ARTH 101 FINAL PAPER:
DUE by the end of reading period, 5 PM on Monday December 14. No extensions except for very grave medical and personal emergencies; if you have any other conflicts with other course assignments, or you start to become ill, inform me and your TA as soon as possible, so we can help you make a timetable and preliminary outlines that will let you complete the assigment on time.
TOPICS: see below. 10 pages of text (=, at 250 words/page, 2500 words. You will be supplied with format instructions in a separate advisory handout. Sylvan Barnet's little handbook is a resource for all of you. Try not to write more than 10 pages - as you've found out in the takehomes, describing things so that you can use your description to advance your own arguments tends to expand rapidly!
RESOURCE BIBLIOGRAPHY (see Requirements below): posted by Nov. 3, under the Paper link. (http://www.arthistory.upenn.edu/fall98/101/bib.html)
TIMING: Start thinking over the topics now, and read the introductory comments here carefully.
By Week 10, you should have set up a topic. You MUST tell your TA and me what topic you are working on by the end of Week 10 at the latest, and meet with your TA (and me, in addition, if you like) to discuss your project and the monuments it will incorporate; if your topic changes, you MUST inform your TA and meet with him or her again.
If you have a general idea of what you would like to do but are not sure what art would let you make a paper out of it, or there is a monument you are drawn to but aren't sure yet what one could do with it, that is what your professor and TA's are there to give you tips upon, especially for periods we haven't covered yet in class. When you make an appointment with one of us, it is useful to email ahead any thoughts you already have, so that we've had a chance to think on your behalf and can make the meeting as useful for you as possible.
SALVATIONARY ADVICE: In the Real World, alas, many of you will no doubt start to write your actual text very shortly before the paper is due. There are two ways to make this paper as easy and as good as possible for both the dedicated and the less dedicated:
- discuss an outline with your TA well before the last week of term! you will be tired in the last week of class, and testing out your procedures will make you feel much less harassed and clueless when you are writing the paper. Because I have given you a blanket extension past the last day of class, also, over the weekend your TAs and I will not predictably see any messages from you before you have to turn the paper in.
- start asap to make a dossier, in order to survive the mad rush on Penn's libraries at the end of term, as well as to make your subconscious nibble at your topic. Indeed you can write Something, perhaps even Something good, in a few days, but the footwork of collecting what will let you do that is a horrific last-minute burden of time & effort, especially with the library crush at the end of term which the many freshmen in 101 have yet to experience ... Start collecting asap the xeroxes, web addresses and printouts that will show you your monuments, and all the texts you think may be useful, and throw them all in the same file, binder or drawer. Remember to write down always as you go the source info. (author, title, date & place of publication, figure numbers, footnote numbers) for what you copy and take notes from - this will save the mad scramble for your own endnote and bibliography.
SUBJECTS: You will recognize some of the midterm essays here, in slightly rewritten form! The topic set is meant to give you a good combination of range and guidance. Some focus on particular kinds of subjects, others on particular kinds of analysis; you may find you are arguing a point, as in many English papers, or that your "theme" is to describe a series of phenomena, as in a travel narrative or a science chapter. This paper is meant to let you practice many of the techniques of writing about the different subjects of art history, as you have started to explore them in section, takehomes and exam essays. Its purpose is NOT to make you come up with a wide bibliography;, or research in many different sources. Rather, I would like you to work thoughtfully with what you can see and with the basic facts about a monument or set of monuments which interest you, to practice the art of intelligent description; to make a good set of analogies to bring out the character of your main subjects; to find out about how to exploit what is said in period sources about art and society; and to find out about how to exploit a model set up by a good modern art historian.
REAL THINGS: You are strongly encouraged to use for your main subject, and for some of your comparisons, physical artifacts that you can see here on campus and in Philadelphia, in museums and out-door display, or the museum collections in another city you have visited or know you will visit. (Museum list for the East Coast at the end of the Topics section; we can tell you how to find catalogues for them in advance of a planned visit.) You can turn if you like to exact modern casts of ancient and medieval artifacts (like the busts in Van Pelt, or the garden sculpture at the University Museum, or the Delphi Charioteer outside the PMA, or the Wedgwood clone of the Roman cameo-glass "Portland Vase" inside the PMA). For those interested in architecture and its decoration, I will accept on consultation a commentary focussed on explaing the kinds of sources for one of the many wonderful "retro" architectures in Philadelphia, like the Insurance Building on the Parkway, the neo-Classical PMA and the banks down near the Delaware, or the Romanesque and Gothic-style churches around our city - and at Penn itself the decorated entrance piazzas at the Museum. Finally, if you would like to explain the "classical' sources for many of the Renaissance and later images in the PMA , you may do so on consultation with me.
