Art Analysis Assignment for Tues 9/16

Jan Van Eyck. Madonna of the Church. 1390-1440
Hans Holbein the Younger. The Ambassadors. 1533.
Parmigianino. Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. 1523.
Albrecht Durer. Perspective Drawing of a Woman. 16th C.
(All paintings listed above are searchable on artstor.org. I suggest using this site due to the high quality of the images, in contrast with many of the small and/or compressed results you’ll find from a Google image search.)
For Tuesday, please write a brief “art analysis” essay—about a page long—that describes one of the above paintings and offers an interpretation of it based on your description. When analyzing your chosen work of art, look slowly and carefully at the details of the piece. You may use the readings we’ve covered in the class to determine what might be important details to emphasize, but I really want you to test your own eye—try not to just repeat points from lecture, but attend to the specificities of these particular works. Also, keep in mind that not all of them are from time periods we’ve already covered, so it won’t work to just apply verbatim descriptions of paintings shown in class to those selected here.

A few questions to think about as you plan your written analysis.

1. How does form (the technical construction of the piece) underscore or challenge narrative and/or content?

2. Are there points of inconsistency or tension in the work that destabilize a straightforward reading?

And finally, an option to consider,

3. You may offer comparisons between these works if it helps you to advance your mini-argument.

The following is a brief set of guidelines taken from an informative UNC website. I do want you to learn how to translate from visual language into verbal language. However, please do not simply describe your chosen piece without also interpreting it. The description you offer, and the details you concentrate on in your description, should work in service of an argument in which you set out some (provisional) suggestions about what these formal details mean, and how you conclude that they mean what you think they mean. That is, don’t just say that these formal characteristics mean something, say how they mean—how do elements of the painting interact to produce a kind of visual argument?

From http://www.unc.edu/depts/wcweb/handouts/arthistory.html

1) Formal analysis
This assignment requires a detailed description of the "formal" qualities of the art object (formal as in "related to the form," not a black tie dinner). In other words, you're looking at the individual design elements, such as composition (arrangement of parts of or in the work), color, line, texture, scale, proportion, balance, contrast, and rhythm. Your primary concern in this assignment is to attempt to explain how the artist arranges and uses these various elements.

Usually you have to go and look at the object for a long time and then write down what you see. As you will quickly see from the page length of the assignment, your instructor expects a highly detailed description of the object. You might struggle with this assignment because it is hard to translate what you see into words—don't give up, and take more notes than you might think you need.

Why would your instructor ask you to do this assignment? First, translating something from a visual language to a textual language is one of the most vital tasks of the art historian. Most art historians at some point describe fully and accurately their objects of study in order to communicate their ideas about them. You may already have found this tendency helpful in reading your textbook or other assigned readings. Second, your instructors realize that you are not accustomed to scrutinizing objects in this way and know that you need practice doing so. Instructors who assign formal analyses want you to look—and look carefully. Think of the object as a series of decisions that an artist made. Your job is to figure out and describe, explain, and interpret those decisions and why the artist may have made them.

Ideally, if you were to give your written formal analysis to a friend who had never seen the object, s/he would be able to describe or draw the object for you, or at least pick it out of a lineup.