Art appreciation artworks portion

. Le Boulevard du Temple, Daguerre

"Daguerreotype"-yielded a positive image on a polished metal plate. In France, a different process, which yielded a positive image on a polished metal plate, was named the daguerreotype (Fig. 11-7), after one of its two inventors, Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (Nicéphore Niépce had died in 1833, leaving Daguerre to perfect the process and garner the laurels). Public reaction was wildly enthusiastic, and the French and English press faithfully reported every development in the greatest detail.

Guggenheim Museum, Frank Gehry

project conceived as part of a plan to reinvigorate the Basque fishing port and industrial city of Bilbao in northern Spain. Set along the riverfront, at the site of an old dock and warehouse, it is linked to the downtown historic district across the river (itself largely a pedestrian zone) by a footbridge designed by Santiago Calatrava (see Fig. 14-55), completed the same year as the museum, and known as the Zubizuri (Basque for "white bridge"). The museum itself is enormous—260,000 square feet, including 19 gallery spaces connected by ramps and metal bridges. It is covered in titanium, a material chosen because it reflects light with stunning clarity. Thus, at night it seems gilded in gold, by day it is silvery, and at noon virtually translucent.

The Glorification of St. Ignatius, Fra Andrea Pozzo

Artist used "Frescos". Ceiling design. Standing in the nave, or central portion of the church, and looking upward, the congregation had the illusion that the roof of the church had been removed, revealing the glories of Heaven. A master of perspective, about which he wrote an influential treatise, Pozzo realized his effects by extending the architecture in paint one story above the actual windows in the vault. St. Ignatius, the founder of the Jesuit order, is shown being transported on a cloud toward the waiting Christ. The foreshortening of the many figures, becoming ever smaller in size as they rise toward the center of the ceiling, greatly adds to the realistic, yet awe-inspiring, effect.

Woman of Willendorf

Besides cave paintings, early artists also created sculptural objects—small carved figures of people (mostly women) and animals. These reflect a more abstract and less naturalistic approach to representation, as illustrated in a limestone statuette of a woman found at Willendorf, in modern Austria (Fig. 16-2). (Archeologists originally named it the Venus of Willendorf, but its makers obviously had no knowledge of the Roman goddess.) Here, the breasts, belly, and genitals are exaggerated and the face lacks defining features, suggesting a connection to fertility and child-bearing. We know, too, that the figurine was originally painted in red ocher, symbolic of menses. And her navel is not carved; rather, it is a natural indentation in the stone. Whoever carved her seems to have recognized, in the raw stone, a connection to the origins of life. But such figures may have served other purposes as well. Perhaps they were dolls, guardian figures, or images of beauty in a cold, hostile world, where having body fat might have made the difference between survival and death.

Head of a King or Oba,

By the middle of the twelfth century, Ife culture was producing highly naturalistic brass sculptures depicting its rulers. An example is the Head of a King (or Oni) (Fig. 17-32). The parallel lines that run down the face represent decorative effects made by scarring—scarification. The hole in the lower neck suggests that the head may have been attached to a wooden mannequin, and in memorial services the mannequin may well have worn the royal robes of the Ife court. Small holes along the scalp line suggest that hair, or perhaps a veil of some sort, also adorned the head. But the head itself was, for the Ife, of supreme importance. It was the home of the spirit, the symbol of the king's capacity to organize the world and to prosper. Ife culture depended for its welfare on its kings' heads.

Pantheon

Conceived as a temple to celebrate all their gods, the Roman Pantheon (Fig. 14-17)—from the Greek words pan ("every") and theos ("god")—consists of a 142-foot-high dome set on a cylindrical wall 140 feet in diameter. Every interior dimension appears equal and proportionate, even as its scale overwhelms the viewer. The dome is concrete, which was poured in sections over a huge mold supported by a complex scaffolding. Over 20 feet thick where it meets the walls—the springing, or the point where an arch or dome rises from its support—the dome thins to only 6 feet at the circular opening, 30 feet in diameter, at its top. Through this oculus (Latin for "eye"), the building's only source of illumination, worshipers could make contact with the heavens. As the sun shone through it, casting a round spotlight into the interior, it seemed as if the eye of Jupiter, king of the gods, shone upon the Pantheon walls. Seen from the street (Fig. 14‑18), where it was originally approached between parallel colonnades that culminated in a podium now lost to the rise of the area's street level, its interior space could only be intuited. Instead, the viewer was confronted by a portico composed of eight mammoth Corinthian columns made of polished granite rising to a pediment some 121 feet wide.

