BEST AMERICAN ART by Alexandra Jopp

By Alexandra A. Jopp Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669. The Night Watch, 1642. The most famous of the Dutch Baroque artist is Rembrandt van Rijn. He created paintings and prints of portraits, militia paintings, landscapes and religious scenes.   His style changed much over the years, featuring realistic paintings, ornate Baroque style works, and expressive painterly works. Here is one of his most famous works, popularly called the Night Watch because of a thick varnish that made the painting appear to be a night scene. It was a commissioned portrait of a small Dutch militia. This shows the dynamic portraiture of the best Dutch Artists. Pablo Picasso, Guernica, 1937.                                                      This is probably Picasso’s most famous work. Guernica is certainly powerful politic...

By Alexandra A. Jopp “ To fully evaluate the artistic achievements of the Renaissance, it is necessary to acknowledge that the art that emerged from it was deeply imbued with the worlds of trade and politics, both of the east and of the west.” Heather Karellas Images of the East in Renaissance Art Art is a product and reflection of culture. Because the human mind is both universal and particular, we can understand art objects as culturally specific, yet also interpret them from a broader historical perspective. Panofsky defends the history of art as a humanistic discipline, one that embodies values such as rationality and freedom while accepting human limitations. Without a personal viewpoint, he argued, one would have no system of reference against which observations could be measured. Though the Renaissance is regarded as a period of rebirth of the ideas of classical antiquity, antiquity, in fact, had never disappeared, even during the Middle Ages. During ...

By Alexandra A. Jopp The uncertainty and elusiveness of the Renaissance is well recognized. This is because the period has neither exact chronological boundaries nor distinctive cultural features that would allow it to be sharply defined. The many scholarly approaches to interpretation of the Renaissance do not bring much clarity and, in fact, often complicate the understanding of the period. The more methods and classifications that exist for a phenomenon, the more blurred the criteria become. This creates a particular problem today , one which can call into doubt the “ legitimacy” of historical research : can a historian reasonably hope that he or she will be able to express the essence of the Renaissance as a whole? At the same time , though, there remains a need to examine the Renaissance’s place in history and interpret the many changes that occurred in Italy between the fourteenth and the sixteenths centuries as, at least in part, an expression ...