#读书笔记《A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ART》
写在前面的——
这本西方国家小学生的读物，我觉得也很适合我……
今年想给自己一点小要求，一点点简单地接触，探索，再慢慢深入那艺术的世界，包括绘画，雕塑，建筑。学会做些小笔记，以防自己太过囫囵吞枣。
《A CHILD'S HISTORY OF ART》
Part 1 Painting
2019.01.22
01 The oldest pictures in the world
drawing---------human nature
animals can't learn to draw
Wild men who lived so long ago could draw.
NO PAPER: They drew pictures on the walls or the ceilings of their caves.
THE PAINTS those wild men used were made of a colored clay mixed with grease, usually simply red or yellow. Or perhaps the paint was just blood.
NO PENCIL: Some of the pictures look as if they had been made with the end of a burned stick.
Some cut into bone----on the horns of deer or on ivory tusks.
The cave men drew pictures of only one kind of thing: big animals and strange animals.
Mammoth is the kind of animal in those days. It looks like an elephant and it was a kind of elephant. But its ears were not big like elephant's ears and it had long hair to kept warm for the country was cold in those days. It was much,much bigger than elephants.
The caves men also drew bison, reindeer, bears and wolves.
those pictures not for wall decorations (for it was dark in the cave)
we think they were made just for good luck, or were to tell a story, or make a record.
The pictures made by these wild cave men are the oldest pictures in the world.
2019.01.23
02 What's wrong with this picture
【KEY WORDS: Egyptian, dead body, tomb, front eye on side face, hieroglyphics】
The old Egyptians believed their bodies would come to life again after thousands of year, and so kings and rich people,who can afford it,built tombs to be buried in.When they died, their bodies were preserved in a way we call embaling, so as not to declay.
On the coffins, or mummy cases, and on the plaster walls of their tombs and temples, the Egyptians drew and painted pictures. Some were of animals, though not the kind of animals the cave men drew. Most of the pictures were of people--men and women, kings and queens, gods and goddesses.
In old Egyptian times all the artists drew certain things in a certain way such as----the front eye in the side face,the front shoulders with a side view of legs and feet.
Egyptian pictures are chiefly illustrations. They tell a story either with or without words------a story of the life of some dead king or queen,their battles,their hunting parties, their parades. There are often words,in Egyptian writing,that describe the pictures. These words look very much like pictures. It is called hieroglyphics.
When Egyptian artists drew a king with common people around him,they made the king very large and the other people very small.
The Egyptians had only four bright colors--red,yellow,green,blue, and black, white and brown. And their colors lasted, almost as fresh and bright as when first done, thousands of years ago, because they were"fast" and were hidden away in the dark.
2019.01.24
03 Palace picture puzzles
【KEY WORDS: Two River Country, bricks made of mud, colored tiles, painted for live people, alabaster, mosaic work, perspective(some pictures), strong man and animals, designs and decorations for borders( rosette and guilloche), THE TREE OF LIFE】
Egypt----One River Country
thousand miles away from Egypt------Mesopotamia, Chaldea, Babylonia, and Assyria------Two River Country--------where the Garden of Eden was supposed to be.
One River Country and Two River Country are the two oldes countries in the world.
Yet there isn't a building of these old cities in this Two River Country.-------they weren't built of stone as the buildings of Egypt were, for there was little stone in the Two River Country. They were built of bricks made of mud, but the bricks were only dried in the sun, not baked by fire( for they didn't have much wood of much other fuel to make fire with) as the Egyptian bricks were. They all crumbled away. There are now only mounds of brick dust which look like natural hills.
They painted pictures and decorations on some bricks, and these they covered with a glass-like substance(glaze, we call it), then baked them in the fire so that they became colored tiles. These tiles have lasted and have been found by men digging down in the mounds.
Egypt----painted pictures chiefly for the dead
Two River Country---painted pictures for live people.
The kings didn't build tombs, they built great palaces for themselves and great temples for their gods.
The artists covered the brick walls with pictures made on slabs of alabaster and with tiles.
Alabaster is a stone, ususally white ,so soft that it can be cut easily.
