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...

Music infuses most aspects of my life.  Anything percussive drives my workouts.  Music festivals are highlights of my social calendar.  Certain voices, such as Hanna Reid's from London Grammar , serve as revelations.  Debussy is an old friend, and Sirius XMU and Alt Nation keep me company to and from campus.  I have 57 playlists in iTunes, each calibrated for a specific context or to elicit a certain emotion I'm searching for at a given moment. For all my deep commitments as a consumer of all things sonic (and my knowledge of certain musicians within a historical context), I know preciously little about music -- its vocabulary, structure, and theory -- beyond the basics.  This certainly hampers an informed discussion of music, particularly music that is foreign to my own cultural diet.  Nonetheless, as I write this post, I am listening to Pangue Lingua  ("Sing, My Tongue"), a mass (choral music usually used to accompany the eucharistic liturgy...

Patronage is derived from the Latin patronus , which means protector, advocate, benefactor.             This week we would like you to consider the role of patronage in artistic creation.  As you now know, during the Renaissance artists typically worked for a variety of patrons (wealthy merchants, craftsmen’s guilds, monastic orders and the church elite) who commissioned them to execute works of art for a variety of reasons ; sometimes multiple agendas could be served through a single commission.  For example, Giovanni Rucellai, a 15 th -century Florentine merchant, claimed he supported the arts “because they serve the glory of God, the honor of the city, and the commemoration of myself.”  Often, artistic patronage was a means to reinforce social structures fundamental to civic sustainability – loyalty to family, church, and city/state – and the populous clearly benefited from the humanistic ideals expressed thr...

Welcome to the Image & Text Blog. We will use this space to engage each other in dialog concerning class content and themes.  We will debate controversial issues, ponder the application of visual and literary culture to our distracted 21st century lives, share pertinent resources, and cultivate our skills as effective and ethical digital communicators. During the first few weeks of the semester, we (Drs. Hall and Cleworth) will set the tone for our blog conversations and establish topics.  Eventually, this task will fall to all of you -- more on that later. For your first topic this semester, we would like you to think about your "cultural diet."  When we think of a diet, we typically imagine the intake of nutrition for the sake of health.  In the same way, a "cultural diet" represents the manner in which we "consume" cultural artifacts.  You may argue that you have no interest in arts and culture, but you interface with both everyday via advert...