The Impulse to Art: Creation Through the Centuries
Activity: From the earliest record of human existence, we have evidence of people making art. Art serves both as an expression of emotion and inner thoughts and as a recorder of history and the events of public life. Explain to your students that different areas of the world have vastly different art-making traditions and that the traditions covered in this mini-lesson are from the Western world only, spanning from the ancient Greeks to the present day.
Setting: We are able to study only the art that has survived over the centuries. Many of the creative objects of the past have decayed, were stolen, or were demolished as cultures won and lost disputed territories the victors destroying what they couldn't take. Because of this, the bulk of the remnants from the Greeks, Romans, and even the Middle Ages are architectural: Castles, palaces, churches, and monasteries endured because only very rich families and the church had enough money to create the kind of immense buildings that would stand the test of time. It is not until the 15th century that we begin to have paintings that we can study, and many of these were frescoes, which means they were painted on the wet plaster of the walls of a house or church and allowed to dry there. These paintings used albumen, a substance found in egg whites, as their base. It was during the flowering of what is known as the Renaissance that oil was discovered as a useful base for paint, and it is this kind of paint that helped to produce the many masterpieces that are in our museums today.
One of the other important discoveries of the Renaissance was perspective. This is the idea that our eyes are drawn into the center of a picture, just as they are drawn into the distance when we are looking outside. It also means that things get smaller to our eyes when the objects are farther away a simple idea, but one that had not been represented in painting before. There are many ways to explore this idea, but the "disappearing square" (or circle, if your students are familiar with compasses) is one of the simplest.
For a number of wonderful and more complex examples of perspective drawing, explore the following sites:
Drawing in Perspective
See Perspective at Work in Paintings
Early Cave Paintings
Read an Art Adventure, Falling Into a Painting