Creativity of the Old Order
15,000 - 10,000 BC
The first known visual pieces of communication, with pictographs and symbols in the south of france.
105 AD
Chinese government official Ts'ai Lun credited with inventing paper.
Medieval Art
Pre 1200
Symbolic and to be read exactly as it looks. Limited education limited the extent of interpretation.
1450
Johannes Gutenberg credited with perfecting the system for printing type in books. His printing press was a faster and more economic way of reproducing written information. Before his invention, it would have taken a scribe the same amount of time to produce a handful of pages manually, as it would have taken Gutenberg's press to produce thousands of perfect copies, without any differences or mistakes among them.
Gutenberg's Printing Press.
The Renaissance
Between 1300 - 1500
The creative arts were divided between ART (High Art - Literature & Music) and CRAFT (Artisans).
During this time, artists wanted to emulate the great empires of the Greek and Romans, by a way of there art.
The renaissance was divided between the Northern Renaissance and the Southern (or Italian) Renaissance.
As you can see from the images of various art from the period there was a drastic improvement in the quality over time.
Lamentation by Giotto.
An example of Low Renaissance work.
The Finding of Moses by Paolo Veronese.
An example of High Renaissance work.
Detail from Expulsion of Adam and Eve by Masaccio.
An example of Italian Renaissance work.
Ghent Altarpiece by Jan van Eyck.
An example of Northern Renaissance work.
Baroque Art
Being able to paint with such skill as to fool the eye into believing something was real. Training was very intensive, and likely to be at least 7 years.
Classical
Main points:
- To copy the greatness of the greek and roman empires.
- To show how educated you were.
- Considered very good taste.
- To follow the fashions across the rest of europe.
Typical Classical Painting -
Style:
Buildings and decorations looked like the romans and the greeks, before them.
1760 - The Industrial Revolution begins.
Romantics
Man is not greater than god.
He must succumb to the wonders of nature, as a tiny speck in a much bigger picture.
Examples include; wild weather, mountains , untrained wilderness, ferocious beasts.
Harwich Lighthouse by John Constable
Victorian Art
Photography
The Camera Obscura (CO) and Camera Lucida (CL) were both early forms of image transfer using light in order to capture (but not record) an image. The CO was being used as early as the 1600's and The CL came in 1807.
1835 - 1840 - Fox Talbot
Inventor of the Calotype
View from the Window at Le Gras by Joseph Niepce.
The earliest (1826) surviving photograph of a real-world scene, made using a camera obscura.
Boulevard du Temple by Louis Daguerre.
This is the earliest known candid photograph of a person(s). Because of the relatively long exposure all of the moving traffic on the road and sidewalks is not visible, but a man who was sat still, having his shoes shined, is clearly visible in the bottom left.
Photography immediately became popular and was subsequently used to document changes in society and the growth of the middle classes, becoming part of the mass culture, alongside popular fiction and newspapers.
People became obsessed with their own likeness, which lead to the vast popularity of cart-de-visite's, which were self portraits handed out and collected by prominent persons of the victorian era.
The Victorians would also take part in post mortem photography, in which they would photograph their recently deceased children. This became popular because of the high mortality rate amongst children and the want to keep in memory their young.
Pictorialism
In the 1880s - 1920s it was the time that photography turned the corner from just recording something, to turning it into an art form. There is no specific style - just that that the photograph has been changed or treated for artistic merit. Often soft focus and mirrors were strong elements during this time.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pictorialism (Gallery)
References
Constable, J. (1820). Harwich Lighthouse. [image] Available at: http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/constable-harwich-lighthouse-n01276 [Accessed 28 Sep. 2017].
Eyck, V. (1432). Jan van Eyck, Ghent Altarpiece (open), completed 1432, oil on wood, 11 feet 5 inches x 15 feet 1 inch (open), Saint Bavo Cathedral, Ghent, Belgium.. [image] Available at: https://www.khanacademy.org/humanities/renaissance-reformation/northern-renaissance1/burgundy-netherlands/a/vaneyck-ghentaltar [Accessed 28 Sep. 2017].
Giotto (2017). Lamentation, fresco by Giotto, c. 1305–06; in the Arena Chapel, Padua, Italy.. [image] Available at: https://www.britannica.com/media/full/234069/11071 [Accessed 28 Sep. 2017].
Gutenberg, J. (2017). Gutenberg's Printing Press. [image] Available at: https://vrworld.com/2014/08/17/week-history-gutenbergs-bible/ [Accessed 28 Sep. 2017].
Masaccio (1427). Detail from Expulsion of Adam and Eve, fresco by Masaccio, c. 1427; in the Brancacci Chapel, Church of Santa Maria del Carmine, Florence, Italy.. [image] Available at: https://www.britannica.com/media/full/367676/12862 [Accessed 28 Sep. 2017].
Niépce, N. (1826). Enhanced version of Niépce's View from the Window at Le Gras (1826 or 1827), the earliest surviving photograph of a real-world scene, made using a camera obscura.. [image] Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nic%C3%A9phore_Ni%C3%A9pce [Accessed 28 Sep. 2017].
Veronese, P. (1570). he Finding of Moses, oil on canvas by Paolo Veronese, probably 1570/75; in the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. 58 × 44.5 cm.. [image] Available at: https://www.britannica.com/media/full/626374/181763 [Accessed 28 Sep. 2017].