Talk:Portrait of Doña Isabel de Requesens y Enríquez de Cardona-Anglesola

Image

Hervé Lewandowski

DCoatzee retouched

The start image suffers a blatantly unpleasant yellow colour cast. DCoatzee, who provided the image, is on record as saying that he only provides these derivative images to supply thumbnails when the original are too dark. In this case however we have a beautiful image from one of the Louvre's most noted photographers Hervé Lewandowski, while the Commons description includes a gallery link to the original high resolution version. There is no need at all to put with a plainly inauthentic thumbnail which does no justice at all to this beautiful painting and I am reverting the start editor's reversion. Coat of Many Colours (talk) 13:04, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

I'm afraid I disagree with your assessment, which appears to be based purely on personal preference. I'm going to leave your change to the image in place for the moment rather than edit war, but as I recall from the Featured Picture discussion, you were the only one who found the retouched image unpleasant. I may ask at the wikiproject for others with relevant experience to weigh in. My view is that the retouched image makes it easier to see details such as the loggia and the figure there at a normal screen resolution, and also that the high flush and unnaturally red cheeks on the Lewandowski image (possibly the result of your having uploaded it from a blog) are undesirable. Yngvadottir (talk) 15:00, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

I wouldn't say that the robes in the retouched image are "deep velvet red", would you? And I didn't raise the Featured Picture discussion here, which is irrelevant. The Hervé Lewandowski image as reproduced here is the same image as reproduced in Brown (as you can readily check from your copy - same "flushed" cheeks, that would be the Petrarchean ideal of feminine beauty again) and the same as at the Museum page. The only reason I uploaded it from a 'blog' was that the watermark had been removed. I don't myself have the technical expertise to do that. Coat of Many Colours (talk) 20:44, 14 August 2014 (UTC)

They're described in French-language sources as Burgundy/wine-red; there are issues of semantics as well as of scale/colour saturation here, and in the book I can discern the loggia much more clearly than at the smaller resolution of the computer screen (and she doesn't appear as flushed, either). The desirability of being able to see that the loggia has frescoes on its ceiling and the fact I do not perceive the unpleasant yellowish cast you have described are my main reasons for preferring the version I had originally uploaded (hence my edit summary about resolution). I hope we can get other eyes on this - there are a number of images we could use. Your eye may well be better than mine, or others may prefer a third version. Yngvadottir (talk) 12:09, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

There's of course the issue of the angle of vision with these new LED screens. If you stand up and look down on these images you can see the retouched image is actually posterized, an effect you get when you push these equalisation edits too far. I don't know what to make of your assertion you can't see a colour cast here. It's a as plain as plain can be. I just don't have the computer memory to get rid of it in this in 80 Mb something file. I am an expert user of Mathematica and could remove it in a twinkle with its image processing commands, except I just can't work on a file this large. What I will do if I have time this evening, since your responses are not entirely dismissive, is that I'll reduce the original (not the retouched file) to a 2.25 MP file and see if I can't make a more sophisticated derivative work in LCH space, which is where you should be making these edits, but I think it's unlikely I will succeed since the original has quite a pronounced cast in itself. I'm pretty sure it won't recover the deep velvet red the robes should be. It really is true in life than bigger isn't necessarily better and I seriously doubt you will get a better image than that by Hervé Lewandowski. Here a link to another internet art encyclopaedia that uses the same image http://www.artcyclopedia.com/artists/giulio_romano.html. And these are Flickr photos https://www.flickr.com/photos/snarfel/4085962904/in/photostream/ https://www.flickr.com/photos/magika2000/9169333826/ where you see the same reds. Face it. The retouched image sucks. Get over it. Coat of Many Colours (talk) 19:54, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Curiously enough Mathematica's basic ImageAdjust command does a reasonable job of getting rid of the colour cast in the adjusted image and recovering the reds. I'll work on the original tomorrow and post here. It will be a lot better than the existing adjusted, but it still won't match Hervé Lewandowski's image, or for that matter that first Flickr image. Coat of Many Colours (talk) 20:19, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

