Module 9 Videos

 I choose to watch the two videos from the list for different reasons. I watched The Drawings of Michael Angelo because he was a familiar artist to me. His work in the Catholic Church is very well know and his most famous work in the Sistine Chapel has always interested me. I picked the video Valazquez for the opposite reason. I know very little about any of the Spanish artists and I was interested to learn about who he was and what his work looked like. 

I learned a lot about Michael Angelo by watching the film. I did not know that 19 of his works are kept at Princeton for viewing and studying. This man drew all his life and at 12 years old he finally got his hesitant father to accept that he would be an artist as he took an apprenticeship. As an apprentice he used human models to draw detailed sketches of the human body. 30-40 years later, Michael Angelo continued to use the ideas from his mentor although he denied any debt to this man. The drawings that Michael Angelo did of the male human body showed an amazing anatomical understanding of the body. These pictures actually set the ideal standard for body builders as they showed each muscle perfectly sculpted and proportional. He started his sketches at the core of the body and eventually they grew into a moving body. Detail was blended with idealized and some impossible poses. Michael Angelo sought perfections in his 60 years focused on the nude male body. It was not surprising to me then, to learn that he fell deeply in love with a man in Rome. I was surprised however, to learn that he actually wrote a poem complaining about his work on the Sistine Chapel. The pope commissioned him to this famous job and I was surprised that he did not love it. His work as he got older progresses as his own aging body and soul. As he drew the crucifix, this was a far different work from that of the sculpture of Adam. He expressed both hope and dread of death in this painting. 

Valazquez was very different from Michael Angelo. He was a very discrete and educated Spaniard. His art captured the elements of light and his figures were sometimes is shadow. He had one friend, the king, and  one love, his wife. He enjoyed realistic themes and thought that life was all that mattered. To me, his paintings looked like posed photographs against fake backdrops. The detail was in the person he was painting, not the landscape. The pieces were also lacking much color at all. They seemed very gray to me.He was a very slow and deliberate painter. My favorite of his paintings were of the young Prince Baltisar. His paintings of the palace jesters were very interesting as they attempted to express beauty and human quality beneath hideous exteriors. He used the element of soft and strong colors to allow people to look inside these characters.

I thought both of these films were very good at summing up both the life and most famous works by each individual artist. The films add more interest than the textbook as far as allowing us to understand these famous artists, in my opinion. The two sources are paired very well though. There are many more examples of pieces in the text and reading the descriptions allows for a better understanding of the work itself while the videos help us understand the people themselves.