Michelangelo's Last Judgement
Essay - 3 pages - Arts and art history
Michelangelo Buonarroti was born on March 6, 1475, to the wife of a podesta in the diocese of Arezzo. As podesta, his father held an executive and judicial office of the Republican city-states. When his term in office ended, Michelangelo's father moved the family to their villa right outside of...
San Vitale's Beauty as Seen Through the Eyes of Plotinus
Essay - 3 pages - Arts and art history
Architectural beauty is a concept that is continually changing and entirely subjective. It is dependent upon who is doing the evaluating and the criteria with which they are basing their evaluation. Usually, the structure's ultimate function weighs in heavily in the determination of its...
Forms and colours : Malevitch, Mondrian and Kandinsky
Essay - 7 pages - Arts and art history
“The representation of an object, in itself, is something that has nothing to do with art,” claims Malevitch. In abstract art, there is no more representation of an object and also there is not even the conception, like there was in cubism. The object completely disappears. The...
Violence and expressionism
Essay - 7 pages - Arts and art history
Expressionism is an avant-garde movement in which violence is everywhere in themes, in forms, in the expression of the artist in general. We can define violence by aggressive facts, language immoderation, brutality and provocation. When we talk about violence in art, the violence is not...
Medieval Renewal: The Pre-Raphaelites' Quest for the Holy Grail and Arthurian Legends
Essay - 10 pages - Arts and art history
The Holy Grail is usually considered to be the cup from which Christ drank at the Last Supper and the one used by Joseph of Arimathea to catch his blood as he hung on the cross. This significance was introduced into the Arthurian legends. In earlier sources and in some later ones, the Grail is...
Comparison between Edgar Degas and Edward Hopper's approach to nudes
Essay - 5 pages - Arts and art history
American art of the 20th century is richer than one can think. The Ash can school, cubism, precisionism , biomorphism etc... One of the big movements was regionalism, of which Edward Hopper was a leader. But people often forget that Hopper not only painted landscapes, street scenes and light but...
Gender Inversion and Spectator Identity in Silence of the Lambs
Essay - 5 pages - Arts and art history
Jonathan Demme's 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs centers on a young FBI trainee's attempts to catch a deranged serial killer before he kills again. Clarice Starling is a young woman determined to rise through the ranks of the male FBI. Already at a social disadvantage due to her sex, she...
Matthew Barney or the Gesamtkunstwerk of the 21st century
Essay - 6 pages - Arts and art history
When talking or writing about the American artist Matthew Barney, critics and historians of art always start with the traditional biographic descriptions which in the case of Barney are quite pleasant and are justified by the fact that the artist himself uses autobiographic references in his own...
Egyptian versus Greek Sculpture
Essay - 2 pages - Arts and art history
The Egyptian culture consistently maintained a powerful belief in the afterlife. As a result, tombs were lavished with clothing, furniture, and paintings to nourish the Ka or soul. Most importantly, statues were erected should anything happen to the body in which the soul must inhabit. The...
Acoustic Mythologies of The Natyasastra: Text of Celestial Music
Essay - 5 pages - Arts and art history
Concerning the use of musical rhythm as a sadhana, a path to liberation, one preliminary distinction to make is between the tantric means of rasa and the yogic means of bhakti; The mythological tradition inherited by Hindustani music distinguishes between gana (music for pleasure) and gandharva...
David Hockney
Essay - 2 pages - Arts and art history
David Hockney is a painter, draughtsman, printmaker, photographer and designer. He can, perhaps, be considered as the most popular and versatile British artist of the 20th century. Mainly active in America, he is recognised as an important contributor to the British Pop Art of the 1960s. Born in...
Once More with Talent
Essay - 2 pages - Arts and art history
The room is silent, black, yet complete in its created emptiness. You cannot see the person sitting next to you, the face that looks back in the darkness. Suddenly, from nowhere, a few shaky piano notes fill the air. A melody so simple yet so memorable, it pulls you away from your metal seat and...
Not All is Cold in Iceland
Essay - 5 pages - Arts and art history
Humanity is nostalgic. There is no other way in which to explain the strips of antique malls in the Midwest or the string of collector shows on the shop-at-home networks. Like the sightseers searching for the Grand Canyon pictured on the poster in a local travel agency, humans are such experts...
What kinds of theoretical issues does realism present us with?
Essay - 3 pages - Arts and art history
?Realism' is a cultural movement that became predominant in the middle of the XIXth century. It is an aesthetic mode which aimed at showing life "as it is". Realism, in literature, refers to the insistence of representing reality without embellishment. Leading realist writers were Honoré de...
IS: Music
Essay - 3 pages - Arts and art history
If only Beethoven and Tchaikovsky could have conceived of the technological advantages the musicians of today take for granted. Innovative strides in music technology development have revolutionized the way music is recorded, composed, stored, performed, searched and retrieved by creating easy to...
