Four Video Review

The first two videos I chose were La Primavera, and The Night Watch. I like learning about specific paintings and the reasoning behind them, so I thought I would enjoy these. Both videos begin showing the paintings behind acted out by actors and actresses. La Primavera talks about Botticelli's painting and the interpretation of critics. They try to find a relationship between all nine figures in the painting, but it is uncertain. Some people see it is a sexual painting as all of the girls are dressed in light airy clothing, but some see it as the coming of spring, since that is the translation of the title. It brought to my attention that Cupids arrow is aiming at the group of girls, not Mercury on the left, and that the two figures on the right are really the same person, one is transformed into the other. In The Night Watch, Rembrandt's painting has some questionable aspects as well. The painting has been heavily damaged; cut with a knife, had acid thrown at it, and it was drenched with water, but it survived. It suggests that Rembrandt was commissioned to include rich merchants in his painting. On page 367 of the book, while discussing Botticelli, it talks about the philosophhy of Neoplatoism, and in the movies, the narrator says in order to find the meaning behind the painting, they go back to the philosophies of Plato. In the book, on page 394, The Night Watch is discussed, and they state that all of the members of a commisioned painting were normally seated around the table or lined up for the 17th century equivalent of a class photograph. In the video they discuss this as well, stating that you could decapitate everyone in the photograph with a single swipe.

The next video I chose was the Albrecht Durer video. I chose it because I thought he was a printmaker, but I learned that he was much more than that. He was great at portraiture, but he excelled with landscapes as well. The video tells much of his background, as discussed in chapter 8, along with an interpretation of his woodcut, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

I chose The Power of Art :Caravaggio, as my last video. I liked the title of the video, and I knew there was one of his paintings discussed in Chapter 17, that the video would hopefully give me more insight to. Both the video and the book discuss the drama behind Caravaggio's work, and how he focuses on the here and now. From the video I learned that he used random people off the streets as the model for his works, and that he was much more on the dark side than I thought, not wanting to do things the way they are supposed to be done. In the first painting shown in the video, his head is in the lower right corner, and the narrator suggests that he was sacrificing his head in the painting, to save himself in real life.

I feel like the videos are much about interpretation and the way we see the painting, especially the first two where the meaning is uncertain. I don't feel as if these videos were as relevant to the current chapters as the last group of videos were, but they were still informational, and I did learn some interesting facts from them.