No, it's better but not worth posting. The original file Commons:File:Portrait de Jeanne d'Aragon, by Raffaello Sanzio, from C2RMF.jpg lacks the 25% lightest tones and for some reason the Red colour channel has been suppressed compared with Blue and Green. Nothing you can do about that. You can't recover something which is simply not there. Coat of Many Colours (talk) 20:50, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Thanks for the effort, but I don't see others agreeing about the colour cast at the FA nomination, and I do hope people with better eyes than mine, as well as a far better grasp of the technicalities than mine, weigh in (posterised?). I freely admit to not having good enough eyes to feel confident in my judgement on image quality per se, and it doesn't help that I can't see the first Flickr image - requires a sign-up. So I didn't try the second :-) Anyway, the article is still using your preferred version of the image. Maybe the French and Italian images should be changed? The French at least is using the one you now say lacks some of the tones. Yngvadottir (talk) 20:54, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Strange about sign-up. You don't have a Flickr account? Missing something there. I think the French wiki might be using the second Flickr photo I found. It's not very ideal, but I would say it's preferable to the retouched. The Italian is using the retouched. Of course there's a very wide variation in the quality of art repro, but that's not the issue here. Colour casts would be lesson 2 or so in any primer on digital photography (seriously, after adjusting the histogram for a full range of tones, it's generally the second edit you make in the edit flow to check you have an image worth working on). Posterised is when whole groups of pixels merge into flat sheets of colour. Your remark about eyes not sensitive. FP, and as I say I'm not revisiting. Done here. Coat of Many Colours (talk) 21:16, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Edit reverts

I am the editor who first pointed out on Wikipedia that the attribution both of artist and sitter in this portrait have been revised since 1997. I made a number of Talk page comments to that effect (for example here at Talk:Giovanna_d'Aragona#Portrait) and I also took the trouble to document the painting at this Commons file Commons:File:Giulio Romano (school of Raphael) - Portrait of Doña Isabel de Requesens - Louvre 612 Joconde 000PE026978.jpg. The circumstances behind all that are alluded to by the start editor in the "Image" section above. I don't see the point of revisiting that discussion, but those familiar with it will be aware that my Commons file was certainly the primary source and inspiration for this article start.

Yet a number of good faith edits I made improving this article were all reverted by the start editor (even an unassailable point of fact concerning Vasari was reverted). That frankly strikes me as a disservice to the community and a discourtesy to me.

I think there are two points worth stressing.

First of all this portrait is, as has always been recognised, a painting by Giulio Romano, a master draughtsman who executed many important commissions in his lifetime. To equivocate about that, as the start editor does in his lede, seems to me pointless and partisan. Raphael's intervention is conjectural, as is the cartoon (not mentioned by Vasari). Modern x-ray and infra-red indicate that it was confined (if it is indeed his hand) to reworking the gaze of the sitter so that it meets the viewer's. The painting is not to be found listed under Raphael in the Louvre catalogue.

Secondly, the description of the painting depends on a single source used by me in my Commons file, properly cited. My intervention there was largely confined to prefacing it with a remark "Woods-Marsden describes the painting as signalling a new chapter in the history of Italian female imagery". That gets to the heart of the significance of this painting today. To revert that strikes me as a genuine disservice to the reader.

There are a number of other significant losses (red being the Petrarchean colour of love for example) but those are the two most significant. It would please me if a disinterested editor were to restore them at some future date. Coat of Many Colours (talk) 10:03, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

