Art · 6 lessons
Art
Works you can stand in front of, and buildings you can walk into. Each sentence names the maker, the place the work is kept, and the later reading when there is one.
The work, and the room
This chapter is about objects. A painting hangs in a named room. A building is a work you enter. The chapters below keep the maker, the date, and the collection in the sentence, and they keep a later interpretation in the name of the person who offered it.
The painters are the ones museums keep returning to: Giotto, Leonardo, Michelangelo, Raphael, Artemisia Gentileschi, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Velázquez, Turner, Hokusai, Monet, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Hilma af Klint, Kandinsky, and Picasso. The buildings are the Parthenon, the Pantheon, Hagia Sophia, Chartres, Brunelleschi’s dome in Florence, the Alhambra, the Taj Mahal, and Angkor Wat, with Gaudí’s Sagrada Família as a work other hands are still finishing.
The Great Pyramid and Göbekli Tepe stay in History. Those pages are about dates and about claims made for the stones. Here the question is the work itself.
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01
A method
How to look
A painting is an object in a room. A building is an object you walk through. The maker, the date, and the later reading stay in the sentence.
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02
1305–1620
The figure
Giotto gives the body weight. Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael each take that body somewhere else. Artemisia Gentileschi signs her own Judith.
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03
1599–1844
Light
Caravaggio, Vermeer, Rembrandt, Velázquez, and Turner each make light do the work that a story used to do.
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04
1831–1937
After the window
Hokusai, Monet, Van Gogh, and Cézanne change what a view can be. Hilma af Klint and Kandinsky drop the view. Picasso breaks the single standpoint, and his canvases stay off this page.
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05
The old rooms
A room you enter
The Parthenon, the Pantheon, Hagia Sophia, Chartres, and Brunelleschi’s dome: five buildings where structure, light, and ceremony are the work.
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06
Courts, tombs, a work still rising
Courts and tombs
The Alhambra, the Taj Mahal, and Angkor Wat are buildings you enter as a whole world. Gaudí’s church is still being finished by other hands.
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