Scarica Exploring London's Cultural Heritage: From the Mona Lisa to the Shard - Prof. Federici e più Sintesi del corso in PDF di Lingua Inglese solo su Docsity!
ENGLISH FOR CULTURAL HERITAGE
THE MONA LISA (I) The ‘Mona Lisa’ (also known as ‘La Gioconda’) is the most famous work in the history of the visual arts. The author of this masterpiece is Leonardo Da Vinci. By the 16th century it was being considered divine rather than human in its perfection. Many historians believe the painting is a portrait of Madame Lisa Giocondo, because Vasari in Leonardo’s biography called the work ‘Mona Lisa’. Before him, the painting had been referred to as ‘a certain Florentine lady’. There are many theories about the lady in the painting, but the panel is unsigned and undated and there is not any record of a commission for the portrait among Leonardo’s paper. Leonardo worked and reworked the painting for over four years, carrying it with him during his travels. Some speculate the Mona Lisa may be:
- a portrait of Isabelle of Este
- Leonardo himself/ self-portrait
- an artful composite of many portraits of women
- a Leonardo’s idealisation of womanhood
- Leonardo’s young male models in drag The painting is painted in oils on a poplar wooden panel. The subject is close to the front edge of the picture, and we only see her from the waist up. She is simply dressed in a dark dress, a veil and has folded hands and a slight smile. Leonardo provided the Mona Lisa with an enigmatic background. It’s a two-storied structure: below there is a bridge on the right side and a road that crosses some red rocks on the left side. Above there is a frosty region with two lakes and a mountain range. It seems to be an assembled landscape. The blue mountains appear to recede into the vaporous distance according to the rules of aerial perspective.
THE MONA LISA (II)
The Mona Lisa revolutionised painting. Leonardo introduced the waist-up, hands-folded-on- lap approach (before him, the portraits were full length. The pose was imitated immediately and became fashionable for portraiture. The background is painted in a gradation of lights and colours, loosing details in the distance, instead the traditional approach in which foreground and background are equally distinct. Leonardo displayed in this work a mastery of technique that was unknown at the time: it’s light and shade created through delicate brushwork that allows one form to blend in with another leaving something to the imagination. He did this to the corner of Mona Lisa’s mouth and eyes, which explains why she may look different at different time. Leonardo also uses shadows to create the illusion of volume and the subject comes closer.
ILLUMINATION IN THE MIDDLE AGES
Prior to the invention of the printing press by Guttenberg, the process of producing and multiplying copies of books was strictly manual and performed by skilled craftsmen: the scribe wrote the text and various artists decorated the manuscript. Illuminated manuscripts are handwritten books that have been decorated (illuminated) with gold, silver, or brilliant colours. Illuminations may include small illustrations (miniatures), initials, borders, or other decorative elements. They were used to indicate divisions in a text, to tell stories, and to add beauty and visually memorable elements to texts. The phases of writing and illuminating were preceded by a number of preliminary steps:
- the preparation of the parchment
- the cutting of the sheet into double leaves
- the gathering of a number of these leaves into a quire
- the ruling of the leaf to calibrate the writing surface The final step consisted of joining the quires together within a protective cover or binding. Books took time to produce and the end product was expensive There were several levels of decoration. The most important was the illuminator-illustrator, who executed the paintings or ’histories’. He performed only when his two lesser colleagues had finished their work. They were:
- the illuminator in charge of the pen-flourishing
- the illuminator in charge of all the painted decoration The social status of illuminators in late Middle Ages was variable most were humble craftsmen who set up shop. Some illuminators were independent, itinerant artists who travelled from city to city in search of commissions. Some were court artists attached to the exclusive service of a powerful patron.