Each tile had on it a different part of picture,and then a great many tiles were put together to form a large picture. A picture made of colored stones is called a mosaic, and these people who lived in the Two River Country were the first to use a kind of mosaic work.
These alabaster and tile pictures told stories about the king and his courtiers doing something------battles and hunting.
The pictures are like the Egyptian pictures in some ways-----front eye in side face, men of back were drawn above those in front.
But in some pictures, the artists did try to show the man behind by raising them only a little in the picture and making them smaller, and by partly covering those behind with those in front. This effect, showing distance in a picture, is called perspective.
The Two River artists admired strength and strong man, and they thought all strong men had long hair and beards.So they made the pictures of kings very muscular, with bulging muscles in their arms and legs, and with long hair and long beards every lock of which was carefully curled.
The picture of animals they made are much more natural than those the Egyptian drew. They liked painting the lion and the bull, because these animals are so strong.
They were especially good at making designs and decorations for borders------rosette and guilloche.
" THE TREE OF LIFE" made by the Two River people ,has been copied by the artists of many other countries. It is a tree like no tree that grows. It has many different kinds of leaves and flowers and fruits all on the same tree at the same time. It is often used in designs on rugs and in embroidery.
2019.01.25
04 April fool pictures
【KEY WORDS: Greek, April Fool painting, few Greek paintings exist, Polygnotus(the father of Greek painting), Zeuxis, Parrhasius, Apelles(the greatest of all the Greek painters)】
April Fool painting------to paint something so natural and lifelike that a person would be fooled into thinking it real.
The Greeks were the greatest sculptors that have ever lived and were also great architects. But their pictures were not so great, for many of them were of this kind of April Fool painting.
In Egypt an Assyria we know the paintings but not the names of the painters.
In Greece we know the names of the painters but not the paintings they did.
Polygnotus-------he is called the father of Greek painting( no paintings left )
Zeuxis-----He lived four hundred years before Christ was born. It is said that he painted a boy carring a bunch of grapes and the grapes looked so real that the birds came and pecked at them, trying to eat them. And his rival painter in a contest was Parrhasius. He drew a curtain across the front of the picture and it fooled Zeuxis.
Apelles-----the greatest of all the Greek painters. He was a great friend of that precocious young ruler and general, Alexander the Great, and painted Alexander's portrait. And yet we know him more by two of his sayings that have become famous than by his pictures.
"let the shoemaker stick to his last" ------which meant, let him stick to his own business, to things he knows about.
"No day without a line." ------he was a very hard worker and made it a rule never to let a day go by without doing some worth-while work.
These sayings hve become proverbs. They have lasted, but none of his painting have.
"Splitting hairs"------It is said that one day he visited a friend of his,also an artist. He drew an extremely fine,thin line across a board on the easel. His friend returned and when he saw the painted stroke,he exclaimed:Apelles has been here.No one else in the world could make such a fine and beautiful brush stroke as this--except myself. Then he painted another line,down the length of the fine one, splitting it in two.Later Apelles divided the fine line lengthwise again.
We have very few Greek paintings now.
2019.01.28
05 JARS AND JUGS
One kind of Greek paintings has lasted. These are the paintings that were made on vase.
Greek vases were all made out of clay and they were not used for flowers at all. They were used to hold anything liquid. They were made in many beautiful shapes.
The Greeks had names for most of the shapes.
All the better vases were painted on the outside with pictures. The pictures were not of kings and queens. At that time the Greeks had no royalty, so they painted Greek gods and heroes and scenes from their fairy-tales or mythology. Many of these pictures on the vases are like illustrations in a book and they do not fool you.
The pictures were ususally in two styles-----one was black or dark on reddish or clay-colour background, other one was reddish or clay-colour pictures on the black background( the whole vase had been painted black,then the picture scraped out so the clay-colour was left to form the picture.)
2019.01.29
06 Pictures of Christ and Christians
Rome, more Christians.
