Video Reviews

More Human than Human

            Visual Legacy – Epic story how humans made art and art made us human.  Pictures of the human body dominate the world.  Humans don’t resemble the images that they create.  August 7, 1908 found status of female Venus of Willendorf.  Human tendency is to make unrealistic human figures.  Seagull research – chicks tap mother s beak cause of red strip because stimulated.  Weather influence – The Nile River – Egyptian artist created proportional and emphasize all body parts equally. Egyptians created images of the body in a consistent way for 3000 years using grid lines to be consistence.  Culture is King.  Stefano Mariottini had discover ancient Greece status that are anatomically accurate and in perfect proportion.  If you look good you were good.   Kritios Boy carved from marble mastered realistic statues by a Greek artist.  Some argue that humans have a primeval tendency to exaggerate.  In 450 BC, Polyclitus made an artistic breakthrough in sculpture; he divided the body into quadrants and moved the parts to create a sense of movement.  The Riace bronze sculptures are greatest statues ever made. Michelangelo made his sculptures more human than human.  Today the art of caricature is fueled by the human desire to exaggerate what is important to a culture. 

I choose the following videos because after reading the chapters I wanted to learn more about the topics.

A World Inscribed: The Illuminated Manuscript

Writers write so that the future may learn.  Work of an angel not a man.  Monks were fighting devil with pen and ink to preserve knowledge.  Spread of knowledge was slowed because each book was copied by hand in adverse conditions.  Scribes wrote their thoughts in the margins of books.  All sorts of mayhem in the margins “How do you get a fox, a lamb, some greens across the river in a boat...  The printing press had replace scribes, ending an era.   

Cairo Museum

The Egyptian Museum in Cairo houses relics and artifacts of thirty dynasties of pharaohs.  Rare beauty, mystery and iconic power draw visitors from all over the world.  The basement is full of artifacts that arrived over 100 years ago.  One artifact is a foot fitted with an artificial toe.  The Cairo Museum is preparing for its centennial celebration.  The statue of Kai, a high priest of Khufu is the most amazing artifact in Egypt.  In 1925 an expedition from Boston discovered the tomb of Khufu’s mother.

The Measure of All Things: Greek Art and the Human Figure

Acropolis is a visual reminder of the politics, philosophy, art, and architecture of ancient Greece.  Artists portrayed humans in a realistic way and obsessed with the perfection of the body.  Sculptures revolutionized realism by using a 3D effect, depicting movement and using bright colors.  Images on Greek pottery depicted everyday life as well as the gods.  Sculpture was the heart of revolution in sixth century Greece, giving a new sense of humanism with the realistic and idealistic depiction of the human body as seen in the Kritios Boy.  Olympic Games the athletes participated in the nude.  The Classical Period, Greek artists produced idealized forms and portraits sculpture of individuals like Socrates. 

The videos related to the reading, chapter 15 talks about illuminated and more human representation in sculptures and this is what the videos were about. 

The videos expanded on the reading and also had a lot of sculpture to show the detail put into the sculpture.  Very interesting mod.