All papers must include a cover page, page numbers, an introduction, subsequent paragraphs and a conclusion. Write the paper as one continuous exploration of your subject.
Proofread your paper carefully. All references must be documented with proper citations, MLA format, cite the book, the file I attached. no Wikipedia.
Here is your topic:
1 -Choose an image from your museum visit. List the museum, title of the piece, the artist, date of the artwork and medium.
This is the image I chose, Mona Lisa. I saw this image when I visited France in Louvre Museum, Paris.
2 -Then find a propaganda image from the last 30 years including cu
ent advertising images, mass media, public relations campaigns (including political campaigns).
This is the propaganda Image I chose. You should write about the image.
3 -Finally, choose an image of yourself from the last few years, preferably one that you have used on a social media platform. Study your face in a mi
or for at least fifteen minutes. Time yourself... make sure you stare for the entire fifteen minutes. (This will be difficult to do!) Study yourself with the same honesty as Rem
andt or Van Gogh did. Study yourself candidly. For the last five minutes, strike several different intentional poses. Consider the portraits of JR’s friends and the poses they struck.
This is the picture I chose. I took this selfie during my visit in Louvre museum, Paris.
Your Goal:
Explain what propaganda is in your own words as well as explanations offered by scholarly sources. Compare all three images. What is being valued in each image? What are your personal responses and reactions? Discuss any emotional response you may have to each of the three images. Do you see the cultural myths of individualism (the autonomous individual) or love of technology reflected in any of these images? What about bipolar thinking? Do you feel victim or purveyor of these values in your own image? Can you honestly view yourself differently from how advertising presents how you should look or be? What specifically influences you in an advertisement?
Discuss the functions of your chosen works of art, their methods of creation and focus on what is important or historical about them. Discuss how your selections reflect the cultures and the times in which they were created. This means that you must include quite a bit of history about the country
egion in which it was created and a taste of the times. Include information about the stylistic movement with which each artwork is identified.
Finish your essay with a general summary that includes a comparison of your three images and how they reflect the values we have studied all semester. Are their differences in the cultural values shown by the three images or are they the same? Identify and discuss historical and contemporary propaganda. Do you feel that one era delivered a message more artfully than another? Does your own image reflect specific propaganda?
PLAGIARISM:
This means NO cutting and pasting of information of any kind. Put data in your own words, then footnote every time you take information from any outside source. You should have dozens of footnotes for a paper of this size. If there is ANY plagiarism, you will get a ZERO on your paper without a chance to re-do the work. See page 3 of your syllabus for more information on plagiarism.
QUOTES, BIBLIOGRAPHY and FOOTNOTES:
Cite all written sources both in the footnotes and in the bibliography. Format Chicago style. (You can review this by a Google search of “Chicago Footnotes” or “Chicago bibliography”, etc. Your paper will most likely have at least five footnotes per page and your bibliography should have at least eight sources. Use a direct quote from a source only if you feel that there is no way that you could say it better. Quoted sentences should comprise no more than 5% of your paper.
Chapter 3: Renaissance 1
The Renaissance
Filippo Brunelleschi XXXXXXXXXXpublicly revealed his discovery of perspective in
Florence, Italy, in 1425.
The event was quite simple, almost playful. Brunelleschi
ought a little painting based
on his new ideas into the square in front of the cathedral. The original painting has disappeared,
ut accounts of it and how it was used in the demonstration survive. Despite scholarly dispute
over details of the event, its main features are clear.1
Brunelleschi’s Experiment: The Duplication of Sight
The scene in front of the cathedral on that August day in 1425 must have been puzzling.
People were used to seeing Brunelleschi around the cathedral; its magnificent dome was then
eing constructed according to his design and under his supervision. But on that day he was not
involved with the dome. A crowd of passersby stood in line. He gave each of them, one after the
other, a small mi
or and a small painting XXXXXXXXXXWhat each one did with the painting and the
3.1 Experimenting with perspective.
mi
or seemed very strange. Each person put
the back of the painting up to one eye and
looked through a hole in the painting’s
center, then held a mi
or in front of the
painting so that the painting itself was seen
(through the hole) reflected in the mi
or.