Secret society----catacombs-----pictures, more like decorations, had some meaning to a Christian.
dove---holy Ghost
cock---Peter denied that he knew Christ
anchor---their religion was like any anchor that ketp a boat in a storm
fish----in the Greek language the first two letters were Christ's initials.
vine----Christ said, "I'm the vine."
three hundred years after Christ died,a Roman emperor named Constantine became a Christian.
the christians built churches and covered the walls with pictures and mosaics, then for over a thousand years, they painted pictures of people and scenes from the Bible.
the Greeks painted pictures chiefly on people without any clothes on, the Christian painters though such fingers immodest and covered up the entire body with clothing, only the faces,hands, and feet showed. They trying to make the face soulful and holy,not just beautiful. Ofthe the background was painted in gold.
Mosaic pictures were often made on the floors of churches, it would not wear out.
the best paintings the Christian artists made were tiny illustrations or decorations for their Bibles and holy books. All books were written by hand( we call them manuscripts).
2019.02.18
07 The shepherd boy painter
Cimabue（契马部埃）----the father of Italian painting, lived in Florence, he is known chiefly as the teacher of Giotto（乔托）.
Giotto was a shepherd when he was a boy. When Giotto grew up, he painted many famous pictures of Christ, the Virgin Mary, and especially of Saint Francis（圣方济各）, whom Cimabue had painted.
Saint Francis lived in a town near florence called Assisi. In Assis there are two chruchs built in his hornor. One on top of the other. In the upper church, Giotto painted along the walls a series of pictures that told stories from the life of Saint Francis.Among many wonderful things Saint Francis used to do was to preach sermons to the birds that gathered round him to listen.
In those days, artists mixed their powdered colors with water and painted on the fresh plastered walls, it was called fresco. Or they mixed their colors with something sticky, like egg or glue, and painted on dry plaster, wood, or copper, it was called tempera, which means mixed.
2019.02.19
08 The angel-like brother
In Florence , there was a monastery called St. Mark's, for the Apostle who wrote the second book of the New Testament. Fra Angelico who was called the Angel-like brother, because he was so very good and holy, lived in this monastery. He had a talent for drawing and painting and he painted Bible pictures on the walls of the rooms in his monastery.
Fra Angelico lived about a hundred years later than Giotto,but his style was very much like Giotto's style.
There was one religious subject that painters of that time loved to paint. It is called the Annunciation--that is , the announcement to Virgin Mary that she was to be the mother of the lord by an angel.
The monastery of St.Mark has been made a museum for the paintings of Fra Angelico. It now contains most of his movable paintings as well as the fresco paintings on the cell walls.
One of these movable paintings now in the St.Mark's monastery is a picture of the virgin Mary with the Christ Child. The Virgin Mary is called "My Lady," and this ,in Italian, is Madonna. For hundreds of years, thousands of pictures of the Madonna were painted.Every family that could afford to have any painting at all had a Madonna hanging on the walls.
The Madonna that Fra Angelico painted is in a broad gold frame,he painted twelve angels playing different musical instruments on this particular frame. Thousands of colored post cards and other copies of these angels have been made.
2019.02.27
Born again painters
Two thousand years after the old Greeks, people were born in Italy who in many ways were like those old Greeks. So we call this time the Born Again time, or Renaissance, which means born again.(1400-1500)
One of the first artists of the Born Again time was Massaccio（马萨乔）. He was a very poor boy, and he died young. No one seemed to like him or his painting while he lived. But after he died, great artists thought his paintings so good that they studied and copied them.
The reason is that Masaccio had found out how to do something that no artist before hime had been able to do. Masaccio's pictures did not look flat, He painted pictures so that you could see back into them. Perspective, you remember, we call it.
One of these painters who studied Masaccio's frescoes was a monk named Fra Filippo Lippi. He fell in love with a nun when he was hired to paint a picture of the Modonna for a convent, they ran away together. They had a son whom them name Filippino（ 菲利皮诺·利皮） which means" Little Filippo." Filippino became a great painter, too, even greater than his father.
