Comprehensive Study Notes on Art History, Media, and Cultural Contexts
Foundations of Art History, Contexts, and Cultural Narratives
Textual and Historical Sources:
Art throughout history heavily relies on biblical texts, especially works by Old Masters and Renaissance artists.
Classical literature serves as another primary source, such as Homer's Odyssey, which features themes of adventures, misadventures, and the struggle to find one's way home.
Key Vectors in Art Creation:
Time: Chronological context shapes artistic expression.
Geography and Location: Physical location heavily dictates visual style. For example, creating art in Baton Rouge in 2026 produces fundamentally different aesthetics than creating art in 5th-century Rome (Roman antique style).
Political and Economic Events: Historical disruptions, government systems, and economic structures influence artistic subjects and production.
Narrative and Storytelling in Human Culture:
Narrative structure is essential across all human disciplines, including quantitative fields like finance.
Initial Public Offerings (IPOs): When a company launches stock on the New York Stock Exchange for the first time, it presents a written prospectus that forms a cogent narrative to persuade potential investors.
Patronage and Economic Systems:
Art Patron: A financial sponsor who provides capital to commission artworks.
The Medici Family: Wealthy bankers in Florence, Italy, during the 1400s and 1500s (Renaissance era).
Economic Base of the Renaissance: Built on trade expansion with Northern Europe, banking hubs in present-day Belgium (e.g., Antwerp and Bruges), and the wool trade (the core origin of Medici wealth).
Medici Financial Allocation to Art: Economic analysis reveals that the Medici family spent only approximately of their total fortune on art (compared to popular estimates of ). Despite this miniscule percentage, their support of artists like Botticelli and Donatello created an enduring legacy.
Social Shifts and Intellectual History
The 19th Century and Industrial Transformation:
Cutting-Edge Technology: The Industrial Revolution was driven by the invention of the steam engine and steam locomotives, transforming transportation and manufacturing.
Social Impacts: Industrialization created urban labor shifts, class struggles, and severe social imbalances.
Mainstream History versus Intellectual History:
Intellectual History (History of Ideas): Focuses on philosophical mindsets, overarching worldviews, human purpose, and the structural evolution of scientific thought rather than purely event-based history.
History of Science: Special academic focus found in institutions like Caltech (where humanities courses emphasize the history of science), whereas many standard universities lack dedicated courses in scientific history.
Key Frameworks in Intellectual History:
The Enlightenment (18th Century): Positioned human reason and the human mind as the primary measure of all things rather than religious texts, triggering the scientific revolution.
Positivism (19th Century): Formulated by French philosopher Auguste Comte, stating that only assertions verifiable through direct scientific proof should be believed.
History of Medicine: Examines historical paradigms of human health, disease, and medical treatment.
Motivation, Symbolism, and Evolutionary Purpose of Art
Origins and Early Evidence of Art:
Paleolithic Era: Cave paintings at Lascaux (dating back to \,years ago) represent the earliest evidence of premeditated human activity.
Relationship with Nature and Religion: Early religion and art emerged from human vulnerability to natural elements. Art served to appease nature, such as securing successful bison hunts to avoid starvation or warding off lightning.
Psychological and Hierarchical Drivers:
Twentieth-Century Theories: Influenced by Sigmund Freud's link between sexuality and human behavior, artistic creativity in the 20th century became heavily associated with sexual symbolism.
Power and Social Hierarchy: Artworks, monuments, and formal attire signal authority, rank, and social standing.
Self-Reflectivity: Art serves to celebrate or mourn human existence, while financial backers use art to display institutional power.
Evolution of Beauty and Language:
Pursuit of Beauty: Ancient Greece first self-consciously formalized aesthetics by treating the human body as the ultimate standard of beauty, a tradition perpetuated by Ancient Rome and revived in the 1400s Renaissance.
Linguistic Evolution: Early written communication derived from visual shorthand (e.g., Chinese ideograms evolving from small pictograms). Cuneiform script emerged in ancient Mesopotamia around \,years ago, while ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics directly combined text with visual records. Visual art predates formal written language.
Intentionality: Human art is distinguished from animal painting by intentional, planned, and premeditated execution.
Academic Approaches, Contextual Dimensions, and the Art Market
Academic Disciplines:
Art History: An objective, historical timeline approach mapping visual works across human history.
Aesthetics: A subjective subdiscipline of philosophy evaluating the definition, nature, and experience of beauty.
Four Contextual Dimensions of Art:
Spatial Context: Physical placement and scale. A large roundel plaque of Mike the Tiger designed for an LSU lecture hall fits its physical space but would be entirely out of scale in a dorm room.
Social Context: Cultural and institutional relevance. LSU-specific symbols function as social representations that hold no meaning at Florida State University. Social context also encompasses political propaganda and persuasive imagery.
Emotional Context: Subjective internal feelings expressed through art, such as 17th-century Dutch painter Rembrandt's series of self-portraits chronicling his personal triumphs and life struggles.
