Topics for Today’s Class Session
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Art-historical approaches
Optics (if time)
Setting up your folder on WebDAV
Uploading Lab Assignment 1
Camera Use teams
Lab Assignment 2
If time– presentation of First Design
Assignment
Art Historical Approaches: Theories and
Methodologies for Understanding & Analyzing
Images
Emperor Qinshihuang's Tomb (r. 221-207 BC), rediscovered c. 1974
Readings: Theory Text Ch. 4
Xian another view
Art & Images as a way to understand or know history, life & the
world
Pompei & Herculaneumrediscovery c. 1748
Foundations of Art History as a Discipline (Western
Traditions) & It’s Influence on Ways of Thinking about
(and analyzing) Visual Images
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Art History as a Discipline (take notes as this part is not included in detail in this outline)
Questions of
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Formalism (theories of H. Wöfflin on progression of formal qualities in history of artistic
representations
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Linear vs painterly
Plan vs. recession
Closed form vs. open form (angles, motion)
iconography, iconology, attributes (symbolism)
genres (examples: history & religious subjects, landscape, portraiture, still life, everyday life)
stylistic movements (many--archaic, classical, neo-classical, byzantine, gothic,
impressionist, expressionist etc…..)
Changing notions & debates : what visual is representation doing?
– Mimesis
• Art as imitation of absolute ideas (world of forms--Plato)
• Art does not reproduce visual appearance but essential idea (not just what exists but
what could or should exist--Artistotle)
– Imitatio (art as representation of nature, reality, the world)
• Imitation of what (ancients? natural world? Universal truths? Artist’s vision? Reflection
of context? Anticipation of viewer?)
– Art history in socio-cultural context (the ‘new art history’)
Early Western Art Traditions of
Portraiture
Early Examples of funerary art from Egypt. Death Mask, Tutankhaman c. 1323 BC
(BCE), Limestone sculpture (copy) of Queen Nefertiti (fl. 1370-1330 BC—14th c. BC_
Book of the Dead, c. 1375
Greek and Roman Art Traditions
• Black Figure and Red Figure pottery ‘painting’ (c. 550 BC and
430 BC)
Greco-Roman Art & Architecture
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Large built public spaces
Visual display of power
Lost engineering skills
Insights into culture
Framing spectacles
Formalism: Kouros (singular)
male figure
• Late archaic (transformations-frontal to naturalistic asymmetry)
Classical to Hellenistic Periods in
Greek Art
Poseidon & Porch of the
Maidens as examples of
stylistic change
Venus de Milo
Etruscan Sarcophagus. 6th c. BC
Later Roman Art—some intimate-- Portrait of
literate woman from Herculaneum c. 50 AD
But mostly
Political
Figures
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Roman Emperor Augustus
Hadrian c. 135 CE
Transition from Byzantine to Early
Renaissance
Cimabue Madonna Enthroned 13th c.
Gentile da Fabriano early 14th c.
Italian Renaissance (begins in early 1400s—15th-16th
century CE)
Intermediality
Core early foundations inspired by humanists
from the Italian Renaissance:
– Leon Battista Alberti (1404
• Philosopher: rationalism,
moderation, following nature,
public good, ancient
philosophers
• Admiration for ancient styles:
Major work analyzing
architectural styles & role of
architecture in civic life,
notions of beauty : De Re
Aedificatoria, c. 1450-72
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Vasari’s Lives of the Most
Excellent Architects, Painters
and Sculptors (Lives of Artists
in your readings) 1550
– Notion of connecting art to
world views, socio-economic
& cultural contexts emerges
Maison Carré, Nimes, c. 19 AD
Classification &
Analysis of
Architectural Styles-Relation to General
Theories of LifeNature
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Illustration from Diderot’s Encyclopédie
17th c.
Notion of New Techniques for Depicting ‘Reality’/Nature
as “we” see it or “as it really is” (??)