Another artist of this time was Benozzo Gozzoli（ 贝诺佐.哥佐利）. In the city of Pisa is a peculiar tower that does not stand straight, but leans to one side. Another peculiar thing in the same city is a cemetery. The peculiar thing about this cemetery is that the ground for it was brought all the way from Jerusalem. It is called the Campo Santo. Around the Campo Santo is a wall and on the inside of this wall Benozzo Gozzoli painted scenes from the Old Testament.
2019.02.27
Sins and Sermons
The High Renaissance began just about 1492.
An artist named Botticelli（山德罗.波提切利），was one of the first Italian artists to paint pictures of things that were not told about in the Bible. He painted religious pictures too,but he liked especially to paint pictures of Greek gods and goodnesses and other fanciful subjects. He had a peculiar style of painting. His women usually had long legs and seemed to be dancing or floating along the ground instead of standing or walking. They were clad in very filmy, gauzy gowns as thin as a veil that showed their figures almost as if they had nothing on.
There was a young painter in Florence who, as Botticelli had done ,had also burned all of his pictures that were not religious ( because they had heard Savonarola preach, and they felt that they had committed a sin in painting pictures that were not religious). He was so shocked by the way in which Savonarola had been treated that he gave up painting and became a monk himself. He took the name of Fra Bartolommeo（ 弗拉·巴托洛米奥 ）
Fra Bartolommeo was the first painter to put baby angels at the foot of his pictures of the Madonna.
2019.03.04
11 A great teacher and a "greatest pupil"
Perugino (佩鲁吉诺）------- Raphael（拉斐尔） 's teacher. Raphael studied with Perugino for three years.
MADONNA
CHERUBS
2019.4.10
12 THE SCULPTOR WHO PAINTED PICTURES
Michelangelo
2019.4.11
13 LEONNARDO DA VINCI
2019.4.12
14 SIX VENETIANS
THREE BELLINIS
Giorgione(乔尔乔内）
Titian（提香）
Tintoretto( 丁托列托 )
2019.4.15
15 A TAILOR'S SON AND A MASTER OF LIGHT
Andrea del Sarto 安德烈·德尔·萨托
Correggio 科雷吉欧 （foreshortening, light and shade)
2019.4.16
16 FLEMINGS
FLEMISH ARTIST
Van Eyck brothers( Hubert and Jan( 扬·凡·艾克 ))------altar-piece( Ghen); improved oil painting so much that we can call them the fathers of oil painting.
Peter Paul Rubens 彼得·保罗·鲁本斯
Anthony van Dyck 安东尼·凡·戴克
Breughels
2019-4-23
17 TWO DUTCHMEN
Frans Hals 弗朗斯.哈尔斯-------The expression on the faces of Frans Hals portraits is what we call a feeting expression.
Rembrandt 伦勃朗-----He created a light in his pictures that was unlike real daylight or lamplight but which makes his pictures marvels of brilliant light and deepest shadow.
2019-5-21
18 丢勒和小霍尔拜因
Albrecht Durer -----
German artist
He lived and painted at the same time as Titian, Tintoretto, Michelangelo, and Lenardo da Vinci.
He painted many kinds of pictures, but hisportraits are more famous than his other paintings. And besides paintings, Durer made engravings and woodcuts.
Durer was apt to put a great deal of detail into his pictures. He filld the paintings with all kinds of odds and ends, and every tiny button is painted as carefully as if it were as important as the person's face. And he was a great enough artist to keep the little things in the picture from becoming too important.
Hans Holbein------
2019.6.24
19 FORGOTTEN AND DISCOVERED
Jan Vermeer
Most of his pictures are of indoor scenes. Most of these paintings show a woman doing some very ususal things.
The wonderful way Vermeer could paint light coming into a room through a window is one of the first things people notice about these paintings. Next, one notices how well Vermeer could show what material a thing is made of- its texture.
2019.6.25
20 SPEAKING OF SPANIARDS
El Greco 埃尔·格列柯
El Greco painted pictures that are so different from other artists' paintings that you may think they are not beautiful when you first see them. All his people are too long and thin to be like real people,and the colors are used differently from the colors in most paintings.
His paintings of men and scenes represent the spirit(or the idea), which is a defferent thing from what you would see with your eyesif you looked at real men and scenes.