Great Stupa at Sanchi

Deeply saddened by the horrors of war, and believing that his power rested ultimately in religious virtue and not military force, Ashoka became an ardent pacifist and a great patron of the Buddhist monks, erecting some 84,000 shrines, called stupas, throughout India, all elaborately decorated with sculpture and painting. The stupa is literally a burial mound, dating from prehistoric times, but by the time the Great Stupa at Sanchi was made (Fig. 16-37)—it is the earliest surviving example of the form—it had come to house important relics of the Buddha himself or the remains of later Buddhist holy persons. This stupa is made of rubble, piled on top of the original shrine, which has been faced with brick to form a hemispherical dome that symbolizes the earth itself. A railing—in this case, made of white stone and clearly visible in this photograph—encircles the sphere. Ceremonial processions moved along the narrow path behind this railing. Pilgrims would circle the stupa in a clockwise direction on another wider path, at ground level, retracing the path of the sun, thus putting themselves in harmony with the cosmos and symbolically walking the Buddhist Path of Life around the World Mountain.

Imponderabilia, Marina Abramovic and Ulay

Example of: "Performance Art." Choosing which body to face, rub against, and literally feel, forced each viewer to confront their own attitudes and feelings about sexuality and gender. In much performance art, the physical presence of the body in space becomes a primary concern. The performance team of Marina Abramović and Uwe Laysiepen (known as Ulay) made this especially clear in works such as Imponderabilia, performed in 1977 at a gallery in Milan, Italy (Fig. 12-34). They stood less than a foot apart, naked and facing each other, in the main entrance to the gallery, so that people entering the space had to choose which body—male or female—to face as they squeezed between them. A hidden camera filmed each member of the public as he or she passed through the "living door," and their "passage" was then projected on the gallery wall. Choosing which body to face, rub against, and literally feel, forced each viewer to confront their own attitudes and feelings about sexuality and gender. Abramović and Ulay's bodies composed the material substance of the work and so did the bodies of the audience members, who suddenly found themselves part of the artwork itself—at least they did for 90 minutes, until the police stopped the performance.

Portrait of Thomas Carlyle, Julia Margaret Cameron

Digital Image. blurred their features slightly, believing this technique drew attention away from mere physical appearance and revealed more of her sitter's inner character. Commenting on her photographs of famous men like Thomas Carlyle (Fig. 11-9), she wrote, "When I have had such men before my camera, my whole soul has endeavored to do its duty towards them in recording faithfully the greatness of the inner man as well as the features of the outer man. The photograph thus taken has been almost the embodiment of a prayer."

Live-Taped Video Corridor, Bruce Nauman,

From the outset, one of the principal attractions of video as a medium for artists was its immediacy, the fact that the image was transmitted instantaneously in "real" time. Installations such as Bruce Nauman's Live-Taped Video Corridor (Fig. 11-36) were designed precisely to underscore the sometimes startling effects of such immediacy. The piece consisted of two floor-to-ceiling panels forming a tunnel the length of a room. At the far end were two video monitors stacked on top of one another. As viewers inched their way down the corridor one at a time, it gradually became clear that they were walking toward their own image, shot from a surveillance camera mounted on the ceiling.

