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Lecture01 Introduction part1

Mar 18, 2024
welcome, this is renaissance art history. uh, I'm travis lee clark, just a little bit about me. I initially got my PhD and there I am, so you know what I look like. I really hate doing picture in picture, it's so much more convenient. do this in a sweatshirt and I don't have to justify it to anyone, but I got my doctorate at temple university and I was working on medieval manuscripts specifically, I was working on manuscripts here at the monastery of Saint Catherine, this is located in the middle of the desert of Sinai in Egypt and this is the place where Moses saw the burning bush.
lecture01 introduction part1
If you've ever been there, you know that the real miracle is not that he saw a burning bush, but that he saw any bush because it makes it look like Utah. By comparison, the Cambodian rainforest is really desolate and dry, but that's actually a good thing because it means that the library they have there has beautifully preserved manuscripts. It is a perfect climate for preserving manuscripts. Here you can see me 15 years ago. 20 pounds lighter without the goatee when I was there all the pilgrims referred to me as cappello de indiana jones which is a bit insulting but I stayed in this little apartment right here and did research on a manuscript known as Christian topography just wonderful . 10th century illustrated manuscript here you can see Moses receiving the law and there is Moses in front of the burning bush, so I did my dissertation on that but I also did research on Islamic manuscripts.
lecture01 introduction part1

More Interesting Facts About,

lecture01 introduction part1...

Islamic manuscripts are also very fabulous. Here is this wonderful Safavid Persian manuscript. this is from the 16th century and this is in the court of geomars gaya mars was the first man according to persian tradition and here you see him dressed in animal skins this thing is simply stunning uh holy cow, beautiful thing if the sky doesn't It doesn't look like a Safavid manuscript, I don't want to go and I also had a little experience in Indian art. I studied with Kurt Barrett, who is currently an assistant curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and worked on damn guns.
lecture01 introduction part1
Well all things eventually come to an end, although I was a lifelong student in 2008, I actually graduated and had to get this thing called a job, so I actually went to a small school in far west Texas known like Solraw. been and they asked me the wrong question in my job interview they asked me if you could teach or can you teach Latin American art and I said yes I can, they should have asked you you know? Have you taught Latin American art? I did not know anything. about Latin American art, but I had a whole summer to study, so I studied and lo and behold, they also have manuscripts and I became a big fan of Latin American art and I taught Latin American art.
lecture01 introduction part1
Here are a couple of examples from Latin American manuscripts. They are mashika manuscripts from what we call the mashika renaissance, which is the 16th period, 16th century period where, uh, the descendants of the Aztecs, the natives rediscover their heritage. I love this one, uh, because it shows that guy talks more about this legendary cave and the cave. shows the footprints this is where the aztecs leave and begin their migrations uh to lake tashkoko where they will found the city of detroit it's kind of fun uh the other thing I did in Seoul Ross was teach contemporary art and it turns out that sol ross is not far from marfa texas, it's about 23 miles away and marfa texas is home to the judd foundation and the gennady foundation the china foundation is a foundation dedicated to large scale installations by contemporary artists here is one of donald judd's most famous this is 15 works in particular, the locals think this is some kind of abandoned construction project, but it is actually a work of art, so although I started in the world of medieval Western art, I quickly found my way into contemporary and non-Western art and when they hired me again. in 2013 at UVU, that's what they hired me for.
I was hired to teach the non-Western classes and the contemporary art classes. When I teach those non-western classes one of the first things I do is start questioning the whole non-western art thing, the title itself is really horrible, what other class do you define a work of art or an entire culture and period so they are not? So my first lecture when I teach non-Western is to basically deconstruct the whole idea of ​​non-Western. -western is a completely arbitrary term, but I quickly started to realize that you know, hey, I should really do the same thing for my western classes for my studio classes on western art.
I could do the same and deconstruct the whole notion of Western art, so this is a Western art course so what do we mean by Western art? What is Western art? Well, on some level, on the popular cultural level, we think of Western art, we think of cowboys and, perhaps, artists like Frederick Remington and Charles M. Russell, and while I'm a big fan of Charles M. Russell, fantastic painter. That's not what we mean. What we mean are the arts of Western civilization. Well, what does that mean? Well, we generally mean representing the arts of the Mediterranean, the Near East and Europe from about the 19th century. prehistoric period, so you know, 40,000 years BC.
C. until about the Greco-Roman period, you know, and from there we refer to the arts of Europe and the Mediterranean from the end of the Greco-Roman period, let's say the end of the Roman period. empire around 500 AD to the Renaissance era and things like Michelangelo and then from there, going further, we mean the arts of Europe and its colonies in America and the new world, well, that's a very broad collection of different cultures and different periods. of time and I just want you to think about this logically for a second Michelangelo's David and Tutankhamun's golden throne are two very different objects made by two completely different cultures with completely different religions that are separated by over 1500 miles and are In reality, separated by more than 3,000 years between the time of the creation of the golden throne of the common Titan and Michelangelo's David, we have and this is by no means a complete list of the rise of the great empires of the Age of the Iron in the Near East. alexander the great the rise of rome the rise of christianity the collapse of rome uh the dark ages uh the rise of islam the great cathedrals of europe the crusades the black death I swear I didn't put that there because of the coronavirus the invention of the printing press and gunpowder and the age of discovery, that's a lot and yet somehow these two things that are so far apart are considered part of the same culture, just to put it in perspective, that 3,000 year gap is almost six times longer than the distance between, say, Michelangelo's David and our greatest cultural expression, Lady Gaga, so how are they both Westerners?
