Museum Report

The more we know, the more we can see or look into something.
This is what I felt when I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the last weekend because I happend to see the painting of "The Death of Socrates" that we went over together at the class. It reminded me the context of the literature and professor's explanation about the painting.

However, at this time, I focused on paintings and sculptures made in the period of the Renaissance because William Shakespeare's most famous work, Hamlet, that we will read was written during the period and it is possible that ideologies of the Renaissance affected Shakespeare's works. The core of the Renaissance is humanism. It brought substantial changes to the European society and differenciated ideas of art from the medieval age.

The first work that I saw is a sculpture named "La Crainte des Traits de l'Amour" by Jean-Louis Lemoyne. According to the explanation from the museum, this statute looks like "the woman is self-protecting as Cupid suddenly appears." It seems that its sculptor tried to describe the moment as realistically as possible and wanted to express the sophisticated bodylines, which is one of characteristics of the Renaissance.

The folloing painting is a work made in mid-16 century. It was drawn by oil on wood and is portraying images of French aristocrats of the Renaissance. We can notice here how vividly its artist is expressing each figures and their splendid clothes. The other two pictures are accessaries of the Renaissance. The lighters and ornaments made by gold clearly shows how the life of aristocrats in England for the period of the Renaissance looks like.

Although I could not find any works that directly relate to William Shakespeare's Hamlet, it was such a good opportunity to know social circumstances of the Renaissance in order to funther understand his work.

Reference

The website of the Met museum (http://www.metmuseum.org/works_of_art/collection_database/european_sculpture_and_decorative_arts/listview.aspx?page=10&sort=0&sortdir=asc&keyword=&fp=6&dd1=12&dd2=0)