Video Review: The Renaissance

For this week’s video review, I started with “The Drawings of Michelangelo”. This was an enjoyable film on the surviving drawings of Michelangelo and what they show and might show about the man and his works. The sketches give insight into his desire to achieve perfection. The method he used to shade his drawings, straight line hatching and cross hatching, was difficult for the artists in the film to reproduce. He was a self taught sculptor and his work “David” was the first colossal marble sculpture since classical times.

The second film I chose was “Leonardo da Vinci: The Mind of the Renaissance” This film was interesting for the subject matter but I wasn’t too fond of the over-dramatization. This film gave a history of da Vinci’s life from an early age, where he showed great gifts at an early age to the time of his death. One of the things I found interesting was that his Master gave up painting after seeing how skilled he was. He was also the first artist to make a drawing of landscape. He was an accomplished Engineer and served in Italy as an official architect and engineer in charge of fortifications. He studied the flight of birds and insects that led to his ideas on manned flight. Because he was always in search of perfection, he never finished his work and he actually developed a bad reputation for this.

The first two films I chose because of the fame of Michelangelo and da Vinci. The next two, I’m sorry to say, I picked because they were the shortest. I’m a little time constrained this week. That being said, the third film I chose was “Albrecht Durer: Image of a Master”. This was a nice film on an artist I had not heard of before taking this class. A gave a good example of how the Renaissance differed in the north as opposed to in Italy. Dure was best known for his realistic, not idealized, portraits and later in his life, his prints made from his woodcuts. The example shown of the woodcuts he produced in his home later in his life were beautiful. I really liked these. The detail is amazing. He also was known as the first time landscape artist in Europe.

The last film I chose was, “Velazquez”. This Spanish artist was the court painter to King Philip the IV. This film was terrible. It was produced by the Spanish Ministry of Culture and felt like a propaganda piece. I did like his painting “Surrender of Breda”, but besides that I didn’t find this to be very interesting. In particular, I disliked the segment on the court jesters or the “buffoons”. After seeing the portrait of the King with that ridiculous twirled mustache I thought they had a lot of nerve calling those other subjects of his paintings buffoons.

All in all, a good supplement to my reading this week. Especially the first three films.