Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Albrecht Dürer - Master of Northern Renaissance

Albrecht Dürer
(1471 - 1528)
On May 21, 1471, German painter, engraver, printmaker, mathematician, and theorist Albrecht Dürer was born. He was considered as one of the greatest artists of the Northern Renaissance. Aside from painting, he also excelled in prints. Many of his works focused on Roman Catholicism, mostly altarpieces and other related religious art, but he also did numerous self-portraits. Moreover, his works were also backed up by theories, which join concepts in math, idealistic proportions and perspective.

In order to becoming a goldsmith, Dürer was apprenticed by his father, and during the year after he began studying art under the painter Michael Wolgemut. His earliest works were accomplished in this period, in which Dürer experimented with his first copperplate engravings and vellum sketches. During a journey through Italy in the mid 1490's, Dürer painted several water colored pictures showing landscapes and several pictures in the style of Quattrocento, which he was critically influenced by during his trip.

However, even though Albrecht Dürer gained first experiences during these years, his real life as an artist began in 1503 when he went into business by himself and led a workshop with already three employees. In this period, the artist accomplished mostly the self portraits he is now (among the numerous engraved copperplates) so widely known for.

The second trip to Italy during the beginning of the 16th century influenced Dürer even more. He finished the 'Rosenkranzfest', one of his best known works significantly influenced by the Venetian art culture and was deeply admired for this work. He was also asked to stay in Italy for a high monthly wage, but preferred to return to his hometown. During the following 10 years, Dürer created mostly copperplate and wooden engravings before intensively concentrating on his studies of proportions and further mathematical issues related to painting, like perspectives.

Dürer's reputation across Europe grew and during a journey though the Netherlands, he was celebrated and admired by fellow artists and governments, and received numerous presents and awards during his travel. After returning to Nuremberg, Albrecht Dürer led the decoration of the city's hall. Also he donated two impressive panels to the city of Nuremberg showing the apostles Paulus, Petrus, Markus, and Johannes. These belong to Dürer's most influential works.

Dürer's works as an artist helped to establish a whole new art genre of wooden engravings, like the Rhinocerus from 1515 and he improved the techniques of copperplate engravings critically. He authored several works on the problem of perspective in paintings and was one of the few artists during the Renaissance to be mathematically well educated. Albrecht Dürer read and understood geometrical problems very well, publishing a few works himself, in which he emphasized the meaning of accurate measurement and created new ways of construction geometrical shapes which put him often in contrast to contemporary artists.

At yovisto, you may enjoy a video lecture by Thomas Dacosta Kaufman on Albrecht Dürer and contemporary artists at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.



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Monday, May 20, 2013

Honoré de Balzac and the Comédie Humaine

Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850)
Portrait by Nadar (1842)
On May 20, 1799, French novelist and playwright Honoré de Balzac was born. He is best known for his his keen observation of detail and unfiltered representation of society, which is reflected in his opus magnum, the Comédie Humaine, sequence of short stories and novels, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the 1815 fall of Napoleon Bonaparte, the period of the Restoration and the July Monarchy (1815–1848). Overall, La Comédie Humaine was supposed to comprise 137 novels and short stories, of which Balzac could only finish 91volumes during lifetime, which makes Balzac a rather prolific writer, considering that he already died at age 50. By reusing already introduced characters in his stories, he created a connective linking everything together to a series. His goal was to "depicting all society, sketching it in the immensity of its turmoil".

Honoré Balzac was born on May 20, 1799, as the second of five children to Bernard-François Balzac, Secretary to the King's Council and a Freemason, and Anne-Charlotte-Laure Sallambier, who came from a family of haberdashers in Paris. She was eighteen at the time of the wedding, and Bernard-François fifty. His father, never called himself de Balzac and Honoré only assumed the noble particle after 1830. As an infant Balzac was sent to a wet-nurse followed by his younger sister the next year. When both siblings returned home, they were kept at a frigid distance by their parents, which affected the author-to-be significantly. From 1807 to 1813 Balzac visited boarding school at the collège des oratoriens de Vendôme in the Centre region of France. However, from sixteen years of age he left his native region to study in Paris. Honoré was placed as a clerk in a attorney’s office and enrolled at the Sorbonne where he studied civil and criminal law. But, against his father’s wishes he turned to a career in writing. As a journalist, Balzac wrote essays on various topics including politics which garnered much of his attention, while working on his short stories and novels. Extremely poor and living in a garret in Paris, he published under pseudonyms. These books were without literary merit, but he earned his living by them.

Searching for ways to make his fortune more rapidly, Balzac next entered a series of business ventures using borrowed funds. But, these commercial ventures were also failures, leaving him with very large debts. Finally, at age 29 he had given up all hopes to live a prosperous life, he published the first novel signed with his own name entitled Le Dernier Chouan, a historical novel. Since historical novels were the fashion, the book was well received. But real fame came to him two years later, when he published La Peau de chagrin, a fantasy that acts as an allegory of the conflict between the will to enjoy and the will to survive. In 1832, Balzac conceived the idea for an enormous series of books that would paint a panoramic portrait of "all aspects of society." When the idea struck, he raced to his sister's apartment and proclaimed: "I am about to become a genius." Although he originally called the series Etudes des Mœurs (Study of Mores), it eventually became known as La Comédie Humaine, and he included in it all the fiction that he had published in his lifetime under his own name. This was to be Balzac's life work and his greatest achievement.

