Essay 2.2 Guidelines

1. Essay 2.2 Guidelines • Primary sources • Use simple present tense to do a plot summary; • Secondary sources: modeled on Karen DiYanni who has briefly summarized the two most representative interpretations of Kafka: the religious aspect and Freudian psychoanalytical approach;

2. Biographical Information on the author • Sources from the Internet • Move away from the web to books/biographies/autobiographies • Evaluate the sources • Identify the most prestigious sources • Use books and materials on our course reserve—search by instructor’s name • Gao, weizhi

3. Scale/Proportion/position& meaning • Travelers amid Mountains and Streams by the Chinese artist Fan Kuan (fl. 990–1020) • ink and slight color on silk; dimensions of 6¾ ft by 2½ ft.[1]National Palace Museum, Taipei • http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Travelers_Among_Mountains_and_Streams.png • Scale and its implication • Taoist perspective

4. A Taoist Painting • Fan Kuan (Chinese: 范寬; pinyin: Fàn Kuān; Wade–Giles: Fan K’uan (fl. 990–1020)was a Chinese landscape painter of the Song Dynasty (960–1279). • Travelers amid Mountains and Streams, a large hanging scroll, is Fan Kuan's best known work. • It became a model for other Chinese artists. Fan based the painting on the Taoist principle of becoming one with nature.

5. Scale & Proportion • When looking at the painting, the viewer realizes how small he/she is compared to the big picture of nature. The painting focuses on the totality of nature and the world as a whole instead of the individual.

6. The historian Patricia Ebrey explains her view on the painting • the...foreground, presented at eye level, is executed in crisp, well-defined brush strokes. Jutting boulders, tough scrub trees, a mule train on the road, and a temple in the forest on the cliff are all vividly depicted. There is a suitable break between the foreground and the towering central peak behind, which is treated as if it were a backdrop, suspended and fitted into a slot behind the foreground. There are human figures in this scene, but it is easy to imagine them overpowered by the magnitude and mystery of their surroundings.

7. Travelers amid Mountains and Streams

8. Landscape with the Fall of Icarus(c. 1558) by Pieter Bruegel

9. Pieter Brueghel the Elder(c. 1525 – 9 September 1569) • was a Netherland’s Renaissance painter and printmaker known for his landscapes and peasant scenes (Genre Painting). He is sometimes referred to as "Peasant Brueghel" to distinguish him from other members of the Brueghel dynasty, but is also the one generally meant when the context does not make clear which "Bruegel" is being referred to. From 1559 he dropped the 'h' from his name and started signing his paintings as Bruegel.

10. The Fall of IcarusGreek Mythology • In Greek mythology, Icarus succeeded in flying, with wings made by his father Daedalus, using feathers secured with wax. Ignoring instructions, Icarus chose to fly too close to the sun, melting the wax, and fell into the sea and drowned. His legs can be seen in the water, just below the ship. The sun, already half-set on the horizon, is a long way away; the flight did not reach anywhere near it.

11. Continuity • Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, now seen as a good early copy of Bruegel's original • Based on the mythological scenario by Ovid, the painting itself became the subject of a poem of the same name by William Carlos Williams, and is described in W. H. Auden's poem Musée des Beaux-Arts, named after the museum in which the painting is housed in Brussels.

12. Las Meninas by Diego Velázquez • Inside/outside views • What is interesting is that the artist put himself in the painting; • Center decentered; • A set of relationships must be redefined;