BEST AMERICAN ART by Alexandra Jopp

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 ...

By Alexandra A. Jopp --> “There is geometry in the humming of the strings, there is music in the spacing of the spheres.” --Pythagoras One of the most intriguing aspects of a culture is how it reflects on its past. For instance, nineteenth century German composer Richard Wagner idealized the Middle Ages, while modernists of the twentieth century imitated the Viennese classics. Italian musicians of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, meanwhile, looked upon ancient civilization for aesthetic and ethical ideals. --> But what did the Renaissance know of antiquity, in particular of its music? Italian humanists played a leading role in the revival of antiquity in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, but their knowledge of ancient musical practice was severely limited, because it was, of necessity, based only on references in literature and, to some extent, visual sources whose reliability could be questioned. Even as devoted an admirer of antiquity...