Theodora and Her Attendants. Justinian and His Attendants, (

If the facade of San Vitale is very plain, more or less unadorned, local brick, inside it is elaborately decorated with marble and glittering mosaics, including two elaborate mosaics that face each other on the side walls of the apse, one depicting Theodora, the wife of Justinian (Fig. 17‑7), and the other Justinian himself (Fig. 17‑8). In the Architectural Panorama below, click on the apse and use the up arrow to get a full view of the mosaics Theodora had at one time been a circus performer, but she became one of the emperor's most trusted advisors, sharing with him a vision of a Christian Roman Empire. In the mosaic, she carries a golden cup of wine, and Justinian, on the opposite wall, carries a bowl containing bread. Together they are bringing to the Church an offering of bread and wine for the celebration of the Eucharist. The haloed Justinian is to be identified with Christ, surrounded as he is by 12 advisors, like the 12 Apostles. And the haloed Theodora, with the three Magi bearing gifts to the Virgin and newborn Christ embroidered on the hem of her skirt, is to be understood as a figure for Mary. In this image, Church and State become one and the same.

. A Facility Based on Change, Tajima

In 2010, the focus of the art21 film, Mika Tajima found 26 Action Office wall panels dating from 1971 for sale at a telemarketing office in Bayonne, New Jersey, and purchased them to use as "readymades" in a sculptural installation named after Propst's book and meant to underscore the bleak realities of the dehumanizing work spaces that Propst's modernist aesthetic created (Fig. 15-44). She created enclosed cubes, non-functioning cubicles that no one can enter (or, if somehow trapped inside, leave), metaphors for the confinement and isolation of the modern office itself. The fabric on a number of the Action Office panels was worn thin and torn. Tajima replaced the original fabric with canvas and painted the panels as monochrome, pseudo-Minimalist paintings of the 1960s and 1970s (see Fig. 20-25), which, in the Minimalist artists' confidence that they were producing works of timeless beauty and eloquence, parallels the utopian vision of Propst and Herman Miller in their belief that they were creating a truly ideal, rather than dysfunctional, work space.

Victorian Couple, Shonibare

In the mid-1990s, he began making works out of the colorful printed fabrics that are worn throughout West Africa (Fig. 13-28), all of which are created by English and Dutch designers, manufactured in Europe, then exported to Africa, whence they are in turn remarketed to the West as authentic African design. In this sense, the fabrics are the very record of Shonibare's soul, traveling back and forth, from continent to continent. "By making hybrid clothes," Shonibare explains,

Hagia Sophia, Anthemius and Isidorus

Justinian attached enormous importance to architecture, believing that nothing better served to underscore the power of the emperor. The church of Hagia Sophia, meaning "Holy Wisdom," was his imperial place of worship in Constantinople (Figs. 17-3 and 17-4). The huge interior, crowned by a dome, is reminiscent of the circular, central plan of Ravenna's San Vitale (see Fig. 17-6), but this dome is abutted at either end by half-domes that extend the central core of the church along a longitudinal axis reminiscent of the basilica, with the apse extending in another smaller half-dome out one end of the axis. These half-domes culminate in arches that are repeated on the two sides of the dome as well. The architectural scheme is, in fact, relatively simple—a dome supported by four pendentives, the curved, inverted triangular shapes that rise up to the rim of the dome between the four arches themselves. This dome-on-pendentive design was so enthusiastically received that it became the standard for Byzantine church design.

Study of a Woman's Head, Leonardo Da Vinci

Leonardo's metalpoint drawing of a woman's head (Fig. 8-6) shows this skill. Shadow is rendered here by means of careful hatching. At the same time, a sense of movement and energy is evoked not only by the directional force of these parallels, but also by the freedom of Leonardo's line, the looseness of the gesture even in this most demanding of formats.

Jar, Maria Martinez and Julian Martinez

María Martinez's black jar (Fig. 13-7) is an example of a second technique often used in ceramic construction, coiling, in which the clay is rolled out in long, ropelike strands that are coiled on top of each other. As the potter builds the coils up in a continuous spiral, each strand is smoothed and blended one to the next, eliminating any trace of the original ropes of clay and making pot walls of uniform thickness. Before firing, the pot is burnished or polished to a high gloss, usually with a stone.

