Thursday, January 28, 2010

Golden Days

This week ended our 20-day foray studying the Renaissance in AP Art History, and I wanted to share two different days that were especially memorable in our historical romp. It is hard to decide if this was the best time I had teaching the Renaissance ever but it was wonderful to be back with these art treasures since last teaching the course three years ago.

Of course the Renaissance is always a memorable topic for me—the first (and only) art history course I ever took was in the Renaissance and Baroque periods 25 years ago when I studied in Salzburg, Austria. I would meet my Denison friend Jill in Florence or Rome and we would scream around museums gawking at art we had just studied that week in our respective classes. And in my early teaching days it was the first art works I attempted to use with my high school European history students. But one improvement over teaching the Renaissance at Hackley was that I got to teach these 20 days all in one shot. At Hackley I would introduce the Renaissance in December, then came the Christmas break interruptus. Then we would come back and have another week, another crack at figuring out all the forces swirling in 15th century Italy. Then came the semester exams. Then after exam week and a break we would study the “High” Renaissance for a bit before the Protestants started spoiling the Renaissance party. It was much more exciting to build the momentum day after day as we stretched and thought and provoked and engaged with the Renaissance.

It has already been a banner year with my young art historians—they have an enthusiasm and appetite for the work that is thrilling. But still some of them dwell too much on the narrative of the art work, and it is hard for teen-agers to dip their toes into the pool of philosophical engagement. But I thought I would give it a whirl.

One day a couple weeks ago I projected a statue on the board without telling them anything about it. No name, no artist, no date, no context whatsoever. I asked them what or who the statue looked like.

They were game to play along. They described the fit, young body as certainly an allusion to the young Greek male, the classic ephebe would should be well-educated and change the world. They commented on the Greek proportions and his sense of confidence. Some wondered if the statue was another relic from ancient Greece or a copy from ancient Rome dug up and paraded through Renaissance Rome. They said everything that the statue certainly projected about the celebration of the individual and that oft-used word in studying the Renaissance—humanism.

[Now if you want to play along with the exercise, go and google a statue by Tullio Lombardo, circa 1490, and see what you come up with…seriously…go and google him and see if you find the statue they saw in class…are you doing it yet? Remember, teachers have eyes in the backs of their heads, and their eyes are good—even all the way from Jordan!]

After we kind of exhausted the ‘What do you notice?’ query, I asked them to ask me questions about the statue so we could fill in the context. They know the drill. They asked good questions about the year in which it was made, and who the patron was. Someone asked, “Where the statue could have been seen?” The statue would have been placed in City Hall actually. No one was surprised given the Italian love of “antique chic” during the Renaissance. Then Fadi looked very quizzical and said softly, “Is it Adam?”

The class looked at the statue again. Well, there did appear to be an apple in this man’s hand, and maybe that accessory thing beside his buff body was a tree trunk and serpent…wait…Adam??

Fadi was correct. This statue—this handsome, confident young man was indeed Adam, the guy with Eve who invented sin and caused…dramatic pause…the Fall of Man…

Several hands went up incredibly confused—this did not look like any Adam from the Middle Ages. “He doesn’t look ashamed at all,” said Abdullah, and Dana chimed in, “That is nothing like the Adam on Bishop Bernward’s bronze doors in Germany.” No, this was the Renaissance, and even Adam gets a make-over.

I handed out a quotation that read:
“Neither a fixed abode nor a form that is thine alone
nor function peculiar to thyself have we given thee, Adam…
thou, constrained by no limits, in accordance with thine own free will,
in whose hand we have placed thee,
shall ordain for thyself the limits of nature."

--Pico della Mirandola,
Platonic Academy, 1486


Now these words are not easy even for American students, but imagine, yet again, how remarkable it is for students to tackle this who experience English as a second language! We chewed up these words, and realized the power in phrases like “no limits,” and “thine own free will.” Mohammad was pretty dumb-founded: “But this is Adam—he is all about shame in every art work we have seen.” Rob reminded the class of the medieval Pope Innocent who proclaimed, “Man is the stench in the nostrils of God.” Kais looked at the phrase and dissected the phrase “ordain for thyself,” and said, “The word ordain is usually used for church language and priests, and this Renaissance philosopher uses the word for Adam.” He thought for a moment and added, “If Adam can be redeemed and celebrated—any human can be!”

This is not a simple discussion to have. Think of the complexity of thought, and actually the delicacy of hoping the students get to these points—wow…but we continued with discussing why a city council would put this in their City Hall. They had no trouble speculating the effect this had on Renaissance Italians elevating and celebrating mankind. [Yes, we discussed the article, “Was There a Renaissance for Women,” and we safely decided the era elevated mankind and not womankind.]

Next I decided to bring a little mathematics into the discussion. I helped them understand the concept of the “Golden Mean.” “The Golden Mean” refers to a proportional relationship developed by the ancient Greeks that establishes a harmonic ratio between two unequal parts. It is defined as a line that is divided in such a way that the smaller part is to the larger as the larger is to the whole. (I drew on the board a mess of geometric stuff to demonstrate the point.) “The Golden Mean” is believed to be based on a mathematical formula present in nature and known as the Fibonacci Sequence. Numerically, this sequence is: 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34, 55, 89, and so on. Each new number is generated by adding together the last two numbers: (0+1=1, 1+1=2, 1+2=3, 2+3=5, 3+5=8, 5+8=13, 8+13=21. etc.) An example found in nature would be a flower with 13 petals in one row—its adjacent rows would have 8 or 21 petals. The mathematical formula for “The Golden Mean” is derived by dividing one number in the Fibonacci Sequence by the next highest number. For example, if you divide 55 by 89, the quotient is .618; if you divide 34 by 55, the quotient is .618……..hmmmmmmm………

We went back to the statue of Adam by Tullio Lombardo—there is mathematical precision there. If you measure him from head to foot, it is 75 inches. If you multiply that by .618 you will get 46 inches. If you measure up the distance from the man’s foot, guess where that takes you exactly? It takes you to the navel, where, as these Renaissance philosophers professed, life begins, the center of life…

They were appropriately wowed by the fusion of philosophy and mathematics and the Bible. We went back to the ancient Greek quotation:

“…that beauty does not consist in the elements
but in harmonious proportion to the parts;
the proportion of one finger to the other,
of all the fingers to the rest of the hand,
of the rest of the hand to the wrist,
of these to the forearm
of the forearm to the whole arm…
of all parts to all others…”

--Polykleitos,
“Canon of Human Proportions”



And we looked at how the Renaissance architects used this philosophy and mathematics to actually use the human as the measure for all buildings, just as Athenian Protagoras had pronounced, “Man is the Measure of All Things.” We looked at drawings of private homes and public buildings, with sketches by Leonardo and Durer, and saw how they used man’s body as the measure of buildings, seeing the building as a meeting point of the human and the divine.

Later that week, each student worked in a group of four to teach a Renaissance “Golden Age” art work we had not studied before. Each student acted as the resident scholar for their mini-Platonic Academy. They were impressive.

Maybe sometime I will get to tell you about the contest we had the day before the test on the Renaissance. Right now, I need to get cracking on grading those 60 tests. I hope some of that brilliance from those two classes found its way on those tests.

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