It seems incongruous that somehow these things are included in the same basic study textbook of Western art and So I realized that to explain this I had to explain the concept of the Western canon. A canon that has an n in the center instead of 2n in the centers is a system or set of rules that govern art. A canon written c-a-n-n-o-n is a piece of field artillery designed to launch projectiles and cannonballs, but no, a cannon is just a set of accepted images or ideals about what represents a standard in the art. You can think of this as official or accepted versus unofficial or not accepted, so in this narrative things like the golden throne of the tooth and common is definitely canon and things like Michelangelo's David are definitely canon and things like this beautiful sculpted head uh sculpted head of an ife oni from the aruban culture in nigeria as beautiful as it is it is definitely not non-western uh and this may be a little hard to explain but then i realized it really isn't I need to explain this because I live in the golden age of the geek world, you guys will never know the struggle you really had as a kid. to keep things like the fact that you like dungeons, dragons, and doctor who a secret or you could risk being stuffed face down in your locker or, worse yet, given a whirlpool if you don't know what it is a whirlpool, ask your parents, but we live. in the golden age of the geek world, where geeks and nerds reign and our culture is everywhere, so everyone knows what canon is nowadays.
Canon is things that are officially recognized and accepted, for example in the Harry Potter franchise, the movies, and of course the original books. they're canon, they're accepted and things like your favorites, you know, shipping and, you know, fan comics, they're definitely not canon and they're not accepted, so this is a really good way to explain Western art and why we have rules. that governs what goes in and what doesn't go in uh there is a canon for western art now I'm a good Harry Potter fan, but I'm a big Star Wars fan so if I had to explain this, I'm going to go to Star Wars and one of the things that's really interesting about Star Wars is that the Star Wars canon is constantly changing.
I hope you recognize these characters. Most of you probably recognize the character on the left. This is Daisy Ridley and her. performance as king, who has been the star of the latest Disney trilogy, you know, the Star Wars trilogy, but many of you probably don't recognize the other character, this is of course Mara Jade and those of you who know to Mara Jade, are now and forever. my brothers uh or sisters as the case may be mara jade was in fact originally a character outside of the universe of legends or the expanded universes those of us who know what we love and we love it we like to call it uh and mara jade was luke's wife Skywalker, uh, but she's not canon now, she's actually been removed from canon, so we have this weird thing where characters that were once canon aren't canon anymore and characters that weren't canon before are suddenly they come back canon but now we're in kind of a nebulous place because i heard rumors that there will be a series and they'll bring mara jade back so barajade could be restored and become part of canon again and then that begs the question, Can king be taken out of the canyon?
To work through all of this I have to explain something a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, there was something called the expanded universe and the expanded universe was a series of novels, comics, and other things that basically expanded. about the original Star Wars trilogy, oh if you haven't read Splinter the Mind's Eye it's great, it makes no sense in the current Star Wars universe but it's a great book by Alan Dean Foster and this is where people like you know to Mara Jade and others. Admiral Thrawn was introduced and once upon a time everything in the Star Wars universe and the expanded universe was canon and uh Thrawn were both part of the accepted canon, but then came the dark times when disney bought lucasfilm and disney did something very controversial. they got rid of the expanded universe and got married and separated and brought in a whole new set of characters, largely so they could sell new merchandise and toys, and this made a lot of Star Wars fans very sad because some of their favorite characters were gone and I know a lot of people are really anxious about the current state of the Star Wars universe, but it looks like there's hope on the horizon with the Mandalorian, which we're all eagerly awaiting.
I should change the name to baby yoda, I swear that's what we're looking for, it's not the mandalorian, it's baby yoda, but then another interesting thing happened, uh, star wars, lucasfilm and disney, especially the mouse realized, Hey, if people want to give us money, who are they? We have to say no, so they took that whole Star Wars expanded universe and turned it into Star Wars Legends, which means you can still buy it, you can still enjoy it, it was kind of quasi-canon, it wasn't really canon and they also brought Back, a lot of important characters like Admiral Thrawn, Admiral Thrawn starts showing up in things like Rebels uh and other franchises, so all of a sudden he's part of the canon again and who knows, maybe Mara Jade will be part of the canon eventually in the future, but for the moment it is not, but this begs the question: do you know what the canon states?
Who decides the Star Wars canon? Well, there are a lot of authorities and legal entities to start with, there is a lucasfilm and Disney, of course, they own the copyright to these things, eh, and if you abuse. With those copyrights you could get into trouble. I had a friend who made graphic novels and his most prized possession is a cease and desist letter that he received from the mouse, and he framed it and put it on his wall because he was making fan art of Disney the mouse. He can be a little nasty about it sometimes, but in general, they are fine with fan art because it is advertising for their brand, there are also popular experts, these are bloggers who are critics of the media, uh, people who are like super fans that gain a lot of attention. and people listen to them, you know, they become the kind of oral history of a lot of these popular franchises and then of course there's just tradition, there's fans, there's this kind ofcollective fan consensus about what is or wasn't what is.
Not everyone has their own main canon where there are things they accept and things they don't accept. I know that for some of my siblings the prequels are just apocryphal and don't even speak to the Disney trilogy that some of us are. a little more liberal in that sense um and this really isn't that different from western art so who decides what goes in or out of the western canon of art? Well, you have authorities, illegal entities, these would be academies, museums, etc., there are many. of institutions that own this art and they have a vested interest in making sure that their art is what you remember, i mean, the louvre wants you to come to the museum, they want to be known as this reservoir of western culture and knowledge, there are also popular experts, people like me, teachers, art historians, museum curators who want to educate people, we are certainly people with our own opinions who want to defend certain works of art over other works of art and then of course there is also the tradition of this view that knowing exactly the things that stand the test of time, you can put something in a museum, you can get a fancy art historian like me to talk about it all you want, but at the end of the day, if people don't comes to see it, it's not going to stand the test of time, so I like this because it means that, you know, art historians like vasari, winkelmann and meyer shapiro are more or less just fans, they're just not fans of things like star wars and harry potter, they are the fanboys of art and like the fanboys from all over the world, the fanboys get together and decide, you know, they have these arguments if superman and spiderman were in a fight together, who would win?
