ZAGA ACADEMIA

Place d'Anvers
Frederico Zandomeneghi

1880

Federico Zandomeneghi was an Italian Impressionist painter, whose father and grandfather were sculptors. He was born in Venice and enrolled in the Venice Academy in 1856. He moved to Florence in 1860 and there he met a number of the artists known as the Macchiaioli, including Telemaco Signorini, Giovanni Fattori and Giuseppe Abbati, and he joined them in painting landscapes outdoors. Painting outside of the studio, "en plein air", was at that time an innovative approach, allowing for a new vividness and spontaneity in the rendering of light.
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Self Portrait
Paul Cezanne
1879

Self Portrait
Vincent VanGogh
1887

We have studied Cezanne's harmonious, blended colors in contrast to VanGogh's dynamism, movement, and tumultuous aura of jagged color. Cezanne laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. He formed the bridge between late 19th century Impressionism and the early 20th century's new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism. Cezanne's works are in stark contrast to those of VanGogh, a Post-Impressionist painter whose work had a far-reaching influence on 20th century art for its vivid colors and emotional impact. He suffered from anxiety and increasingly frequent bouts of mental illness throughout his life, and died largely unknown, at the age of 37, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

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The La Toilette
Edgar Degas
1886

The Bather

Toulouse-Lautrec
1894

Degas style displays his mastery in the depiction of movement, as do his racecourse subjects and female nudes. His portraits are notable for their psychological complexity and depiction of human isolation. Inspired by Degas' paintings, Toulouse-Lautrec became know for his immersion in the colourful and theatrical life of fin de siècle Paris yielding an œuvre of exciting, elegant and provocative images of the modern and sometimes decadent life of those times. Many of these paintings, I have seen and studied before with my Mom but now that we move to making comparisons about all of them, I find dedicated to Cararras theory:"the more you look, the more you see."

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In Renaissance English 366 with Prof. Horvath we are reading Sir Phillip Sidney’s collection of love poems, Astrophel and Stella. The name derives from the two Greek words, 'aster' (star) and 'phil' (lover), and the Latin word 'stella' meaning star. Thus Astrophil is the star lover, and Stella is his star. Sidney partly nativized the key features of his Italian model Petrarch (whom we have just read and examined), including an ongoing but partly obscure narrative, the philosophical trappings of the poet in relation to love and desire, and musings on the art of poetic creation.

SONNET ONE
Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That she (dear she) might take some pleasure of my pain:
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know,
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain,
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain:
Oft turning others' leaves to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sun-burned brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting Invention's stay,
Invention, Nature's child, fled step-dame Study's blows,
And others' feet still seemed but strangers in my way.
Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
'Fool' said my Muse to me, 'look in thy heart and write.'

The poems were written for the woman that Sidney was in love with, even though she was already married and did not return his affections. The poem says that Stella has snow white skin and black eyes, so Horvath told that that I will be "our own personal Stella." I was excited to hear that, to say the least.

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Zeuxis Choosing a Model
By: Victor Mottez

Philosophy of Art 479 with Prof. Vosilla is by far my hardest class. This week Vosilla asked us to consider another kind of judgment we commonly make and express in statements of the form and art; “This is more beautiful than that.” No concrete sensible object or person is perfectly beautiful, for each of these objects is many things (for example, woman, red-headed, thin, graceful, soft-spoken, etc.) and not just this one thing–beauty. The beautiful woman participates in or shares this beauty with all other beautiful things, but both she and all those other things can only be beautiful in certain respects and to a certain degree. The concept of beauty, or what Plato calls Beauty, provides a standard with which to judge individual objects as being more or less beautiful, and this is what we argue about in class... very complicated sometimes.

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The Artists' Studio
By: Johannes Vermeer

We are also, studying art and the reality of the images depicted in what we see when we look at different artistic modes- sculpture, fresco, painting, etc. Plato believes that sensible objects could not possibly be real; they could at best be copies or images (as Plato calls them) of underlying realities which can be thought about but which cannot be perceived. In short, what we usually call “the real world” is not that at all, but is rather just a world of appearance.