Hello dear class -

here are the essay questions for the exam, for you to think over looking at all your image and information sources. You'll get a printout for the exam, minus this introduction.

I & II: I've divided the questions in two parts - one makes you talk across two cultures in time and space, the other one lets you focus more tightly, if you find it profitable.

I've tried to give you a range of topics that let you play with anything we've done so far, and to focus on the shapes of things and their significance in different kinds of balance.

****For the second section, There is no subtext - one example is not Worse Than 3, if the question permits it and you can get a good essay out of it! And if some points expand to fill your whole essay, that is OK, as long as the essay has a plausible structure. But if that is what you wish to do, thinking out contrasts and analogies a bit, as you decide, will help you to see better the individual character of your main case. Where it is relevant, I will let you draw for me as well as write, where you find an expository diagram useful as well as quick - spelling out the program of the Siphnian Tresury, for instance, can be easier for all of us to understand if you make a kind of map-diagram.

****Useful for all your midterms:

1. If you are working with a series of case artifacts, themes, persons etc., it can be useful to just list them in a batch of quick titles & info points at the start of your essay, so that you can refer to them more parenthetically as you churn out the core prose and still let us see that you know what they are. You can also look at that list while you are writing, to remind yourself of what you meant to do. Think out a bit of triage in advance - what things you absolutely want to get to, and which you can cut if you start to run out of time and still be left with a coherent exam product.

2. If you are estimating length of what you've geared up for, here are some tips:

- first, write out anything at all at your exam-writing speed, stopping at the bottom of a page.

- then, read it out loud to yourself at about the speed at which you tend to think something through, and see how long that took by comparison.

- Now, when you are thinking through how you would write something up, if you chat yourself through the details you will see roughly how long it would take you to write out the same thing.

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I. DISCUSS WITH REFERENCE TO AT LEAST TWO CULTURES AND TIME PERIODS:

We've looked a great deal about how art works in its settings. In reviewing several different time periods and cultures, do you see the dynamics of this as the same regardless of time and place, or do they seem to you culture- and period- specific? Do distinctions like public/private, large/small or differences in media seem to matter?

At the very beginning of this course, we had you discuss in section your reactions to some of Kubler's essay on "The Shape of Time". Now that you've been looking for several weeks at some actual art traditions, how would you want a section discussion to juxtapose what interested you in Kubler, with some of the arts that you now know about?

Art historians have long noticed that it is useful to think about the social settings for art, because we can see that at many times and places, there seem to be differences between style and content in public display habits and in private/domestic display habits; conversely, it's interesting to see where there seems to be a good deal of continuity in form &/or content between the two spheres. Sometimes these differences involve content, sometimes they involve style, sometimes they involve whole genres of making. In the arts that you've been studying, where are some occasions that you think that such distinctions between public/private help us to a better understanding?

In studying the ancient and medieval world, we know that the "accidents of preservation" have physically destroyed much that would tell us about what its visual culture originally looked like. If you were giving a lecture on what we should reconstruct in our minds' eye, what forms and characteristics of art would you emphasize to a modern viewer to supply from mental reconstruction, as you ran through a slide set of 5 to 10 things?

As an ancient art historian, you are often asked by your friends in other depratments and universities to come an guest lecture about the evidence from art, in courses on history, political science, philosophy and sociology. How would you outline an art historical guest lecture on how ancient monuments can document for us ONE of the following themes, by what they "illustrate" and also by the fact of their existence:

-Attitudes to authority and power

-The nature of the kosmos and humanity's place in it

-the nature of the afterlife

-Humanity's relation to the gods and the supernatural

-Attitudes to violence

-Attitudes to the world of work and of making

Art history has come to see "court culture" or "palace culture" as a distinctive environment for the arts in ways that seem to cut across cultures separated in time and space. Do you feel that you've seen enough so far to be able to generalize across two or more of the cultures that you've seen, about a court culutre with shared characteristics? If you do feel that way, how do you think that the similarities you see between the court arts of your different peoples and nations might have had meaning in their time?

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II. DISCUSS WITH ONE EXAMPLE FROM ONE CULTURE, OR TWO TO THREE EXAMPLES FROM ONE TO THREE CULTURES

Most of the architecture and building traditions that we've touched on, for Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Aegean and Greece incorporated representation in some way. In many other traditional sorts of classes and books, space limitations mean that the forms and functions of "architecture" are discussed without reference to installed images, symbols, and decorated surfaces. Discuss one to three sites/buildings whose architectural character, in your opinion, benefits from understanding art in architecture.

In this class we've emphasized a good deal how ancient art and designed space discussed the world around it, its "landscape". In recent decades, both the depiction of landscape, and the practice of landscape architecture, have become major subjects in current art history. Suppose that you, as (that rare thing) a knowledgeable ancient art historian, were asked to one of Dumbarton Oaks' annual conferences how a survey course in Landscape could plan a week' presentation on the ancient world. What would you outline as the sorts of monuments and themes that students and scholars would want to know about to illustrate ancient landscape traditions? you might think a survey of many sorts of things would be best, or you might decide to focus on one sort of phenomenon or region.

In any area of cultural history, from the beginning of writing to the 20th century, period description of art is invaluable to understanding the evidence of artifacts. This course has introduced you to texts to illustrate how, when, and why ancient peoples talked about the art of their world. If you had the space of one or two illustrated lectures in an art history course to talk about the texts on your course page and in your books, or were going to make your research paper out of them, what would you like to do with your audience, either surveying a range of writings, or making a deep analysis of one or two texts? [though it makes a good model, please Don't Just Transcribe the notes to yr. Odyssey excerpt!] If you would like to do this as running commentary to a text, you may bring a printout of it to the final exam to pass in with the bits you would discuss circled.

All of the cultures that you will study in 101 were very interested in extending the ability of art to make visual patterns and patterns of meaning, by juxtaposing several images/ monuments with one another in two main ways - putting them where they could be seen in the same visual scan, and/or by sending the viewer from image to image on an expected itinerary. Programmatic display, multi-image series, seriated art - we have many different names about such practices. Explore for me this formal and conceptual habit, in reference to one to three examples.