October 5 — Baroque & Trompe l’Oeil
- Zeuxis and Parrhasius – Pliny the Elder, Natural History. The Elder Pliny’s Chapters on the History of Art. Reserve. Don’t worry about this reading.
- Jorge Luis Borges, “Library of Babel” in Collected Fictions, p. 112 -118. Reserve.
We will also read Georges Bataille, “Informe.” Documents 7 (December 1929), p. 382. I’ll bring a photocopy of the English translation to class. It’s only one paragraph long.
If you don’t know much about the Baroque period please conduct some background reading; sources are available under “Baroque & Trompe l’Oeil” on the blog. The Baroque is characterized by excess. To that end we might also think about Georges Bataille’s notion of the “part maudite” (the “accursed share”), which is a kind of excess. I’ll talk a bit about it in class.
We won’t be reading anything written in the Baroque period (the 17th century), but we will take some ideas about representation and apply them to Baroque paintings.
Questions for this week:
- What is the role of imitation? What should it set out to do? Is it necessary to faithfully reproduce nature? Why or why not?
- Can there be an excess of imitation? What happens? How do we contain imitation?
- Is it possible to have an imitation that contains everything? What would that look like? Why would anyone want it?
- Look up the phrase “trompe l’oeil.” How does it relate to what we’ve read so far? Look at a couple of examples of Baroque illusionistic paintings before class. (Look at any book on Baroque art or Google “illusionistic Baroque ceiling frescoes” for images). Would Plato or Aristotle be impressed by these? Why or why not?
- How is this similar or different from Renaissance perspective?
REMEMBER: your essay proposals are due this week!
