Review of Arte

Arte is a story about a noble young woman with some innate talent to drawings that despite the whole mentality of her time tries to prove her worth as a female painter. With that being said, you can expect some historic bending to fit the proposed premise by the author. Arte is a young woman who wants to be a painter, she is clumsy, not that smart, but she has a great amount of care for the details on the paintings she does and she is willing to work herself to the bone so people don't treat her as a "woman", but a fellow painter apprentice.She was taken under workshop of a great Italian artist which is referred only as "Leo" - but, aside from the name, we can't really assume it is really Da Vinci, even though people might be lead assume that - because he didn't see her as a woman or a noble, he saw her as a struggling painter, like he was, willing to prove her worth.

We are able to see, to a limited amount, how life in the Italian XVI century was like, even so this Renaissance kinda feels lacking, it is like eating a pizza with only dough, maybe some olive oil for it isn't that dry. Storywise it isn't that much better either, it mostly follow an episodic format, but there seems to be lacking an objective, sure Arte wants to be recognised as an artist, so why wouldn't they at least focus on showing the process and final result of a beautiful painting? We only see a handful of nice looking paintings, so even this purpose is defeated, and Arte's main objective is something that takes years to achieve, so it was clear we would get some "closure" for this season at least, they could have done something better about that.

However, Arte is still cheerful and goofy, which makes this anime quite lighthearted and smooth to watch and I enjoyed myself watching it nonetheless, even though I reckon this anime fails to present any of the main ideas: historical? No. Nice paintings? No. Renaissance life? No. But it isn't solely a "cute girl doing cute things", although it could have been so much more.