As an artist, she was gifted. As a woman, she was intelligent, independent, and brave. Maria Sibylla Merian was a remarkable European woman and artist with an interesting passion for insects and nature, more specifically, with the process of metamorphosis. Her choice to follow her interests and pursue opportunities took her to one of the richest sources of insects, and subsequently inspiration for her work. Her choice to travel from the comfort of the Western World, to the Dutch colony of Surinam, allowed for an unprecedented view of the insect life outside of Europe, which in turn allowed Merian to produce art that inspired and sparked curiosity in those who had never seen anything like it before. Her research in South America and aesthetic talent has gained Merian a well-deserved and prized place in history. For this essay, I have chosen three works by Merian (Fig. 1, Fig. 2, and Fig. 3) to discuss that are examples of how her travel to Surinam directly influenced her artwork.
To fully understand why Merian and her work are so fascinating, it is important to know some information about her personal life. Merian was born in Germany in 1647 into an already rather artistic family. Her father, Mathias Merian the Elder, was an artist and publisher who was well known for his engravings, scientific books, and illustrations. Merian’s father died when she was only three and her mother, Johanna Sibylla Heim, remarried a still-life painter, engraver, and art-dealer named Jacob Marrel (Davis, 1995, p. 142). While her mother taught her the customary things, like embroidery, her stepfather taught her to draw, watercolor, and engrave. At the early age of eleven, Merian herself began to show talent in the arts and was very fascinated by insec...
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...en, deserving of the most priced position in the family’s private collection of curiosities.
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Merian, M. S., Brafman, D., & Schrader, S. (2008). Insects & flowers: The art of Maria Sibylla Merian. Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum. (Plate 1 Photo from Cover Page)
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The outstanding Simplemente Bellas by Mabel Poblet Pujols is a 2-D art piece, located in Tampa Museum of Art, in downtown Tampa. Tampa Museum of Art is free to students, and is a great home to many spectacular forms of 2-D and 3-D art. The first glance at this wonderful work of art, I quickly decided this would be the piece I would write my humanities paper on. During my first visit to this museum, Simplemente Bellas was immediately the first work of art to have caught my eye. At first, it changes your perspective, due to the fact it is a three-dimensional piece on top of a two-dimensional canvas. This piece is beyond beautiful. As it says in the title, Simplemente Bellas, is translated to Simply Beautiful. It is a great example of human expression,
...ths of the sixteenth century. Yes, women of that time and place left a very light mark on history. Eventually, the story the book tells spirals down into just some nasty courtroom feuds among family members. The story provides a driving narrative that brings into intimate contact disparate kinds that are still prevalent today. And the conclusion drawn from Anna's actions and reactions may surprise. In both everyday life and in times of crisis, women in the twenty first century has access to effective personal and legal resources.
Isabel de Madariaga was considered an expert on Russian history, she was Professor Emeritus of Slavonic Studies at the University of London. Catherine the Great: a Short
By most accounts, the year 1500 was in the midst of the height of the Italian Renaissance. In that year, Flemmish artist Jean Hey, known as the “Master of Moulins,” painted “The Annunciation” to adorn a section of an alter piece for his royal French patrons. The painting tells the story of the angel Gabriel’s visit to the Virgin Mary to deliver the news that she will give birth to the son of God. As the story goes, Mary, an unwed woman, was initially terrified about the prospects of pregnancy, but eventually accepts her fate as God’s servant. “The Annunciation” is an oil painting on a modest canvas, three feet tall and half as wide. The setting of the painting is a study, Mary sitting at a desk in the bottom right hand corner reading, and the angel Gabriel behind her holding a golden scepter, perhaps floating and slightly off the canvas’s center to the left. Both figures are making distinct hand gestures, and a single white dove, in a glowing sphere of gold, floats directly above Mary’s head. The rest of the study is artistic but uncluttered: a tiled floor, a bed with red sheets, and Italian-style architecture. “The Annunciation” was painted at a momentous time, at what is now considered the end of the Early Renaissance (the majority of the 15th Century) and the beginning of the High Renaissance (roughly, 1495 – 1520). Because of its appropriate placement in the Renaissance’s timeline and its distinctly High Renaissance characteristics, Jean Hey’s “Annunciation” represents the culmination of the transition from the trial-and-error process of the Early Renaissance, to the technical perfection that embodied the High Renaissance. Specifically, “Annunciation” demonstrates technical advancements in the portrayal of the huma...
In the essay “Naturalism and the Venetian ‘Poesia’: Grafting, Metaphor, and Embodiment in Giorgione, Titian, and the Campagnolas,” Campbell explains the role of poetic painting, poesia, in Venetian artwork during the 1500s. Titian personally used the term poesia when he “[referred] to paintings he was making for [King Philip II] with subject matter derived from the ancient poets.” Poesia now refers to a type of sixteenth century Venetian painting, which Giorgione and Titian initiated and used within their works. Campbell’s main argument is that poesia is not simply aesthetic or reflective of poetry, but rather “grounded in the process of making – and in making meaning – rather than in an aesthetics of self-sufficiency or self-referentiality.” Like poetry, it is not self-contained; meaning lies outside of the work, within the interpretations of the viewers. He discusses the idea of grafting in poetry and how the same grafting model is utilized in the visual arts. Different images, such as pagan figures and contemporary figures and settings, are juxtaposed to create visual discordance and give an intrinsic meaning to the viewer. Campbell then uses many examples of writing, poetry, engravings, and paintings to explore his argument and the connections between artists during the 1500s.
Sofonisba Anguissola was one of the most prominent female painters of the Renaissance. Not only was she one of only four women mentioned by Giorgio Vasari in his famous Lives of the Artists, she also paved the way for later female artists. One may look at Sofonisba’s upbringing and assume that her talents were a result of her wealth and family background. However, if investigated more carefully through both analytical secondary sources and primary sources, it becomes clear that Sofonisba’s painting abilities formed because of her talent, not her wealth. Sofonisba integrated herself into the artistic community and used her second-class status as a female painter to accelerate her career: because she was not able to study as an apprentice in a workshop, her models were usually family members, she pioneered the style of genre painting. Historian Joan Kelly argues in her essay, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” that women did not experience a Renaissance during the actual Renaissance. Sofonisba’s training and connections were extremely helpful to launch her career, refuting Kelly’s argument that women only were taught “charm” during the Renaissance. In addition, Sofonisba married her second husband for love, not for money, debunking Kelly’s argument that marriages during the Renaissance were not based on love. Though Sofonisba’s life as a woman is a unique case in terms of wealth and profession, her success and fame, talent, and marriage (van dyck?) disprove Kelly’s argument that women did not have a Renaissance during the Renaissance.
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To begin, the differential treatments between gender identities have stereotypically discriminated Renaissance women, in Europe, from achieving an era of resurgence, hence obstructing females from their struggle for future change and independence. In the family, women held undermined roles and were expected to submit under the control of male authority . The stages of a woman’s life were solely defined as a daughter, virgin, wife, mother or widow; all of which...
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Throughout history, women have been oppressed and seen as subservient to men. Gender differences denied women the right to education, among many factors that men had. Women lived their lives to be wives and mothers while men went to school, held careers, interests passions and individual lives outside of the homes women so rarely left. Mary Wollstonecraft expressed her abhorrence for this injustice in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Later in the same year of 1792, Anna Barbauld responded by attacking Wollstonecraft with her “The Rights of Woman.” Both women present a clear, though opposing argument allowing the reader further insight of the oppression plaguing women in the late eighteenth century.