A little class fun before going into the finals. (The Machiavelli personality test)

Machiavelli influences spread into many different topics, among them, psychology. The term Machiavellism, accordingly to wikipedia.com is " a term that some social and personality psychologists use to describe a person's tendency to deceive and manipulate others for personal gain." A test of 20 questions named MACH-IV was eventually produced to categorize your Machiavellism.

The test:

http://www.salon.com/books/it/1999/09/13/machtest

Works Cited

En.wikipedia.org. "Machiavellianism." Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, 1992. Web. 12 May 2010. .

Kevin Cedeno - Museum Report

My Museum Report

In the era of Machiavelli’s “The Prince” the Medici family gave assistance to the rebirth of the Italian culture. In the Italian Renaissance we see how it was a rebirth of the classical arts. The classical arts consisted of the Greek innovations. The Greeks had a mentality of perfection when it came to the human body. When walking through the Greek section of the Metropolitan Museum of art the statutes shown are made with great precision. When comparing it to the Italian renaissance the body figures are clothed more and include unproportional bodies. The Italian renaissance was time in which many famous pieces of art were produced. In this video you can see plenty of these amazing works.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVQBVE9BzYk

When looking at the pictures taken below we see how the artists portray the human bodies with clothing and less of a perfect appearance. In the painting of the two little angel infants the bodies are extremely unproportional. The infants are large compared to the horse. The woman that is standing has a head that is too small for its body.

Religious representations are portrayed but can be appreciated in a more emotional level; one doesn’t have to be religious to appreciate such art. In the religious ones they can be seen not only religiously but by the beauty of the painting and the emotionally input as the “La Pieta”.

A year ago I had the opportunity to see the “La Pieta” in Rome. This sculpture was surrounded by people, all types of people were eager to admire this piece of art for its beauty. It was clear that one didn’t have to be religious to appreciate it; just by looking at it everyone can sense the pain of a mother mourning over its offspring. In the visit to the museum I was able to see a painting of the “La Pieta”. The details that are presented in the photo portray a series of painting of the struggle that the Virgin Mary had gone through in her son’s suffering.

rapier and dagger -- 16th century fencing

Those of you interested in the history of fencing check this out:

http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~wew/fencing/lovino2.html

Museum

I went to the MET this past weekend and for my report I decided to take a look at the Renaissance period art. Pardon the poor picture taking but I managed to get a couple paintings and decided to write about three that interested me.
Hendrick Ter Brugghen

Dutch, 1588-1629

This oil canvas shows the crucifixion of Jesus with Virgin Mary and Saint John. It was painted as an altarpiece for a Catholic "hidden church". This painting gave a brutal depth to Jesus' death because you saw the places where his hands,feet, and body were pierced. The scene showed his mortality and the final sacrifice he made.

Fra Bartolomeo

Italian, Florentine 1473-1517

This painting shows Madonna and a Child with the young Saint John the Baptist. It is one of Fra Bartolomeo's early works and what struck me about this painting was how bright it was. The use of light was the key to creation of High Renaissance paintings and it was one of the more colorfully detailed paintings that I took a picture of.

Bennozzo di Lese di Sandro

Italian, Florentine, 1420-1497

This painting depicts the bishop of Florence resuscitating a dead child on the square in front of San Pier Maggiore. There are four panels which were painted but I decided to only take one because of its immense size. The crowd that just stands by to watch, brings a reality into the painting.

Dante's Inferno

This is my 3rd time going to the Metropolitan Museum and I enjoyed every visit. It is amazing how ancient people using simple tools to create such great images. This time I'm here to find arts about Dante's Inferno so I went to Medieval Art and European Paintings sections.
At Medieval Arts section, there were some paintings and worship tools. Somehow I lost all my Medieval Arts section pictures and some European Painting pictures, so I borrowed this picture from Demi's blog without her permission. We went there together so I think it is ok.


Christian, like Islam and I believe Jewish, are all "Religion of Book". The reason why there weren't a lot of sculptures of Gods is during Medieval times there was a big debt over religious figures. Some Church doesn't want people to warship some human figure as God whereas some believe this is the way to teach people and give believers something to look up to. Lots of paintings and sculptures were destroyed because of this.


Here is part of the painting by Jan van Eyck and Workshop Assistant. The painting is called "The Crucifixion; The Last Judgment". This painting has 3 layers and it is positioned hierarchically. The upper layer is the heaven; middle layer is the human world; the bottom is hell. It gives clear details of how each worlds are different from one another. How people in the heaven are receiving blessing of God and how people in the hell are suffering. The judge in the middle reminds me of the Monster in Dante's Inferno. Here is another painting of last judgment by Joos van Cleve.




This painting is done by Carlo Crivelli. it is a painting of Pieta. As shown in the picture, they all have halo above shoulders suggesting that they are holy and pure. I enjoy how Carlo made their expression to look like. It shows how important Pieta meant to them and how sad they were to lose him.

Ancel's Museum Report

During my visit to the metropolitan Museum, I decided to focus on arts relevant to the medieval time. Just like Dante's Inferno, Medieval arts are mostly about religion. In the prospect to share my understanding of what medieval arts are about, I decided to take 2 different pictures, each representing the general form of medieval art; sculpture and glass work.




This sculpture is called Icon with the Virgin and Child. I chose this one because it made me think of the role of the women in the male dominated religion. In Catholicism, only men are allowed to be priests, cardinals and other important figures while women have a side role as “sisters”. But here we have this picture representing a woman that gave birth to the god of this religion. A woman that took care of him and that is seen carrying him but yet women are not considered as important in this religion.







This one is called Angels swinging Censers. During the medieval times, artist master the art of working with stained glass. So they use this to decorate church while representing many important events of Christian religion.
After looking at many other medieval art, I came to the conclusion that art was mainly used to renforce the religion during this period.