If you know, if One Punch Man and Goku, you know, really paired up, who would do it? Win, the answer is one punch, but other than that, you know they have these kind of intense arguments and although it may seem a little silly, art historians have the same kind of arguments, let me give you an example, believe it or no, this job. The piece of art that you are seeing here was once one of the most famous pieces of art in the world and that probably surprises you because I bet most of you have never seen it before, believe it or not, this piece of art was as famous as Michelangelo's David and was considered the pinnacle of Western art Finkelman one of the greats, you know, art historians called him the epitome of grace, noble simplicity and quiet greatness, and that meant that not only was not in the canon, but was the defining element. aspect of the canon, but by the 19th century tastes had changed and 19th century critic John Ruskin came along and called it positively bad, so the thing was removed from the canon in the 20th century.
Kenneth Clark, a very famous art historian, said a British art historian. For 400 years after its discovery, the Apollo was the most admired piece of sculpture in the world. Napoleon's greatest boast was having sacked the Vatican. He is now completely forgotten except for the coach group guides who have become the only surviving transmitters. of traditional culture, just as the Star Wars canon has changed over time, the canon of Western art has changed and I want you to know that it will continue to change, it will never stop, we will constantly argue about what should or what. It should not be in the Western canon of art and you and I are not going to solve that problem today.
My job here is to teach you an idea of ​​what the Western canon is, but have you recognized that that's a pretty subjective thing and certainly ok? To change one of the biggest things we have a problem with is the problematic geography of Western art or a better way to put it is what do we mean by the West? I hope everyone realizes that we live on a globe, everywhere is west of somewhere. otherwise, you know, Australia is west of us and west of Australia is Asia and west of them is Africa and Europe and then eventually we're west of them, so what do we mean by west?
Well, what we mean is the western eastern Mediterranean and Asia and that largely means Europe. When we think of the West, we mean Europe and sort of the Mediterranean and then, in addition, the countries that were colonized by Europe, but just sort of. It is always important to remember that the West is an arbitrary line drawn by Europe. an imaginary line between each other and asia across the aegean and down through the black sea and up through the ural mountains and anything on one side is west and anything on the other side is not west , of course, I hope you realize from your geography studies that there is no place called Europe, Europe is just the tip end of the Asian continent and in fact most textbooks are now moving to calling it Eurasia instead of Asia or Europe they are two separate continents, uh, but the west. he thinks very possessively about himself, you can see this in literature and because I have to include as many pop cultural references as possible, you can definitely see that in Lord of the Rings is how we identify.
It's funny to relate to uh you know a cardinal point on the compass, but here we are, so what do we mean by West? It is an arbitrary term, but we are referring to Europe, but we are also referring to the lands of Europe and the Mediterranean. Well, because a lot of what we're going to study in this class is actually technically not in Europe, but in places like Africa, Asia Minor, and the Middle East, and they were once considered part of the West, but not today. considers us part of the West, so how did that happen?
Well, let's start with the basics. In general, when we think of the West, we talk about regions dominated by European peoples, descendants of Indo-Europeans who settled in Europe and the Mediterranean and in particular, we are talking about the cultures of Greece and Rome. Greece and Rome have enormous power over the imagination of people who grew up in the west. Greece was this great power led by Alexander the Great. He started here in the Aegean but he created the works of the parthenon and uh deripharus uh the derivatives of um Polycletus uh and Alexander the great uh in a brilliant stratagem he wrote a giant green arrow towards persia and he conquered it and there he brought many cultures there what we would call the west in fact, if you want to take my non-western class, we'll talk about how Greek art actually ended up influencing Buddhist art, it's kind of interesting, the inheritors of this legacy of course were the Romans, the Romans eventually conquered the areas which controlled by the greeks, including much of the eastern mediterranean, egypt, north africa, they turned the entire mediterranean into a roman lake, of course they are responsible for building the pantheon and of course for creating many great works of art themselves art, etc., places like Egypt that were Once completely different cultures and places like the Middle East, like Sumeria, etc., Mesopotamia, came under the control of the West and could therefore reasonably be considered part of the West because They were under the control of one of these two great cultures.
It is important to know that a large part of northern Europe, the part we consider Western today, also came under the umbrella of the Roman Empire at this time, so the Mediterranean and large parts of North Africa and the Middle East were once It was considered the heart of the West, but not anymore. While the West was dominated by Greeks and Romans in the Mediterranean area, we do not consider large portions of this territory to be the West, today, North Africa is not considered part of the West, certainly the Levant is the coast of what would be Syria, Lebanon, Israel and Palestine are not considered the west, but Turkey is certainly not considered the west today, so what happened?
Why the focus on what is Western? Well, it changed because of what we call the barbarian migrations of the 2nd to 8th centuries. We have a lot of people who just migrate to what was the Roman empire and they cause a big fuss. They demolish many monuments. That is the reason why many monuments in Rome are in ruins today. They cut off the aqueducts and more or less moved in and set up shops and when they arrived they brought a completely different style of art. Here's this wonderful battle sarcophagus showing Romans, you know, fighting hairy barbarians, uh, but the barbarians had a completely different art style that relied more on metal work.
