Group 7 : Enter Stuart...

I'm not too hot on my art history guys so I dug up this link of the different art movements in Europe for the past few hundred years. It's only a rough guideline but I think we could convert it into a pretty neat bar chart or flow chart for the presentation, this will give our audience (and ourselves) a rough idea of when the Apollo resurfaced as an icon in art.

Here's the link

http://www.artyfactory.com/art_appreciation/timelines/western_art_timeline.htm

It's also quite useful because it highlights (oh so briefly) the shift in change from Rococo to Neo-Classicism and I'm not positive but that Frankenstein lecture Phil gave us almost seemed like a clue towards this particular point so I really think we should focus on this (alarm bells went off when he dropped a comment something to do with Neo-Classicists admiring the past beauty of Greek sculpture and painting).

Further Ideas

- I'm also gonna get on the Nazi/Aryan race as well, I want to make a massive point about how the Nazi regime and its symbology also took a massive chunk out of antiquities book, with the Nazi salute being that of a roman soldier and also the Nazi Reichstag emblem being an almost direct copy from Caesar's Eagle, there's loads of good stuff here!

- Before we get to that I think we should ease people in with the ideas of earlier anthropology, aka scientific racism.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Races_and_skulls.png

Phil showed me this image in a post-lecture talk on this topic and he's also commented on one of our earlier posts on this subject as well, so this is a definite must. The wiki page for this (cardinal sin I know) is

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_racism

and the book this image was ripped from is 'Josiah Clark Nott and George Robert Gliddon's Indigenous races of the earth (First published 1857)' but was taken from an earlier 19th century work (unknown). So if we can get a good few links in the chain from this that'll be awesome too.

- Heres a really good one too, I'd like to make reference to the idea that these statues are the very first photo shoots. I have a few books from the library stuffed with images of sculptures of Apollo, David, The Virgin Mary and a myriad of other biblical figures too and I think we should definitely comment on the fact that these 'people' are not dissimilar to the photoshopped glamour models (kudos Fiona) and pornstars of today! Obviously we'll have too word it better than that but a good point to look at is something like the story of David killing Goliath. I've read this passage and the Bible makes note of David definitely being a young boy whereas in these statues he is most definitely a strong, athletic muscular young man, not the scrawny little runt as he is described in the Bible. It is these 'widening of the truths' and these uses of 'poetic license' that we really need to drive home.

So, I'm about out of steam for this moment in time, but I'm sure with at least these scraps of knowledge we can cobble some foundation of a presentation together. Also, I thought we could make the final presentation mildly amusing in some parts, nothing offensive of course, just like Phil's little touch with the apples something along those lines to hold general interest, because not being funny guys, we can't bang on about a fancy block of stone for 10 minutes because a masterpiece it is, but really really interesting it is not. I had a few ideas in mind but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it, the key objective at the moment is the content, once we have what we need then we can jazz it up to our hearts content (looking at you Fiona) as this will make it a more simulating performance, but it'll give us a hell of a lot more confidence up in front of everyone as well which will be absolutely critical I reckon.

Right, thats all for now guys,

Stu