I thought I had put back the Petrarch? (I'd originally left it out as excessive detail). Thanks for pointing out Woods-Marsden's authorship of the chapter - I'd missed the fact Brown is just the editor. I'm a bit puzzled also by the insistence on ascribing the painting to Giulio Romano - as I pointed out in a responding edit summary, there are two Louvre pages cited in the article - one in a footnote, the other, which is basically just a thumbnail, as an external link. Both credit the painting in part to Raphael, although wih the verbal equivalent of a question mark in the latter case. I flipped the order of the two in the infobox, but scholars have gone back and forth on this and the latest scholarship appears to be partly crediting Raphael. (Note that that's also what the French and Italian Wikipedias do). I found the Louvre database almost impossible to use, and the French patrimony database completely impossible - but if they don't list this painting as in part by Raphael, there's a disconnect with their pages on this painting. The Brantôme thing must be coming from somewhere - it may be in an earlier passage in Vasari. (I looked him up in Italian first, since there is no complete translation, but the text is in a font that makes it very imperfectly searchable in GoogleBooks.) So as you have no doubt seen, I took your point that that was unsupported and just put the link on Vasari on the first occurrence. But I'll be hunting some more for that. Thanks for writing that whole essay on Commons (and for uploading the version of the picture that is currently in the article - I've asked for others at the Wikiproject to weigh in because you may be right, or there may well be still another file we'd do better to use in the article). It gave me valuable indications of where to look and what the issues were; otherwise I'd have translated the French article and looked for additional references. Hafspajen had put a few on my user talk page (the conversation has just been archived), but many I couldn't use, and you will note that I added a few I found myself, one via JSTOR. However, I wondered when I saw that why you didn't just create the article here, and I found different things when I researched the topic. So thanks again for the Commons essay and for the effort here, and I appreciate there have been many twists and turns in thinking about this painting - as well as about the relationship of Raphael to his workshop and specifically to Giulio - but I feel we must go with the sources. (Also as you know, it's hard to compare diffs when paragraphing is changed, and since I saw no reason to quote Vasari, and in general appear to be summarising a bit more than you would prefer, you may possibly think I reverted more than I did.) Yngvadottir (talk) 12:02, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

No, regarding Joanna Woods-Mardsen I had missed the fact. You simply copied my omission. Regarding Romano, I refer you to WP:Verifiability. The principle source I used in my Commons file write up was Brown, as do you via me in your article start. At page 80, Woods-Marsden baldy states "A new chapter in the history of Italian female imagery is signalled by Giulio Romano's monumental likeness of the vicereine of Naples". You are repressing that. "Monumental" by the way refers to the life size portrayal (the painting measures 47 inches by 37 inches). Note 118 remarks that only Titian previously had used life-size format in his 1510Schiavona. I'm surprised you missed that in your researches. It's the sort of detail in normal circumstances I would have enjoyed adding, and there is much else worth recording in Woods-Marden's interesting and detailed remarks, on the rhetoric of beauty and virtue for example.

My comments stand and I look forward to disinterested future editors reinstituting the material you reverted. Coat of Many Colours (talk) 14:56, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

Heh. Actually it was more a matter of the large format of the book and the smallness of my desk surface; I failed to turn back to find the start of the chapter. I really did use your notes as a jumping off point; I forget now whether you had found the "Raphael's Giocondae" article or whether Hafspajen did? But I'm responsible for my own research, and that's why, as you say, I summarised more briefly than you would have. I didn't find the size of the portrait emphasised in any other treatment of it, for example (although it helped me understand how the viewer is to see the loggia ceiling), so I did not note that. It's an encyclopaedia entry, not an essay, although I've been told before that I tend to be terse. Thank you for editing the article; it's better for it, and I hope others with expertise will also contribute to making it better. But I still think you believe I left out more of the substance of your changes than I did. The Petrarch name-dropping is there, for example; I just fixed the spelling. Yngvadottir (talk) 15:39, 15 August 2014 (UTC)

I don't thank you for reverting my edits. The simple facts are that this is a painting by Giulio Romano recognised as representing a new chapter in Italian female portraiture and you have repressed that. The Giaconda stuff is from a Canadian (physician I believe) who has made something of a respected expert of himself in tracking down the identity of the Mona Lisa. He has written interestingly on the landscape in that painting, splitting it down the middle and then reassembling it the other way round, and after that I don't recall his ideas. A future editor willing to run the gauntlet of your reverts may care to expand on it. Me not. Coat of Many Colours (talk) 17:23, 15 August 2014 (UTC)