A Woman’s Pleasure: the Grand Odalisque by Jean August Dominique Ingres

[CTyankee]

34. About disegno it was the overarching principle of the Renaissance in Florence, following

what was laid down by Brunelleschi and others and concerned linear perspective and the vanishing point. The opposite pole is colore or colorito, which was the Venetian ideal with such artists as Titian. My understanding is that drawing is first in the disegno dictum. Everything must be balanced and in order. Emphasis in the Veneto on the color aspect might be because the light in Venice playing on all of the surrounding water made a real difference in how artists saw things. I don't get the application of disegno to this work because linear perspective is not stressed nor do we imagine this work to be laid out on a grid the way some early Florentine Renaissance art was. I see his work as one of a transition to Orientalism of the early 19th century. See the artist Gerome for a full dose of this style!

I went round and round on the narghile thing myself. A censer probably is the same thing, but I was trying to distinguish the part of the overall pipe construct was where the incense was burned and the pipe attached for someone to draw the smoke into their bodies. In this painting the pipe was attached to burner, as I interpret it. I have never seen one IRL so I can't say for sure. But I figured out that the pipe was indeed connected to that thing that has steam coming out of it, whatever it might be termed.

You see a woman holding a censer ball on a chain in Turkish Bath (in the middle of the painting while she arranges another woman's hair), much like a smaller censer of the type used by the Catholic Church during Mass.

I don't see anything resembling a zither myself. You can try Googling "details from Grand Odalisque" as they have some closeups you can't make out in the larger picture.