Now I have to emphasize this because we live in Utah and since I can't see you in person, I can't say I can't speak in general, but chances are that if you are from the state of Utah, you are a descendant of these barbarians. I mean, let's be real. Utah is one of the main members of Pale's legion and that is significant. because although we think that the Greeks and Romans were the founders of the West, it is not the Greeks and Romans who continued the tradition of the West; In fact, it is the same barbarians who conquered Rome who become the founding peoples of what we would consider medieval Europe, they convert to Christianity, they bring with them their styles and arts, they build the great cathedrals of Europe, so you see that there is a complete change from one ethnic population to another, which is why the West has never done it. state necessarily limited by race or ethnicity and it is strange because in many ways Western civilization has abandoned ship twice if we think that Western civilization began in the ancient near east, it jumped to the populations of Greeks and Romans in the period classic and then with the The Fall of Rome it jumped from the Indo-European peoples who lived in southern Europe to the nomadic Germanic tribes who were relatively new to the area, so that was the first thing that happened that changed the paradigm and took us away from a more Mediterranean-focused approach. to a focus of western and northern Europe, but there was also something else and that is that, at the same time, the barbarians were taking over the northern half and the western parts of the empire, the eastern and southern parts of the empire were lost.
To the Islamic expansion we have the development of a new religion and this new religion spreads like wildfire across North Africa occupying areas that were once Christian. If you've ever heard of St. Augustine, St. Augustine of Hippo, he was actually a North African St. Augustine. a roman christian from north africa, but that part of the world is not terribly christian today, it is mostly muslim and in fact these muslims actually conquer europe where they build beautiful structures like the alhambra and stay there for hundreds of years, of course. causes a huge contention between the east and the west, it's a little hard to consider that this part of the world that was once part of the west is lost, so we end up with a whole series of things we call crusades, where Christians decide to reclaim territory that was once there specifically in the holy land, but it comes to nothing and in fact what we see is that eventually Islam expands again to territories that had long been considered European such as bulgaria, hungary and other places, in fact , by the In the 17th century, the Ottomans had reconquered Constantinople and were also threatening to conquer Vienna, so much of the territory that was once the west became the east and that's the fact that it's a little strange, but that's how it was if you're talking about what it is.
The West, well, it depends on the time, because if you are talking about the 5th century AD, that is, 500 years after Christ, then definitely the places that we call Israel, Palestine, Egypt were definitely part of the West, but in the 7th century, VIII, IX, and well into the 20th century, by the way, you can see from the numbers that the Ottoman Empire and the Muslim world didn't regress significantly until the 20th century, so you know, if you're talking about any time after that, definitely it's not west so you have to know what period or time period you're talking about before we can decide if it's west or not and then we get to the age of discovery in the 15th century, late 15th century, early 16th century, we see a huge expansion of Europe. power and influence, of course, you have the great voyages of Columbus, but you also have the conquest of Mexico and the conquest of Peru and this begins the era of European colonialism where the definition of the West expands to all the territories that he eventually conquered and is important to recognize that you were conquered through violence or pandemic and again this is relevant to all of you, some of you may be taking this class out of state because you may not be in the state of Utah anymore, but if you are from the state of Utah or If you are currently in the state of Utah listening to this lecture, it is always important to remember that the piece of land you are standing on was not part of the West that long ago, in fact, up.
Until relatively recently it was part of Mexico uh and before that it was part of New Spain and before that, of course, it belonged to the Shoshone, the Eu, the Paiute and many other Native American tribes, so thedefinition of west not only changes because over time it changes due to actions, geography, war and conquest, so when we talk about the West we refer to Europe, more or less we talk about the lands of Europe and the Mediterranean, but we also talk about the lands and periods dominated by European influence and One of the things that really defines the West is that for the last 500 years globally, because of imperialism and colonialism, the West has really dominated, maybe that won't continue in the future, but at least for the last 500 years, this has been a period of time. of increasing power, dominance and influence for the West, but there are other problems with this idea of ​​the West as well.
One is the type of chronology. If you open any textbook on Western art, you are going to find things like the tomb of Tutankhamun or you are going to find things like prehistoric caves like the Altamira caves or you are going to talk about things like the Gian bronze age and the wonderful discoveries like the mask of the golden mask of agamemnon discovered by heinrich schliemann but there is a problem with that, none of those things were really known until the 19th and 20th centuries, they are all relatively recent discoveries, i hope you realize why this is a problem, We tend to group these Mesopotamian societies close to the Bronze Age, like you.
You know Uruk, you know, Babylon, Egypt, we tend to lump all of their great creativity into the Western canon, we even do the same thing with these bronze age genetic cultures maybe that makes a little more sense, we think they were al less European, but none of these cultures would have been considered in any way analogous to our culture, they did not worship the same god as us, they did not have the same worldview, the same language, many of them did not even have the same ethnicity or ethnic roots and many of them had not been completely destroyed.
There is a massive collapse at the end of the Bronze Age and most of these cultures were simply wiped out. and they disappeared and we only know them through archeology because we put a shovel in the ground and dug them up and found out who they were. How can these things be part of the Western canon? I mean things like Cycladic figures or beautiful ones. lascaux bull hall calf uh cave in france both cultures were completely unknown until the 19th century now again causality still matters we still live in a world where causality matters you know you can't consider them as part of the history of western art uh Of course Boy, that was loud, so you can't consider them part of the Western art canon unless you believe in time travel, let's have a tardis in your back pocket, so why are these things part of the Western canon? the people who made the caves and the art and the Lascaux cave were probably not even European, they were probably already gone before our ancestors showed up, but you open any textbook and they will show you the prehistoric cave paintings. of Europe first, so here is the problem, we are not only referring to Europe, the lands of Europe and the Mediterranean, the lands and periods dominated by European influence, but there are also a lot of things that we claim just because we like them , just because we think it's cool and satisfies our sense of identity and it's important to remember that this is constantly changing, but the West means different things to different people at different times.
