Met Art presents fine art at its best in this new black and white series. Meet Elisabetta, a stunning Italian whose body brings to mind the entire wealth of beauty produced by the country’s history of artists.
Michieletto is a master. His passion is the nude form: he has perfected the art of studio work, and his eye for the role of light and shadow in eroticizing and glorifying the female figure is unparalleled. His series with the lovely Elisabetta brings to mind an invention of the famous artists of his native country. Chiaroscuro – which means "light and shade" in Italian – refers to the modeling of volume and depth by the use of bodly contrasted light and shadow. Traditionally used by painters, Michieletto has taken it for photographic inspiration. The results are nothing short of spectacular. The shock of Elisabetta’s white torso against the solid backdrop of the setting in which she rests is, you’ll agree, a breathtakingly successful experiment.
This series, though, is not all austerity and art. Michieletto has chosen to shoot the natural beauty of his model in a domestic scene that, too, conjures images of the country in which they both grew up. (Too, it cannot be denied that the photographer knows the value of a story: we witness the model in various stages of suggestive undress, with each shot leading us more closely to the beauty of her final nude figure.) Elisabetta poses prettily in front of gauzy drapes. Is she waiting for someone? Or merely pensive in the morning light? Later on we find her brushing her hair, wresting a comb through her thick black mane. The inky luster of her hair again against the pale skin of her breasts is another fine example of chiaroscuro: Michieletto, even in these scenes, has not forsaken his eye for art. Later on still, she sips coffee from a tiny espresso cup. She sits, nude, her body bared, her eyes peering mischievously over the rim of white china.
There are other delights to be had in the sequence. From the images in which Elisabetta’s pale figure is captured by the camera as a statue, cool and firm and carved in it’s beauty, to those tantalizing domestic scenes in which she stands naked in the kitchen, or presses her nude body against a chair, to those in which a blend of the two forms occurs, in which she curves, serpent-like, to watch and worship her own exquisitely sensitive skin, Michieletto has done it all. We’re sure you’ll come away with a new appreciation of Italian art.
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