Study Of The Figure’s Back In Western Painting

Compared with the general portrait painting,the figure back is a special painting subject.To understand a figure in the painting,we will first look at the person’s mood at the moment from the person’s face,and then guess the person’s identity and character from the person’s overall face and temperament.The mood displayed by a person’s five features can be multifaceted,so the information we get from the visual angle is multifaceted.When we use the two-way dialogue mode of face-to-face communication with each other,it is also the most direct channel for us to understand things.When the characters turn back to us,without faces,the direct channel is blocked,which breaks the previous facial language expression of iconography,and becomes a one-way dialogue,so that the audience can consciously establish a new understanding channel,which can also be in many aspects.As viewers,how can we establish an observation channel from the picture to get some clues brought by the back image? In this paper,through the multi-dimensional study of the western painting works about the figure’s back,to understand the hidden expression that the back brings to the viewer in the painting works,and what the artist hopes to achieve with the back.The first content of the paper mainly studied the appearance and function of figure in the picture from the angles of art history,explores the breakthrough and transformation of the figure’s back from the Middle Ages to the 19 th century iconography,and then analyzes the artist’s interpretation of figure from the metaphorical meaning,formal language and viewing mode of figure,and concludes that figure’s back is not only the demand of image composition,but also become a kind of artistic language and self-expression concept of artist’s independent painting.