Balzac counts as a representant of the 19th century realism movement. As a hard working writer, he worked on his writing continuously for long hours without sleep. His preferred method of working was to eat a light meal at five or six in the afternoon, then sleep until midnight. He then rose and wrote for many hours, fueled by innumerable cups of black coffee. His consumption of coffee is considered legendary. He would often work for fifteen hours or more at a stretch. He wrote numerous notes and revised his work obsessively. The characters he wrote about carried a realistic element in them, they neither were super heroes nor completely evil, they represented the everyday person. His characters also came from an array of social states and classes. His detailed description of the location of the story entrapped the reader making the story sound as real as possible. He wrote "The author firmly believes that details alone will henceforth determine the merit of works...."

Balzac influenced the writers of his time and beyond. Gustave Flaubert, Marcel Proust, and also Henry James were deeply influenced by the works of Balzac. He has been compared to Charles Dickens and critic W. H. Helm actually called one "the French Dickens" and the other "the English Balzac". Also Karl Marx made ongoing references of Balzac in his seminal work "Das Kapital". At age 50, only five months after his late wedding, on 18 August, 1850, Honoré de Balzac passed away. The funeral at the Cimetière du Père Lachaise in Paris was attended by "almost every writer in Paris.

At yovisto you can learn more about the daily life of the French people, esp. about the raise of the bourgeoisie, as also Balzac has describe in his Comédie humaine, in the lecture of Prof. John Merriman of Yale University.



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Sunday, May 19, 2013

Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the German Idealism

Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814)
On May 19, 1762, German philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte was born, who was one of the founding figures of the philosophical movement known as German idealism, which developed from the theoretical and ethical writings of Immanuel Kant. Thus, Fichte often is regarded as a bridging figure between Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Like Descartes and Kant before him, he was motivated by the problem of subjectivity and consciousness. Maybe you have never heart of Fichte. It was also only recently that philosophers and scholars have begun to appreciate Fichte as an important philosopher in his own right due to his original insights into the nature of self-consciousness or self-awareness. So, let't get to know Johann Gottlieb Fichte a little bit better....

Fichte was born on May 17, 1762, in Rammenau, Upper Lusatia as the son of Christian Fichte, a ribbon weaver. The Fichte family was noted in the neighborhood for its probity and piety. There is the story that Fichte owes the chance of a good education his profound memory. One day, the Freiherr von Militz, a country landowner, arrived too late to hear the local pastor preach. He was, however, informed that a lad in the neighborhood would be able to repeat the sermon practically verbatim. As a result the baron took the lad, who was young Fichte, into his protection, which meant that he paid his tuition. After having visited the the celebrated foundation-school at Pforta near Naumburg, where also the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich Schlegel as well as Friedrich Nietzsche had spent their school days, Fichte began study at the Jena theology seminary in 1780. Unfortunately, his patron Freiherr von Militz died in 1784 and Fichte had to end his studies prematurely, without completing his degree. For the next years, he worked as a private tutor and in 1790 finally, Fichte began to study the works of Immanuel Kant, but this occurred initially only because one of his students wanted to know about them. However, they had a lasting effect on his life as well as on his thought.

In 1791, Fichte had the chance to see Kant at Königsberg. But the interview was rather dissapointing. He shut himself in his lodgings and threw all his energies into the composition of an essay to raise Kant's attention and interest. The Versuch einer Kritik aller Offenbarung (Attempt at a Critique of All Revelation, 1792) was written in five weeks only. There, Fichte investigated the connections between divine revelation and Kant's critical philosophy. The first edition of the book was published without Fichte's name and signed preface. Therefore, it was thus mistakenly credited to be a new work by Kant himself. When Kant cleared the confusion and openly praised the work and author, Fichte's reputation skyrocketed. Now, the French revolution was creating excitement all over Europe. Inspired by its principles Fichte wrote and published anonymously two pamphlets which led to him being seen as a devoted defender of liberty of thought and action and an advocate of political changes. The same year, he received an invitation to fill the position of extraordinary professor of philosophy at the University of Jena, which he gladly accepted. With extraordinary zeal, he expounded his system of “transcendental idealism.” His success was immediate.

After publication of his essay “Ueber den Grund unsers Glaubens an eine göttliche Weltregierung” (On the Ground of Our Belief in a Divine World-Governance) in 1798, in which he wrote that God should be conceived primarily in moral terms: "The living and efficaciously acting moral order is itself God. We require no other God, nor can we grasp any other.", he was finally dismissed from Jena in 1799 as a result of a charge of atheism. Since all the German states except Prussia had joined in the cry against him, he was forced to go to Berlin. In 1805, Fichte was appointed to a professorship in Erlangen. One year later, in 1806, Napoleon, who had brought war all over Europe, completely crushed the Prussian army in the battle of Jena-Auerstadt. The deplorable situation of Germany stirred him to the depths and led him to deliver the famous Addresses to the German Nation (1808) which guided the uprising against Napoleon. In 1809, Fichte became a professor of the new founded university at Berlin and was unanimously elected its rector. When the campaign against Napoleon finally began in 1812, Fichte's wife devoted herself to nursing, where she caught a virulent fever. Just as she was recovering, Fichte himself was stricken down and died in 1814 at age only 51.

At yovisto you can learn more about Fichte and his philosophy in the lecture of Prof. Fred Amrine entiteled "Kicking Away the Ladder", where he is referring to Kant, Goethe, and finally to Fichte's idealism.

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