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Sorolla.com is the first Spanish online art gallery to buy paintings, framed pictures, etc. Buy Figures of Women and other styles of paintings.
Women have always been one of the most recurrent themes for painters of all times. In some cave paintings as those found in Almería or Barcelona, we can see schematic representations of the female body, often referring to female deities.
During the European Middle Ages and throughout the Renaissance, women are represented in two major aspects: the portrait of women belonging to the nobility and the religious kind of painting where the figures of saints and virgins are depicted, in works mainly aimed at churches and cathedrals, with a mission to extol devotion to these figures.
Leonardo Da Vinci and Raphael among others are the best examples of this period with their Madonnas and portraits, in which the keynote are the shapes and proportion, compared to the contained and formal expressions of the subjects , as in the case of La Gioconda (1503).
From the eighteenth century, with the emergence of the romantic trends, artists start to represent scenes of great emotional content, relegating religious themes in favor of mythological and symbolic scenes, an idea which breaks with the academic straitjacket, shattering the composition rules established so far. The paintings of Delacroix, Gericault, Turner and Constable are clear examples of this new way of painting.
From the beginning of XX century onwards, figurative paintings of women has remained as a recurring theme in almost all 'isms' and pictorial currents associated with figurative art, from impressionism to symbolism, through pop art, expressionism and Cubism. To this day, it has been a vehicle to reflect the ideal and aesthetic values of each current.