After looking through the painting at the reflected image of the painting in this way, each
person inevitably lowered the mi
or and stared at the building beyond—the ancient Baptistry of
Chapter 3: Renaissance 2
Florence—then, with obvious eagerness, raised the mi
or and looked at the painting reflected in
it again at least once more before reluctantly handing both mi
or and painting to the next person
in line. Everyone was obviously pleased and excited, especially Brunelleschi, who continually
shrugged and laughed in enjoyment at the questions and comments su
ounding his little
experiment.
Brunelleschi wanted to demonstrate that his newly discovered rules of linear perspective
could reproduce the exact “look” of things to the eye—the illusion of three-dimensional space on
a two-dimensional surface. To show this, he had painted a small picture of the Baptistry on a
wooden panel precisely according to his newly developed method.
After painting the building on the panel, he covered the area of the painting above the
Baptistry with highly reflective silver leaf to produce a mi
or-like surface. Then he drilled a hole
in the painting. A person looking through the hole in the back of the painting at its reflection in
the mi
or held in front of it could then see more than the precisely painted image of the
Baptistry: reflected in the silver-leaf surface su
ounding it would be the sky and the moving
clouds.
The scene seemed miraculously real! And its reality could be tested: by lowering the
mi
or while still looking through the hole in the painting, one could see the Baptistry itself—
from exactly the same angle that Brunelleschi had drawn and painted it. The real Baptistry
looked exactly the same as the painted Baptistry. The moving clouds were a dramatic touch of
genius. A miracle, indeed, but a “miracle” of particular importance, because it fused art and
science in a common achievement: an image that approximated how the world appears to the
human eye.
Chapter 3: Renaissance 3
Art historian Elton Davies called Brunelleschi’s painting of the Florence Baptistry a
“milestone” in cultural history and compared it “to the Wright Brothers’ first flying machine.”2
Psychologically, the little painting did create a change as revolutionary as flight. It began the
process of turning attention from God and eternity as the basic reality in art and life to the
individual self and human perception as the basic reality. Davies summarizes this impact in the
following terms:
“Medieval art…had its center in the images of God, the saints, and the devil… These
were fixed, changeless beings to be viewed by spectators who were moving about. But for
Brunelleschi’s painting (the first known use of perspective) the human spectator was the
motionless center, and so was the spot on the earth’s surface where he sat.”3
Viewers of Brunelleschi’s linear perspective painting were convinced that the drawing
was a real duplication of the building because the linear perspective formulation created the more
“real” images anybody had ever seen. They were completely convinced of the realism.
It is hard for us to imagine today what an impact seeing the first perspective images must
have had. Human perception is a fluid, changing experience. Few of us today would mistake the
painting of a building for the real thing.
To better understand how things can look quite different to different audiences, try
viewing a ho
or film from the 1950s like the original Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, US,
Don Siegel). It may be hard to believe the special effects that look corny today actually
frightened audiences of the past—but they certainly did! As technology advances in Western
culture, more and more “real” images are made possible. Audience expectations and responses
evolve with the advances.
The Perspective Age Begins: The World Conforms to the Human Eye
Chapter 3: Renaissance 4
3.2 Uccello, perspective of a chalice.
We can look at two images from the
history of art to understand the impact of
Brunelleschi’s discovery on Western art and
culture.
The first image, completed within
ten years of the introduction of perspective,
is a drawing by Paolo Uccello XXXXXXXXXX),
a Florentine artist who was a friend of
Brunelleschi. Uccello’s drawing shows how
perspective could picture manmade and
natural forms with a proportional and
measurable sense of objectivity (3.2).
The second image was made some four hundred years later. It shows an anonymous
couple proudly holding a photograph of their friends or relatives in their hands as they pose for a
photograph of themselves XXXXXXXXXXThe photographic process that was first patented in 1839 grew
directly out of artistic and scientific
applications of perspective images begun in
the early Renaissance. Photography is the
mechanization of perspective.
3.3 Anon., “Couple holding Photo,” 1850.
No one foresaw the artistic and cultural changes symbolized by these images. Between
1425 and 1839, perspective replaced the cosmic geometry of the Parthenon and the sacred
geometry of Chartres with an art whose basic realism was justified by human perception itself.
Chapter 3: Renaissance 5
Perspective’s Essential Ingredient: The Vanishing Point
Linear perspective as developed by Brunelleschi is the scientific, mathematical