Art Description: The Death of Socrates Visual & Performing Arts Essay (Essay Sample)

Art Description: The Death of Socrates
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Art Description: The Death of Socrates
The concept of form appeals to the material appearance of a work of art, and in The Death of Socrates, Jacques-Louis David captures this facilitation in a most daring and indisputable manner. Form, in its most basic meaning, infers the quality of dimensionality – it is the way the artist interweaves space, light, distance, and shape to mimic three-dimensional environments on two-dimensional art platforms. Perhaps the most striking technique of implied form in The Death of Socrates is in the use of light to cast shadows and create lighting differentials to mimic reality in the sharpest way possible. A raking beam of light appears to be issuing from the top left corner of the painting shining directly onto Socrates, a technique so deliberate as to bring the center figure to the attention of the painting’s audience.