Institutional Context: Official structures housing art, such as Greek and Egyptian temples (housing cult statues), churches (housing altarpieces), art academies, and modern museums.
Evolution of the Art Market:
The Renaissance model of direct personal patronage (e.g., the Medicis) was largely replaced in the 19th century by the modern commercial art market.
Modern art distribution is driven by commercial galleries and major auction houses like Christie's and Sotheby's, creating an anonymous commercial bidding market.
Drawing Principles, Media, Techniques, and Preparatory Work
Foundational Role of Drawing:
Serves as the primary preliminary step for painting, sculpture, and architecture to test scale, proportions, and composition before investing major resources.
Italian term: Disegno (the origin of the English word "design").
Core curriculum: Art academies and university degree programs (such as Bachelor of Fine Arts / BFA programs at LSU) require introductory drawing classes, where students practice perspective outdoors in the quad.
Drawing Components and Materials:
Support: The physical surface receiving the drawing (e.g., paper, cloth, walls, coarse board).
Medium: The physical substance applied (e.g., pen, pencil, ink, watercolor, gouache [a variant of watercolor], charcoal, pastel).
Linear and Shading Techniques:
Line: An extension of a dot denoting movement and outlines.
Hatching: Utilizing multiple parallel lines placed closely together to build tonal values.
Crosshatching: Intersecting parallel lines used to create darker shading and deep shadows (commonly visible in currency engravings, such as the shading in Abraham Lincoln's beard on the dollar bill).
Notable Draftsmen and Masterworks:
Leonardo da Vinci: Produced thousands of notebook sketches (A Man Tricked by Gypsies, c. 1493 pen-and-ink drawing).
Vincent van Gogh: Created intricate pen-and-ink drawings while institutionalized in a mental hospital following his fallout with Gauguin and ear injury (Fountain in the Hospital Garden, 1889).
Georges Seurat: Executed detailed preparatory drawings (e.g., figure sketches for Bathers at Asnières / Bathers in Alien near Paris) before executing large-scale paintings like A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (housed at the Art Institute of Chicago).
Charcoal and Pastel Mediums:
Charcoal: A black, friable carbon medium that requires textured, coarse paper to catch the powdery fragments.
Pastel: Highly pigmented, friable chalk sticks applied to textured colored paper, producing smooth, blendable, paint-like effects. Pastels are extremely light-sensitive and cannot be rolled.
Rosalba Carriera: 18th-century Venetian female artist (daughter of an embroiderer) who specialized in pastel portraits (Portrait of a Girl, 1720s).
Edgar Degas: French Impressionist painter with Louisiana heritage (his mother was from Louisiana; he resided and painted in Louisiana). Famous for capturing ballet dancers and female figures using pastel on paper.
Painting Supports, Pigments, and Encaustic Techniques
Structural Components of Paint:
Pigment: Fine powder ground from organic or inorganic sources (e.g., dried and ground cochineal bugs for deep red; Afghanistan semi-precious lapis lazuli stone for rare blue). Modern pigments are largely products of the chemical industry.
Binder: Liquid or soft substance holding pigment particles together.
Thinner: Solvent added to adjust paint flow and viscosity (unnecessary in watercolor and gouache).
Painting Supports:
Common supports include canvas (cloth stretched on wooden frames), wood panel, board, paper, and copper plates.
Copper Supports: Oil painted on copper plates avoids the bending, warping, and insect damage typical of wooden panels (utilized primarily in 17th-century Netherlands).
Encaustic Painting:
Recipe: Powdered pigments + beeswax (binder) + heat (thinner).
Historical Origins: Dates back to ancient Egypt. Used for mummy coffin head portraits on wooden panels (e.g., Roman-era Egyptian coffin portrait, c. 160–170 AD, created over \,years after the Pyramids).
Modern Application: American Pop artist Jasper Johns (originally from Texas, preceding Andy Warhol) utilized encaustic combined with collage in his 1950s American flag series.
Fresco Painting Techniques and Historical Masterpieces
Definition of Fresco:
A mural painting method involving water-based pigments applied directly onto wall plaster.
Buon Fresco (True Fresco):
Pigments mixed with water (thinner) are applied directly onto wet lime plaster, soaking permanently into the wall structure.
Requires rapid execution in daily segments before the plaster dries.
Giotto: Early Renaissance master who painted the Arena Chapel (Scrovegni Chapel) in Padua, Northern Italy. Pioneered naturalistic blue skies instead of traditional gold skies, painting in visible daily plaster sections (Lamentation scene depicting Christ being laid to rest).
Gian Domenico Tiepolo: Late 18th-century Venetian artist who painted Il Mondo Novo (a peep-show crowd scene) for his personal home (now displayed in the Museum of Eighteenth Century Art in Venice). Detachment from the wall in the late 19th century caused permanent structural damage and stripped its original spatial context.
Fresco Secco (Dry Fresco):
Painting applied to dry plaster, typically using oil-based paints.
Examples: The Elm Hall frescoes located at LSU; 1930s Great Depression and New Deal era public murals in the United States (influenced by Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, such as his Detroit Industry murals).