We must also consider that perhaps the whole idea of ​​Western identity is a myth. I love this map from the year 1900 because it shows all the nations of Europe as different animals or creatures and they all hate each other, they're all at each other's throats, uh, and they can't stand each other, so it's not like the West. It's a unified thing, in fact, as the recent Brexit phenomenon has shown, not even Europe is in any way united, so maybe we emphasize this idea of ​​Western civilization too much, maybe it's not really a thing, so if we go back to this. standard definition what is Western art seems really unsatisfactory is an unsatisfactory way of defining it is very, very arbitrary I know these regions at the moment but not these regions at the moment and these things because we like them but not these things because well we like them, may not be in this area, so I think a better way to think about Western art is that it is the arts of European heritage or a better way, I think, is European identity, that is, art created by the Europeans or their descendants and heirs art of non-Europeans that was influenced by Europeans art of non-Europeans that influenced European art art from historical regions dominated by Europeans but also a lot of things that we like, they are things that our sense attracts European of identity our European sense of art and therefore Western art is really what we mean by Western art is actually the visual culture of Western identity and sometimes it's a little difficult to figure out why something is or isn't in Western Canon, I mean, when you look at Michelangelo's David, it was created by a European, it was created in Europe.
Okay, we'll admit that he is definitely European, but this is not a creation. Tutankhamun's throne was not created in Europe and it certainly was not created by a European, so you would think not, but in fact it was created in an area dominated by Europeans, both in ancient times and in the modern day, in the ancient times and in modern times, Europeans controlled Egypt and were greatly influenced by it, so okay, we have to give it a pass. Egypt has always had a special fascination with Europeans, it has these beautiful lithographs by David Roberts, but that's not even the oldest example, you know, here's this wonderful piece of art that was made during the Greco-Roman period where you have this fusion from Greco-Roman and Ancient Egyptian Culture The Greeks and Romans had great reverence for Egyptian culture due to its antiquities.
This is the facade of a building that comes from Paris. Napoleon went to Egypt and brought back a lot of Egyptian art and this. it influenced art in Europe a lot, so it definitely influenced European tastes and it definitely appealed to European tastes and for all those reasons we would consider it part of the European or Western Canadian canon, but I always had to mention a counterexample What happens to Spain for 700 years? Spain was under the control of the Muslims. It is called al-andalus and they built many wonderful artifacts there. One of the most famous is the Alhambra palace.
The Alhambra palace. uh, it's this beautiful palace, there are these beautiful carved stuccos. portals and porticoes and it's important to remember that the people who made this were Muslims, but they had been living in Europe for centuries, so centuries, that counts for something, so was it created in Europe? Hell yes, Spain is in Europe. Last time I checked, did it create an area dominated by Europeans well at the time maybe not but certainly as it now influenced European art it absolutely did when the Spanish reconquered Spain in 1492 they didn't tear it down in fact they loved it and they preserved it Charles V built a huge gigantic palace right next door so he could use it as an administrative center when he was in Spain and it was definitely influenced, it appealed to European tastes, oh yeah, you can bet he did, a whole new style was invented . in Spain it is called mujihar style, which was influenced by Islamic art, so it definitely means that it was created by a European, well, it is a Muslim living in Spain, whose ancestors, parents and grandparents had great friends, grandparents and great-great-grandparents They lived there for generations.
Is it European? You would think, but maybe not. You know there was this whole conflict between Islam. The Muslims entered and expelled a group of people. Those people were the barbarians who eventually converted to Christianity. So maybe you know. Who owns the land? If you want to use that kind of qualification, I hate to break it to you, but none of us have any rights to the territory we are in at any time. Everyone has been replaced by everyone else. So you know, I mean this is three out of five, not bad, you'd think maybe this would be there for Europeans, but no, it's not in the textbooks, it's not considered and I'm not so sure that This is something fair.
Go back to this period of the Ottoman Empire. Remember that the Ottoman Empire had control over a large part of what we consider Europe and this is Mehmed II. This was the guy who conquered Constantinople, but this painting you're looking at was actually painted. by bellini bellini was an italian painter from venice and meppa ii uh he considered himself the caesar of new rome in fact you know that the name of this territory by the turks was habitation, that's how you say rome in turkish now i know, i know that they think Rome is in Italy, but they think that any place that was ever part of the Roman empire was Rome and he considered himself sultan and caesar, he considered himself a European, that's a bit strange, we wouldn't think that. but that's how they thought of themselves and he greatly appreciated European art.
You can see it, I mean, he allows himself to be painted by a very famous Italian Renaissance painter and, in fact, the connections between the Muslim world and the Christian world are much stronger than you. Think about it and you'll probably have a good demonstration in his living room right now. Everyone probably has something in their living room called an ottoman. Now an ottoman is kind of a little tufted thing that he rests his feet on when he's sitting. your sofa and yes, ottomans invented ottomans, that's why we call them ottomans, but did you know that ottomans invented so much more than just the ottoman? uh your sofa, your sofa is actually an ottoman invention of what you call a sofa actually comes from an Arabic word sofa comes from an Arabic word that means cushion filled with wool, that's what it means, that's what sofa means in Arabic and the French word for sofa devon actually comes from a Persian word diwan, now if you went to the court of mephid the second and sat on a divan and d1 was an empty room, that's what it means in Persian, it was a borrowed word that was taken from Persian for the Turks and they had all these cushions laid out on the floor and you sat down. on these sofas, these cushions on the floor, but you know, getting up from a cushion on the floor is kind of a headache, so the Turks said, "Fuck it", let's make a wooden frame and raise these cushions off the floor so that we can sit more easily, so the sofa, this thing that we consider American apple pie is actually an ottoman invention and of course not only the sofa, but also the ottoman, because if you are elevated on a sofa , you need to have something to put your feet on and you also need the coffee table because if you're not sitting on the floor you need a place to put your coffee and they also gave us coffee, I know that's probably not that important. for the people of Utah, but believe me, this is a big deal.
