Painted Ladies; Models of the Great Artists
- ISBN-10
- 081281472X
- ISBN-13
- 9780812814729
- Pages
- 184
- Language
- English
- Published
- 1972
- Publisher
- Stein and Day
- Author
- Muriel Segal
Description
With few exceptions, the women who have inspired great sculptors and painters have been largely ignored. Muriel Segal remedies the situation in this irreverent look at the model through history. All the lovely and enigmatic ladies are here, from Phryne, the model for the greatest classical Venus ever sculpted, who did a beach-strip more than 2000 years ago to win Praxiteles' eye, to Kiki, the "Venus of Montparnasse," and sweetheart of the Latin Quarter's unheated studios in the 1920s. Between the fifth century B.C. and the twentieth century A.D., the lives of the models were no less fascinating: Mona Lisa Gioconda, whose tentative smile may have had something to do with enduring Leonardo's homemade dentures; Botticelli's golden-haired Simonetta, who died (she was too good to live) when she was twenty; Lady Hamilton, who posed for "Attitudes" at stag parties; Rembrandt's wife Hendrickje, who saved her husband's paintings from creditors by a tax dodge; and many others.--From publisher description.