Morris and Company, chairs

Morris constantly emphasized two principles: simplicity and utility. Desire for simplicity—"simplicity of life," as he put it, "begetting simplicity of taste"—soon led him to create what he called "workaday furniture," the best example of which is the company's line of Sussex rush-seated chairs (Fig. 15‑5). Such furniture was meant to be "simple to the last degree" and to appeal to the common man. As Josiah Wedgwood had done 100 years earlier (see Chapter 13), Morris quickly came to distinguish this "workaday" furniture from his more costly "state furniture," for which, he wrote, "we need not spare ornament . . . but [may] make them as elaborate and elegant as we can with carving or inlaying or paintings; these are the blossoms of the art of furniture."

The Annunciation, Robert Campin and workshop

Oil on wood. the Christian story of the Annunciation of the Virgin, the revelation to Mary that she will conceive a child to be born the Son of God, takes place in a fully realized Flemish domestic interior. The Archangel Gabriel approaches Mary from the left, almost blocking the view of the altarpiece's two donors, the couple who commissioned it, dressed in fashionable fifteenth-century clothing and standing outside the door at the left. Seven rays of sunlight illuminate the room and fall directly on Mary's abdomen. On one of the rays, a miniature Christ, carrying a cross, flies into the scene (Fig. 9-15). Campin is telling the viewers that the entire life of Christ, including the Passion itself, enters Mary's body at the moment of conception. The scene is not idealized. In the right-hand panel, Joseph the carpenter works as a real fifteenth-century carpenter might have. In front of him is a recently completed mousetrap. Another mousetrap sits outside on the window ledge, apparently for sale. These are real people with real daily concerns. The objects in the room—from the vase and flowers to the book and candle—seem to possess a material reality that lends a sense of reality to the story of the Annunciation itself. In fact, the Archangel Gabriel appears no less (and no more) "real" than the brass pot above his head.

The Capture of the Sabine Woman, Giambologna

Sculpture in-the-round—or freestanding sculpture—literally demands movement. It is meant to be seen from all sides, and the viewer must move around it. Giambologna's Capture of the Sabine Women (Figs. 12‑5 and 12-6) is impossible to represent in a single photograph. Its figures rise in a spiral, and the sculpture changes dramatically as the viewer walks around it and experiences it from each side. It is in part the horror of the scene that lends the sculpture its power, for as it draws us around it, in order to see more of what is happening, it involves us both physically and emotionally in the scene it depicts.

Marilyn Monroe, Andy Warhol

Used "Silkscreen Printing." Pop artist who recognized in silkscreen printing possibilities not only for making images but for commenting on American culture in general. In his many silkscreen images of Marilyn Monroe, almost all made within three or four years of her death in 1962, he depicted her in garish, conflicting colors

Delftsche Slaolie, Jan Toorop

The Dutch artist Jan Toorop's advertising poster for a peanut-based salad oil (Fig. 15‑13) flattens the long, spiraling hair of the two women preparing salad into a pattern very like the elaborate wrought-iron grillework also characteristic of Art Nouveau design. Writing about Bing's installation at the 1900 Universal Exposition, one writer described Art Nouveau's use of line this way: "[In] the encounter of the two lines . . . the ornamenting art is born—an indescribable curving and whirling ornament, which laces and winds itself with almost convulsive energy across the surface of the [design]!"

Annie G., Cantering, Saddled, Muybridge

Used a "trip-wire device"Such a dream seemed even more possible when photographs of a horse trotting were published by Eadweard Muybridge in La Nature in 1878.Muybridge had used a trip-wire device in an experiment commissioned by California governor Leland Stanford to settle a bet about whether there were moments in the stride of a trotting or galloping horse when it was entirely free of the ground.

. Pyramids of Giza,

The architecture of the vast majority of early civilizations was designed to imitate natural forms. The significance of the pyramids of Egypt (Fig. 14-2) is the subject of much debate, but their form may well derive from the image of the god Re, who in ancient Egypt was symbolized by the rays of the sun descending to earth. A text in one pyramid reads: "I have trodden these rays as ramps under my feet." As one approached the mammoth pyramids, covered in limestone to reflect the light of the sun, the eye was carried skyward to Re, the Sun itself, who was, in the desert, the central fact of life.

