show his drunken folly. These artists were undoubtedly influenced by their earlier Italian forebear, Caravaggio. Musical instruments are strewn about the floor in his shocking and influential "Triumphant Eros" , an allegory of love and adolescent beauty.

Young Eros, nude, with arrows in hand, smiles salaciously at the viewer. So unusual was his wicked expression that when it debuted, onlookers read the piece "as a celebration of tumescent homosexual passion," Jeeves writes. The lasting allure of reserved, closed-lip smiles like the Mona Lisa's, on the other hand, feature in elegant portraits of elite women to suggest a coy, seductive aura of sexual availability. Almost immediately after the invention of photography in the midth century, the fleeting smile became a standard part of the portrait.

Modern and contemporary painters working with portraiture have presented unsettling smiles to suggest sinister sociopolitical meanings. Kerry James Marshall's "A Portrait of the Artist as a Shadow of His Former Self" features a two-dimensional, nearly all-black rendering of the artist with a wide, white-toothed smile stretched creepily from ear to ear.

The work references Ralph Ellison's novel "Invisible Man" while simultaneously riffing on racist caricatures and images of black-faced minstrels. Yue Minjun, part of the Cynical Realist movement in China, has made a booming career from his exaggerated self-portraits -- each featuring maniacal grins -- in which he reenacts poses from iconic works from the Western canon. Hidden behind these frozen smile-masks lie weighty political criticism and social commentary.

Is the smile a revealing expression or one of concealment? In many ways, its reception throughout art history has said a lot about our willingness to really see ourselves, and one another. American Realism began as a reaction to and a rejection of Romanticism, with its emphasis on emotion, imagination, and the individual. Realists tend to believe that whatever we believe now is only an approximation of reality but that the accuracy and fullness of understanding can be improved.

In some contexts, realism is contrasted with idealism. Today it is more usually contrasted with anti-realism, for example in the philosophy of science. Realism is widely regarded as the beginning of the modern art movement due to the push to incorporate modern life and art together.

Classical idealism and Romantic emotionalism and drama were avoided equally, and often sordid or untidy elements of subjects were not smoothed over or omitted. However, all realist scholars agree on a number of core theoretical assumptions. Aristotle is a perceptual realist. He claims that sensible qualities are mind-independent qualities of objects: they are features of bodies like shape of size, present whether we perceive them or not.

Many scientists would agree with Galileo that the aforementioned qualities are, in some sense, not real. They are the material, formal, efficient, and final cause.

Opposite of the property of seeming true, of resembling reality. Begin typing your search term above and press enter to search.