User:Chen Junyu/graduation/theise/research notes/Notes for thesis

[English Scripts]Earth, Sea, and Sky: Nature in Western Art: Masterpieces from The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Chinese Version

Chapter1: Nature Idealized

Earth, Sea, and Sky begins with artistic visions of nature shaped by powerful ideas. Western culture has a long and rich history of nature imagery derived from literary sources and the imagination rather than from the world before the artist's eyes.

From early times, people struggling to understand powerful natural forces imagined them as human in order to mitigate their fear of the unknown. The tradition of personifying nature continues to this day, for example in the practice of giving personal names to hurricanes. The personification of nature is a form of metaphoric representation that depicts a culturally understood avatar for the idea of a river, season, or time of day

nature personate

Chapter 2: The Human Presence in Nature

A human figure can literally wear nature as a crown of foliage or a rough animal skin, thereby taking on the symbolic attributes of the leaves or the strength and ferocity of the wild beast.

Chapter 3: Animals

The earliest prehistoric cave paintings of primitive man featured animals, and they have remained an important subject for art through the centuries. Many of the creatures seen here embody something more than the zoological species depicted. Pagan gods, for example in ancient Egypt, often assume animal form. Christian art finds symbolism in every species. The challenge for the artist often lies in preserving the true character, energy, and appearance of the animal while also expressing a theological or metaphorical meaning.

Artists try to give every species their own metaphor in works

Chapter 4: Flowers and Gardens flowers sometimes serve as symbols. All flowers have brief moments of perfection, and so their portrayal often implies the idea of transience.

The word "photography" derives from the Greek for "writing with light," and so despite the technology involved, photography is a form of art made of nature.

for the various manifestations of the theme of nature in art are recapitulated in this one medium: idealization, animals, gardens and flowers, and landscape.

<The Great Wave> Its success can be attributed to not only Le Gray's technical tour-de-force, but also to the picture's Romantic evocation of the sublime—the lone ship on a wide expanse of sea suggests our small place in the vast universe.

The Nature And Art of Motion

Introduction

The inescapable attribute of our time is its runaway pace. 我们的时代的固有属性是其失控的速度.

The traffic of the outside world has its inner counterpart. Our interior world is shaped by the restless haste of bad consciences.

Our proudest and most potent possessions, without reliable social guidance, become misused. we live under the terrifying shadow of superinventions, with their much too easy push-button control.As we all know so well, these have brought us to the brink of final disaster.

It seems impossible to look inside ourselves and find renewal of spirit. our privacy, the sanctuary for our imaginative powers, is invaded, not only by such lashing tentacles of this world of motion as the onrushing images of the television screen, but even more by our own frantic restlessness. Motion, in a strict physical sense, is change of position with respect to a reference system(参考系) of space coordinates 空间坐标系. In a broad social sense, motion is change with respect to a reference system of basic human values. --we find ourselves trapped in a gigantic social and emotional traffic jam. just as our cities are strangled by traffic because vehicles overflow our streets, so our vast traffic of new knowledge and power is choking to a standstill.

The last accelerated decades of history span what used to be centuries of technical progress and centuries of economic and social advancement or regression. Unable to correlate the time of the individual's willed puirsoses with the time scale of social directions,others of us blame a hundred different things: events occur absurdly fast....we shift scapegoats without realizing that the real problem is our lack of a coordinating, genuinely contemporary, dynamic scale.