Making Objects Speak » Global Encounters

Encounter with the Past: The Renaissance and the Ancients

admin — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 19:23:08 +0000

This tour introduces students to Renaissance objects in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, stressing how artists and their patrons not only revived ancient traditions but also adapted what they revived to the ideals and values of their own time. In the Gubbio Studiolo, the feudal lord and mercenary captain Federico da Montefeltro fills his private space with images of himself as living a life of both action and contemplation like the noble Romans of old. In a religious painting from Urbino, Fra Carnevale’s Birth of the Virgin , a Roman triumphal arch frames a holy event, thereby making it a scene of Christian victory. By studying these and other such objects, students will deepen their understanding of what Renaissance artists and patrons achieved: far from breaking completely with the late medieval world in which they lived, they developed its traditions in new ways under the inspiration of the ancient past.

Converging Cultures: Latin America 1520-1830

admin — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 19:22:33 +0000

This audio tour through the Brooklyn Museum’s collections of Andean textiles, ceramics, furniture, and paintings from the pre-Hispanic and colonial periods focuses on the effects of the Spanish conquest on indigenous societies, with attention to patterns of cultural syncretism. Reflecting broad developments in Latin American scholarship, the tour approaches the cultural interactions of Andean colonial society not as a simple dichotomy between Indian and Spaniard, but rather as the mutual entanglements of the many ethnic groups and social ranks that clashed and connected after the Spanish invasion of 1531-32. The objects examined by the tour will help stimulate students to see that at the time of their meeting, both Spanish and indigenous societies were themselves cultural hybrids and their encounter generated yet another synthetic culture.

A Global Appetite: Food History as World History from 1500 to 1800

admin — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 19:21:58 +0000

The Global Appetite tour of the European Decorative Arts and the European Painting collections of the Metropolitan Museum emphasizes the historical importance of food in world history as both a catalyst and consequence of larger trends and events. The audio tour focuses on the ages of exploration and empire, when Europeans diversified their larders just as they enriched their treasuries, and invites students to trace the history of European expansion in the paintings, tankards, finger bowls, and chocolate pots they examine.

The Afro-European Encounter in Africa

admin — Mon, 08 Nov 2010 19:20:05 +0000

In the tour at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, students will examine African artifacts from the seventeenth to the twentieth century to explore, from an African perspective, the often surprising nature of the encounter and developing relations between West Africans and the Portuguese, Dutch, British traders and missionaries active in the region before the rise of European dominance of the continent.