The Jas Player

"The Jas Player"
Nikon D5100, f/5.3 1/15", 18-55mm lens

The Renaissance was a very important cultural and intellectual movement that is considered to have originated in Northern Italy during the late 1300's and then spread to England, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Spain and many other countries throughout the 1400's. The word Renaissance itself means "rebirth" or "reconstruction" in French. This movement did in fact live up to its name. It not only induced the rebirth of culture and civilization, but it also led to the rediscovery of spirit and enlightenment that still exists with humans today. With Gutenbergs development of printing, Christopher Columbus's unearthing of North America, and Copernicus new found information of the Earths rotation around the sun, the era definitively marked a time of discovery.


The Renaissance Era did not only see to scientific growth and development, but brought a great transformation to art history. Art had difficulty remaining significant throughout the Middle Ages (a.k.a. the Dark Ages) due to expanding territory struggles in Europe - people had more important things to worry about, like staying alive, than making time for creativity or originality . The Renaissance art back into Europe with a huge boom. Through experimenting with new mediums, artists created a bigger and brighter sense of light and colour in their art. Creating a sense of space was also increasingly popular at the time, due to the three-dimension factor it achieves. It was also the handwork of artists that made the most commissions. Artists created more work that expressed their freedom and individuality as celebration to the end of the Medieval times. Art was forming into more than just a hobby or a craft during the Renaissance.

Italy plays an enormous part to the Renaissance. Two particular Italian artists of this time have merged themselves forever into art history with their astounding creation of paintings and sculptures: Leonardo da Vinci and  Michelangelo. Like most Renaissance artists, both had one main focus in mind while creating art: natural objects for Da Vinci and the human anatomy for Michelangelo. The most well known works of these artists are the Mona Lisa and David, both still existing along the worlds most well known painting/ sculpture many centuries later, and countless centuries to come.  

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio was also an artist who originated from Italy, but he was more apart of the Baroque period than the Renaissance. He is a very realistic painter who preferred to work with his own controversial painting method. He rejected the traditional Italian ways by using oils directly from the subject in his art, but his art was so intensely filled with realism that it made an everlasting impact on every artist who saw them. Caravaggio paints the physical and emotional state of humans upon severe examination, with a forcible use of lighting. Although he aimed for total realism, he craved for drama in his art, and seemingly his life as well. He was largely successful in Rome, named "Most famous painter in Rome", but he always appeared to be in some form of trouble, whether it was attacking a police officer or even being involved with murder. Within a mere time spam of six years, Caravaggio had been to none less than 11 trials, and fled from Milan to Rome. 


"The Lute Player" was painted by Caravaggio in 1596, during his earlier period of experience with art just after he fled from to Rome. He had an interest in painting still lives then, such as images of musicians with instruments like this one. The  model who poses for this painting was a friend of Caravaggio's and appears in many of his other paintings as well. In this painting, the boy is in the middle of singing a song about love and plucking a note on his lute. There are three versions of this painting, all with the same boy but adjusted amount of lighting, shadows and sometimes different background objects. This particular particular version is currently located in the Hermitage Museum in Russia. Caravaggio's use of strong shadows created a huge amount of contrast in his painting, and accentuates the subject of the painting. His is so attentive to detail that the music sheet in front of the boy actually contains notes to a certain song.  


The lighting of this painting was very hard to match. It was especially the dark shadow on the right cheek of the boy's face I couldn't get dark enough, without making the lighter side too dark as well on Jasleen. To get the shadows on Jasleen's face, a lamp was posted high above Jasleen on my left hand side facing down and another lamp farther away, also on my left, on the ground casting a shadow up on her face. My inspiration for this photo was to match Caravaggio's shadow technique in his original painting by using shadows to enhance and contrast the models face as well as recreate the same angry, yet smiling face of his model. However, the shadow on the neck of the boy did not match the shadows on his face. Since I only copied the shadow of the face on Jasleen, her face did not look like it is apart of the boys neck. I realized this afterwords, or I would've matched the lighting with the boys neck instead.