Coffee was probably invented in Ethiopia, but it was the Turks who brought it to the forefront. They were the first to have coffee shops and in those coffee shops, I'm not kidding. There were also annoying hipster beatnik poets who would get up and make poetry while people sat and drank coffee, so pretty much everything in your living room, with the exception of the big screen TV, uh, the big flat screen comes out of a ottoman. living room these were Europeans they traveled to the Ottoman empire they saw these wonderful inventions they certainly liked coffee and they brought it all back to Europe and then they exported it all over the world and you probably didn't know it, you probably didn't know How much of your life daily is actually functionally Islamic and not really European?
You can see the same thing in European Renaissance art. This is another wonderful painting. This is again painted by Bellini and Bellini painted the Madonna and Child. It's the blessed virgin mary, well if you're going to paint the blessed virgin mary you need to make sure it's painted on the most fabulous textile you can produce, that's why he painted it on this beautiful rug, in fact this rug is called bellini style rug, but the rug actually comes from central Anatolia, in the middle of what is now Turkey, and the rug is an Islamic artifact, in fact, it is an Islamic prayer rug.
Let me take the pen here. I can't do this thing here. I really see it because I'm writing in red, let's go to white. This thing here is meant to represent the mihrab or prayer niche. This is meant to represent the wudu or the fountain of abolitions where you washed your feet before entering the mosque. They are supposed to be lanterns hanging from the mosque. This is a very Islamic artifact and here it is depicted under the feet of the Virgin Mary. Did Bellini know it was a Muslim artifact? Yes, vaguely, but he didn't know the religious meaning.
He knew that this was so important to the Muslim religion that he probably wouldn't have put it in a painting with the Virgin Mary. In fact, some artists in the West copy these rugs so perfectly that they actually copy Islamic calligraphy on the rug, so sometimes you have the virgin mary and you will have an inscription on a rug over yourhead and he will say the shahada that says rasulullah, which is, I declare that there is no god but god and Muhammad is his prophet, that is probably not something that anyone would put intentionally. behind the virgin mary we have a lot of evidence in both the ottoman world and the renaissance that the muslim world was closely interconnected with the christian world, they had enormous trade contacts with each other and although they fought each other and were at war with each other You could see the influence of one culture spilling over into the other, so I ask you if Islamic art had so much influence, why is it not considered Western?
Why is it something like you know Tutankhamun's golden throne? To be clear, it was stuck in the ground here until 1922. Why is it part of Western art but something like an Islamic rug is not and at the end of the day you can't really justify it? It's something arbitrary. This rug is definitely there. I think a lot of this, of course, has to do with the great conflicts that existed, but also a lot of it has to do with how the West thinks of itself now. I want to point out that many Muslims have immigrated to both. in the united states and especially in europe there are many muslims in europe today and i think as europe ages it becomes less noticeably christian and we may see a shift where islam is not considered outside of the west but is in some ways a continuation of Western Muslims recorded Aristotle and Archimedes and many of the great Greek thinkers Thomas Aquinas when he worked on his great work Sumo Theologica, he was clearly working from a translation of Aristotle that had come from uh uh ibn Rust, who was this great. scholar who came from the Islamic Spain of Al-Andalus, so there are a lot more connections than you think, but at least for the moment, no, we won't, so at the end of the day, it's really arbitrary as to why some things. are in and some things are out and the things that we think are in fashion today may very well be out tomorrow, so I think a better way to think about all of this is not to think about times and places, but to think about identity, it's That is, both objects appeal to Western identity.
We like to think that we are ancient, sophisticated, that we have a very long and deep history, so we build those narratives for ourselves, and this is where we have to introduce this concept of visual culture into the world of archaeology. We have this thing called material culture, this is anything that comes from the earth, you know, anything that you extract from a culture is its material culture, the chair that you are sitting in at the desk, your clothes, anything that a culture do if you didn't. It doesn't come from nature, it's material culture, but there's also something called visual culture, which is the sum total of how a culture visualizes itself and art is fascinating because it's in the superposition of these two, you know, objects. in the Venn diagram you can think of. one is fundamentally about ideas and the other is about objects, well, art is an object that carries those ideas, particularly visual ideas of how a society thinks about itself and I like visual culture more than art history because I know that This is a cross in the history of art. art history the renaissance, but art history suggests that there is a kind of monument system in which there is a grand narrative about why things are included or not, whereas visual culture is much more inclusive and says that recognizes that there is a subjective basis that it is really part of our identity, our culture includes the socioeconomic context, looks at the evolution, adaptation and variation of forms, and you can see this when you start to look at things, I mean, A spearhead is just a spearhead, it just has to be sharp enough. just you know, stab, stab, but you can see that different cultures make different spearheads in different ways because it's important because that's their culture and so at a certain point even mundane utilitarian objects can be an expression of a visual culture, don't believe it.
Me, how's the design? We put a lot of emphasis on design and design says a lot about how we see ourselves. Both are modern designs. This is a very famous Barcelona chair. The right field chair, but think of a chair. A chair just has it. to keep your butt from hitting the floor, that's all you have to do, you know, a simple block of wood will do, but we don't make simple blocks of wood, so here on the left we have a shaker chair where the shakers were . A religious minority that lived in the United States valued simplicity and simplicity of design.
