Post #9 - Reading and GRQ - Renaissance and Modern Art

 

                                                     Guided Reading Questions

1. The revival of portraiture during the Renaissance was an expression of two impulses: the desire to immortalize oneself by way of one's physical appearance and the wish to publicize one's greatness in the traditional manner of Greek and Roman antiquity

2 For Renaissance artists, the painting constituted a window on nature: The picture plane, that is, the two-dimensional surface of the panel or canvas, was conceived as a transparent glass through which one might perceive the three-dimensional world.

3 But the more revolutionary “breakthrough” in Renaissance painting was the invention of linear perspective, an ingenious tool for the translation of three-dimensional space onto a two- dimensional surface.

4 Masaccio's application of one-point perspective provides spatial unity to the three separate episodes, while tonal unity is provided by means of aerial perspective —the subtle blurring of details and diminution of color intensity in objects perceived at a distance.

5 The first artist to master Brunelleschi's new spatial device was the Florentine painter Tommaso Guidi, called Masaccio, or "Slovenly Tom" (1401-1428)

6 Brunelleschi projected the picture plane as a cross-section through which diagonal lines (orthogonals) connected the eye of the beholder with objects along those lines and hence with the vanishing point.

7 The immediacy of the material world is enhanced by the technique of oil painting, which Jan brought to perfection.

8 Leondardo 's belief in a universal order led him to seek a basic correspondence between human proportions and ideal geometric shapes, as Vitruvius and his followers had advised.

9 The School of Athens advanced a set of formal principles that came to epitomize the grand style: spatial clarity, decorum (that is, propriety) and good (taste), balance, and grace (the last, especially evident in the subtle symmetries of line and color).
Botticelli executed Birth of Venus in tempera on a shading, so that they seem weightless, suspended in space.

10 In relation to subject matter, Courbet's political stance meant depicting ordinary laborers and other unidealized aspects of peasant life, as he did in his Stonebreakers.

11 Michelangelo's David is a defiant presence-the offspring of a race of giants. While indebted to classical tradition, Michelangelo deliberately violated classical proportions by making the head and hands of his figure too large for his trunk.

12 The paradigm of the modern artist as a thinker of unexpected thoughts, expounded upon in the
metaphors of visual form, has its origin in the mid nineteenth century.

13 "Avant-garde" originated as a French military term, referring to the small group of soldiers that went out ahead of the main forces to scout for the enemy.

14 Clement Greenberg, the American heir to Fry and Bell, took this to an extreme in portraying the avant-garde as being chiefly engaged with the purification of art as an autonomous abstraction.

15 Greenberg defined this as “high art,” which attempts to expunge all references to the world, as opposed to "kitsch," or popular culture.