Romanticism

Beginnigng in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, the new Romantic attitude begun to characterize culture and many art works in Western civilization. It started as an artistic and intellectual movement that emphasized a revolution against established values like social order and religion. Since they were against the orders, they favored the revival of potentially unlimited number of styles.

Romanticism exalted individualism, subjectivism, irrationalism, subjectivism, irrationalism, imagination, emotions and nature-emotion. Romantic artists were fascinated by the nature, genius, their passions and inner struggles, moods, mental potentials, and the heroes. They investigaed human nature and personality, the national and ethnic origins, the medieval era, the exotic, the mysterious and more. They had a role of an ultimate egoistic creator, with the spirit above strict formal rules and traditional procedures.

The Heirs of David
At the beginning of the Revolution,  a young woman, notably Marie Guillemine Leroulx de la Ville, also know as Mme Benoist (1768-1826) is among David's pupils. It was 'easy to see from the purity of drawing that she waas a pupil of David', a critic remarked when her arresting portrait of a black woman was shown at the Salon at 1800.

Marie Guillemine Benoist, Portait of Black Woman,1800.

Oil on canvas, 81 x 65cm. Louvre, Paris.

With this painted image of great visual sensitivity, the soft black skin set off by the crisp white freshly laundered and ironed drapery and head-dress, Marie Benoist made a radical break with the eighteenth-century tradition of representing non-European people as picturesquely exotic 'types'. It is obviously show the portrait of an individual, and a highly finished portrait rather than an etude or study from life such as were done mainly as demonstrations of an artist's technical ability. 

On the other hand, it differs from contemporary portraits of white woman. This painting seem to have pandered to male voyeurism even though it was painted by a woman and without having been commissioned. At that time, female nudity was associated either with a divinity or personification or scientific ethnographic illustrations of people in a state of nature. Marie Benoist's painting does not have any of those categories and yet the bare breast of her black woman would seem to have, perhaps ambigious. It was almost certainly painted on the artist's own initiative and remained in her possesion until 1818 when it was bought by the French state for the Louvre.

 Antoine-Jean Gros, Napoleon in the Plague House at Jaffa, 1804.

Oil on canvas, 5.32 x 7.20m. Louvre, Paris.

The above painting Antoine-Jean Gros is one of the David's favourite and most successful pupil. In this painting, Antoine-Jean Gros (1771-1835) celebrated the glory of Napoleon and the benefits of his regime. He began with an incident in Egyptian campaign of 1799 - General Bonaparte visiting his plague-stricken troops in Jaffa as shown in the painting. The various symptoms and effect of the plague are illustrated like bubonic sores, emaciation, feverish thirst and vomiting and one of Bonaparte's aides holds a handkerchief to shield his nose from the stench. But the general is invulnerable, almost immortal, touching a sick man with the gesture of a divinely appointed healer-king, if not that of Christ.

Goya

Francisco de Goya (1746-1828) is a far greater artist may initially have conceived his two paintings The Second of May 1808 and The Third of May 1808 as replies to Gros who became the most influential painter of his generation, partly through prints which dessminated his major compositions.

Francisco de Goya, The Third of May 1808, 1814.

Oil on canvas, 2.6 x 3.45m. Prado, Madrid.

In both composition and subject matter, The Third of May 1808 seems to be direct riposte to the faintly absurd Capitulation of Madrid (Versailles) by Gros and perhaps also a desenchanted comment on the stoic heroism of David's Oath of the Horatti. Goya's French soldiers echo the stance of the Horatti and thet shoot a group of defenceless civilians rounded up in Madrid after the previous day's uprising against the French army of occupation. The emphasis is placed on the victims, especially the man in a white shirt who stands with outstretched arms before the facelss firing-squad.

Goya, an almost exact contemporary of Jacques-Louis David, established himself in the 1780s as the leading painter in Spain, specializing in religious pictures, portraits and much employed by the royal court. He also knew well one or two of the Spaniards who welcomed the Enlightenment and shared their hatred of injustice, religious fanaticism, superstition and cruetly. After that, he made his first great series of etchings, Los Caprichos (The Caprices), published in 1799 which is the year he was appointed first painter to the king. 

Francisco de Goya, Blowers (Soplones), no.48 of Los Caprichos, 1799.

Etching and aquatint, 21.5 x 15 cm. Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

Francisco de Goya, That is Worse (Esto es peor), no. 37 (32) of 

Los Desastres de la Guerra,  1812-15. Etching, 15.7 x 10.7 cm

 Francisco de Goya, Saturn Devouring one of his Children, 1820-3.

Wall painting in oil transferred to canvas, 146 x 83 cm. Prado, Madrid.

Gericault

The shift in emphasis from heroism to suffering, from victors to victimss, is also apparent in the work of the French painter Theodore Gericault (1791-1824). His first exhitbited work was a painting of a cavalry officer thrilling to the music of battle, the boom of cannon and the whine of grape-shot in 1812. He was a middle class painter with a private income large enough to enable him to work without commissions.

