BEST AMERICAN ART by Alexandra Jopp

By Alexandra A. Jopp Love and passion: The female voice in Louise Labe's sonnets Louise Labé,  poètes  poètes There are certain epochs in the history of literature in which poetry was the predominant verbal art, such as the classical period of Greek and Roman antiquity, the era of European romanticism and the "golden" and "silver" age in Russian poetry. The poetic period of the Renaissance began in Italy in the 14th century and gradually expanded throughout Europe to join this short list. Characterized by the uses of personal applicability, limits and the purposes of human aspirations to understand the problems of society and what it means to be human, the poetry of the Renaissance, as much or more than any other art form, represents the "revival" and "rebirth" that defined the period. It can even be argued that the value of a person and of human life was not fully realized until the Renaissance. When we think about lite...

                                                                                --> Giovanni di Cosimo de' Medici. Detail from the fresco by Benozzo Gozzoli, in the Cappella dei Magi, at Palazzo Medici Riccardi Florence, --> By Alexandra A. Jopp The notion of magnificence is often associated with fifteenth-century Italian art, especially with monarchies and Italian courts whose art commissions were inspired by motives of commemoration, prestige, power, and fame. According to this context, magnificence consists of various series of expensive building projects. How...

--> --> Raphael, Portrait of Pope Julius II, 1511-12  BY ALEXANDRA A. JOPP The relationship between an artist and a patron during the Renaissance was a subtle one. Money can buy a lot of material objects, and in Renaissance Italy, it could buy even more important things, including status, respect and “the long lasting of [a patron’s] name and reputation, for which man’s desire is infinite.” (Nelson, Zeckhauser, 42.) All of these could be acquired by becoming a patron of the arts and commissioning a work that proclaimed one’s devotion to God, city, even oneself. Jonathan Nelson and Richard Zeckhauser in The Patron’s Payoff cite the example of the Florentine merchant and patron Giovanni Rucellai who “spent a great deal of money on his house, the façade of the church of Santa Maria Novella, the chapel and tomb in the church of San Pancrazio, and other projects.” These commissions, Rucellai said, brought him “the greatest contentment and the greatest plea...

By Alexandra A. Jopp As Dutch-born historian Hendrik Willem Van Loon said, “The arts are an even better barometer of what is happening in our world than the stock market or the debates in congress.” [1] Indeed, art can tell us with remarkable accuracy a great deal about lives and cultures, both our own and those in other parts of the world. It can illustrate the tides of social and political change, the strengths and weaknesses of new trends, and the flaws and crimes of oppressive regimes. American artists in the 1960s had the good fortune to be working in a free environment that allowed them the opportunity to change the nature of the creative process. Their revised fields of vision explored the ways in which artists changed the core of formalist aesthetics, which resulted in changes of perception, as well as, to quote Morris, an “attempt to contradict one’s taste.” Morris further remarks in Notes on Sculpture IV that “changes in form can be thought of as a vertical sc...