Essays on Engravings

CONTEXT AND COMPARISON OF

In reaction to the decadence and corruption so pervasive in the Roman Catholic Church, the Protestant Reformation sought to introduce an asceticism into the artistic world of its followers. Martin Luther, as well as others who followed him, advocated the destruction of art in churches, particularly images of saints, muted color schemes for the artwork that remained, and an emphasis on images either of Jesus or of contemporary leaders and heroes of the movement. Joseph Koerner’s book The Reformation of the Image (2004) compellingly shows how visual art became indispensable to a religious movement built on words. In a time ...

The rock artists of Australia were drawing the dreamtime long before they had a word for art or long before the first Westerner arrived there. The dreamtime for the indigenous people of Australia is their story of creation. Their beliefs are reflected in the ancient paintings on rock. The aboriginal are believed to have occupied Australia for at least forty thousand or even maybe hundred thousand years, which makes them the “oldest continuous human culture on the planet” (Rock Art). Their art is a primitive history book and guide for living (Rock Art). Seasons played crucial role in their lives; that ...

Introduction

Beginning with stone tools to the current high-tech communication devices, human beings have made countless innovations throughout history. The people who lived during the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods invented many things. This paper presents a discussion of the course readings on the Paleolithic people during the Ice Age, the early Neolithic farming methods, and the society during the New World era.

Part 1

The people of the Upper Paleolithic period formed the first part of the discussion in part one of the course. The period began about 2 million years ago and ended about 10,000 years ago. This period is also ...

Introduction

Archeology has helped scholars to reconstruct the story of the Bible from its utopist genesis to epic battles and struggles of the patriarchs of Israel. Archeologists have found evidence of the kingdoms, kings, temples and the people of Biblical times. Archeological excavations have corroborated some biblical events, contradicted others while entirely dismissing the occurrence of others because of the absence of archeological evidence and logical proof (Finkelstein & Silberman 15). This paper will examine the existing archeological evidence in relation to the biblical accounts of the Exodus and the life of Jesus in Early Rome. The paper will analyze two ...

Symbolist literature often discusses the abstract - the essence of symbolism is to discuss the truth through indirect means. Symbolism is full of metaphors, often discussing the nature of reality. Since it is either difficult or not as interesting to get across the author's ideas about life and reality in a realist or naturalist way, Symbolism looks to hide those messages in metaphors and objects that are different from the explicit message the author wishes to convey. Two prominent examples of the ways Symbolist authors deal with the subject of reality are Huysman's A Rebours (Against Nature) and Oscar Wilde's ...

The Cave Paintings at Lascaux

A Detailed Summary Discovered on September 12, 1940, the cave paintings at Lascaux are generally thought to have been created by the Magdalenian culture at some time between 15,000 and 13,000 B.C.E. at an age that was noted for fine art and tool making. There are other cave sites in France that date back to this era, notably the caves at Les Trois-Freres, Niaux, Altamira, Font-de-Gaume and Les Combarelles. However, Lascaux is larger, and the art is the best preserved. The artist or artists used minerals found in the area of the limestone caves, which were ...

John White’s watercolours and De Bry’s engravings

Introduction: The failed colony at Roanoke in 1585 was a disastrous mission yet it brought about some interesting observations on Indian life which would be useful again in the future. Nothing is more intriguing as a finding from this mission than the sets of watercolours on Indian life by John White and the resultant engravings made by De Bry which provide for a striking comparison. They also include much detail although that can appear to be also the imagination of both artists but on the whole the pictures are a valuable document of Indian life at a time when such things were completely ...

Abstract

Products of the Enlightenment, Voltaire and William Hogarth were pioneers and masters of satire, a comic form with a long venerable history reaching back to Ancient Greece and Rome. Both were apt observers of a society adrift in a sea of moral aimlessness, rotten with greed, ambition and cynicism. Voltaire’s Candide and Hogarth’s great paintings and engravings both entertain and inform, using exaggeration to ridicule the behavioral excesses of rich and poor alike.

As products of the Enlightenment, Voltaire and William Hogarth expressed their contempt for those bourgeois manifestations of society that would eventually bring down the French nobility, the Bourbon ...