They did not believe in making elaborate works of art and their furniture was highly appreciated because it was very simple but also very resistant and very elegant on the other hand. you have, exactly the opposite, you have a throne and this is Napoleon's throne and this was deliberately thought out this is more than what you need for a chair this is meant to communicate not just simplicity this is meant to communicate a grander power all those things then Both chairs perform the same function, just place your butt, that's all, but they say completely different things about the visual culture of each group and of course you can have things in between.
A Chippendale chair is a bit fancy. but it's also a little bit, you know, pragmatic and of course since you noticed, you may have noticed that I'm into pop culture. I couldn't leave without chairs without mentioning this. I love his look. I love the Queen Elizabeth is looking at that chair, so this is a long way of saying you know a chair is never more than it's always more than just a chair, let's go back to this chair that I've been using. I beat this chair like a dead horse. this whole conversation let's talk about this chair this chair is of course the golden throne with two in common it was actually discovered in his tomb but you may have noticed that there is a scene on the back of the chair of a person sitting in a chair In fact, that it's too common so this is a chair a picture of a chair on a chair so it's a chair let's take a closer look at the scene of him on this chair so what you're seeing in this scene of him in this chair is he is sitting on this throne now wearing the triple feathered crown of Osiris and his wife and the oxen of the moon actually wearing the horns of Hathor.
These are the boys of the goddess Isis, so they are dressed up, they are dressed up. I am cosplaying as the god and goddess of the underworld and the king and queen of the gods and she is anointing her necklace well. This is more than just a cosplay. This is actually a very important religious function. The pharaoh was considered the link between his people. and the p and the world of the afterlife and the world of the gods and that is why he assumed the identity of the god and this is an investiture scene, this is a scene in which he is invested with the power of god and because he is a God. he sits on a throne and of course the anointing is part of the symbolism of him becoming a god, so when we see this scene on the back of the throne we can guess that that is what this throne was.
It is more than just an elegant chair, this throne is the throne through which he would perform these daily rituals that connect his people to the gods and the afterlife. The chair explains its function through its images and that is what we understand by visual culture. Visual culture is this. depth of meaning in all of these things, so okay, that's a good place to start. What is the visual culture of Western art? What is the visual culture of Western art or what is the visual culture of European heritage? I think a better way to say it is European identity.
Another way of saying it is how Europeans come to see themselves and the truth is that we see ourselves in very specific ways. Some of these forms are stylistic, particularly until you get to the modern period, but particularly until you get to the modern period, Westerners will emphasize the naturalism and the monumentality of the art. We like great art, not just little art, but great art. That's not true in all cultures for much of Chinese history. They preferred handmade rolls. The small art. Collectible art. most of the time it was in storage and not on display, but we love display, we love monumentality, some of these things are contextual, probably the most important is classicism and Christianity, also this idea of ​​progression or humanism, and Let's analyze a couple of them.
I'm going to discuss classicism and Christianity because these are two really important topics at least for this part of the class. If you take the second half of class 2720, we could go more into humanism and progression, but for now let's focus on these. What do we mean when we say something is a classic? So I googled this. I decided to Google Classic and see what comes up. What do you think came up? Place your bets. Did someone say classic cars? Just because. that came about, classic cars were the first thing that came out and the next thing that came out was classic rock, yeah there you go, so what do we mean when we say something like classic?
You know, when we say something like a 57 chevy a 57. chevy bel air is a classic what do we mean by that? We see that Queen is a classic band, what do we mean by that? we mean they set a standard they set a benchmark for a class they are what sets the standard for future generations, that's what we mean when we say what a classic is, well that's exactly what we mean when we talk about classicism in art, the first classics were the cultures of Greece and rum, Greece and Rome set the standard for Western art until the end. through the Middle Ages to the Renaissance and beyond, in fact, it set the standard until the early 20th century.
It is not until the early 20th century that a different standard emerges: modernism, but classicism sets the standard. So what is classicism? Well, it is It will be naturalism It will be an art that will look like people. It will have this incredible monumentality. They are the classic orders. They are also all the myths and stories of the classical world. You know, Venus in our half shell and all the rest. and it will be defined by the cultures of Greece and Rome, the monuments of ancient Greece and the monuments of Rome, things like the Parthenon or the Colosseum, and for much of the history of Western art, the history will be the history of classicism.
How did classicism begin? Who were the first people to make classical style art with a concern? It's this incredible concern for human anatomy and naturalism and then the next question is okay. How did it disappear? There will be breaks in the history of the era of classicism. where classicism is not the standard for Westerners, it is abandoned and revived again in the Middle Ages and finally you get to the renaissance, the whole point of the renaissance is that it is a revival of classicism, so a lot of this class is going to be tracing the arrival, survival and resurgence of classicism through the ages, how it got here, how it influenced everything and how it keeps reappearing and why it keeps reappearing, why it is such a defining characteristic, next up is It's Gonna Be Christianity and We're not really going to talk about this until the second half of class, but Christianity is one of these defining characteristics.
Christianity spread extraordinarily quickly through Europe and the barbarians who entered and conquered Europe were eventually converted. Christianity my ancestors were Vikings they converted to Christianity and much of the conflict of the Middle Ages is the conflict between Christians and Muslims but also Christians and other Christians and thus the development of Christian art how we go from very, very simple topics to already you know, in the catacombs and all kinds of paintings that were painted in dark catacombs of the great cathedrals of Europe, but Christians will also be the heirs of classicism, so we often think that Christianity destroys classicism, that's not really true, reality. is that classicism collapses in the Middle Ages and we often think that it is abandoned.