American Idol
Essay - 4 pages - Arts and art history
In its first season, American Idol garnered the attention of 22.77 million viewers on the finale night. The last season—the show's fifth—36.38 million people tuned in to witness Taylor Hicks take home the ultimate title of American Idol (Wikepedia.com). Hicks, a stocky, gray-haired...
Breakaway (A continuation of "AmericanIdle")
Essay - 4 pages - Arts and art history
To the surprise of fans and American Idol producers alike (in varying degrees of delightful glee and ghastly shock), Clarkson's second album conveyed an entirely different message than the first. Entitled Breakaway, the music simply delves deeper than the playful bubbles at the surface of all...
The Recovery of Music
Essay - 3 pages - Arts and art history
To experience music as it is exactly is a great thing, but a difficult thing. Being an audience to a piece of music does not ensure such experience, and in fact the performers of music themselves can experience music. Bystanders and composers also experience music in unique ways. All of these...
Doctor Faustus and Renaissance Humanism
Essay - 4 pages - Arts and art history
The introduction to Christopher Marlowe's The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus in The Norton Anthology of English Literature describes the play's protagonist as “an overreacher, striving to get beyond the conventional boundaries established to contain the human will” (990). While...
Bach vs Sousa
Essay - 2 pages - Arts and art history
Throughout history there have been an infinite number of composers. These composers range in time period from the 1600s to present day and their styles of music range from classical to rock ‘n' roll. Two of the most influential composers of all time are Johann Sebastian Bach and John...
Schnittke
Essay - 2 pages - Arts and art history
Schnittke was born in the Soviet Union in 1934 into a Russian Jewish family. The father was a German Jew from the Baltic area, and the mother was a Catholic from Germany. Given this, his first language was German. In 1945 for three years, he lived and studied in Vienna where he heard much of the...
Sample Music Review
Essay - 1 pages - Arts and art history
The Legendary Pink Dots, featuring members of Skinny Puppy, played the Howlin' Wolf on Saturday, June 12th. Upon scanning the stage and seeing the medley of performers, I knew it would be an interesting show. The saxophone player, dressed in a purple and orange suit, a rather average-looking...
Alfred Schnittke in Retrospect
Essay - 2 pages - Arts and art history
“For almost thirty years I repeatedly saw one and the same dream: I would arrive in Vienna at long last. I would feel really happy, for I was returning to the most serene time of my life.” In this quote, Alfred Schnittke, in the final years before his death, recaps his pleasant times...
The Pre-Raphaelite Sisterhood
Essay - 10 pages - Arts and art history
A considerable number of women were active in every phase of the Pre-Raphaelite movement. Some, as was the case for Elizabeth Siddal and Lucy Madox Brown, incorporated the ideas of their husbands and fathers into their own art. Others were deeply influenced by the freshness of the Pre-Raphaelite...
The influence of Socrealism in Poland
Essay - 7 pages - Arts and art history
Socrealism is „an attempt to translate Marxism into the sphere of art” . This term appeared first in 1932 in the soviet press. It is, more formally, an artistic current; it was indeed the official art trend imposed by the Communist regimes. It originates in the Union of Socialist and...
The Rise of Choral Polyphony in Burgundy
Essay - 7 pages - Arts and art history
In the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, there was a flourishing of culture in the Netherlands with the rise of humanism and the patronage of the Dukes of Burgundy. With the advances in trade and commerce, there was also a general prosperity which contributed to the wealth of artistic...
Comparison between 'Nighthawks' by Hopper and Mystery and 'Melancholy of a Street' by de Chirico - publié le 20/02/2007
Essay - 4 pages - Arts and art history
The success of the Melancholy show demonstrated that existential issues are a productive source of inspiration for artists. Universal melancholy affects both painters and spectators. Hopper's Nighthawks and De Chirico's Mystery and Melancholy of a Street represent human metaphysical concern,...
William Hogarth (1697-1764)
Essay - 5 pages - Arts and art history
The exhibition about William Hogarth at the Louvre museum is an essential one for many reasons. First of all, it is the first time that such a retrospect is held in France to honor the British painter. Besides, it is the occasion to discover or rediscover this genius artist admired by the...
Critical Theory: theatre and post-structuralism
Essay - 6 pages - Arts and art history
The idea of Post-structuralism derives from philosophy. It is a discipline which has always tended to emphasize the difficulty of achieving secure knowledge about things (Barry;1995:63) .Philosophical writing, although following the structure thesis, followed by anti-thesis, then a synthesis of...
Critical Theory: theatre and post-structuralism - publié le 22/01/2007
Essay - 6 pages - Arts and art history
Post-structuralism derives from philosophy , ‘ a discipline which has always tended to emphasise the difficulty of achieving secure knowledge about things' (Barry;1995:63) .Philosophical writing, although following the structure thesis, anti-thesis then a synthesis of both, always comes...