FRA MAURO’S MAPPAMUNDI
It’s a large circular planisphere, drown on parchment, mounted on wood in a square flame and preserved/exposed in the Biblioteca Marciana in Venice. It shows a particular map oriented with south at the top and it’s full of details. However lexodromes and compass roses are absent therefore the effect is a mappamundi, not a nautical chart. Fra Mauro was a Camaldulian monk from the island of Murano. He was active in the middle of 15th century. Working from a commission granted by king Alfonso V of Portugal, he was known to be at work on a mappamundi with his assistant sailor-cartographer Andrea Bianco. They completed the map in 1459 and dispatched it to Portugal, but for some reason has not survived. Fra Mauro’s was described as a ‘geographus incomparabilis’. He died during the following year while working on a copy of mappamundi destined for the Seignory of Venice. He shows all the continents as being surrounded on all sides by the great ocean. He didn’t have a very accurate conception of exactly what proportion of the earth he was portraying on his map, therefore he hadn’t been able to arrive at an opinion on the overall size of the globe.
THE BRITISH MUSEUM
Located in the Bloomsbury area of London, the British Museum is the location of a national collection of science and art treasure. First opened to the public in 1759 in Montague House, it was later moved to its present location. The British Museum mandate is ‘to illuminate the histories of cultures for the benefit of present and future generation’. The collections exhibited are vast: ranging from Africa, Asia, the Americas and Europe to ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome, and back to the pre-historic times. We can see the British collections, that trace the history of Britain and cover prehistoric times, Roman Britain, medieval and later Britain. The Museum hosts the famous Elgin collection, maybe the most well-known Greek sculptures from the Parthenon in Athens. The Museum boast the largest collection of Egyptian artefacts in the world outside of the Cairo museum. They include a famous collection of mummies and coffins, jewellery, weapons, furniture and tools. The Rosetta Stone is perhaps the most famous of all the Egyptian artefacts. It’s a basal slab with identical texts in hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek and it’s thanks to it that we have managed to translate the hieroglyphics writing.
VICTORIA AND ALBERT MUSEUM
The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, is the world’s largest museum of decorative arts and design, housing a permanent collection of over 4.5 million objects. It was founded in 1852 and named after Queen Victoria and Prince Albert. The Victoria & Albert Museum is split into four Collections departments. The V&A’s collection of Japanese art and design is one of the largest in Britain. It includes ceramics, lacquer, arms and armour, woodwork, metalwork, textiles and dress, prints, paintings and sculpture. The V&A has one of the most prestigious holdings of this material outside Japan. It’s collection of ukiyo-e is one of the largest in the world (a school of Japanese art depicting subjects from everyday life, dominant in the 17th–19th centuries). The ukiyo-e prints represent one of the highpoints of Japanese cultural achievement. This art is frequently associated with colour woodblock prints. The earliest prints were simple black and white prints taken from a single block. Sometimes these prints were coloured by hand, but this process was expensive. From 1765 that the technique of using multiple colour woodblocks was perfected. The glorious full colour prints that resulted were known as nishiki-e or ‘Performative arts’. Prints could be produced quite cheaply and in large numbers. Ukiyo-e prints were enjoyed by a much wider audience. The subjects depicted in these prints reflect the interests and aspirations of the people who bought them. ‘Pictures of the Floating World’, the literal translation of ukiyo-e, refers to the licensed brothel and theatre districts of Japan’s major cities during the Edo period. Inhabited by prostitutes and Kabuki actors, these were the playgrounds of the newly wealthy merchant class. Actors and courtesans (high-class prostitutes) became the style icons of their day. Their fashions spread to the general populace via inexpensive woodblock prints.
LIFE AND ADVENTURES OF MARTIN CHUZZELWIT
It’s a Charles Dickens’ novel, written in 1844. Mrs Gramp is looking after an ill man and asks to the assistant chambermaid, in a tone of weakness, a little bit of picked salmon, with a little spring of fennel and a sprinkling of white pepper. She also asks for a slice of bread with a little pat of fresh butter and a mossel of cheese. She asks for a cucumber if it’s in the house and for a Brighton ale, that is considered wakeful by doctors. She says that she would wait at the door as not to wake up the ill man a second time. BLURD This volume of short fiction is something talking and describing an emotional story of Margaret Atwood. She has an original voice, full of intensive. Each of the 14 stories shimmers with feelings and illuminates the unexplored interior landscape of a woman’s mind. The stories reveal the complexity of human relationships, bring to life characters who touch us deeply, evoking terror and laughter and demonstrate why Margaret Atwood is one of the most important writers in English today.
