In our last class before spring break we talked about the Baroque in France and England. These were cool chapters to read and discuss in class, as we hadn’t spent much time in France since the start of the semester and this is only our second time reading about art in England (though we didn’t discuss it in class).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We started off with talking about one of the most magnificent palatial compounds in the world – Versailles. Obviously I had heard of Versailles before we talked about but I knew practically nothing about its construction. It certainly takes inspiration from High Renaissance architectural forms with the balance and repeating temple-like figures – but the sheer size and opulence of the compound convey Baroque ideals about the magnanimity of the French Crown. I knew Louis XIV was called the Sun King but I didn’t realize how seriously he took that moniker, and how he wove solar imagery into the layout and motifs of his humongous gardens.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
We then talked a bit about the French Academy of Painting and Sculpture. It seems as though the school was established to help French artists catch up to the artistic advances made in the Italian peninsula over the past hundred or so years. In my opinion, I think the school overstated the importance of design in creating beautiful works of art, and I’m not personally a fan of how they decided to tier particular genres of art. I think artists like Poussin, who was a great influence on the curriculum of the Academy, use drawing and Hellenistic styles well in their work (and given Poussin’s background in archaeology it would make sense that his paintings are very sculptural) but if every artist coming out of France decided to do so it would just sterilize the individual styles that artists might develop. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In our last class before spring break we talked about the Baroque in France and England. These were cool chapters to read and discuss in class, as we hadn’t spent much time in France since the start of the semester and this is only our second time reading about art in England (though we didn’t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18314,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2202"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18314"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2202"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2202\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2203,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2202\/revisions\/2203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/web.colby.edu\/ar112-spring2024\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}