Apoxyomenos (The Scraper), Lysippus

The court sculptor to Alexander the Great was Lysippus, known to us only through later Roman copies of his work. Lysippus challenged the Classical canon of proportion created by Polyclitus (see Fig. 7-23), creating sculptures with smaller heads and slenderer bodies that lent his figures a sense of greater height. In a Roman copy of a lost original by Lysippus known as the Apoxyomenos (Fig. 16-24), or The Scraper, an athlete removes oil and dirt from his body with an instrument called a strigil. He seems detached from his circumstances, as if recalling his victory, both physically and mentally uncontained by the space in which he stands.

Queen Nefertiti

The sun god, manifested as a radiant sun disk—the Aten—embodied all the characteristics of the other Egyptian deities, and thus made them superfluous. Though the traditional standardized proportions of the human body were only slightly modified, artists seemed more intent on depicting special features of the human body—hands and fingers, the details of a face. Nowhere is this attention to detail more evident than in the famous bust of Akhenaten's queen, Nefertiti (Fig. 16-11). Both the graceful curve of her neck and her almost completely relaxed look make for what seems to be a stunningly naturalistic piece of work, though it remains impossible to say if this is a true likeness or an idealized portrait.

Sharecropper, Elizabeth Catlett

This is a LINOCUT. It is comprised of three separate linoleum blocks printed in black, dark green (for the jacket), and burnt sienna (for the neck and face). The practice of sharecropping, which was introduced soon after the emancipation of the slaves in the last half of the nineteenth century, essentially reinstated the conditions of slavery itself as white landlords exploited former slaves by contracting for a share of the crops produced on their small plots of land in return for the dubious privilege of working the land. We look up at Catlett's sharecropper as if we are her children, and what we see is anything but a visage defeated by a lifetime of indentured servitude. Instead we are witness to a determined strength

venus, henri mattise

Used scissors to cut out figures and put them together. The figure of the goddess is revealed in the negative space of the composition. It is as if the goddess of love—and hence love itself—were immaterial. In the blue positive space to the right we discover the profile of a man's head, as if love springs, fleetingly, from his very breath.

Great Serpent Mound

Uses "Earthwork" medium. Spiral Jetty was directly inspired by the Great Serpent Mound, an ancient Native American earthwork in Adams County, Ohio (Fig. 12-28). Built by the Hopewell culture sometime between 600 bce and 200 ce, it is nearly a quarter of a mile long. And though almost all other Hopewell mounds contain burials, this one does not. Its "head" consists of an oval enclosure that may have served some ceremonial purpose, and its tail is a spiral. The spiral would, in fact, become a favorite decorative form of the later Mississippian cultures. The monumental achievement of Smithson's Spiral Jetty, made with dump trucks and bulldozers, is dwarfed by the extraordinary workmanship and energy that must have gone into the construction of this prehistoric earthwork.

whispers from the walls, Whitfield Lovell

a full-scale recreation of what a 1920s North Texas one-room house lived in by an African-American family working the fields might have looked like, Whitfield Lovell has used charcoal drawing in a particularly evocative way. On the shack's plank walls—salvaged from abandoned buildings around Denton, Texas, where the piece was first installed at the University of North Texas—he has drawn life-size figures based on actual photographs of the Texas African Americans, especially those who lived in the thriving Denton African-American community in the 1920s. The very fragility of the medium lends the drawings an almost ghostlike presence, an eerie sense of the past rising through and in the collection of period artifacts—blankets, a rag carpet, a trunk, a gas lamp, pots and pans, the hat on the bed—that he has assembled in the room.

Primavera, Sandro Botticelli

painted for a chamber next to the bedroom of his patron Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici, is one of the greatest tempera paintings ever made.The figures and trees were painted on an undercoat—white for the figures, black for the trees. The transparency of the drapery was achieved by layering thin yellow washes of transparent medium over the white undercoat. As many as 30 coats of color, transparent or opaque, depending on the relative light or shadow of the area being painted, were required to create each figure.