I mean, you know a lot of medieval art is very unclassical, like the Book of Kells, but it's those same monks who created these things that are going to preserve things like Greek and Latin and ultimately the classical tradition. and those classical traditions are going to return when we start to build the great Gothic cathedrals and we will see that figures like these that represent the visitation are going to be borrowed quite a bit from classical art and finally you will see this absolute fusion between these two themes, that is why I chose these two themes because when we get to the Renaissance, the ideas of classicism and the ideas of Christianity merge and nowhere is that better demonstrated than in the Sistine Chapel, where the figures are completely classical but they are not classical mythology, they are actually stories of the creation of the Judeo-Christian Bible, so that's what this class is going to tell that story.
What is the visual culture of the Western world? How do we decide what the world's visual culture is?Western culture and how all these different and disparate voices are woven into it? Hopefully by the end of this class you will have a general narrative of Western art from the early days of the prehistoric period to not exactly the Renaissance, but to the cusp of the Renaissance and hopefully you will have the skills to differentiate all of these time periods, but most importantly I want so you can understand why this aesthetic came about, why classicism was created, you know, why it survived for so long and what it said about the cultures that created them.
I love art. I love art to death, but I'm not a formalist I don't like to just describe art I'm not a tour guide I don't like going to museums and saying this is what was created and then this is what was created next that's it very boring to me what I like art is my reason I like art because it tells you something about the culture that created it. It allows you to get inside their heads. It's a time machine. It is a fossilized idea. It's a way to unravel your worldview. And I think that's the most important thing.
The most important thing that I love to do in non-Western art is that I love showing non-Western art to people so that you can understand their culture through their art and the same goes for Western art, so that's the essence of class. Now there are some important points to consider, this is where we get into some of the essential mechanical aspects of the class, but the course is a history course, um, there will be a lot of concepts, terminology, vocabulary, there will be a lot of dates, you will have to know a little about the archaeological method and evidence and we're really going to emphasize the social, religious and political context of the art, so first of all, you know I mean dates, periods, movements, timelines, chronologies b c e c e b c a d uh, you'll have to to know your centuries you will have to know some important historical events and a couple of examples let me give you things like the death of alexander the great or the edict of milan these are things i also had the black plague up there but i think that's a little morbid considering the current circumstances , so I think I'll skip it.
These are important dates that you will need to know because they mark the pauses between certain periods and styles of art. Let me give it to you, Alexander. the great alexander the great uh you know, he conquered the known world i don't know why he's doing it, this time you know the red arrow as opposed to a green arrow last time, but he conquered even persia and brought greek styles and ideas to the whole world , so we use his death as a convenient break between Hellenism, which is the art spread by the Greeks, and the Hellenistic Greek art of non-Greeks, so that historical events and figures matter, the edict of Milan is just one of these greats, I mean Constantine the Great, if there's ever a guy that really impacted history, it's him because he shows up and allows Christianity to become a state religion.
I said no, paganism in Roman paganism and Christianity coexisted for 80 years together, it's kind of amazing, but he makes Christianity a state religion and that means Christians go from building little cottage churches like this that aren't much more larger than my from houses to huge and large basilicas, places where many of them can gather, so there is this change from small architecture to large scale architecture and that would not happen if there had not been someone like Constantine, so no It is necessary to know the history. dates there are so many isms in the history of art I have to apologize oh my God there are so many movements and periods and isms uh that continue you know classicism Hellenism um you know oh God it gets even worse when you get into the 19th and 20th centuries there are also stylistic terms abstract realist idealist and this is an important thing to remember remember that classic can refer to a period which is the time of the Greeks and Romans, but it can also refer to a style like this piece we saw earlier, this is definitely classical, but it is not made during the classical period, it was made during the early Middle Ages.
There are all kinds of bits and pieces of the whole that you should know, there are ziggurats, step pyramids, tumuli and all kinds of things. You know when getting to cathedrals will drive you crazy, there are naves, which is the central aisle, there are triforiums, which are these kinds of strange false galleries, there are ambulatories where people walk and I'm going to use these terms now in class, always Tell people stop me, raise your hand and say you just used a word I don't know please could you define we can't do that here but they will be in a discussion group and you can ask questions in the discussions and Yeah?
I will see them and respond to them. I know I tend to speak at the speed of a longhorn auctioneer mixed with an adult game show host on meth, so I know I can be very difficult to understand, so please, you know, ask me. ask send me a message through canvas and I will explain it to you, but it is important that you learn these terms because you will need to use them in your essays and in your research, in your final papers, you will also need to know about the archaeological method, how we date things, because.
We date things, some things we only know by their location in the strata, basically the lower strata are older than the younger strata so you can only get things like relative dating which is really the only way we can date many things to the Aegean period. and then you know they're going to divide it into Early Minoan, Middle Minoan, and Late Minoan. The old joke about a German archaeologist is that if you give him a void, he will break that void into early void, mid-void, and late void, and it's really true. sometimes we get scientific dating and I'll have to explain this carbon 14 dendrochronology, ice cores, these are all different ways that we can try to date things, a lot of the things we're talking about we only know from the archeology.
We only know them because we brought them out of the ground and therefore if you don't know a little bit of the science or the method of archeology you will simply be lost so you will have to learn it and you know. You will also have a bit of archaeological method. Some archaeologists like Heinrich Schliemann were very important but they weren't exactly the most ethical guys and you know they dug until they found a lot of shiny stuff and put it all in a box and we destroyed a lot of information in the process. Today we try to be much more careful, so many things we think we know we don't know because we don't have solid archaeology.
He was very famous for excavating Troy and here is his wife wearing all the jewelry she excavated. It's a little funny, but here's the most important one. We really want you to know the social context of these things. This is not simply a chronological reiteration of the artistic production of the Western world. We really want you to understand that this is a way of understanding these cultures, a time machine, a fossilized idea, a way to get inside their heads and hopefully we can do it for you.

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