Risk
Progress involves exposing ourselves to and considering the impact or forms of danger, harm, uncertainty or opportunity.
16 March 2020
In Grades 8 and 11, using Google Classroom and Google Meet, we looked at the risks taken by Renaissance artists, designers, architects and engineers in the 15th and 16th centuries and how their contributions brought Europe out of the middle ages and sowed the seeds of modern Western art history– driving history-changing innovations in printing, optics, scientific inquiry, and linear and aerial perspective, to name a few. Students first toured the historic centre of Florence, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, to see the artefacts of progress that propelled the city’s artistic and architectural legacy. They then considered the art conventions and methodologies borne out of the Renaissance as they created digital collages recontextualising Renaissance motifs with elements of important artworks made in later centuries.
Rick Steves' Europe Travel Guide | Florence: Heart of the Renaissance (24:57) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ut-e40u3lS0
Students were challenged to create dynamic compositions and engaging digital collages by layering and manipulating motifs from numerous well-known Renaissance artworks, including Botticelli’s paintings, the frescoes of Raphael and Michelangelo, and the altarpieces of Fra Angelico, with elements of noteworthy artworks produced in later time periods and successive art movements. Students’ individual creative choices in composing their images created new and interesting dialogues between very different artists, traditions, styles, movements, and cultures.
In a clever interpretation of risk, one student (at top left) played the role of mad scientist in collaging a self-portrait of Sandro Botticelli from ‘The Adoration of the Magi’ (1475) with the gown of a wealthy woman, cropped above the knee to reveal bare legs and feet rising out of a giant shell taken from Botticelli’s ‘The Birth of Venus’ (1485-86). The sepia-toned, ambiguously gendered subject stands defiantly at the centre of the composition, in front of the central vanishing point and framed by the classical architecture behind, taken from Raphael’s fresco ‘The School of Athens’ (1509-11).
Another student (below, at center), in a nod to Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, chose Van Gogh’s Japanese Oiran courtesan as the subject set in a pastoral scene of Van Gogh’s rhythmic brushwork, illuminated by the red rising sun of Monet’s 1872 ‘Impression, Sunrise.’ And moving forward in art history to the present day, another (below) approached the task with a flatter, more dizzying use of space set against the tightly knit paint strokes of a Yayoi Kusama infinity net. There, two figures are suspended in the space behind tall Van Gogh tree trunks growing tropical Matisse cut-out leaves: a headless Yinka Shonibare figure rolling on a globe, and a Kara Walker black cut-paper silhouette reminiscent of the folklore of the Antebellum South. Each of my students applied great effort in composing new images from existing images using their knowledge of the Elements of Art and Principles of Design. And I must commend them all for their hard work in distance learning during the school closure!
