Third Of May And Flanders

Submitted By archangelmalice
Words: 1041
Pages: 5

Arh1000.01

Final Exam

1. a. I chose the artwork of Francisco Goya’s Third of May and Otto Dix’s Flanders. Both represent the dark side of humanity, specifically war. Goya’s use of dark tones and darkness highlight the savior character in front of the riflemen. His white clean clothes and his pose is a reference to the pose of Jesus Christ on the cross. The Christ figure and the faces of the closest people around him can be seen as pleading while the riflemen only the show their backs and partial faces. The poses of the riflemen is a strong forceful stance with their bodies creating a triangle shape. The church is shown in lighter tones in the background as a possible refuge for the villagers. Otto uses a softer pallet to paint his landscape of rot. In the sky you have two conflicting clouds, one white on the left and a dark storm cloud appear to be leaving the area. The battlefield shows corpses strewn about and mud dominating the landscape. It almost appears they are resting from the way the faces are portrayed with closed eyes. The bodies are decaying and becoming what the mud they rest in. Otto uses the earthy tones to blend the soldiers into the mud as to add to the rotting effect. He also uses the reflective surfaces in the ponds to denote a hopefully brighter future by reflecting the white sky.

2. I chose to use St. Basil’s Cathedral of Russia and the Forbidden City of China. St. Basil’s Cathedral in central to the red square of Moscow. It was constructed and used by Ivan the Terrible in order to commemorate his victories in war. The most notable feature about the church is the fact there is no other example if this exact style of architecture and the color pallet. It is speculated that there was much influence from Byzantium architecture and Italian concepts. The nine towers were latter additions to the central church. Ivan added them in accordance with his war conquests during his reign. The building is constructed of white stone and red brick. Because red brick was conceptually new to Russia, they used it heavily to decorate the inside and outside of the building. The domes were originally made from tin, but later on tin was replaced by copper and painted. Because of the Russian Orthodox Palm Sunday ritual, it is referred to as Jerusalem. This ritual symbolized the entry of Jesus into Jerusalem and solidified the power of the czar to the Russian people. The ritual involved the Czar leading a horse carrying the Patriarch of Moscow to the church to display where the Czar received his power to rule. The Forbidden City was the imperial palace from the Ming dynasty to the Qing dynasty. The reason it is called the Forbidden City is because it was viewed as the earthen home of their Holy Emperor and therefore no one could enter without the emperor’s permission. It was constructed with marble, wood and baked bricks. It was the center of Chinese political and ceremonial power as well as housing the emperor and his family. The entire palace was designed to exhibit the Taoist and Confucian philosophical and religious beliefs and the majesty of the emperor. A symbol of this is the layout of the inner and outer courts, one being arranged in a trigram of earth and the other in the trigram of heaven respectively. A symbol of the emperor’s power is the painting of most of the roofs with yellow paint, the color of the emperor. It the best and most preserved example of two thousand years of Chinese culture.

3. I will compare funerary art of the civilizations of ancient China and the Vikings. These two are cultures are similar for the shared ideal of gifting their dead with treasures to make use of after death. The tombs of the Emperor Qin are a prime example of this. In most Chinese burial tombs, gifts of food and