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Unity of Size

 

 

 

 

Bruegel’s painting of chaos and excitement “The Fight Between Carnival and Lent” is a busy confusion of small incidents taking place in the square of a little town.

 

There is no fixed focal point, the eye jumps from one small incident to another, meandering around the painting. The feeling of confusion is what makes this painting so interesting.

 

The unity brought about by the fact that all the separate incidents occupy similar small areas of the painting holds the work together and encourages the eye to wander randomly from incident to incident.

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Pieter Brueghel the Elder (1526/1530–1569) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Pieter Bruegel the Elder (1526/30-1569) “The Fight Between Carnival and Lent” (1559)

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Kutná Hora is a small church near Prague, Czech Republic. The interior is decorated with the bones of thousands of dead bodies. This plinth is made up of hundreds of femurs with the hip ball to the outside. The unified size and even spacing of the bones create a bland, almost unnoticed, texture from something we are not used to seeing on this scale.

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Kunta Hora Bones  © John Lovett

Kunta Hora Bones

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