Diego Velazquez 迭戈·德·席尔瓦·委拉斯开兹
He was the greatest of the Spanish painters.
Bartolome Esteban Murillo 巴托洛梅·埃斯特万·穆立罗
2019.6.26
21 LANDSCAPES AND SIGN-BOARDS
It seems strange that from the time the cave men made their animal pictures, thousands of years ago,all the way up to the middle of the seventeenth century, almost no one in Europe painted a real landscape.
Nicolas Poussin 尼古拉斯·普桑
Claude Lorrain 克劳德·洛兰
Claude Lorrain had people in his pictures, but generally they were small and unimportant. The landscape was the important thing, even more important than it had been with Poussin. So Claude Lorrain is sometimes called the father of landscape painting, He like to paint pictures of the sea even more than landscapes, so we might call him a seascape painter too.
Antoine Watteau 让·安东尼·华多
Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin 让-巴蒂斯特·西梅翁·夏尔丹
Chardin liked to paint still life. He was also a portrait painter. But the third kind of painting that Chardin liked to do is the kind he is best known for- scenes of people inside their houses, doing the everyday things that people do.
2019-7-2
22 STIRRING TIMES
Jacques-Louis David 雅克-路易·大卫
It was the year 1793. The French Revolution had overthrown the government of the King of France.David was a court painter. He believed the revolution was right. He painted many pictures of scenes from Roman history.
Nowadays we think that David's paintings are not so wonderful as the revolutionist thought them. But they are important because they set a style in painting. The old Roman and Greek days are known as the classical times, and so this style that David made so popular is called the Classical style of art (Neoclassisim).
Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres 让·奥古斯特·多米尼克·安格尔
David had had many pupils and some of them became famous painters,too. One of these pupils was Ingres.Ingres was a wonderful draftsman. He thought more about the lines in a picture than the color or the light. All classical painters tried to make the lines and shapes in their pictures more important than the colors. So their colors are dull and lifeless.
Eugene Delacroix 欧仁·德拉克罗瓦
Delacroix led a revolt against the Classical style of painting. Painters who thought as Delacroix did were called Romanticists. The Romanticists didn't see any sense in painting Greeks and Romans. Then wanted to paint what was going on in the world at that time. They beleived in color.
2019.7.5
23.A LATE START
Enghlish painters
William Hogarth 威廉·荷加斯
Joshua Reynolds 乔舒亚·雷诺兹
Thomas Gainsborough 托马斯·庚斯博罗
2019.7.16
24 THREE ENGLISHMEN WHO WERE DIFFERENT
William Blake 威廉·布莱克
John Constable 约翰·康斯特布尔
He found a way of making paints look brighter. Intead of putting the paint on smoothy,he put it on in little dabs of thick color so that if you touch one of his paintings with your finger it feels rough.
Constable found that when he used little dabs or sports of color,the whole picture became brighter. The old way of painting a green field, for instance, was to paint it all green, Constable' s way was to paint the field with separate little spots of green and yellow and blue. And, strange to say ,these make the field look all green, unless you get too close to the picture.
So we remember Constable for two helpful improvements in landscape painting. He made trees green instead of brown. He made pictures brighter by using rough little spots of paint in place of smooth,solid colors.
J.M.W. Turner 约瑟夫·马洛德·威廉·透纳
Many people believe the best English painter of all was the landscape painter Turner-Joseph Mallord William Turner. He came nearer than any other painter to catching the brightness of color and light of nature. He loved to paint the sea and the sun.
25 SOME VERY POOR PAINTERS
Barbizon painters
Corot
Jean Francois Millet
26 The most important person
Impressionists
Claude Monet
Manet
“The most important person in any picture,is the light.” And that was what the Impreesionists tried to show in their paintings.
27 Post-Impressionism
Paul Cezanne保罗塞尚
Vincent Van Gogh
Paul Gauguin
28 Early Americans
Benjamin West
Gilbert Stuart
29 More Americans
landscape painter
George Inness乔治英尼斯
Winslow Homer温斯洛霍默
30 Two European Americans
James McNeill Whistler
John Singer Sargent