1. The monuments: you can do this working from the images and monuments in H&F, on our course web, and on the other image bases made for Penn's art history courses. (The format instructions will tell you how to make the source citation for a web image.). We will also make sure that there are available on reserve additional survey handbooks for the periods covered by 101. The suggested paper topics will all let you choose, between focussing on one monument with subordinate comparisons, or giving equal space to several monuments - your balance may shift either way, as you develop your final draft. Also, you may use a period monument description (like the Funeral Car of Alexander in Pollitt's Greek sourcebook, or the Gudea Hymn), whether the monument itself survives or not, as the main subject of your paper. You can consult with us at any time about finding additional monuments, illustrations or information for a point you want to chase up.
2. Make use of at least two primary sources to help your explanation. You can use Wren and the select group of web texts and H&F's quoted texts; we will also put on reserve, and in the Nov. 3rd Resource Bibliography, the sourcebooks which have been written for most of the periods which you study, for you to exploit further as you like.
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TOPICS:
1. Response to secondary literature: a) 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 begun to become familiar with some actual art traditions, take a chapter of Kubler and write a commentary about its usefulness and its problems in relationship to art that you are trying to understand. b) You may take any of the Resource Bibliography essays and critique its usefulness to other relavant monuments outside its discussion.
2. As an ancient & medieval art historian, you are often asked by your friends in other departments and universities to come an guest lecture about the evidencefrom art, in courses on history, political science, philosophy and sociology. Discuss with a set of case examples from ancient & medieval monuments & art texts ONE of the following themes:
-The depiction of authority and power -The nature of the kosmos and humanity's place in it -Religious attitudes to and uses for the visual arts and/or architecture -Attitudes to violence and war -Attitudes to the world of work and of making -The description of "history" -Attitudes towards the portrayal of the human figure - The character and story of the "hero"
3. Most of the architecture and building traditions that we've touched on,for Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Aegean and Greece incorporated representation in some way. Discuss two to four sites/buildings where our spatial experience of their architectural character seems to exploit installed and applied art.
4. In this class we've emphasized a good deal how ancient art and designed space discussed the spaces of the world around it, its "landscape". Discuss the varying character and functions of landscape images in the ancient & medieval world, based on a set of case examples from at least two different cultures.
5. Program: All of the ancient & medieval cultures that you study in 101 were very interested in extending the ability of art to make visual patterns and patterns of meaning, by making sets of images meant to be seen in close physical & temporal proximity. In such art, the meaning and impact of single images expands, or even changes, when it is looked at as part of its whole set of stories and compositions; and single images can be made to convey qualities like narrative, allegory and thematic statement by such juxtaposition. Do an analysis of this kind of "program: arrangement, either focussing on explaining the relationship between the components of one monument, or looking at a series of case examples.
6. All of the cultures that you look at in 101 knew about the existence of at least some other cultures, distinct from them in time and/or space, and made art which alluded to or borrowed from other peoples' art forms and practices, though they practiced this common habit for a variety of reasons and to convey a variety of messages. Discuss in relation to one of the cultures that you know; you may build your discussion on setting up the comparisons for "imitation" in one work of art, or looking across several monuments or genres of monuments from one such borrowing culture.
7. Much of what you study in 101 is art and architecture made to serve an empire. We notice that social institutions, beliefs and practices in imperial systems have many common chacteristics; do you think you can also make a case, in comparing monuments from 2 or more imperial cultures, for similarities between their arts?
****** Some Regional Museums
Phildelphia: The University Museum the Phildelphia Museum of Art
Princeton: The Princeton University Museum, especially for Greek & Roman & Late Antique art and mosaics
Washington DC: Dumbarton Oaks Museum, for Greek, Roman and Byzantine art National Gallery of Art, for Medieval and early Renaissance art Freer Gallery of Art, for Islamic art and also for the "classicizing" art of ancient North India (Gandhara)
New York area: Metropolitan Museum of Art, for all periods & places of 101 - Egypt, Near East, Greece & Rome (including Roman wall-painting), Islamic, Medieval and Renaissance Pierpont Morgan Library, for small but good collection of ancient and medieval art Brooklyn Museum, for Egypt especially, and some other ancient art
Boston & area: Boston Museum of Fine Arts, for all periods & places of 101 The Fogg Museum at Harvard, "" The Worcester Art Museum
Baltimore: The Walters Art Gallery (Roman is mostly in storage)
And also, good museums in Cleveland, Toledo, Richmond, Kansas City, Chicago, San Antonio, and many other places where any of you may head for Thanksgiving. Many colleges and universities have fine small study collections, including, on your possible party/family circuit, Smith, Mt. Holyoke (which also has good casts in the art history building), Yale, Bowdoin, Dartmouth, Rhode Island School of Design, Wesleyan, Wellesley, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.