Image & Text

This week's blog prompt was composed by moderators Erica and Isac. They look forward to engaging with you as you share your ideas about how art is best taught (and learned). For this week’s blog we would like you to think about the way the arts are studied. Every week, we attend class and learn about historical art among peers. We are able to discuss our ideas with one another as well as with our instructors. As Dr. Hall has explained to us over the course of the semester, this approach is much different from the past. During the Renaissance, aspiring artists were apprenticed to artisans, and would eventually become masters themselves to train the next generation. At the start of the Baroque period (the end of the 16th century), the first academy was established by the Carracci family. As we have learned, they were a large family of artists with big influences in the Italian art world. In the 17th century, King Louis XIV founded the Royal Academy in France. The Academy pro...

This blog prompt is courtesy of our colleagues Bryson and Josh.  They will serve as our blog moderators this week.  Engage their prompt, and they surely will engage you. In this weeks lecture we discussed one of William Shakespeare's famous 16th century plays titled The Merchant of Venice .  Dr Cleworth gave us a brief overview of this play on Tuesday and explained that it has been the subject of much debate since it was written.  Many have argued that the play was originally written in order to promote antisemitic views and stereotypes; however, others have argued that the play was written in order to shed light on the discrimination many Jewish people faced during Shakespeare's time. For this blog prompt we would like you to consider multiple factors of The Merchant of Venice in order to assess whether or not this play was originally intended to be antisemitic. Is it? Once you have considered this question we would like you to tie your explanation into one or ...

When was the last time you “slowly” looked at a work of art?   Actually making intentional time to carefully observe more than meets your eye at first glance?   In our increasingly fast-paced world, where we are bombarded with more visual clutter than we can possibly process, it is all too common to rush through our looking rather than pausing to linger, reflect, and wonder.   Last week, Dr. Cleworth asked you to spend focused time listening to Renaissance music. This week, I invite you to engage in “slow looking” at Van Eyck’s masterful Ghent Altarpiece .   You might be surprised to learn that recent research demonstrates that most museum-goers, who claim to have had “incredible” and “outstanding” experiences during their visit, spent an average of fewer than 30 seconds looking at any single work of art.   (Incredible but true; for a summary, see  this article )   Yet, other scholarship asserts that prolonged observation is the foun...