I chose to watch A World Inscribed: The Illuminated Manuscript because I am planning a small art project for one of my education classes on Illuminated Letters, and this seemed like a good way to get more information on them. I chose Cataclysm: The Black Death Visits Tuscany because, well, there are few things more morbidly interesting to learn about than the Black Death, and I'm curious how the video will relate it to art (assuming it does). I chose Beyond the Classical: Byzantine and Later Greek Art because this is an area that I'm not terribly familiar with. The Greek art history class I took didn't delve into anything from this time period. In high school I painted part of a mural that was based on a Byzantine mosaic, but didn't really know anything about what I was painting.
More Human than Human went back thousands of years to explain why modern humans are obsessed with exaggerating the human figure. The 25,000 year old Venus of Willendorf statue has very exaggerated sexual features. Professor Ramachandran (who we also saw in the other video presenting this argument) believes that it is hardwired into animals' brains to look for key features, and the more exaggerated, the better. Sea gulls, for instance, prefer a three-striped stick to their mother's singly-striped beak. They simply look for the most important characteristic, and the bigger it is the better it is to see. As reproduction was important for nomadic people, their brains focus on breasts and sexual organs rather than faces or hands. Some societies, however, learn to suppress this instinct, such as the Ancient Egyptians, who instead streamlined their figures as much as possible. Creating a figure that could easily be repeated with the aid of a grid was what was important to this very stable civilization.
The Ancient Greeks were obsessed with the ideal human body, and soon were able to create very realistic sculptures. Soon, however, they lost interest in this, and they, too, created exaggerated figures. Their exaggerations, however, were much more subtle, such as torsos that were a little too long. They had achieved reality, but couldn't resist the part of their brains that was telling them to create statues that were more human than human. In today's world, many different cultures mean many differently-exaggerated depictions of the human body, satisfying our urge to see the three-striped versions of ourselves.
A World Inscribed actually turned out to be more about the people who created the illuminated manuscripts rather than the process of making them, which was interesting. I didn't realize how humorous they could be! Scribes, who were typically monks, originally worked in monasteries, where they copied and illustrated texts from dusk until dawn. Many would complain in the margins about how painful and exhausting it was. They were some of the very few people who were literate, and these books took an incredibly long time to complete. They believed that with each letter they wrote, a sin they had committed was erased. This was good, as the scribe of the devil would trick them into mistakes, and then present these mistakes on the day of their judgment.
Eventually, it became important for other people to learn to read and write, such as judges, lawyers, and merchants. Universities were set up, where students could borrow sections of texts and copy them themselves. Students could support themselves by becoming scribes. No longer were only religious texts copied: luxury books, such as histories, romances, and manuals, for the wealthy were created. These often had cheery little messages such as "good bye, reader!" in them, and illuminations that were silly or poked fun at the scribe. As is always the case, unfortunately, scribes were eventually replaced by the printing press, which did away with such personal touches, but made literature available to a much larger audience.
Cataclysm: The Black Death Meets Tuscany explores where Siena and Florence were before the Black Plague struck in 1348, what happened during this time, and the aftereffects. At the beginning of the 13th century, both city-states, which were rivals, were having an economic boom. They were very wealthy, had access to goods from around the world, and were constructing hospitals, public squares, and cathedrals. Shortly before the plague hit, however, Siena and Florence were overpopulated without enough food, and broke from their excessive constructing and lending to monarchies who did not repay them. These suddenly weakened cities were struck hard by the plague, which killed a third to a half of the population.
Before the plague, people certainly believed in heaven and hell, but depictions of hell were almost a little too ludicrous, a little tongue-in-cheek. Afterwards, however, hell was painted as a horrifying place, where the physical body was submitted to unspeakable torture. Paintings of heavenly bodies, on the other hand, were very celestial and lacked a physicality. The progress of Giotto in the area of creating individuals with individual feelings was done away with in favor of austere, expressionless holy figures. Some, however, are skeptical that all of this can be attributed to the plague. They claim that times of progress are fairly often accompanied by times that in some ways go backward, for it takes some time to get out of the previous time's shadow.
One shouldn't think, also, that everything that happened following the plague was negative. The plague made many people question the role of religion. While before religion was the center of everything, people now explored fulfillment in other areas, such as technology and philosophy. New ways of thinking about ourselves emerged, so in some ways the plague helped pave the road for the Renaissance.
Beyond the Classical: Byzantine and Later Greek Art gave a general history of Byzantine and Greek art. Many people stop paying attention to anything that isn't Classical Greek art, but their art world is still vibrant today. Many artists still paint in the Byzantine, iconographic style of centuries ago. Those who practice it say that Byzantine art influenced and contains the same elements of modern art. Hellenistic art is a mixture of many different Greek influences, and is very modern but with traditional content. The most recent major development in Greek art came in the 19th century, during their war of independence. During this time, their art was trying to elicit a sense of nationhood, and was often a combination of realism, idealism, and sentimentalism. Greek architecture, clearly, has influenced the western world. Strangely, it was outsiders that introduced Neoclassicism back into Greece. Nowadays, people still flock in a kind of pilgrimage to famous Ancient Greek sites, not as a religious act, but a spiritual one nonetheless.
The textbook may have explained what the trends in portraying the human figure looked like, but it did not take a huge amount of time in explaining the "why" behind these trends. More Human than Human filled the gap, however, and explained the neurological and psychological reasons behind humankind's urge to exaggerate the figure to certain ideals. A World Inscribed and Cataclysm: The Black Death Meets Tuscany both were explaining the nature of the Middle Ages, and how they weren't as dark as people believe, even with the Black Plague. The text stated that there was still progress during this time period before the Renaissance, and these videos illustrated reasons why this was true.
Beyond the Classical: Byzantine and Later Greek Art brought Greek art and architecture out of the Ancient world. While the text did a thorough job explaining how Classical architecture is still an inspiration for today's buildings, it didn't go into current Greek painting at all. I think it's important to show that these cultures that we learn primarily about when they were ancient civilizations can still be significant and relevant today.
As stated above, the videos did a good job of explaining why art movements exist, how they build off one another, who the artists are behind the artworks, and how historical events can affect the art, positively or negatively. I probably understood the Byzantine video the least, as it was discussing things I was the least familiar with, and I would like even more of a context to understand Byzantine art. More Human than Human was very interesting and entertaining to watch, but I got to wondering eventually if they were saying much that wasn't sort of common sense. The sea gull example is nice, but didn't we always assume that the Venus doll had exaggerated body parts because humans were obsessed with reproduction? I suppose the difference is that Professor Ramachandran states that this urge to exaggerate is an instinctive, unconscious part of the brain, not really a choice we make knowingly. My favorite was probably A World Inscribed, for we really got to get into the artists' heads. You would think that Middle Ages monks would be quite stuffy, but instead they were often humorous. The Black Plague video sometimes seemed to contradict itself, though that's probably my fault for not fully understanding. It seemed to be saying at one point that as a result of the plague, people became less humanistic. In a later section, however, they seemed to be stating the opposite. Perhaps the answer is that both happened?
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