Abstract:
During the Fall 2009 Virginia B. Ball Center immersive project, Art in Sight, I learned a lot about art and how people respond to it, especially high school students. Art and museums can be intimidating to students who do not understand how they are supposed to react to art. Art in Sight is a Web site written, designed and built in cooperation with Ball State University Museum of Art by students at the Virginia B. Ball Center for Creative Inquiry to help high school art and humanities students take a closer look at, appreciate, and understand art. My thesis, Beyond the Painting: Humanism in Renaissance Art, is an accompanying Web site that takes a deeper look into the European Renaissance and the history that can be viewed through art. My focus will be on three different paintings from Ball State University Museum of Art: Portrait of a Lady, Mystic Marriage of Saint Catherine, and Kitchen Still Life with a Scene of Supper at Emmaus Beyond, accompanied by three famous Renaissance paintings with similar subject matter: Mona Lisa, The Entombment, and The Arnolfini Portrait. The purpose of the Web site is to provide a more in-depth history of the Renaissance, an important era for art history, than Art in Sight can provide, yet still keep the focus on high school students. My thesis includes a section for each of the three areas the chosen paintings represent: portrait, religion, and still life. In addition, there are two more sections that generally define the Renaissance and provide information on other disciplines that made contributions to society during the Renaissance. Beyond the Painting will be linked to Art in Sight's timeline page to make it easily accessible for students.