When he set out to make his reputation at the Paris Salon of 1819, he took a subject of his own choosing and painted it on a vast scale: the survivors from the wreck of a French government frigate, La Medusa, in the Atlantic in 1816.

 Theodore Gericault, The Raft of the 'Medusa', 1819.

Oil on canvas, 4.91 x 7.16cm. Louvre, Paris.

When the ship was found, the captain and the senior officers took the seaworthy lifeboats and cast 150 passengers and crew adrift on a makeshift raft on which only 15 survivied a horrifying ordeal of 13 days. When the picture was first exhibited, comments in the press were strongly colored by the scandal of La Medusa. By elevating a topical 'low-life' subject to such a colossal and heroic scale, Gericault might seem to have been attaking by implication not only the long-established hierachy of genres but also the recent Bourbon restoration. The Raft of the 'Medusa' was well received by the artistic establishment. Gericault was awarded a gold medal and given a commission for a large religious painting.

Ingres

The Odalisque of 1819 was the first of the many nudes in West Asian settings which Ingres painted in the course of his long career, including the Odalisque with a Slave and the Turkish Bath which he proudly inscribed his age-82. Both paintings reveal the same fleshy, expressed erotic sensuality with the utmost refinement of line, often in bright, rather acid colors.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Odalisque with a Slave, 1842.

Oil on canvas, 71 x 100cm. Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore.

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, Turkish Bath, 1859-63.

Oil on canvas, 1.08m diameter. Louvre, Paris.

Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863)

In 1828, the picture was shown in the last Salon held under the Restoration, at a moment when Romanticism in arts was being adequated with liberalism in politics. Declaroix's next major work The 28th July: Liberty Leading the People showing the revolution of July 1830 and was shown in the first Salon of the new regime under Louis-Philippe.

Eugene Delacroix, The 28th July: Liberty Leading the People,1830.

Oil on canvas, 2.59 x 3.25m. Louvre, Paris.

For this evocation of fighting on the barricades, this painting perhaps is the most famous visual imate of revolution ever created. It is more idealized than the many other representations of the July days, but also more vivid and disturbing. In this painting, Liberty herself with a bayoneted rifle in one hand is tricolor in the other and advances inexorably towards the spectator. The picture bring a remark made by the French novelist and liberal politician Benjamin Constant (1767-1830): ' Human beings are sacrificed to abstractions; a holocaust of individuals is offered up to the "people"'.

Bibliography

Romanticism-Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanticism 

Romanticism in Art

  http://www.huntfor.com/arthistory/c17th-mid19th/romanticism.htm

Book of "A WORLD HISTORY OF ART"

 

 

Ancient Egyptian Pyramid

  The word 'pyramid' comes from the Greek word 'pyramis' which means 'wheat cake'. A pyramid is a structure whose outer surface are triangular and converge at a single point.

Why did the ancient Egyptians use the pyramid shape?
The Egyptologists had developed some theories about the reason of the early pharoah's tombs were built in the pyramid shape, which is the pyramid:
(a) represented the first land to appear at the beginning of time - a hill called 'Ben-Ben'.
(b) symbolic the dead pharaoh can climb to the sky and live forever
(c) represented the rays of the sun

The structure of pyramid
A pyramid's design with the heavy weight closer to the ground and pyramidion on top means that less material higher up on the pyramid will be pushing down from above. This distribution of weight allowed early civilizations able to create stable monumental structures.

The base of a pyramid which is in trilateral, quadrilateral, or any polygon shape give the meaning that a pyramid has at least three triangular surfaces. For thousands of years, the largest structures on Earth were the Red Pyramid in Dashur Necropolis and the Great Pyramid of Khufu in Egypt.

                       "The Red Pyramid in Dashur Necropolis, built by Old Kingdom Pharaoh Sneferu."

  "The Great Pyramid of Giza, in 2005. Built c.2560 BC, it is the oldest and largest of the three pyramids in  Giza Necropolis."                                                 

Khufu's Pyramid is built entirely of limestone and is considered an architectural masterpiece. It contains around 1,300,000 blocks ranging in weight from 2.5 tonnes to 15 tonnes and is built on a square base with sides about 230m, covering 13 acres. The height of the pyramid was 146.5m(488 ft), but today it is only 137m (455 ft) high because the 9m is missing due to the theft of the fine quality of limestone covering. But it still consider the tallest pyramid.

The Egyptolotgists show that this structure was built to a tomb for the king and queen. But this interpretation of evidence is satisfied by less and less people. According to the research, they believe the structure of pyramid was an active device for living or the enhancement of life for those who built this massive structure. For example, the Great Pyramid was not built to be a tomb for a self-proclaimed man-god but was the high-water mark of an advanced civilization because water was important for the civilizations and it was at the central to the construction of the Great Pyramid, just as the purpose of the Great Pyramid.

Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts
The purpose and meaning of the pyramids is to ensure the eternal welfare of the king. The earliest known of these 'pyramid texts' are at Saqqara in the pyramid of Unas, the last king of the fifth dynasty who died in about 2345 BC. While the others are more than 700 in all, which is in the tombs of kings and queens of the sixth dynasty (c.2345- c.2184 BC). During the Middle Kingdom (c.2134-1787 BC) similar texts were inscribed on the inside walls of wooden coffins of the nobility as well as royalty.
The basic system of Egyptian hieroglyphics had been discovered in 1822 by Jean-Francois Champollion by studying the 'Rosetta Stone'. He recognized two types of sign were combined which are ideograms and phonograms. Ideograms are conventional representations of objects signifying nouns and associated verbs such as sun, light, to rise, to shine while phonograms indicate the sounds of consonants.

The pyramid texts were believed to be more effective in securing the well being of the dead than the relief carvings of servants, animals, piles of  food on the walls of outer chambers of tombs and mortuary temples. They repeated continuously the action during funeral ceremories. Although many are similar to one another, but there is still don't have any two are exactly the same. A typical resurrection text includes the following sentences:
O flesh of the King, do not decay, do not rot, do not smell unpleasant. Your foot will not be overpassed, your stride will not be overstridden, you shall not tread on the corruption of Osiris. You shall reach the sky as Orion, your soul shall be as effective as Sothis; have power, having power; be strong, having strength; may your soul stand among the gods as Horus who dwells i  'Irw. May the terror of  you come into being in the hearts of the gods like the Nt-crown which is on the King of Lower Egypt, like the Mizwt- crown which is on the King of Upper Egypt, like the tress which is on vertex of the Mntw-tribesmen. You shall lay hold of the hand of the Imperishable Stars, your bones shall not perish, your flesh shall not sicken, O King, your members shall not be far from you, because you are one of the gods.

In another pyramid text a prayer is addressed to the goddess of weaving, called Tait.
Hail to you, Tait, who are upon the lip of the Great Lagoon, who reconciled the god to his brother! Do you exist, or do you not? Will you exist or will you not? Guard the King's head, lest it become loose,; gather together the King's bones, lest they become loose, and put the love of the King into the body of every god who shall see him.

(R.O. Faulkner, The Ancient Egyptian Pyramid Texts, Oxford 1969)

SpainVelázquez, Las Meninas - Smarthistory

Spain<br>Velázquez, Las Meninas - Smarthistory

Pictures of architecture of classical Egyptian in Malaysia

The picture on the left hand side is Indian Jeweler. It show that the indian shop has use the style of Greek's architecture on the two columns in front of the shop. The two columns is build by the Corinthian order which is the most decorative and is usually the one most modern people like best. The Corinthian capitals have a very unique and attractive style that will catch the viewer's attention at the first sight. The shaft of the columns has flutes while the base is almost like the Ionian although the base is look a little too high compare to the acient times.





The picture on the left hand side is the HSBC bank building in Ipoh. The style of the building is almost like the Egyptian style and also looks like Inggeris style. It is very attractive and it give us a sense of historical. The most attractive is the repetition of columns they used in the middle part. The columns is the Ionic order which normally taller than Doric orders. From the picture, they build so many columns to balance up the building same as keep the weight of the building so that the building will not collapsed. The Ionic capital consist of a scrolls above the shaft and very decorative which make the whole building become attractive.

The left hand is the Bangunan KTM Berhad ( Railway Administration Building) at Kuala Lumpur. The design of the building is amazing and it almost like the old church in the old times. Besides that, this building also have the repetition of columns which is in Doric order which is very plain, but still have a powerful-looking in its design and is almost like Greek styles. From the first time I see this picture, it remind me as the oldest times of church building.

The left picture is the Municipal Council Building  in Georgetown. The building has the Greek style and the columns they use is almost like the Ionic order as the decorations of this building or for the balance of the building. The decorations and the position of columns made the whole building looks like a noble family house.

The picture in the left side is the Sri Mariamman temple in Johor Bahru. This indian temple is very colourful, attractive and have a good decorations. The part that is almost like the Greek style is the columns they build between the entrance and the roof top which is besides the statue. The columns they build is the Doric order which have the capital, shaft, base and padistal. So, the decorations made the temple become more effective to the Indian people come to pray to their god.

Is history of art and design necessary for your large goals

I think yes. Because I think the history of art can give more knowledges and ideas in create something. I think that all the desingn is begin with the history of art which the ancient people start having the knowledge of drawing in the ancient times. It help me to get more well know about the art since I like art the most.

what do I want to get from this class?

The thing I want to get from this class is I want to know more about the history of art whether is egypt or greek or else. After enter this class, the most I interested is the painting that the old times people draw on the wall gave especially about the materials they used and the techniques of drawing. I also want to get known more about how the ancient people do the statue and I feel very proud of them when everytime I saw the photo whether in class or books.

what do I want to be doing in 5, 10, 20 years?

Whether it is 5 or 10 or 20 years, I just want to get a better job and let my parents who nowadays working very hard to clear my grandfather debts to have a easy life and want them to rest more. This is my first wish. Besides that, I also want to have an adventure to the other place especially the historical place because I want to see the real history things by my own eyes because I always see those things inside the photo. But it still attract my attention and my curiousity. And of course, I wish I have a new family for my parents as their new partners,haha....