Homework #4: Course Project
Tentative title and abstract of your project due: Tuesday, 5 April
In-class presentations describing your project: Thursday, 21 April
Final project write-up due Monday, 25 April at 17:00
You are to develop your own topic for a final project for the course. You will have
to design your own project, research it, and write a paper.
If your project primarily involves reading and writing only, your paper should be
6-8 pages, double-spaced, typed. If your project involves substantial non-writing
work, then the write-up can be briefer assuming there is some other tangible product
that shows what you did in some other way. Finally, there will be in-class presentations
of your project on the last day of class.
Some possible topics for projects include:
- V. S. Ramachandran is a prominent psychologist who has written a very
provacative, yet very serious, paper that conjectures that there may be
built-in cognitive processing in the human brain that leads to a natural
aesthetic of what's visually pleasing. Read this paper and use it as a starting
point for evaluating, supporting, refuting, or adding material to it. As in
your Hockney paper, use fact-based arguments, not intuition or personal opinions.
The paper is:
V. S. Ramachandran and W. Hirstein, The science of art,
J. Consciousness Studies 6(6-7), 1999, pp. 15-51
( paper |
figures )
- Researchers
who have studied Leonardo's Annunciation have observed that it's
perspective is wrong, noticing that the building's foreshortened facade is partly obscured
by an out of scale cypress tree, and the corner ashlars are too large in related to the wall's
dimensions. The Virgin's right arm seems twisted, and the lectern's alignment with respect
to the door seems wrong. Research what others have studied with respect to this issue
(e.g., Antonio Natali),
and do your own perspective analysis, including perhaps evaluating whether or not
Hockney's hypothesis might be applicable here, or that a non-standard center of projection
was used by Leonardo to construct it.
- Apply a Hockney-like analysis to a painting that has not yet been studied as part of
the recent conjecture by Hockney that artists used optical aids in producing their works.
- Explore issues related to advances in painting related to a specific type of
natural object such as human hair, human skin, or silk cloth.
- After the cleaning of the Sistine Chapel, it was found that Michelangelo used traditional
medieval approaches for showing shadows, which are now fully saturated with color, instead of
what appeared prior to the cleaning as a new technique which made the tones in shadows darker
and tending towards black. Were Michelangelo's intended tones destroyed by the cleaning
or not? Read at least one of many books on the cleaning plus James Beck's article
Art Restoration: The Culture, the Business, and the Scandal and write a paper which
discusses some of the technical aspects of this debate.
- Some of the changes that occurred in rendering light and shadow were significantly
helped by the changing technology in paints, from egg tempera to oil-based paints in
the 15th century. Trace the historical developments of chiaroscuro, show detailed areas of
illustrative paintings, and
analyze selected paintings in terms of specific qualities of the two paint types'
reflectance characteristics. Reference books of interest include
Baxandall's Shadows and Enlightenment, and Lamb and Bourriau's Colour: Art and Science.
- Philip Ball's book Bright Earth: Art and the Invention of Color
investigates how the invention of new pigments and coloring materials have affected
developments in Western art. Explore some aspect of this issue such as investigating the
question of how restorers infer what paintings really looked like when they were
new.
- Explore the development of conveying a sense of motion in paintings
- Create a digital photo album demonstrating some of the effects described in the books
Light and Color in the Outdoors by M. G. J. Minnaert, and
Color and Light in Nature by
D. Lynch and W. Livingston
(selected chapters are in the course
Reserves List).
Some nice projects showing Minnaert-like effects in nature and organized as powerpoint
presentations are
here,
here, and
here (all three are large powerpoint files).
- Create an educational video of notions studied in class (or related)
- Use digital images and digitial image processing tools such as Photoshop to analyze
the style, colors, etc. in a Renaissance painting or fresco. Get ideas at the
Harvard University Art Museum project on
Investigating the Renaissance.
- Propose bridges between artists and technology
- Examples of student projects in a
similar course taught at Stanford's Florence program are
here
- Other project ideas from student projects done at Stanford University are
here
- Projects done by students at Brown University are
here
- Projects done by students at the University of Newcastle, Australia, are
here
Homework Assignments