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Renaissance rediscovery of linear perspective (Edgerton)
Depicting 3 dimensions (3D) on picture plane (2D)
Not just about art & science--“art in the service of God” (Edgerton)
‘Rediscovery’ of
Linear
Perspective -Art & Science
“in the service of
God”
• D. Veneziano, Madonna & Child 1445
Edgerton’s
analysis of
use of
symbolic use
of
perspective
• Form &
composition
as key to
meaning or
content
Content/Meaning, Norm & Form
• Formalism
• Example: theories of Heinrich
Wöfflin Principles of Art
History…
1-Linear vs. painterly
2-Plane vs. recession
3-Closed form to open form
4-Multiplicity to unity
5-Absolute clarity to relative clarity
– Developed for 16th-17th art but
applicable to later art
– Examples: Ingres vs. Delacroix
in 19th c. French painting
Ingres Valpincon Bather
Delacroix--Liberty Leading the
People
Panofsky’s ideas about meaning &
iconology (Theory Text Ch. 4:1)
Iconology & Search
for Methodologie of
Interpretation s
Beyond Formalism
• Panofsky is critical of
Wolfflin’s Formalist
analysis (ex. triangle
between legs of
Michelangelos’s
David)--Analysis of
motifs & compositions
• Seeks ‘intrinsic’
meaning or content
“Intrinsic Meaning”=Underlying principles
that reveal attitudes (Panofsky)
• Examples of change in conventions about depictions of “The
Adoration of Christ)
Madonna Kneeling
Abstract Art as
a Challenge to
“the canon”
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Picasso Les
Demoiselles
d’Avignon
Prostitute with
‘recognizable’
features
Continues 19thc
tradition of new
art challenging
the
‘establishment’
MANET Dejeuner sur l’herbe
Impressionism (1870s)
Renoir
Neo-Impressionism
Proliferation
of stylistic
movements
• Cloisonism -Pont Aven
School
Re-evaluation of
artists & art in terms
of historical
significance for
subsequent
developments
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Van Gogh self-portrait
(fauvism)
Relationships
between artistic
movements
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Alfred Barr-Museum of Modern
Art exhibition
catalogue
Gombrich on art & invention or discovery
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Example: Constable
Constable
JM Turner: Steam & Fog
(before 1844)
Svetlana Alpers
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Meanings & the position
of the viewer--when the
artist becomes the
observer & the gaze is
turned on the spectator
Analysis of Velazquez’
Las Meninas
who is the viewersubject?
What is the painting
about?
Idea of multiple meanings
Modes of picturing
relationships between the
“viewer-subject”
Detail of Velazquez’ Las Meninas
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Manet’s Olympia
Buck-Morris on critical analysis of contemporary images & imagemaking
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Aesthetic Experience & the “virtual”
Example of Surrealsm--S. Dali The Persistence of Memory
The “New Art History”
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c.1980s
Context
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“art for art’s sake”
Political and economic contexts
Anti-racist, feminist & postcolonialist influences
Not just “great works” (canons) or
“great men” (questioning bias in art
historical methods)
Re-thinking older classifications of
art and non-art
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Non-representational art
Popular culture
Pop Art (Roy Lichtenstein Nude with Beach Ball)
Artists had long been challenging
definitions of what is art and who can
define it
Marcel Duchamp. Fountain, original (left) and recreations of lost 1917 “Original”
Interest in Visual
Culture/Visual Studies
• Rise of visual forms of
communication in the
postmodern world
• Merging of popular &
"high" cultural forms
Visual Cultures as
systems
• Cross-mediation, intermediality
– Codes & contents migrate
across media, forms, genres
– visual/textual opposition or
hybrid experience?
• studying visual cultures as
systems
– Institutions (macro, micro),
networks of communication
What is Visual Culture & How do our ideas of it
inform Visualizations?
• Contested field
• Multidisciplinary
approaches (read
general intro. to the
theory textbook)
Robert Doisneau, Sideways Glance (1948)
Practices of Looking
– Myth of photographic truth
– Images & ideology
– Meaning-making (producers’
intentions, “reading images”,
appropriation & counter
bricolage)
– Critical approaches to media
production
Recent Art: Portrait Examples
• Andy Warhol
Chuck Close
Cindy Sherman
Gilbert & George
Dulce Pincon: portraits of
Mexican immigrants as
superheros
link
Dash Snow
More examples in Resources
Folder
Topics for Today’s Class Session
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Discussion of art-historical approaches
Optics
Setting up your folder on WebDAV
Uploading Lab Assignment 1
Camera Use teams
Lab Assignment 2
If time– presentation of First Design
Assignment